Abstract
This chapter engages and interrogates social media addiction as it relates and extends to the emergence of creative and innovative codes of communication and representation amenable on the online semiotic landscapes. Taking its point of departure with insights from Young’s Internet Addiction Test, the chapter locates Zambia’s online narratives on Facebook and WhatsApp as bearing sociolinguistic resources that transcend the classical and normative attributes of language for communication. Thus, the chapter leans on Blommaert’s Supervenaculars as well as Kress’s Multimodality as it uncovers intricacies of this addictive, creative and innovative way of communicating to learn its potentialities, constraints and permeation across spaces. It concludes with a sketch detailing the normative processes in local sociolinguistic spaces in the absence of pedagogic spaces.
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Jimaima, H., Simungala, G. (2019). Semiotic Creativity and Innovation: Offshoots of Social Media Addiction. In: Ndasauka, Y., Kayange, G. (eds) Addiction in South and East Africa . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13593-5_9
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