Discourse and Digital Practices

Doing discourse analysis in the digital age

Rodney H Jones, Alice Chik, Christoph A Hafner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317536994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discourse and Digital Practices shows how tools from discourse analysis can be used to help us understand new communication practices associated with digital media, from video gaming and social networking to apps and photo sharing.

This cutting-edge book:

• draws together fourteen eminent scholars in the field including James Paul Gee, David Barton, Ilana Snyder, Phil Benson, Victoria Carrington, Guy Merchant, Camilla Vasquez, Neil Selwyn and Rodney Jones
• answers the central question: "How does discourse analysis enable us to understand digital practices?"
• addresses a different type of digital media in each chapter
• demonstrates how digital practices and the associated new technologies challenge discourse analysts to adapt traditional analytic tools and formulate new theories and methodologies
• examines digital practices from a wide variety of approaches including textual analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, object ethnography, geosemiotics, and critical discourse analysis.

Discourse and Digital Practices will be of interest to advanced students studying courses on digital literacies or language and digital practices.

Chapter 1 Introduction Discourse analysis and digital practices

Rodney H. Jones, Alice Chik and Christoph A. Hafner

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726465-1

Digital technologies have given rise to a host of new ways for people to communicate, manage social relationships, and get things done, which are challenging how we think about love and friendship, work and play, health and fitness, learning and literacy, and politics and citizenship. These new practices are also challenging the ways discourse analysts think about texts, social interactions, and even the nature of language itself. The affordances digital media provide for the production of multimodal texts, for example, call into question analytical paradigms that focus only on written or spoken language. Interactive writing spaces such as blogs and social network sites make possible very different forms of social interaction than those found in face-to-face conversation and traditional written texts. And practices of remixing and ‘curating’ raise questions about the status of authorship. Even analytical tools designed to examine the ideological dimensions of discourse need to be adapted to contend with discursive environments in which the loci of power are much more diffuse and the instruments of ideological control and discipline are more subtle and complex.

Although there have been numerous attempts in discourse analysis (see for example Herring 2007), and sociolinguistics more broadly (see for example Androutsopoulos 2011), to formulate new analytical frameworks especially designed for the study of digital communication, the range of social practices associated with digitally mediated discourse, and the rapid pace at which new technologies are being introduced, make it difficult for any single framework to meet the challenge of understanding all of the complex relationships between discourse and digital practices. In order to cope with the fast-changing landscape of digital media, discourse analysts need to both draw upon the rich store of theories and methods developed over the years for the analysis of ‘analogue’ discourse, and to formulate new concepts and new methodologies to address the unique combinations of affordances and constraints introduced by digital media.

This book brings together fourteen eminent scholars in linguistics and literacy studies to consider how various practices people engage in using digital media can be understood using tools from discourse analysis. The methods adopted represent a range of approaches to discourse, from more traditional analyses of textual coherence and interactional turn-taking to newer approaches such as corpus-assisted discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis. Each chapter focuses on a particular social practice associated with digital technology and shows how tools from a particular approach to discourse, or combination of approaches, can help us to understand that practice.

What are digital practices?

The focus of this volume on digital practices is in line with recent approaches in applied linguistics (Pennycook 2010), literacy studies (Gee 2012), and discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005) which take as their starting point not discourse per se, but, rather, the situated social practices that people use discourse to perform.

The orientation towards social practice taken by contributors has its roots in a number of intellectual traditions, including the critical sociology of Bourdieu (1977), who sees practice in terms of the way social conventions become submerged into people’s habitual dispositions, and the cultural critique of Foucault (1972) and his followers, who see it in terms of the regimes of knowledge which define what sorts of behaviours, identities and relationships are considered normal. But it is most closely informed by the understanding of practice articulated in the new literacy studies (Barton 2006; Gee 2012) and mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 2001), in which practice is seen less as a matter of dispositions or regimes of knowledge and more as a matter of the concrete, situated actions people perform with particular mediational means (such as written texts, computers, mobile phones) in order to enact membership in particular social groups. In these approaches, practice is nearly always used as a countable noun (‘practices’) and refers to ‘observable, collectable and/or documentable . . . events, involving real people, relationships, purposes, actions, places, times, circumstances, feelings, tools, (and) resources’ (Tusting, Ivanic and Wilson 2000: 213). It is difficult, from this perspective, to speak of the ‘practice’ of social networking, or the ‘practice’ of ‘video gaming’ without considering the ways these practices are performed by real people in real situations. Indeed, as many of the chapters in this volume dramatically illustrate, practices (such as ‘tagging’) can have very different meanings and very different social purposes, and, in fact, involve very different actions, in different contexts (for example Twitter vs Flickr) (see Barton this volume). Practices are, in this way, often hard to ‘pin down’, always changing to meet the demands of new circumstances or to respond to the affordances and constraints of new cultural tools. Complicating this is the fact that practices are almost never engaged in in isolation, but are always mixed in complex ways with other practices. Practices such as purchasing animals to decorate one’s language learning garden on Busuu (described by Chik), keeping track of one’s calories with MyFitnessPal (described by Jones), reading to children with an iPad (described by Merchant), or attending online parties held by ‘elite’ Club Penguin Music Video production teams (described by Marsh) all involve multiple overlapping practices such as shopping, gardening, dieting, story-sharing and socialising, which have long histories independent of the digital practices into which they have been recruited. Digital practices are always ‘nestled’ or ‘nested’ (Marsh this volume) with other cultural practices, some new and some old, to form what Scollon (2001) has referred to as a ‘nexus of practice’, a configuration of tools and actions with various conventions and histories associated with them which come together to form recognisable sequences of actions and to make available to actors recognisable social identities.

