This brief conclusion summarizes the main thesis of the book, noting that both conservative and progressive critiques of social media lack strong empirical justifications, and that many if not most of the regulatory proposals directed at social media are not only likely to be found unconstitutional, but are also wrong-headed. It then argues that it is time we all accept that the old, pre-social media world of gatekeepers is over; and further, that this development has important, positive implications for the democratization of public discourse in ways that free speech theory supports. Finally, the Conclusion analogizes the modern hysteria over the growth of social media to earlier panics over changes in communications technology, such as the inventions of the printing press and of moving pictures. As with those earlier panics, this one too is overblown and ignores the positive potential impacts of technological change.

The negotiated South African revolution of the 1990s inaugurated a marked shift toward strong constitutionalism: the post-apartheid Constitution comprised an extensive Bill of Rights, including substantial socioeconomic rights and constitutional duties for far-reaching redistributive measures, and established an independent judiciary under the auspices of a new constitutional (rather than, as before, parliamentary) supremacy. This way, South Africa quickly turned into a paradigmatic case of “juristocracy” (Hirschl 2004) and became imbued with an iconic indexicality for the enormous hopes for transformative justice that came to be vested in the law during the post-cold war era. Based on this progressive Constitution, the government immediately embarked upon a massive land reform in order to address persisting racial inequalities regarding access to and control of the land. Aiming at “putting land rights in the right hands under the rule of law,” as the former minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs put it in 2007 in contradistinction to ongoing extralegal land occupations in neighboring Zimbabwe, South African land reform exemplified a profound belief in “transformative constitutionalism” that was advocated as the solution to many of South Africa’s pressing political concerns. However, growing criticisms of the limited impact and slow pace of South African juristocracy in general and of law-based land reform in particular have substantially altered public discourse over the past decade, revealing a more complex and ambiguous dialectics of reckoning to be at play. Transformative constitutionalism is increasingly also portrayed as being part of the problem – or at least as suffering from “a dis/empowerment paradox” (Mnisi Weeks 2022) – that needs to be overcome in order to finally transform South Africa, which remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, in substantive and meaningful ways. This contested development is paradigmatically exemplified in the recent constitutional amendment process, designed to allow for “expropriation without compensation” in order to fast-track South African land reform, as its advocates claim. This chapter charts the contested terrain of this complex dialectic of juristocratic reckoning in order to evaluate the potentials and pitfalls of a continued project of transformative constitutionalism that increasingly has to operate in an era in which South Africa’s moment of iconic indexicality seems to be passing.

Chapter 5 is concerned with sequential aspects of health-oriented interactions and the challenges this poses for corpus research. Two case studies demonstrate how conventional corpus procedures can be augmented with other linguistic approaches to facilitate a critical examination of the relationships between parts of the data that might otherwise be separated in corpus analysis. The first study is an investigation of a thread from an online forum dedicated to cancer – one that is explicitly dedicated to irreverent verbal play. We show how a corpus approach enabled the identification of humourous metaphors and helped us reveal recurrent lexical and grammatical features that facilitate discussion around sensitive topics, enable a coherent identity, and contribute to a sense of community. In the second study we use an approach that was originally applied to the Spoken BNC 2014 corpus to examine interactional data in terms of functional discourse units. We apply this coding framework to a sample of anxiety support forum data in order to document, quantify, and evaluate how various communicative purposes are formulated in forum posts and are met with different types of response.

Critics from across the political spectrum attack social media platforms for invading personal privacy. Social media firms famously suck in huge amounts of information about individuals who use their services (and sometimes others as well), and then monetize this data, primarily by selling targeted advertising. Many privacy advocates object to the very collection and use of this personal data by platforms, even if not shared with third parties. In addition, there is the ongoing (and reasonable) concern that the very existence of Big Data creates a risk of leaks. Further, aside from the problem of Big Data, the very existence of social media enables private individuals to invade the privacy of others by widely disseminating personal information. That social media firms’ business practices compromise privacy cannot be seriously doubted. But it is also true that Big Data lies at the heart of social media firms’ business models, permitting them to provide users with free services in exchange for data which they can monetize via targeted advertising. So unless regulators want to take free services away, they must tread cautiously in regulating privacy.

Chapter 13 presents a synthesis of the previous chapters, beginning by asking the question – what have our experiences taught us about health communication that we didn’t know? We go on to examine lessons we learnt about carrying out corpus-based research on health communication, offering practical advice and tips for people who might be carrying out similar kinds of studies to the ones described in this book. We then consider the limitations of a corpus-based approach and end by looking to the future – what changes have taken place since we completed our analyses? What kinds of developments in the field of healthcare and in corpus linguistic analysis have occurred recently? And what avenues of research into health care do we believe are potentially interesting to investigate next?

This chapter compares the early and middle encounter periods in eastern Canada to the ninteenth-century encounters in Australia and British Columbia. The chapter documents two distinct approaches to Indigenous land rights taken by the British Crown, with important implications for dispossession and recognition and reclamation of land rights. Because valid title to real property in eastern Canada primarily rested on good title from an original Indigenous seller, Indigenous rights to land were largely honored. Precisely the opposite situation played out in the west, where valid setter title turned on the complete erasure of Indigenous interests in the land. This was accomplished through the Torrens system of land-title registration, which erased Indigenous land rights in ways unimaginable to colonists along the east coast of the Americas where English law treated Indigenous lands as cognizable property interests. The chapter then focuses on the contemporary distribution of land rights in British Columbia to illuminate the continuing effects of the Torrens system of land-title registration on Indigenous land rights.