Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment
Accepted panel at the 20th International Pragmatics Conference (IPC20)
University of Helsinki | 27 June - 2 July 2027
Organisers: Carolin Dix, Karina Frick, and Daniel Pfurtscheller
Digital platforms are increasingly organised around practices of reacting. Across platforms, reactions are shaped by affordances and emic labels, from low-threshold uptake such as likes, comments, quotes, reposts, or stitches to elaborate audiovisual formats such as live responses and reaction videos. At this end of the spectrum, reception becomes a "vernacular form of visual production" (Kim 2016: 333): prior content is watched, paused, felt, discussed, and repackaged before an audience. Positioned "in-between media text and media reception" (Bliss & Nansen 2023: 751), reaction media offer a privileged site for analysing how users take up, reuse, evaluate, and align with existing digital content.
The panel examines reacting as a pragmatic, multimodal, and affective practice of digital participation. It builds on work on recontextualisation, quotation, linguistic recycling, and the pragmatics of sharing, which has shown how communicative material changes when it is quoted, shared, screenshotted, remediated, or re-embedded in new participation frameworks (Haapanen & Perrin 2020; Pfurtscheller 2020; Zappavigna 2022; Dynel 2024). Sequentially, reaction formats are placed in second position: they comment on, respond to, or rework already available digital content. By selecting, transforming, and recontextualising earlier resources, reactors position themselves affectively, epistemically, and deontically towards both content and participants, including forms of convergent audience alignment (Pelttari 2023). Such practices connect diverse scales of multimodal action, from button clicks and comments to memes, screenshots, GIFs, stickers, livestreams, timed comments, and videos (Dainas 2025; Sampietro 2025; Messerli & Locher 2021, 2024; Song & Licoppe 2024), and they coordinate talk, gaze, gesture, text, sound, and platform-specific metrics in a "crisscross of modalities" (Dutt & Graham 2023: 2).
We invite empirically grounded and theoretically oriented papers on reactions across languages, platforms, and communities. Contributions should approach reaction through specific empirical cases while engaging with the broader pragmatic problem. Comparative, ethnographic, corpus-pragmatic, media-linguistic, multimodal, and interactional approaches are welcome.
How to submit
We welcome abstracts of up to 500 words presenting (nearly) completed research with a clear research question and, for empirical work, a concise description of the data and approach. Please submit each contribution separately through the IPrA2027 conference platform by 15 October 2026, midnight CEST. This also applies to invited contributions. In step 4 (Topics), select the panel Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment. An active IPrA membership is required to submit an abstract. Each person may be first author of only one conference contribution, whether a panel paper, lecture, or poster.
Please consult the official IPC20 Call for Papers for the complete submission instructions; further conference information is available on the IPrA website. Questions about the panel may be sent to Carolin Dix (carolin.dix@uibk.ac.at), Karina Frick (karina.frick@uibk.ac.at), or Daniel Pfurtscheller (daniel.pfurtscheller@uibk.ac.at).
More info here.