Ruth Page

Stories are shared by millions of people online every day. They post and re-post interactions as they re-tell and respond to large-scale mediated events. These stories are important as they can bring people together, or polarise them in opposing groups. Narratives Online explores this new genre - the shared story - and uses carefully chosen case-studies to illustrate the complex processes of sharing as they are shaped by four international social media contexts: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Building on discourse analytic research, Ruth Page develops a new framework - 'Mediated Narrative Analysis' - to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication.

Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide introduces the linguistic frameworks currently used to analyse language found in social media contexts. This highly accessible guidebook outlines the practical steps and ethical guidelines entailed when gathering linguistic data from social media sites and platforms. In this new edition, the authors update the range of social media interactions used as examples and draw attention to important developments such as “fake news” and new areas of debate such as hate speech. Expanding the geographical and multilingual aspects, this edition also includes examples from Asia and the Arabic-speaking world. With updated methods that help students study the language of social media from a multimodal perspective, the recent uptake in image sharing, video-chat, and graphicons will also be addressed. Each chapter begins with a clear summary of the topics covered and also suggests sources for further reading to supplement the initial discussion and case studies. This timely book is an essential guide for students of English language and linguistics, media, and communication studies.

Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide introduces the linguistic frameworks currently used to analyse language found in social media contexts. This highly accessible guidebook outlines the practical steps and ethical guidelines entailed when gathering linguistic data from social media sites and platforms. In this new edition, the authors update the range of social media interactions used as examples and draw attention to important developments such as “fake news” and new areas of debate such as hate speech. Expanding the geographical and multilingual aspects, this edition also includes examples from Asia and the Arabic-speaking world. With updated methods that help students study the language of social media from a multimodal perspective, the recent uptake in image sharing, video-chat, and graphicons will also be addressed. Each chapter begins with a clear summary of the topics covered and also suggests sources for further reading to supplement the initial discussion and case studies. This timely book is an essential guide for students of English language and linguistics, media, and communication studies.

Stories are shared by millions of people online every day. They post and re-post interactions as they re-tell and respond to large-scale mediated events. These stories are important as they can bring people together, or polarise them in opposing groups. Narratives Online explores this new genre - the shared story - and uses carefully chosen case-studies to illustrate the complex processes of sharing as they are shaped by four international social media contexts: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Building on discourse analytic research, Ruth Page develops a new framework - 'Mediated Narrative Analysis' - to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication.

This challenging book is essentially a reflection on the first three words of its title. What understanding can we have of God, and of what God was about in Christ, such that the church may celebrate it in its sense of form or worship, live it out individually and collectively, and put it into practice? Who are we, and what are the activities we engage in among ourselves? What relationship do we have with others? And how is our relationship with one another related to our relationship to God? The accounts that Ruth Page gives, which arise out of her experiences in her own Church of Scotland and from seven years spent on the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches and the WCC's Commission on Mission, are down-to-earth, practical, positive and sometimes critical. What stands out particularly clearly is that the word 'with' often cannot be used of what goes on in churches; any sense of togetherness can be sadly lacking. She also points out that contemporary thinking on mission is much more vibrant than thinking within the churches at home, where instead of rethinking relationships and the redistribution of power the churches for the most part continue in the same old patterns. A feature of the book is the inclusion of a large number of boxes' of texts which form vivid illustrations of the main argument.

The ongoing ecological crisis keeps raising important questions for traditional Christian theology. If belief in God as creator means not only that God created the world in the first place but is involved in all that goes on in it, valuing creation and desiring its good, what form does divine action take in the world of today? Surely, for Christian belief, God cannot just be a distressed but helpless onlooker while human beings are exhorted to get on with what has to be done? Furthermore, what in the light of God's relation to the world, is the relation of human beings to non-human creation? Central to Dr Page's book is the view that there is too much anthropocentricity in doctrines of the creation, so that the world of nature is too often seen as it relates to human beings and not in its own right. She argues that a rethinking of fundamental doctrine is needed, if only as penance for what Christian doctrine has allowed human beings to get away with. Her new approach begins with the view that what God created was possibility, a more important characteristic of the world than has ever been acknowledged. All creation, not just the human world, is by its very being a response to the divine gift of possibility. Every creature, from the tree frog to the cheetah, lives in God's presence and has it own relationship with God, to whom it is all valuable and intimately known. Against this background, not only the doctrine of creation but the whole question of human ethical conduct takes on a new form, and any vision of eternity must be kaleidoscopic enough to include the whole web of creation.