Nov 19
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Ruqaiya Hasan: a Life in Linguistics
February 16-17, 2015
Macquarie University
At this symposium, hosted by the institution where Ruqaiya Hasan spent the most years of her career, and where she conducted some of her best known research, we will examine Hasan’s legacy, retrospectively and prospectively. Ruqaiya Hasan is one of our discipline’s most thoughtful and exciting scholars. Over a 60 year career, she showed the penetrating power of language. She understood that the reach of linguistics was “life-wide”, because this was also the central characteristic of language. She took her critical faculties to the examination of socialization, education, literary aesthetics, the making of mind in society, literacy and globalization, the intricacies of grammatical form, as well as the enormous scope of language, and what this means for the discipline of linguistics. She was a scholar who could think deeply, and range widely.
In her scholarship, she entered into dialogue with the ideas of the greatest thinkers on language in the 20th century: Saussure, Vygotsky, Vološinov, Bahktin, Firth, Mukařovský, Malinowki, Whorf, Labov, Bernstein, Halliday, Bourdieu, Derrida, Austin, Searle, Leech, and Levinson. And she showed herself to be at least their equal.
This two day event will begin with workshops on some of the key aspects of linguistic theory and application developed in Hasan’s work, including
- · the relations of language and context
- · language, ideology and semantic variation
- · language and verbal art
- · cohesion and cohesive harmony
- · theorising and analysing meaning
On the second day, we will host a series of talks which will examine the intellectual vistas of her career, and explore the new horizons she has opened up in her relentless inquiry into the nature of language as humans’ most powerful collective resource.
The two day symposium will be free-of-charge. Registration details will be shortly available. On the evening of 17th of February all participants are invited to attend a dinner where we will share our memories of Ruqaiya as a friend, a colleague and a mentor. We will circulate details of dinner venue and cost closer to the event.
Nov 19
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Marta Dynel
EDITOR: Jan Chovanec
TITLE: Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Martine van Driel, University of Birmingham
SUMMARY
(1) Preface: Researching interactional forms and participant structures in
public and social media, by Jan Chovanec and Marta Dynel
The preface focuses on an explanation of the origin of this volume, the
theoretical frameworks it is grounded in and an overview of the articles
contained inside. Chovanec and Dynel believe that with a changing media scape,
it is important that participation frameworks are altered to fit the new media
that audiences are getting involved in. They refer to Goffman’s (1981)
initial work, which came from a more sociological perspective, as well as to a
wide variety of linguistic scholars who used the framework to adopt it to the
more current diverse range of communication (among others: Hymes 1972; Bell
1984; Clark 1996).
They go on to explain their perspective on two different forms of interaction
in the participation frameworks: public media (e.g. TV) and social media; they
have included articles in both areas in this volume. Their main aim with this
volume is to address two topics: (1) “participation frameworks and
interactional phenomena in traditional public media discourses” and (2) “the
nature of participation and interaction in novel discourses arising in
computer-mediated and technology-mediated communication” (Chovanec & Dynel
2015: 10). They explain that they have ordered the articles by the authors’
approaches to participation frameworks (though they mention the articles could
also be grouped by theme: television and film discourse, news discourse and
social media), and they provide the reader with a short overview of each
chapter.
Part 1 – Reconsidering participation frameworks
Participation frameworks and participation in televised sitcom, candid camera
and stand-up comedy, by Alexander Brock
Brock’s article is focused on re-arranging existing participation frameworks
to account for the communication between TV characters (fictitious) as well as
the communication between the collective sender and the TV audience (real). He
shows how to add to existing frameworks by focusing on televised comedy,
specifically sitcoms, candid camera shows and stand-up comedy. Brock refers to
the real communication between the collective sender and the TV audience as
Communicative Level 1 (CL1) and to the fictitious communication between the
characters as Communicative Level 2 (CL2).
