Multilingualism and multisemioticity in social media (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal for Innovation Education and Research, 2019
This paper relies on digital ethnography as a methodological frame and addresses the cyberspace as a context for the research of social and discursive interactions. Mediatization is taken as a key concept for the investigation of cultural practices that involve digital technologies. The assumptions are supported by the study of the case of "Know your meme", a website dedicated to find and document memes and viral phenomena. Grounded on a critical view of the interrelations between digital media, communication and society, it pinpoints remix and multimodality as two of the main stylistic resources employed in meaning-making processes. The analysis suggests that the contemporary subject resorts to digital media affordances and the immediateness of internet communication to create/share memes in response to offline events. It also considers that featuring memes as objects in a curator's page turn these texts into social-cultural artifacts. Assuming a dialogic point of view, the discussion highlights that the cultural products created by subjects in discursive interactions both shape and are shaped by axiological positions. It also caters for the idea that the mediatized practices analyzed show that the boundaries between online and offline universes have being increasingly blurred in the current society. Abstract This paper relies on digital ethnography as a methodological frame and addresses the cyberspace as a context for the research of social and discursive interactions. Mediatization is taken as a key concept for the investigation of cultural practices that involve digital technologies. The assumptions are supported by the study of the case of "Know your meme", a website dedicated to find and document memes and viral phenomena. Grounded on a critical view of the interrelations between digital media, communication and society, it pinpoints remix and multimodality as two of the main stylistic resources employed in meaning-making processes. The analysis suggests that the contemporary subject resorts to digital media affordances and the immediateness of internet communication to create/share memes in response to offline events. It also considers that featuring memes as objects in a curator's page turn these texts into social-cultural artifacts. Assuming a dialogic point of view, the discussion highlights that the cultural products created by subjects in discursive interactions both shape and are shaped by axiological positions. It also caters for the idea that the mediatized practices analyzed show that the boundaries between online and offline universes have being increasingly blurred in the current society.
2014
Drawing on insights provided by linguistic anthropology, the study of multisemioticity and research in computer-mediated discourse (CMD), this chapter discusses how entextualization (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Silverstein &
Social Media and Linguistic Relativity: Language as a Performance of Culture
According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the socio-cultural background of a speaker and listener determines the meaning of discourse, suggesting that language is a performance of the culture the speaker represents. The theory of Linguistic Relativity, realized by Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, has been a dying theory until a recent renaissance, inspired by new directions. Linguistic Relativity states, “The particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality.” The concept is considered important for understanding how cultures perceive the world around them. Language, therefore, not only manifests within culture, but it can also affect cultural values, processes, conceptualization, and thinking. Many studies in the field of linguistics concluded that language does not wholly influence thinking, yet more recent studies have discovered a correlation between the language one speaks and how they perceive the world around them. Furthermore, language acts as a performance of how one views the world, giving acts a verbal statement. Specifically in Social Media, such as Facebook and Twitter, users utilize text and phrasing to carry out the performance of the quotidian. This essay examines how language is used through social media to carry out acts of performance, focusing on heterogeneous texts which have changed how users of social media perceive the expanding world around them. The revolutions of Egypt and Tunisia were primarily executed through technology, due to the ability to circulate heterogeneous texts and act out through words alone. A further look into how social media has accomplished a magnification of language as a performance is needed to progress the study of linguistic relativity in a world where technology manifests as socio-cultural discourse.
The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media despite a number of notable scholarly works. But as yet there has been little that has dealt specifically with issues of multicultural discourse – how language, identity, cross-cultural social relations and power play out in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media. In this paper, I show why discourse studies must engage with theories and empirical work on social media across academic fields beyond discourse studies and linguistics, at how these can help best frame the kinds of research that needs to be done, how to best formulate some of the basic questions of critical discourse analysis for this new communicative environment. I use this as a platform to point to the areas where multicultural discourse studies can work – where all the ambiguities of former studies of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are present, but realised in new ways. Yet these new forms of communication are fused into wider patterns of changing cultural values about forms of social structure, knowledge itself and the kinds of issues that tend to form our individually civic spheres.
