EXPLORING DIGITAL EXPRESSIONS ACROSS CULTURES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PAKISTANI AND GLOBAL SOCIAL MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The digital media has changed the communication practices of the world by initiating new possibilities in communication, identity and expression of culture. Even though online communication is global owing to the digital platforms, it has the local lingual and cultural peculiarities. The following research compares and contrasts the digital expressions in Pakistan and the global by using a qualitative comparative approach. The paper discusses the influence of language choices, code-switching, Roman Urdu, emojis, hashtags, memes, and religious phrases in online communication based on Sociolinguistics and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA). It has been found that the Pakistani digital texts have been marked by an immense amount of Urdu-English code switching, religious allusions and culturally constructed communication patterns, and the global digital texts are more linguistically standardized, and secular oriented. Simultaneously, similarities between the two settings are the use of emojis, hashtag activism, shortenings and the meme culture. The paper has concluded that online communication is a hybrid place where the global technological forces are in co-existence with local cultural identities. The findings can be used to appreciate the relationship between language, culture and technology in the present digital worlds.