Brock considers many different situations in TV comedy which alter
participation frameworks, such as hecklers during a stand-up comedy show,
different camera perspectives (such as Point of View) and studio audiences
present during sitcoms. His use of CL1 and CL2 is helpful in these situations;
yet addressing such a wide variety of participation situations results in a
lack of depth in terms of how these participation frameworks change the
dynamics of audiences and producers, as well as how these participation
frameworks assist in the production of comedic moments. Both these issues are
alluded to by Brock, and he acknowledges that there is a “complexity of things
yet to discover” (45).
(2) Participation structures in Twitter interaction: Arguing for the
broadcaster role, by Fawn Draucker
Draucker’s paper focuses on Goffman’s (1981) theory of three different
production roles: (1) the animator as the participant who “produces the talk
in its physical form” (p 50), (2) the author who wrote the words and (3) the
principal whose ideas are expressed in the words. Draucker argues that when we
analyse Twitter, we should incorporate a fourth role: the broadcaster. She
defines this role as “a ‘followable’ party that makes talk available to
recipients” (p 63).
The role of broadcaster is different from any of the three other roles
described by Goffman (1981) as it can re-distribute previously written tweets
(with its own author, animator and principal) in the form of re-tweets. In
that case, the followable party or the broadcaster, is still considered an
active participant, Draucker argues, as they can be held accountable for the
content of what they re-tweet. The role of broadcaster is also applicable in
the case of company accounts, where one person in the company might be the
animator, author and principal, while the company as a whole will be the
distributor of the tweet through their Twitter account.
Draucker has also included previous research into computer-mediated discourse,
which forms the basis of her idea that the broadcaster is an active
participant in Twitter communication.
(3) Participant roles and embedded interactions in online sports broadcasts,
by Jan Chovanec
Chovanec builds his paper around “Goffman’s (1981) observation that much of
human talk contains embedded instances of prior talk” (p 68). He has taken
this observation and applied it to online sports broadcasts. In his analysis,
he employs frames of interaction based on Fetzer (2006) which reflect the
different levels of interaction. For example in a television broadcast of an
interviewer, the first frame will include the interviewer and interviewee as
well as the studio audience. The second frame is the audience watching at home
and will envelope that first frame. Chovanec’s analysis contains four frames:
(1) the football match, (2) the television broadcast studio, (3) the audience
at home and the online studio, (4) the online recipients. His analysis focuses
on how the interactions within each frame as well as across frames are
represented in the online commentary.
Chovanec’s analysis leads to two main conclusions: (1) embedding leads to a
one-way flow of communication, meaning the final at home audience cannot
interact with the interviewee on screen, but (2) with modern technology it is
possible that final recipients can temporarily enter into a production role,
through online commentary for example. According to Chocanec this reflects the
trend of “participatory journalism” which includes audiences in the production
of media communication.
Part 2 – Participation and interpersonal pragmatics
Troubles talk, (dis) affiliation and the participation order in
Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion boards, by Michael Haugh and Wei-Lin
Melody Chang
Haugh and Chang have analysed a Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion board on
‘mom talk’. Their interest lies in how participants on these forums understand
their roles in the participation order as well as the moral order. By looking
at how participants respond to ‘troubles talk’ which they define as “the
expression of some degree of dissatisfaction or discontent with a particular
situation (…) followed by (dis) affiliation with those troubles by a recipient
(Jefferson 1988)” (p 102). Haugh and Chang lay out three types of talk found
on online discussion boards with interlinked preferred responses: (1) troubles
talk, (2) soliciting advice and (3) complaining.
They explain that participants displaying troubles talk have a preferred
response of displaying emotional reciprocity but can sometimes encounter
dispreferred responses of giving advice (preferred response to soliciting
advice) or blaming or accusing (dispreferred response to complaining).
Their analysis shows that participants show emotional reciprocity through
“mutual encouragement”, “mutual bemoaning” and “empathic suggesting”; however
a small number of responses showed accusing and advising. Whereas in English
culture this can be seen as face threatening, in Chinese culture giving advice
is seen as a supportive response. This leads Huang and Chang to suggest that
more work needs to be done in non-Western computer-mediated communication
(CMC) in order to create the metalanguage to deal with these different
cultural responses appropriately.