Investigating multilingualism and multisemioticity as communicative resources in social media
2017
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Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication (presentation pdf)
Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication, 2018
Before being the title of our new journal, Digital age in semiotics and communication was a short definition of the research program of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University. Of course, today speaking of a “unified program” in the humanities is a utopian act, given the nature of our communities, the hyper-productivity of our colleagues, the orientation towards projects, a shortage of funding, and predatory open-access publishing. Digital age in semiotics and communication is the first specialized semiotic journal dedicated to the deep cultural transformations after the advent of the internet, and thus provides a platform for a long term collaboration with those fellow semioticians who intend to dedicate their research predominantly to such a topic. It is conceived as a platform for a kind of intellectual crowd sourcing for new semiotic ideas, adequate to new cultural realities, thus opening our discipline to the cultural agenda of the XXI century. The paper of Vuzharov “Personalization Algorithms – Limiting the Scope of Discovery? How algorithms force out serendipity” is about the major backstage processes behind the seductive services of Google and Facebook. The author keeps a strong ethical stance concerning the necessity for more awareness in this regard, and to make the point more clear uses the textual pragmatic model of Eco from The Limits of Interpretation (1992). The next two papers analyze new identity mechanisms emerged in digital culture. Andacht’s paper “The Imagined Community Revisited through a Mock-Nationalistic YouTube Web Series” is dedicated to a new and original form of video narrative, addressing the Uruguayan national identity in a totally different way compared to the nation formation described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983). The main theoretical concept of the British scholar is semiotically revised with the help of some Peircean terms. The paper of Lankauskaitė and Liubinienė “A Shift from ‘Me’ to ‘We’ in Social Media” examines the impact of the Web 3.0. on the mentality of internet users. The shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’ is seen as a consequence of technological innovations which allow crowdsourcing, participatory culture, collective intelligence, etc. The thesis is illustrated with three case studies of an online TV, an offline social action, initiated in social media and an online project for artistic collaboration. The next five papers are dedicated to various aesthetic and interactive practices in digital culture. In his paper “Postcard from Istanbul: Digital Reconstruction of the City as Memory in Tasos Boulmetis’s Polítiki Kouzína / A Touch of Spice / Baharatin Tadi”, Dimitriadis explicates the narrative mechanisms for representing the past with the help of digital effects. Contrary to the mainstream use of the digital special FX, in this case a strong poetic effect is achieved in visualizing the space of memory. Cassone dedicates his paper “’It’s over 9000.’ Apeiron Narrative Configurations in Contemporary Mediascape” to an interesting videogame phenomenon, started as a pen and paper role-playing game in Japan prior to the digital age. The particular narrative device of individual growth of power in the fictional discourse, after the transfer of the plot as a videogame, is analyzed with the tools of generative semiotics and is spread as a meme and viral phenomenon. Another paper is about “Constructing the Corporate Instagram Discourse – a critical visual discourse approach”. There Poulsen takes a critical stance towards an important incoherence in the way Instagram represents its mission, and at the same time how the app is trying to regulate the use of the platform and its visual tools. In his text “Formalism and Digital Research of Literature,” Debnar examines another phenomenon typical of the digital age - the mass digitalization of literary texts and the challenges for the reader in front of huge archives available for everybody. The key notion of his text, borrowed from Moretti, is distant reading, and the author’s contribution is to demonstrate the validity of the formalist approach to that theory. In “Enchanted Object: Indian Sari, Negotiating the Online and the Offline Space”, Khanwalkar makes a sociosemiotic analysis of a garment with huge symbolic value – the Sari. The main object of the research is how online discourse on the Sari upgrades and transforms its significance, how local and global interact in the identity formation process. In the next section there are two papers on the digital age in corporate communication. In “Engaging Brand Communication in Facebook – a Typology of the Brand Page Users”, Kartunova identifies four types of Facebook users of corporate pages using the classical approach of Jean-Marie Floch. The study is supported by empirical data, collected among the target groups and puts the main emphasis on brand culture adoption and brand narrative engagement. Asimova has chosen a semiotic content analysis approach in order to investigate “Digital Culture of the Regulated Industries. Focus: Tobacco Sector”. The conclusions state that although the efficacy of the legal regulations in such industries, social media, blogs and forums open possibilities for marketers in innovative ways of promotion. Contrary to all other papers the last text in the journal, written by Yankova and entitled “The Effeteness of Social Media” holds a conservative stance and argues that similarities to past social relations are more relevant than the differences. The author shows how an abstract metaphysical vision of Peirce about the universe can be extended to the cultural reality of social media.
