Message and Medium

English Language Practices Across Old and New Media

Caroline Tagg, Mel Evans

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110670899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Studies of digital communication technologies often focus on the apparently unique set of multimodal resources afforded to users and the development of innovative linguistic strategies for performing mediatised identities and maintaining online social networks.
This edited volume interrogates the novelty of such practices by establishing a transhistorical approach to the study of digital communication. The transhistorical approach explores language practices as lived experiences grounded in historical contexts, and aims to identify those elements of human behaviour that transcend historical boundaries, looking beyond specific developments in communication technologies to understand the enduring motivations and social concerns that drive human communication.
The volume reveals long-term patterns in the indexical functions of seemingly innovative written and multimodal resources and the ideologies that underpin them, and shows that methods are not necessarily contingent on their datasets: historical analytic frameworks can be applied to digital data and newer approaches used to understand historical data. These insights present exciting opportunities for English language researchers, both historical and modern.

Section 1: Rethinking Perspectives

Introduction to rethinking perspectives

A key debate in the field of digital language research concerns the extent to which scholarly understanding of “new” media practices requires similarly “new” theories of language, communication and society. The argument for developing novel theoretical approaches presupposes that digitally mediated interactions are characterised – perhaps even defined – by their novelty and constitute a break from past practices. In seeking to historicise new media practices – to situate them as the latest developments in a complex and ongoing history of technologically mediated social change – we call instead for the rethinking of existing theoretical and methodological frameworks in the light of contemporary practices, based on the assumption that what is already known about social interaction remains of relevance in understanding how and why humans take up and use new technologies (Brooks 2007: 10). This approach is widely adopted elsewhere in linguistics and has resulted in the emergence of hybrid “old-new” methodologies such as MOOD, the microanalysis of online data, a digital version of conversation analysis (Giles et al. 2015; Giles, Stommel & Paulus 2017). The approach also enables frameworks developed for understanding early internet interactions to be re-evaluated in the light of newer media practices (Herring 2019). The particular concern of the current volume is the extent to which this approach truly enables scholars to think transhistorically – to look beyond the technology at enduring features of human communication – and to identify evidence not only of change but also of continuity in practice.

This first section lays down the groundwork for subsequent chapters by exploring the extent to which existing theories of communication are fit for a dual purpose – that of analysing new media practices and doing so from a transhistorical perspective. In his opening chapter on the pragmatic web, Rodney Jones considers the continuing relevance and analytical utility of pragmatic principles for understanding human-algorithm interaction in technologically mediated contexts. Although he calls for a new way of approaching pragmatics (“algorithmic pragmatics”), his main argument is that contemporary online communication – and, specifically, “how algorithms ‘do things’ with people” – can only be fully understood from a pragmatic perspective, and with reference to established pragmatic concepts including implicature, context and the speech act. His chapter contributes to a transhistorical approach by interrogating the extent to which key pragmatic principles guiding human communication remain relevant in new mediated contexts. In chapter two, Dániel Z. Kádár also starts from existing pragmatic frameworks, both synchronic and diachronic, and draws out the various contributions that each can be said to have made to a “historicisation” agenda (which we would see as a crucial element of a “transhistorical” approach), highlighting for example the reinterpretation of historical constructs such as “courtesie” through a modern lens and comparisons between contemporary pragmatic behaviour such as politeness and its historical antecedents. In illustrating what he identifies as a historically grounded interpersonal interactional approach, Kádár’s analysis of online shaming practices draws on a ritual interactional framework to explore similarities in practice between medieval ritual shaming and its twenty-first century equivalent. The final chapter by Caroline Tagg and Mel Evans proposes a transhistorical pragmatic approach that aligns with, and complements, existing pragmatic frameworks. Our framework focuses on enabling comparative pragmatic analysis of communicative practices in different historical periods by drawing on the uniformitarian principle commonly associated with sociolinguistic research – the assumption that linguistic data from the past is equivalent to that of contemporary data – whilst foregrounding the importance of contextual understanding. Our transhistorical analysis of spelling in Tudor correspondence and twenty-first century SMS feeds into and refines existing pragmatic accounts of new media spelling practices.

The theoretical focus of this section highlights the important role of evidence in transhistorical research, and the difficulties that can arise in sourcing comparative old data: while study of new media spelling can draw on participant interview, analysis of the motivations behind sixteenth-century orthographic practices must rely on metacommentary in the texts themselves, and on published writing manuals. Kádár’s study of medieval shaming rests necessarily on later commentaries around the practice, rather than actual interactional data or contemporary accounts (such as those provided elsewhere by the Old Bailey records, for example). Jones’ algorithmic pragmatics raises wider questions about methods, and how current analytical approaches to digital communication can be adapted to collect data on human-algorithm interaction and what form that data might take. Despite the limitations of evidence, the three theoretical chapters in this section go some way to showing how a sensitivity to continuities in practice and changing technological and social contexts can strengthen existing pragmatic frameworks and enable analysts to build on existing insights. These points are identified by Susan Fitzmaurice in her reflective conclusion, who cautions against presentism when dealing with historical data, and argues for the importance of refining methodologies to explore the language and societies of both past and present on their own, inter-connected but distinct terms.