(2) Humour in microblogging: Exploiting linguistic humour strategies for
identity construction in two Facebook focus groups, by Miriam A. Locher and
Brook Bolander
Locher and Bolander have analysed status updates on Facebook from two groups:
10 students and young professional living in Switzerland, and 10 UK students.
Their aim was to explore how these participants use humour and how that humour
is used to create their identity. Locher and Bolander start by reviewing
previous research on identity creation on (mainly) social media as well as
briefly investigating how to define humour. Though they never clearly state
their working definition of humour, they explain in their methodology that
they decided what was humorous based on “clear evidence through linguistic
means” and “background knowledge that warranted the status update to be taken
humorously” (p 143).
Through their analysis they identify ten types of humour. The most common
types being (1) appeal to shared knowledge, (2) irony, (3) word play and (4)
self-deprecation. Not all these uses of humour were responded to and used in
co-creating a group identity, but as Locher and Bolander state, since the
statuses are published on a semi-public domain (Facebook) they are intended
for an audience and therefore some form of identity creation. They also argue
for the importance of studying the use of humour over time as one humorous
status update will not lead to the creation of a humorous identity.
The researchers also identified five categories of identity creation: (1)
personality, (2) pastime, (3) humour, (4) work and (5) relationship claims.
Within each of the two groups (Swiss and UK) the individuals used these five
identity claims differently. Locher and Bolander conclude that though
differences could be found in their data, the technological advances that
Facebook has made since their data collection in 2008 make it necessary for
more research to be done.
(3) Impoliteness in the service of verisimilitude in film interaction by Marta
Dynel
Dynel’s paper is the first paper in this collection to take a more theoretical
approach, focusing on impoliteness in film interaction. She draws on the
participation framework to separate the two communicative levels of film: (1)
the inter-character level and (2) the recipient level. The inter-character
level follows similar communicative behaviours as nonfictional situations,
meaning that face threatening acts on this level can be considered impolite by
the hearer (on the same level), whereas the recipient (the TV audience) might
consider face threatening acts on the first level not as impoliteness but as a
form of entertainment depending on the “inferential path devised by the
collective sender” (p 159).
Through examples from the TV-series House, Dynel shows how the impoliteness of
House (the main character) is linked to his power, both his expert power (he
is the best diagnostician) and his legitimate power (he has subordinates) and
how his impoliteness has different responses on each communicative level. She
argues that even though on the inter-character level the impoliteness is
neutralised as part of House’s personality and on the recipient level the
impoliteness is classed as entertainment (this is first-order impoliteness),
researchers can still classify his behaviour as second-order impoliteness.
House’s impoliteness acts are not unmarked, she argues therefore are similar
to how even in close relationships, candor can be viewed as impoliteness.
(4) “That’s none of your business, Sy”: The pragmatics of vocatives in film
dialogue by Raffaele Zago
Zago’s paper continues on a topic similar to Dynel’s, as it looks at the
pragmatics of vocatives both on the inter-character level and on the recipient
level. He starts by giving an overview of English vocatives as well as the
pragmatics of vocatives in film dialogue. The latter details methodologies
used in the past as well as research outcomes. Zago then goes on to
investigate different pragmatic functions and positions of vocatives in
Sliding Doors (SD), One Hour Photo (OHP) and Erin Brockovich (EB). Zago
selected these three films because they contain a variety of interactions.
On the inter-character level, Zago found that the use of vocatives mimics
natural conversation. Vocatives are mainly used as “relational, attitudinal
and expressive” rather than “in their identifying role” (p 203). He also found
the use of vocatives particularly high in confrontational situations; these he
labelled “adversarial vocatives” (p 203). Finally, they also mimic natural
conversation when they are used in the final-position, thereby increasing the
illocutionary force of the sentence.
On the recipient level, Zago found four functions of vocatives: (1) they
simulate natural spoken discourse thereby increasing the viewer’s suspension
of disbelief, (2) they increase “conversation dynamicity”, (3) they foreground
certain segments of dialogue by drawing attention to whom each character is
speaking, and (4) they foreground whole scenes in cases where they are
overused.
