Discourses of (De)Legitimization

Participatory Culture in Digital Contexts

Andrew S. Ross, Damian J. Rivers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367584146
• eBook ISBN: 9781351263863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which digital communication facilitate and inform discourses of legitimization and delegitimization in contemporary participatory cultures. The book draws on multiple theoretical traditions from critical discourse analysis to allow for a greater critical engagement of the ways in which values are either justified or criticized on social media platforms across a variety of social milieus, including the personal, political, religious, corporate, and commercial. The volume highlights data from across ten national contexts and a range of online platforms to demonstrate how these discursive practices manifest themselves differently across a range of settings. Taken together, the seventeen chapters in this book offer a more informed understanding of how these discursive spaces help us to interpret the manner in which digital communication can be used to legitimize or delegitimize, making this book an ideal resource for students and scholars in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, new media, and media production.

Part I

Participatory Language Use Online and Discursive Positioning

1 (De)Legitimizing Language Uses in Language Ideological Debates Online

Antonio Reyes

Introduction

In this chapter, I analyze schemes of (de)legitimization that users employ in digital communication to support their opinions and positions when they participate in ideological language debates online. Social actors now have the ability to generate content and to manifest judgments about language use in virtual spaces where users build knowledge collectively (Jenkins, 2006) and negotiate knowledge and authority through Internet-based participatory culture (Rymes & Leone, 2014). The fact that standardization processes are never finished (Cameron, 1995) allows specific social groups to construct, shape and legitimize a “standard language ideology” (Milroy & Milroy, 1999, p. 150) by engaging in debates on language reforms that (re)produce ideologies, compete for hegemony, and construct social identities (Johnson, 2005, pp. 9–11). These social actors (“Citizen sociolinguists”, [Rymes & Leone, 2014, p. 26]) control fundamental aspects of the debate about language use and standardization (Reyes & Bonnin, 2016).

Under the parameters of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study briefly discusses the difference between argumentation schemes (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012) and strategies of legitimization (van Leeuwen, 1996, 2007, 2008) to further account for discourses of (de)legitimization related to rationalization, authorization and personal experience in debates about language use in digital participatory culture. The data comes from different settings displaying language debates on the Internet: (1) comments posted in response to an article published on El País’s¹ website announcing the new orthographic and spelling reforms in the Spanish language, proposed by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), and (2) threads of the Sólo español (“Spanish only”) subforum within www.WordReference.com language forums where users discuss language use and norms by responding to doubts or questions by other users. A digital communication setting “not only facilitates social sharing of information, but also generates social value” (Rymes & Leone, 2014, p. 31) creating, therefore, uneven relationships of power among social groups from a platform that has overtaken the spaces proposed institutionally to discuss normative uses of language (Reyes & Bonnin, 2016). This is important not only because individuals “have the potential to exercise power over other members of their society in ways which affect the behaviours of others” (Liddicoat & Baldauf, 2008, p. 4), but also because participatory digital culture has allowed users to share the power of nation-states’ institutions and elite groups in dictating normative use, preventing these institutions from having the last word about a specific issue in society (Jenkins, 2006) and challenging existing relations of power.

Participatory digital culture offers language users the possibility to refer to, discuss and construct the idea of standard language online by participating in language ideological debates (Blommaert, 1999) and therefore discuss language ideologies publicly online. Watts (2001) defines language ideologies as being “constructed by discourses that have language (language attitudes, beliefs, opinions and convictions about language, etc.) as their central theme” (Watts, 2001, p. 299). When individuals discuss language uses, they discuss them from the perspective of a monoglossic language ideology that relies on the existence of a centrally defined linguistic norm (Bauman & Briggs, 2003). Speakers generally believe that a specific language exists in its standardized form (Milroy, 2001), sharing, therefore, a common ideology about language that favors normative language uses and, at the same time, contributing to and shaping the constant construction of a standard language through these language ideological debates (Blommaert, 1999). Those discourses are mainly about (de)legitimizing attitudes, beliefs and convictions about language use. This chapter investigates discourses within participatory digital cultures, characterized by “civic engagement” (Jenkins, 2009, p. xi), that allow cyber users to negotiate, construct and (de)legitimize language uses. In particular, this chapter addresses discourses regarding the appropriate or inappropriate use of language and the way social actors legitimize, through digital communication, their position about language uses and expressions, reproducing traditional voices or alternatively, creating new perspectives in relation to institutional legitimization.

Legitimization refers to the process by which social actors accredit or license a type of social behavior (mental or physical), that is, the process of justification of an idea or an action. The practice of legitimization is enacted by argumentation, and therefore, by providing arguments that explain our social actions, ideas, thoughts, declarations and so forth. In addition, the act of legitimizing or justifying is related to a goal, which, in most cases, seeks others’ support and approval. This search for approval can be motivated by different reasons: to obtain or maintain power within a virtual community, to achieve social acceptance, to improve community relationships, to reach popularity and so forth.

Important Notions About Legitimization and Digital Communication

There are a few notions about legitimization within the setting of digital communication that deserve attention before proceeding with the chapter.