References

Brooks, JoAnn. 2007. Understanding virtuality: Contributions from Goffman’s frame analysis. School of Information Studies: Faculty Scholarship, 87. Syracuse University. https://surface.syr.edu/istpub/87/ (accessed 26 April 2019). →

Herring, Susan C. 2019. The coevolution of computer-mediated communication and discourse analysis. In Patricia Bou-Franch & Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), Analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions, 25–67. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. →

Giles, David, Wyke Stommel, Trena Paulus, Jessica Lester & Darren Reed. 2015. Microanalysis of online data: The methodological development of “digital CA”. Discourse, Context and Media 7. 45–51. →

Giles, David, Wyke Stommel & Trena M. Paulus. 2017. Introduction: The microanalysis of online data: the next stage. Journal of Pragmatics 115. 37–41. →

1 The rise of the Pragmatic Web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction

Rodney H. Jones

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, Reading, UK

1.1 “This is your digital life”

At the time I was writing this chapter, social media was going through a bit of a hard time. It had just been revealed that a firm called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data of millions of Facebook users and their friends by convincing them to take a “personality test” called “This is your digital life”. The quiz was like so many of those that circulate through social media promising users to reveal to them what character they would be in Shakespeare or how they would die in Game of Thrones in exchange for granting access to their data. In the end, Facebook had to admit that the data of over 87 million users was used by Cambridge Analytica to support the political campaigns of right-wing American candidates, including Donald Trump, as well as to influence the British Brexit vote. The scandal ignited debates not just about online privacy and ethics, but about the fundamental business model of social media.

In most of these debates, however, the key focus was “information” in a very conventional sense – what the media referred to as a “data breach”. And most people assumed that “the data” that had been “breached” consisted chiefly of the content of their profiles – information such as where they lived, the university they had attended, their five favourite movies, and who their friends were. In truth, however, this “explicit” information was the least useful information for Cambridge Analytica. What they were really after was the implicit information, the record of seemingly trivial actions people took when interacting with their friends – what they were really after was the “likes”. By combining a person’s history of “likes” (or what were subsequently reframed as “reactions”) with their profile information and the kinds of people they interact with, Cambridge Analytica was able to infer a great deal about people without having to delve into things like personal messages, status updates, photos, or all of the other information Facebook holds (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison 2018; Grassegger & Krogerus 2017).

Obviously, the issue here was not just “information”, but also the kinds of meanings that could be inferred from the information collected. For this, Cambridge Analytica used a sophisticated algorithm which it developed based on the research of Michal Kosinski and his colleagues (Kosinski, Stillwell & Graepel 2013), who had come up with a model that was able to predict users’ personality traits based on the posts they had “liked” on Facebook. They found that on the basis of only 68 “likes” it was possible to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, a user’s skin colour, political affiliation, sexuality, religion, alcohol, cigarette and drug use, and even whether their parents were divorced. The predictive power of this algorithm was then combined with the communicative power of thousands of “bots”, which were able to react instantly to trending topics and produce targeted posts for particular “microcategories” of people.

There are at least four things about this incident that are of interest to scholars of English language and discourse analysts. The first is the fact that the most valuable source of information for Cambridge Analytica came not so much from things that people said about themselves or others, but from things that they did, specifically the “speech act” of clicking the “like” button underneath a post in their Newsfeed. The second is that the important “meaning” of these “likes” was not the fact that someone liked something, but rather “deeper meanings” that could be inferred from these acts of liking. Of course, many of us have the experience of trying to infer what people mean when they “like” certain things on social media (see Maíz-Arévalo 2017). The difference here was that the inferences that were drawn by Cambridge Analytica’s powerful algorithm were not formed based on individual reactions, but on the trail of reactions users created over time, correlated with the reactions of thousands of other users. Finally, it is notable that the main thing these inferences were used to do was to generate “membership categories” (Antaki & Widdincombe 1998; Sacks 1992), similar to the kinds of membership categories people use to make sense of others, predict their behaviour and tailor their communication to them. But again, these membership categories were different from the recognizable “social” categories that people use to negotiate their identities and make judgements about others. They were sophisticated aggregates of “measureable types” (Cheney-Lippold 2017), “microcategori...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Introducing transhistorical approaches to digital language practices
• Section 1: Rethinking Perspectives
• 1 The rise of the Pragmatic Web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction
• 2 Interpreting “historicisation” in the digital context: On the interface of diachronic and synchronic pragmatics
• 3 Spelling in context: A transhistorical pragmatic perspective on orthographic practices in English
• 4 Reflections on historicity, technology and the implications for method in (historical) pragmatics
• Section 2: Historicizing Discourses
• Section 3: Media Trajectories
• 10 Unstable content, remediated layout: Urban laws in Scotland through manuscript and print
• 11 Visual pragmatics of an early modern book: Printers’ paratextual choices in the editions of The School of Vertue
• 12 Paratextual presentation of Christopher St German’s Doctor and Student 1528–1886
• 13 Reflections on visuality and textual reception
• Section 4: New to Old
• Index