Part 3 – Forms of participation
A participation perspective on television evening news in the age of immediacy
by Linda Lombardo
Lombardo’s paper is the first to focus on television news media in this
volume. TV news is still “among the most influential knowledge producing
institutions of our time” (Ekstrom 2002: 274) and is developing constantly to
grow along with the trend towards “communicating effectively” and with
“improvisation and conversation as preferred mode of delivery” (p 212).
Lombardo then compiled a corpus of BBC evening news programmes and is
analysing the reporter – news presenter exchanges through a participation
framework perspective. This dialogic exchange, she says, is performed on
behalf of the audience and includes a ‘liveness’ as it takes the form of a
conversation.
This ‘liveness’ in the reporter-news presenter exchanges is decreasing though
as Lombardo’s corpus shows. The exchanges are shortening with “less discourse
in a conversational mode” (p 229). This is replaced by a quick switches
between news items and the inclusion of live links and invitations to visit
the website and participate in the news through comments. Lombardo argues that
these changes could have a negative effect on the TV audience as there is less
chance for a full understanding of the news event.
She then draws again on Goffman’s (1981) participation framework, stating that
the TV audience is positioned as a “ratified hearer/observer” in the news
presenter – reporter exchanges and, with the directions to the website, is
more and more becoming a “full recipient who can take on a (limited) role in
producing language” (p 229).
(2) What I can (re)make out of it: Incoherence, non-cohesion, and
re-interpretation in YouTube video responses by Elisabetta Adami
Adami’s paper focuses on video responses on YouTube and how cohesion and
coherence are present in them. As YouTube videos allow participants to use a
variety of multimodal resources for response which can result in only loosely
related responses, Adami argues that a framework should be developed to
“account for marginally related exchanges” (p 234). She follows Kress’s
definition that “communication is always a response by one participant to a
prompt” (2010; p 235). Therefore even responses that are not explicitly
cohesive with the initial video can still be analysed as cohesive and coherent
in some way.
Adami analysed 613 video responses to one of YouTube ‘most responded to’
videos entitled ‘best video ever’. The responses, she argues, can be tracked
along “a relatedness continuum” (p 254) which ranges from “fully cohesive and
attuned responses” through four other categories to responses that display “no
explicit or implicit clues of relatedness with the initiating video” (p 254).
With such a wide range of responses, Adami states that the success of a video
does no longer depend on the author’s intended meaning, but instead on its
“prompting potential” (p 255).
Finally she argues that sign-making through the different copy-and-paste
methods participants use in their video responses is influencing what is
accepted as explicit and implicit cohesiveness and calls for further research.
This research will also need to take into account the changing, multimodal
form of online participation, which is creating more focus on
individualisation over community. Perhaps a redefinition of community is
necessary in further research.
(3) Enhancing citizen engagement: Political weblogs and participatory
democracy by Giorgia Riboni
Riboni’s paper investigates the difference between American political weblogs
run by political parties and those run by citizens. Weblogs have been able to
fill a gap in the market by favouring participation, helping to mobilise
opinions and helping to organise citizens’ activities (p 260). Blogs run by
citizens especially are subjective and mainly represent solely the viewpoint
of the author. This is in contrast with blogs run by political parties who
tend to represent the party as a whole rather than one individual. Riboni then
adopts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach to identify
these differences and how these different blogs represented the 2008 American
elections.
She collected data from 10 citizen political blogs selected by popularity and
from 10 party political blogs selected by their “political creed” (p 263).
With 10,000 tokens taken from each blog, Riboni’s corpus consisted of 200,000
tokens.
Riboni’s analysis focuses on the use of pronouns, both first person singular
and first person plural and finally the discursive construction of the
candidates through the blogs. She shows that citizens’ blogs use more first
person singular pronouns and represent their own ideology in their blogs.
Party blogs use some first person singular pronouns, for example when posts
are written by a member of congress who shares their experience in congress.
They mainly use first person plural pronouns though, as they are representing
the collective party and want to include the audience in that party. Riboni
concludes by showing that the citizen bloggers tended to represent Obama and
McCain (the two presidential candidates) through personal characteristics,
whereas party blogs focused on their political programmes.