Intentionality and Legitimization: Strategy Versus Scheme

The concept of intentionality, crucial in the process of legitimization, inspires the methodological tools considered in the study because it underlines theoretical implications. The task of decoding intentionality in communication can convey important challenges regarding possible motivations, beliefs, and explanations of other subjects’ behavior (Duranti, 1993, 1997), and also around questions related to meditation and premeditation. Nevertheless, we can assume that social actors who participate in a group discussion share a topic affinity with the group and somehow intend to influence ÷or obtain some recognition. At least, they have the intention of being read, otherwise, it can be assumed they would not publish their opinion. Consequently, by selecting a specific lexical choice over another, by quoting or referring to institutional discourse that enjoys certain hegemony in terms of language use, users are aligning themselves with specific ideological positions in relation to a specific language matter.

However, owing to those challenges around intentionality, the theoretical notion of “argumentation schemes” from Fairclough and Fairclough (2012, p. 23) is preferable to refer and classify those justifications instead of strategies. Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) do not consider argumentation schemes as strategies, like Reisigl and Wodak (2001), but as a “verbal, social activity, in which people attempt to criticize or justify claims” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 23). Strategy, on the other hand, implies more premeditation, planning, and goals. For this reason, this work adopts Fairclough and Fairclough’s term of argumentation schemes (ibid.) and not argumentation strategies. Those argumentation schemes “represent the common-sense reasoning typical for specific issues” (van Dijk, 2000, p. 98). Cyber-users express their opinions as a verbal or social activity, sometimes criticizing the different changes proposed by RAE or uses in the language in general, and at other times, justifying them.

Identity and Legitimization

Unlike other cases of communicative events, in instances of digital communication, like comments reacting to news from digital newspapers or forums, social actors’ real identities “often remain backstage in intimacy” (Yus, 2011, p. 21). These individuals usually use a pseudonym, which makes almost impossible to track them in real life. This does not mean that on the Internet, individuals do not tend to create and consolidate virtual groups or communities (Yus, 2011) or that they do not maintain a theme—or, more importantly, that they don’t try to establish an identity online. Nevertheless, identity online is limited to profile features and therefore legitimization cannot rely on someone’s real life name, reputation, qualifications, title or position. It has to be linguistically constructed through time and interaction until they acquire certain status or they are recognized as authoritative figures in the virtual community. For these reasons, it is worth noticing that to legitimize in digital communication, where the user’s identity is related to a pseudonym, involves different challenges.

Participatory Culture and Legitimization: Individual Versus Institution

Digital communication reveals increasing civic participation and engagement in contemporary issues in society such as politics (see Ross & Rivers, 2017). Individuals can now participate in the discussion of information and topics previously controlled mainly by companies, governments or institutions through media, text books, official websites, manuals, dictionaries and so forth. This participation in public debates, published online and often easily accessible, constitutes citizens’ responses to an established discourse, even if those responses embrace, ideologically, that predominant discourse.

In the case of language debates, the phenomenon of participatory digital culture is especially relevant because the debate, sources and agents that determine what is proper in language use have shifted, and there are now new spaces that have overtaken the spaces proposed institutionally (education, dictionaries and institutional publications) to discuss normative uses of language. In this vein, as an example, the comparison between the traffic of the website of RAE and www.WordReference.com, where language debates take place in forums, is enlightening. RAE supposedly has “a universally recognized normative value that makes it unique in its genre” (Rull, 2005, p. 2) as the main authority for the Hispanic-speaking world (San Vicente, 2011). However, many users of Spanish around the world do not use the linguistic instruments designed by the RAE (i.e., dictionaries and grammar) when they have doubts about language use, but instead more and more recur to other instruments, such as style manuals (cf. Ramírez Gelbes, 2011), prestigious media and specialists (Glozman & Miotto, 2013) or search engines on the Internet (Bonnin, 2014).

The latter place offers a well-known website dedicated to language(s) and language use: www.WordReference.com (WR). This site has higher traffic than RAE’s own website. Alexa (www.alexa.com) provides quantitative statistical information that produces a ranking of most visited websites in a country and in relation to global traffic. According to the site, “The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to this site and pageviews on this site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1”. WR occupies a much higher position than RAE in both contexts: its Traffic Rank attributes to WR the 38th within Spain,² whereas RAE occupies 191st place. In relation to global traffic WR is in 251st place and www.Rae.es ranks 2,620th globally (data collected on January 8, 2017). These figures show, first and foremost, a clear dominance of WR over RAE. Even if WR deals with more languages than just Spanish, Google searches on common Spanish uses show that WR is better positioned in Google PageRank than RAE in every Spanish-speaking country. As an important search engine, Google uses Internet analytics to prioritize websites in relation to previous visits by users. In this sense, Google shows the most popular and frequently visited sites before less popular sites, thus contributing to the success of the more visited ones (Goldman, 2008). In other words, despite the lack of institutional affiliation, WR forums are more often consulted than RAE, even in Spain about Spanish language u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: (De)Legitimization and Participation in the Digitized Public Sphere
• Part I Participatory Language Use Online and Discursive Positioning
• Part II Discursive (De)Legitimization Through Social Media Participation
• Part III (De)Legitimization in Production, Participation and Performance
• Part IV (De)Legitimizing Participatory Discourses of Religion
• Contributors
• Index