Revista Amazonia Investiga
Nowadays, digital communication helps people to establish contact quickly and conveniently, to convey their message, ideas, the vision of the world to a wide audience. In this regard, new challenges have emerged for discourse analysis in the field of research on the features of digital communication, digital communication practices, the impact of electronic communication technologies on the formation and conduct of discourse, application, and influence of extralinguistic factors on speech. The article analyzes the problems and features of discourse using digital technologies, current trends, and new data in the field of social networks, hashtag activism, problems of involvement, activity, motivation of participants in online communication, formation of their online identity. The authors used system-functional, hermeneutic methods, linguistic analysis, methods of analysis, and synthesis in the framework of discourse theory. The study found and confirmed that the features of digital c...
SOCIAL MEDIA, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2019
Social media encompass web-based programs and user-generated-content that allow people to communicate and collaborate via mobile phones, computers, and other communication technologies. Unlike other media linked to a particular technology, social media are a phenomenon, associated with a set of tools, practices and ideologies for connecting and collaborating. Social media blur distinctions between one-to-many and face-to-face communication. They allow individuals and groups to connect across boundaries of space and time, both synchronously and asynchronously. Afforded by changing technology, social media are ever-expanding as users develop novel uses and creative content. Scholars have studied social media across a range of topics, including such issues as message content and construction, identity formation, relationship development, community development, political activism, disinformation, and cyber threats. Social media vary culturally. For instance, in China social media are impacted by internet censorship, including not only the kinds of apps that are used in China-WeChat and Weibo instead of Facebook and Twitter-but also forms of expression and online activities. While Chinese social media can be a site for political activism, and creative, humorous, and satirical messages, they are constructed in ways that avoid online censorship. Social media also afford the construction and maintenance of local communities and cultural identities. For instance, users with a shared interest, occupation, activity, or offline connection, such as a hometown, may communicate online using a shared language, vocabulary, or code. Hence, unlike mass media that can promote a collective, national identity, social media may facilitate the re-emergence and construction of local and diverse identities. Finally, social media can empower subaltern individuals and groups to mobilize and effect change through collective action. Yet social media, when employed by the state and/or neoliberal corporate powers, can work to suppress subaltern groups by co-opting social media as a technology that affords surveillance. They may also be used to spread misinformation or extremism by both state-sponsored and non-state actors.
Discourse of Twitter and Social Media
In this volume Michele Zappavigna lays the foundation for a forthcoming generation of work in internet linguistics, drawing on her training in social semiotics, linguistics and information technology. This necessarily involves discussion of how to gather data from Web 2.0, how to use corpus linguistics to process it, how to use functional linguistics to interpret it and how to use social semiotics to make sense of what is going on. The most dramatic turn here, as far as linguistics is concerned, is her interpersonal focus on ambient sociality. This she explores in terms of the way in which tweeters affi liate through searchable talk, demonstrating for the fi rst time in a large scale study how communities constitute themselves through shared values – where it’s not just interaction that matters but shared meaning and where what is being shared is feelings about ideas (not just the ideas themselves). This axiological orientation, based as it is on appraisal theory and quantitative analysis, goes a long way to balancing the ideational bias which has for so long delimited linguistics as a theory of writing and holds great promise for the evolution of a more social sensitive and socially responsible discipline in the years to come. This turn is not of course without its challenges. The sheer scale of the enterprise makes it hard to see the forest for the trees, making the development of novel two- and three-dimensional animated visualisations PREFACE xi a priority. Alongside this are the trials of streaming data, as a microblog unfolds, as a blogger develops and as Web 2.0 evolves; the contingencies of time matter and cannot be theorized away. Finally, and perhaps most challengingly, Web. 2.0 is more than words, and ever more so; this demands not just a linguistics of words but a semiotics of multimodality, with all the implications for data gathering, analysis, interpretation and theorizing such entails. To her credit, Zappavigna dodges none of these issues and, with respect to the fi rst two, shows us the way forward. We’ll be hearing a lot more from her along these lines.