Scholars of digital discourse are increasingly turning their attention to the analysis of visual resources (Thurlow, Dürscheid &Diémoz, 2020). Metadiscursive approaches meanwhile examine how digital media are themselves visually represented (e.g. Thurlow, 2017; Thurlow, Aiello & Portmann, 2020); this work is particularly useful for tracking both visual ideologies media ideologies. In this same vein, we report a corpus-based study organized into three data-generation stages, offering this framework as model for studying the complex, multimodal intersection of the news media and commercial image banks. While others have found a more optimistic, engaging representation of social media (e.g. Dumitrica & Bakardjieva, 2017), our study reveals a vision of social media which is altogether more abstracted, reductionistic and, oddly enough, largely asocial. In Stage 1, we pulled together from Google News a convenience sample (n = 221) of editorial images and image captions from English-language news reports over a twenty-month period. In Stage 2, we conducted reverse searches to identify the sources of these image; we were thus able to confirm the inherent influence of stock photography. In Stage 3, and at the heart of our analysis, was a corpus of 600 stock photographs “top-sliced” from the three major image banks reflected in our news media analysis (Getty, Shutterstock, Alamy). As a second multimodal move, we also pulled together a corpus of over 46,000 keywords used to categorize the photos. Our analysis of this data was organized descriptively, interpretively and critically by combining visual content analysis and social semiotics. While public debate on stock imagery remains both very limited and largely dismissive (Aiello, 2016), it is important to recognize the role it has in shaping the social meanings of technologically mediated communication, especially when these meanings are circulated as “fact” in the news media.

Aiello, G. (2016): 'Taking stock' (retrieved from: http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2016/04/28/taking-stock/)

Dumitrica, D. & Bakardjieva, M. (2017): The personalization of engagement. The symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers. Media, Culture & Society 40 (6), 817-837.

Thurlow C. (2017): "Forget about the words"? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse. The case of sexting. Discourse, Context & Media 20 (2017), 10 -19.

Thurlow, C., Aiello, G. & Portmann, L. (2020): Visualizing teens and technology. A social semiotic analysis of stock photography and news media imagery. New Media & Society 22 (3), 528-549.

Thurlow, C., Dürscheid, C. & Diémoz, F. (eds.) (2020): Visualizing Digital Discourse. Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.