ABSTRACT
In chapter 5, I show how new political identities emerged from the interaction of the commenters to a 2012 post published on Maher’s ad-dōmari public Facebook page. I analyzed these practices through the lens of Tannen’s framework of “repetition as intertextuality” and voicing, De Fina’s framework of participation in social media narrative and through Agha’s notions of voices and register. I show how Maher’s and the commenters’ hybrid practices are “polycentric”, meaning that they are regulated by “norms” that do not comply either with the norms of fuṣḥā or the vernacular, but they are motivated by a symbolic use of language, underlying the construction of political identities.
