26.5174, Review: Discourse; Socioling: Jones, Hafner, Chik (2015)

Wed Nov 18 22:45:20 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-5174. Wed Nov 18 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.5174, Review: Discourse; Socioling: Jones, Hafner, Chik (2015)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
              http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2015 17:44:51
From: Mariza Georgalou [m.georgalou at gmail.com]
Subject: Discourse and Digital Practices

Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36065777

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-897.html

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

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

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 at 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.

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-26-5174	
----------------------------------------------------------