Discourses on discourse, shifting contexts and digital media

This introduction paraphrases this journal’s title, Discourse, Context & Media, as it intends to question and problematise the state of the art on discourse, context and media within the agenda of the article collection “‘What’s past is prologue’. Continuity and change in theories and methodologies on discourse in multimodal digital texts and practices”. In Section 1, we will present the general rationale of this article collection and the research areas that the collected articles cover. Section 2 overviews theories on discourse from a diachronic perspective that is the preferential line of approach adopted here. These theories are briefly mentioned to shed some light on how they have been developed in a range of disciplines and how different epistemologies have brought to the fore the crucial concerns that discourse studies, in their broadest sense, address. The focal point of this overview is how the advent of the digital has affected discourse studies with a view to unearthing emergent discourse practices and reconfigurations of interactional dynamics. We purposefully refer to emergence and reconfiguration, since we are interested in recognising points of contact with the past without invoking newness and uniqueness of the current digital scenarios and discourse practices at any cost. While some scenarios are certainly new, reflections on if and how this newness should be epistemologically tackled appear urgent and undelayable, especially when media and their affordances rapidly change and prompt the emergence of fluctuating communities, discourse/s and contexts. Section 3 illustrates the ideal reading pathway that could guide the readers as regards how the questions and challenges raised by the articles should encourage further research.