EVALUATION
Dynel and Chovanec clearly set out the aims of this volume in the preface;
they are to investigate (1) “participation frameworks and interactional
phenomena in traditional public media discourses” and (2) “the nature of
participation and interaction in novel discourses arising in computer-mediated
and technology-mediated communication” (p 10). A quick answer to whether they
have achieved those aims is yes. In each of the three parts, they give an
opportunity to both scholars in traditional media and scholars in newer media
to adjust existing participation frameworks as well as to propose new ideas.
The traditional media discussed ranges from TV news to film, and while these
topics have been thoroughly discussed in other work, the papers in this volume
are able to give new insight into these media. They do this specifically by
focusing on under-explored parts of Goffman’s (1981) participation framework
(e.g. Brock in Chapter 2), or by focusing on the changes in the media due to
technological advances (e.g. Lombardo in Chapter 9).
The newer media discussed in this volume includes both commonly discussed
media such as Facebook and Twitter, and also less common media such as YouTube
video responses and political weblogs. Especially in the new media chapters,
the variety of methods is striking: corpus linguistics, critical discourse
analysis and multimodality to name a few. This use of a wide variety of
methodologies strengthens the book and its representation of current research
into new media.
Though the volume is coherent in its topic, Dynel’s own paper seems to not fit
as well as other chapters. Although all the articles are related to the topic,
Dynel’s paper is more theoretical than the others. Perhaps the addition of
another more theoretical paper would have made a difference and would at the
same time have added a new perspective on participation in both public and
social media. There is a lot of practical, analysis work in this field, and
more theoretical work like Dynel’s chapter would be a great addition.
I recommend this volume to researchers in both participation and media
research fields. Dynel and Chovanec have successfully integrated these two
research areas, including methodologies and theoretical background from both
fields. As interdisciplinary research is growing, this volume shows how well
different fields can work together.
REFERENCES
Bell, A. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:
145-204.
Clark, H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ekstrom, M. 2002. Epistemologies of TV Journalism: A Theoretical Framework.
Journalism 3(3): 259-282.
Fetzer, A. 2006. ‘Minister, We will see How the Public Judges You’. Media
references in political interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 180-195.
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia
Press.
Hymes, D. 1972. Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In
Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John
Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 35-71. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Jefferson, G. 1988. On the Sequential Organisation of Troubles Talk in
Ordinary Conversation. Social Problems 35(4): 418-441.
Kress, G. 2010. Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary
Communication. London: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Martine van Driel is a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her PhD research focuses on new forms of news media and reader response. Other research interests include: political discourse, multimodality, speech and thought presentation and gender and identity research.
She is a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and has recently presented reader response data of readers of news live blogs at the annual PALA conference at the University of Kent (UK).
Aside her PhD, she is working on articles on multimodality, political tweets and radio interviews.
Nov 19
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Rodney H. Jones
EDITOR: Alice Chik
EDITOR: Christoph Hafner
TITLE: Discourse and Digital Practices
SUBTITLE: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Mariza Georgalou, Lancaster University
SUMMARY
Digital technologies afford miscellaneous ways for people to engage in new
discourse activities and practices, ones which they have not engaged in before
and which have not been possible before (Barton and Lee 2013). In this light,
a volume that addresses discourse and digital practices is a highly welcome
addition towards enhancing our knowledge of what people do with/through
digital discourse and how discourse analysts approach digital texts.
“Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age”
is a collection of 14 studies, first presented at “The Fifth International
Roundtable on Discourse Analysis: Discourse and Digital Practices” (23-25 May
2013, Hong Kong), with a two-pronged aim: i) to explore how discourse analysis
enables us to understand contemporary digital practices, and ii) to determine
how these practices challenge researchers to adjust traditional discourse
analytic tools and advance new theories. Zeroing in on different types of
digital media, examining different kinds of practices and integrating a wide
array of frameworks and approaches, this volume presents a nice panorama of
the current state of research.