What we mean by ‘digital practices’, then, are these ‘assemblages’ of actions involving tools associated with digital technologies, which have come to be recognised by specific groups of people as ways of attaining particular social goals, enacting particular social identities, and reproducing particular sets of social relationships. The assumption is that digital technologies, because of the different configurations of modes and materialities they make available, both make possible new kinds of social practices and alter the way people engage in old ones. The practices dealt with in this volume include the tagging of pictures by users of Flickr, the use of iPhone apps by ‘self-quantifiers’, and the creation of music videos by participants in an online virtual world. Our definition of ‘tools associated with digital technologies’, however, is not limited to software or websites, but includes hardware (physical objects) and semiotic tools (such as conventional ways of talking or writing that have grown up around digital media). Therefore, the practices considered are not limited to those that occur ‘online’ or within the borders of the screen, but also include practices that have developed around the handling of physical artefacts like iPhones and iPads, and even practices of urban signage which appropriate linguistic features of computer-mediated communication. In fact, none of the practices described in this book can be said to reside in strictly defined ‘online’ or ‘offline’ spaces. Digital practices always transverse boundaries between the physical and the virtual, and between technological systems and social systems.

What is discourse analysis?

What, then, do we mean by ‘discourse analysis’, and what is its utility in helping us to understand digital practices? ‘Discourse’ is a term that is used in a variety of different fields and can mean a variety of different things. It can refer to the formal properties of semiotic artefacts that make them ‘hold together’ as certain types of ‘texts’, it can refer to the ways people use language and other semiotic systems to accomplish particular social actions, or it can refer to broader systems of knowledge which act to regulate what people can say, write or think. For the purposes of this volume, we will define discourse broadly as the ways people build and manage their social worlds using various semiotic systems. This definition, of course, places discourse in an intimate relationship with social practices. On the one hand, all social practices are to some extent mediated through discourse – that is, discourse is used as a tool for performing social practices. And on the other hand, discourse plays an important role in maintaining, reproducing and transmitting social practices. ‘Discourse analysis’, then, is the study of the ways different ‘technologies of entextualisation’ (Jones 2009) (including semiotic systems like languages, as well as media like televisions and computers) affect the kinds of meanings people can make in different situations, the kinds of actions they can perform, the kinds of relationships they can form, and the kinds of people they can be. In order to engage in such study, discourse analysts usually pay attention to four things:

• Texts: How different technologies of entextualisation allow us to combine semiotic elements to form socially recognisable texts that can be used to perform different kinds of socially recognised actions.
• Contexts: The social and material situations in which texts are constructed, consumed, exchanged and appropriated.
• Actions and interactions: What people do with texts, especially what they do with and to each other.
• Power and ideology: How people use texts to dominate and control others and to create certain ‘versions of reality’.

Different approaches to discourse, of course, emphasise these aspects of discourse to different degrees, but all of them, in one way or another, take into account all four of these elements, and strive to understand how they work together: how, for example, contexts influence the form and meaning of texts, how different kinds of texts make possible different kinds of actions and interactions, and how the ways people use texts to act and interact in specific contexts both reflect and help to reproduce certain ideologies and power relationships. In other words, all approaches to discourse seek in some way to understand the relationship between the ‘micro’ level of discourse (having to do with the way texts are put together and used to take specific actions in specific situations), and the ‘macro’ level of discourse (having to do with the way texts reflect and help perpetuate certain social orders).

As we mentioned above, the particular configurations of modes and materialities that digital media make available present considerable challenges to the way analysts approach each of these four aspects of discourse. In some cases, the tools that have been developed for face-to-face conversation and writing in print media can be easily adapted to analyse online conversations and texts. In other cases, new concepts and new methods need to be developed. The real issue, however, goes beyond just the applicability of particular analytical tools to the analysis of digitally mediated communication to the fact that digital media in some ways force us to rethink our very definitions of terms such as text, context, interaction, and power.

Texts

By texts, of course, we do not just mean written texts in the traditional sense, but include conversations – both written and spoken – videos, photographs, drawings, paintings, street signs, websites, software interfaces, video games, and any other aggregate of semiotic elements that can function as a tool for people to take social action. Despite the breadth of this definition, discourse analysts do have some fairly strong opinions about what constitutes a text and what does not. Most agree that for a collection of semiotic elements (words, sentences, images, sounds, etc.) to be considered a text, it must have what is known as ‘texture’. Texture is a property of connectedness that is created through cohesion, that is, the way different parts of the text are held together using the syntactic and semantic resources of whatever semiotic system is being used, and coherence, the way different parts of the text are ordered sequentially so that it can be recognised b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: discourse analysis and digital practices
• 2 Discourse analysis of games
• 3 Discourse, cybernetics, and the entextualisation of the self
• 4 Tagging on Flickr as a social practice
• 5 Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in online consumer reviews
• 6 YouTube as text: spoken interaction analysis and digital discourse
• 7 Co-constructing identity in virtual worlds for children
• 8 Recreational language learning and digital practices: positioning and repositioning
• 9 Investigating digital sex talk practices: a reflection on corpus-assisted discourse analysis
• 10 Apps, adults and young children: researching digital literacy practices in context
• 11 ‘It’s changed my life’: iPhone as technological artefact
• 12 Digital discourse@public space: flows of language online and offline
• 13 The discourses of celebrity in the fanvid ecology of Club Penguin machinima
• 14 Discourses of ‘curation’ in digital times
• 15 The discursive construction of education in the digital age
• Index