Repertoires on the move: exploiting technological affordances and contexts in mobile messaging interactions (original) (raw)
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Polymedia repertoires of networked individuals
Pragmatics and Society, 2021
This article introduces the concept of the polymedia repertoire to explore how social meaning is indexed through the interplay of communicative resources at different levels of expression (from choice of media to individual signs) in digitally mediated interactions. The multi-layered polymedia repertoire highlights how people move fluidly between media platforms, semiotic modes and linguistic resources in the course of their everyday interactions, and enables us to locate digital communications within individuals’ wider practices. The potential of our theoretical contribution is illustrated through analysis of mobile phone messaging between participants in a large multi-sited ethnography of the communicative practices of multilingual migrants working in linguistically diverse UK city neighbourhoods. Our analysis of mobile messaging exchanges in a day-in-the-life of these networked individuals reveals the importance of device attention in shaping interpersonal interactions, as well a...
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2022
This paper explores (re)configurations in new media communication practices, as they relate to the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic. We anchor our reflections onto the notion of 'context', which, following Hanks (2006), we understand as both emergent and embedded. Foregrounding context allows for a probing of any perceptible shifts and (dis)continuities in the entanglements of time, space, technological environments, and language and semiotic choices online.We thereby engage with context from two vantage points, following Georgakopoulou's (2007) practice-based heuristic of contextual analysis, that of 'sites' and 'ways of telling'. With regard to the former, we specifically focus on the online/offline nexus. We attest to a process of increasing blurring of online and offline contexts, which involves the material and physical worlds framing people's online interactions. As we argue, the pandemic reinforces the need to recognize the material and physical in the constitution of context online, by adding the dimension of "compression" (Bolander and Smith 2020). The physical confinement and regulation of bodies and everyday lives during lockdown has impacted online sites, not least because it led to many previously offline activities being compressed into or occurring online instead. This leads to our second major perspective, that of ways of telling. We argue that many of our established, normative communicative practices that were well-suited to pre-pandemic lives in mobility, have changed during the pandemic. These changes are mainly by way of adapting and repurposing existing formats rather than coming up with completely novel ones. Overall, our discussion is partly reflective and partly programmatic, in that we attempt to tease apart some of the ongoing reconfigurations of context, with an eye to trying to understand the effect they are having on where and what we do through discourse online. In this spirit, we also offer suggestions for what we might study as discourse analysts, sociolinguists and scholars interested in new media. We have chosen to include this programmatic perspective, since, judging by previous experience and research on (dis)continuities in language and media (e.g. Herring 2007), it is likely that some of these reconfigurations will 'stick' and become consolidated (cf. 'enregistered'), such that they continue to have an impact on our online encounters with one another, even if and as the global pandemic continues to change.
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.
Cita en Yus, F. (2021). Smartphone Communication Interactions in the App Ecosystem. Routledge.
Smartphone Communication Interactions in the App Ecosystem., 2022
This book offers a unique model for understanding the cognitive underpinnings, interactions, and discursive effects of our evolving use of smartphones in everyday app-mediated communication, from text messages and GIFs to images, video, and social media apps. Adopting a cyberpragmatics framework, grounded in cognitive pragmatics and relevance theory, it gives attention to how both the particular interfaces of different apps and users' personal attributes influence the contexts and uses of smartphone communication. The communication of emotions-in addition to primarily linguistic content-is foregrounded as an essential element of the kinds of ever-present paralinguistic and phatic communication that characterises our exchange of memes, GIFs, "likes," and image-and video-based content. Insights from related disciplines such as media studies and sociology are incorporated as the author unpacks the timeliest questions of our digitally mediated age. Aimed primarily at scholars and graduate students of communication, linguistics, pragmatics, media studies, and sociology of mass media, Smartphone Communication traffics in topics that will likewise engage upper-level undergraduate students.
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2022
This paper critically examines how elderly people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse(CALD) backgrounds in Victoria, Australia use visual-based platforms in navigating the lockdown in Melbourne, Australia. Based on conducting remote interviews among 15 participants in 2020, the findings show digital practices as integral to forge and maintain cultural identities and social connectedness. Using the mobilities perspective to interrogate digital behaviours, I coin the term '(im)mobile intimacy' to articulate a sense of closeness enabled, felt and negotiated through modes of movements and stasis in and with online platforms. I contend that differential mediated mobilities and immobilities are informed by social, contextual, and technological factors, revealing the textures of affective and relational dimensions of enacting mobile intimacy. In sum, by locating both movements and stasis in digital environments, this paper sheds light on the (re)production of exclusion during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Social Semiotic Perspective on Digital Mobility
Adopting a social semiotic perspective onto digital mobility, i.e., reframing it in terms of socio-cultural changes in sign-making practices rather than defined by technological innovation, the paper identifies key features of the digital landscape, namely 1. user-generated contents and contexts, 2. multimodality, 3. mobility of media, modes, genres, participant roles,platforms and domains, 4. individualization and fragmentation, and 5. reuse. Analysis of their affordances and consequent sign-making practices enables the identification of today’s priorities in media education (conceived of as education to, through and with media). These deal with new/renewed foregrounded/backgrounded abilities when notions of competence and literacy seem hardly applicable to the current needs in the combined use of media, modes and genres.
Research Journal of Social Sciences and Economics Review (RJSSER), 2020
Whatsapp statuses are an example of computer-mediated communication. The current qualitative and quantitative study aims to explore the ideology of Whatsapp users and highlight the differences among the generations through the semiotic landscape of Whatsapp statuses. The analytical tools of “David Machin and Andrea Mayr” (2012) and theoretical principles of “Kress and Leeuwen” (1996) helped to analyze the multimodal discourse of WhatsApp statuses. A survey was also conducted to know the stance of Whatsapp users. Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of 630 Whatsapp statuses of 90 participants in social semiotics represented Post-Millennials, Millennials, and Generation X with clear differences in their ideologies. The differences are louder for gaze, distance, iconography, colors, vector, angle, and frames. The results of the survey show that Post-Millennial give much value to Whatsapp statuses as 92% of them display statuses daily. All three generations have quite separate ...