In their introduction, which can function as an ideal point of departure for
courses on digital discourse, Rodney H. Jones, Alice Chik and Christoph A.
Hafner detail certain particularities of digitally mediated texts including
texture, intertextuality, dialogicity, multimodality, contexts, affordances,
interactional character, and the conveyance of ideologies.
The first study of the volume, “Discourse analysis of games”, by James Paul
Gee, considers how games can have syntax, semantics and situated meanings
determined by context and socio-cultural knowledge paving the way for the
creation of a field of discourse analysis applied to video games. Taking the
2D indie puzzle platformer video game “Thomas was Alone” as a case in point,
Gee evinces that when we play a video game, we are having interactive,
responsive, turn-based conversations on the basis of the affordances at our
disposal.
The next contribution, Rodney H. Jones’s “Discourse, cybernetics, and the
entextualisation of the self”, analyses 25 of the most highly rated
self-tracking apps available on Apple’s App Store, relying upon his own
experience with these apps as well as those of other users’ as described in
online reviews, blog posts and two focus group interviews. Through a
combination of multimodal and mediated discourse analysis with insights from
cybernetics, media theory, and autoethnography, Jones shows that the texts
produced by self-tracking apps (in the form of analyses, exhortations,
reminders and narratives) “process” their writers and readers in terms of
resemiotisation, retemporalisation, and recontextualisation.
David Barton’s study, “Tagging on Flickr as a social practice”, sheds light on
people’s purposes when tagging on Flickr within the framework of a social
approach to language online, developed from literacy studies. Based on
observations of 30 Flickr users’ photo pages along with online interviews with
some of these users, Barton asserts that tags are not sheer metadata but can
play an instrumental role in meaning-making, enabling users to express
existing and/or new information, convey affective stances towards images, make
“asides”, narrate stories, invent new concepts, and exhibit linguistic
creativity.
In “Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in online reviews”, Camilla Vásquez
focuses on data from user-generated online consumer reviews with particular
reference to the websites TripAdvisor (hotels), Amazon (common consumer
goods), Yelp (restaurants and services), Netflix (films) and Epicurious
(recipes). Her analysis reveals that reviewers adopt a range of diverse forms
of intertextuality and interdiscursivity to ground their opinions, align or
disalign with the evaluations of other reviewers, lend authority to their
claims, educate readers, express tastes and preferences, and forge a sense of
virtual co-membership.
Phil Benson, in his study “YouTube as text: Spoken interaction analysis and
digital discourse”, treats the uploading of a video on YouTube as an
interactional turn, which starts a process of multimodal social interaction in
which users “respond” to the “initiation” of the video via a variety of
semiotic modes. His analysis of a series of YouTube videos entitled “Cantonese
Word of the Week” provides compelling evidence for the usability and
usefulness of the frameworks for analysing spoken interaction (Sinclair and
Coulthard 1975; Stenström and Stenström 1994) in the context of multimedia
digital discourse.
The next contribution, “Co-constructing identity in virtual worlds for
children”, comes from Christoph A. Hafner, who employs positioning theory
(Davies and Harré 1990) to investigate the virtual world of Moshi Monsters.
His discussion is informed by observations of his two children while they were
participating in Moshi Monsters as well as by stimulated recall sessions,
where the children viewed videos of their online activity and then provided a
guided account of it. Hafner concludes that identity in virtual worlds
constitutes a jointly negotiated, interactive process between designer and
user.
Commencing from the same theoretical premises with Hafner, Alice Chik, in her
paper “Recreational language learning and digital practices: Positioning and
repositioning”, takes a 4-week autoethnographic approach to examine the
positioning of language learners in the language learning social network sites
(LLSNSs) of Duolingo and Busuu. What she observes is that learners are
positioned, both textually and multimodally, by the websites to accept certain
conceptualisations of foreign language learning. She also points to the fact
that LLSNSs adopt discursive practices of infantilising learners (e.g. via
cartoonish background colours and figures) as a display of power relations.
In “Investigating digital sex-talk practices: A reflection on corpus-assisted
discourse analysis”, Brian King deals with the practice of “sex talk” in gay
chat rooms synthesising tools from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis
with insights from researcher observation. After working with data from 1,332
participants, emanating from the Queer Chatroom Corpus that he has compiled,
King finds that these chat rooms are mainly places to socialise rather than
places to participate in cyber-sex.
The paper “Apps, adults and young children: Researching digital literacy
practices in context” by Guy Merchant reports on the use of iPad apps to
access interactive stories in early education centres in England, anchoring
his research in the literature on gesture, touch and pointing, and haptics.
The main thrust of Merchant’s argument is that portable screens and apps
contribute significantly to the everyday experience and popular culture of
toddlers and young children, to the same degree as book sharing, television
and related media play. Hence, they should be seen as key ingredients of
educational provision both at home and in early year settings.
In a similar vein, Victoria Carrington, in “‘It’s changed my life’: iPhone as
technological artifact”, is interested in the interaction of a female
adolescent with her iPhone in the construction of everyday life. According to
Carrington’s sociomaterial analysis, an interesting synergy between new
literacy studies, the philosophy of technology, and object ethnography, the
iPhone (by means of its apps, the texts produced within it, and the ways in
which it comes through in the owner’s discourse) facilitates various forms of
communication, displays of identity, information gathering and sharing, and
socialising.
In “Digital discourse@public space: Flows of language online and offline”,
Carmen Lee is concerned with how “internet-specific” language is reconstructed
and recontextualised in offline physical spaces. Her dataset consists of
photographs of public spaces in Hong Kong where internet-specific language is
evident, field notes about the location of the text, and interviews with
passers-by. Situating her discussion within the paradigms of linguistic
landscape research, geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon 2003), literacy studies
and ethnography, Lee cogently argues that the presence of internet language in
offline spaces not only indicates public awareness of netspeak features but
also contributes to the enregisterment of internet language.
Jackie Marsh, in “The discourse of celebrity in the fanvid ecology of Club
Penguin machinima”, explores the social practices embedded in the production
and consumption of machinima (a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” which
refers to films made by fans in virtual worlds and computer games using screen
capture and editing software), which are created by children and young people
who participate in the virtual world Club Penguin. To do so, she coalesces
Foucaultian discourse analysis with an ethnographic approach that involved
interviews with two key participants and observation of their YouTube channels
and Twitter streams. As she demonstrates, in these online worlds, discourses
of recognition, status and competition create celebrity-fan relationships that
replicate those met outside the peer-to-peer network.
The volume ends with two penetrating critiques on discourses about digital
practices where both authors engage with the theoretical concerns and
empirical calls voiced within critical discourse analysis. Ilana Snyder, in
her contribution “Discourse of ‘curation’ in digital times”, examines the
discourses and practices associated with curation in texts gleaned from the
realms of digital marketing, online communication, education online, and
digital literacy studies. In the context of digital technologies, Snyder
notices that curation comprises the processes of creating, editing,
aggregating, organising, culling, interpreting, producing, testing new
attitudes, rethinking and pushing boundaries. As she aptly points out,
curation is a social practice and as such “it is always ideological, always
rhetorical and often political” (p. 209).
Lastly, Neil Selwyn’s study, “The discursive construction of education in the
digital age”, clusters discourses of digital education into two categories: 1)
discourses of digital re-schooling (according to which digital technology
breaks down barriers between and within institutions, facilitates new ways of
participating and interacting, and allows participants to “bring in” their new
vernacular practices); and 2) discourses of digital de-schooling (according to
which digital technology completely usurps the educational institution placing
emphasis on the idea of “do-it-ourselves”). He concludes that both these sets
of discourses dictate the necessity for educational change.
EVALUATION
This is an intellectually fascinating volume essential for advanced students
and researchers within the areas of discourse analysis, literacy and
multimodality studies. It will also be of interest to those working with
digital media in the fields of education, media and communication studies, and
cultural studies. Previous training in discourse studies and familiarity with
the mechanics of digital communication are seen as a prerequisite for readers.
All contributions confirm the significance, robustness, plasticity and
malleability of the discourse analysis paradigm with reference to contemporary
digital environments. Following very different strands within the paradigm,
the authors succeed brilliantly in analysing a broad spectrum of interesting
topics and multimodal examples tackling at the same time useful concepts such
as “packaging” and “flow” (Gee), “servomechanism” (Jones), “deepened
subjectivity” (Ramsay 2003 in King), “polymedia” (Madianou and Miller 2013 in
Carrington), and “enregisterment” (Agha 2003 in Lee). What is more, nearly
every author provides their own conceptualisation of the term “affordance”
hinging on the enabling/constraining configurations of the digital media under
discussion.
One major strength of this volume is the practical advice given to discourse
analysts who (wish to) conduct research on digital media. Barton underscores
that online life is essentially social; hence the role of other people, both
online and offline, has major implications for the analysis. Vásquez proposes
a sustained period of participant observation of the site/community together
with interviews with contributors and readers so as to acquire additional
insider information and approach the given topic more holistically without
overlooking vital details. Hafner, on the other hand, gives handy tips on how
to prompt participants for comments without embedding assumptions about their
activity. In addition, King, Lee and Merchant touch on the role of digital
technology not just as an object of research but also as a research tool. King
provides a lucid account of ethics and digital research emphasising that “[t]o
treat digital data as inherently public and freely available, and to gather
data with impunity, is to risk ‘poisoning the well’ for future researchers”
(p. 134).
Another laudable feature of the book is its orientation towards taking a
critical approach to digital discourse. Jones cautions researchers that they
should not hallow digital services and apps as these are mainly driven by the
commercial and ideological agendas of internet companies and advertisers. On
the same wavelength, Hafner calls for the critical evaluation of consumerism
discourses represented in some texts within virtual worlds. From an
educational perspective, Selwyn suggests moving “beyond the celebratory nature
of much scholarly work on digital media” (p. 239) and endeavouring to
demonstrate the connection between different types of dominance and inequality
inherent in digital education. The authors also recommend circumspection in
claiming generalisability or representativeness of any findings. The global
potential of digital media and mobile devices does not necessarily entail that
they have global reach. Merchant sees iPads as “placed resources” (Prinsloo
2005) with their use always being infused with “the local as instantiated in
routines, relationships and day-to-day operations, as well as by the beliefs,
understandings and experiences of participants” (p. 147). Carrington, on the
other hand, reminds us that the social advantages accruing from technology are
distributed unevenly given that not all (young) people around the world are
iPhone/smartphone owners.
With the exception of Barton and Lee, the discussions included in this volume
revolve around Anglophone case studies. It would be nice to see examples from
more languages as this would considerably increase the potency of discourse
analysis tools in understanding digital practices. Moreover, the inclusion of
(auto)ethnographies on devices that run operating systems other than iOS would
constitute a valuable asset.
The volume displays a couple of bugs related to typos: “herteroglossic”
(bottom of p. 6) instead of “heteroglossic” and an inconsistency between
“complementarity” and “complimentarity” (top of p. 11).
In sum, the volume at hand is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning
field of digital discourse analysis, which can intrigue and inspire further
fruitful research.
REFERENCES
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication
23(3–4): 231–273.
Barton, D. and Lee, C. (2013). Language online: Investigating digital texts
and practices. London: Routledge.
Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of
selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20(1): 43–63.
Madianou, M. and Miller, D. (2013). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital
media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural
Studies 16(2): 169–187.
Prinsloo, M. (2005). The new literacies as placed resources. Perspectives in
education 23(4): 87–98.
Ramsay, S. (2003). Toward an algorithmic criticism. Literary and Linguistic
Computing 18(2): 167–174.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the
material world. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. M. and Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stenström, A. and Stenström, B. (1994). An introduction to spoken interaction.
London: Longman.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Mariza Georgalou has recently been awarded a PhD from Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics and English Language, UK. Her research focuses on social media discourse analysis. She has forthcoming research articles in the journals Discourse & Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, and Social Media & Society. See also www.marizageorgalou.com.
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