Language Online

Investigating Digital Texts and Practices

David Barton, Carmen Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415524940
• eBook ISBN: 9781135907044
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Language Online, David Barton and Carmen Lee investigate the impact of the online world on the study of language.

The effects of language use in the digital world can be seen in every aspect of language study, and new ways of researching the field are needed. In this book the authors look at language online from a variety of perspectives, providing a solid theoretical grounding, an outline of key concepts, and practical guidance on doing research.

Chapters cover topical issues including the relation between online language and multilingualism, identity, education and multimodality, then conclude by looking at how to carry out research into online language use. Throughout the book many examples are given, from a variety of digital platforms, and a number of different languages, including Chinese and English.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this is a vital read for anyone new to studying online language and an essential textbook for undergraduates and postgraduates working in the areas of new media, literacy and multimodality within language and linguistics courses.

1 LANGUAGE IN THE DIGITAL WORLD

DOI: 10.4324/9780203552308-1

• Contemporary change
• Approaches to language online: three key directions
• Some overarching issues when discussing language online
• Language online as texts and practices

Contemporary Change

The idea that technological innovations can change life in a fundamental way and that these changes reach into every aspect of life has been associated with many innovations throughout history, including the development of the printing press, newspapers, cameras, the postal service, radio and telephones. It is becoming central in how we think about contemporary change in digital technologies. This was well expressed by Marshall McLuhan more than 40 years ago in relation to television:

The medium, or process, of our time — electric technology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing — you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to ‘the others’. And they’re changing dramatically.

McLuhan (1967: 8)

These changes identified by McLuhan continue apace with newer technologies. Now it is more accepted that all aspects of life, including everyday activities, workplace practices and the world of learning, are transformed by digital technologies. To give an example, practices of photography have been largely digitized — digital cameras and online photo sharing have taken over the place of film cameras and printed photo albums. Instead of sitting together at home leafing through photos in an album, nowadays people are more likely to share photos with friends and relatives on the internet either on social networking sites such as Facebook or photo sharing sites. Another example of contemporary changes is academic practices. As the authors have experienced, academic writing has been reshaped in many ways with the rise of new technologies. Very few people would handwrite a full manuscript of a book before typing it out on the computer. Students have assumed handing in an essay means handing in a typed, word-processed essay. At work, we receive far more emails than handwritten notes or letters. Other interesting examples of digitally transformed everyday activities include meetings, reading, note-taking, form filling, booking trips, map reading and shopping.

Technology is part of people's lived experiences across all contexts, ranging from engaging in a plethora of social networking sites with friends, through to studying and working or engaging in family life. In fact it is hard to find an area of life that is unchanged. People have gradually taken digitally transformed everyday activities for granted. This is often referred to as the domestication of technology (as in Berker et al. 2005), a concept that captures the process through which technologies are integrated into and mediate people's lives; while at the same time, technology users reappropriate technologies to facilitate their everyday activities. This has all been happening in a relatively short period of time and has become naturalized and unnoticed by people in their lives. There are certainly many issues of access and differences between people and groups of people. Nevertheless, technological change is affecting people everywhere and transforming all domains of life.

These technology-related changes in life are embedded in broader social changes. Contemporary life is changing in many ways which impact on language and communicative practices. Technology is a central part of this but it is just one among a set of interconnected factors. Lankshear and Knobel (2011) have drawn attention to changes that are occurring in the nature of institutions, media, the economy, and general processes of globalization. Kress (2003) further identifies four simultaneous change processes: changes in relations of social power, in the direction of abolishing existing settled hierarchies and remaking new ones; changes in economic structure, with writing taking on different roles in an economy in which information is increasingly important; communicational changes, with a shift from writing to image as the dominant mode, altering the logic of our communicative practices; and changing technological affordances, with a shift in media from page to screen (as in Snyder 1998). As we can see, it is this combination of changes in different areas of life that contribute to changes to our communicative practices and landscape.

It is important to make clear that technologies themselves do not automatically introduce changes in life. In other words, new activities in life are not technologically determined but technology itself is also part of broader social changes. And different people would adopt technologies differently to suit their own purposes in different contexts of use. Thus, in this book, and in understanding the relationship between technology and life more generally, our point of departure is what people do and how they draw upon resources to make meanings in their everyday activities.

The centrality of language

Language has a pivotal role in these contemporary changes, which are first and foremost transformations of meaning making and communication. Language is essential in shaping changes in life and our lived experiences. At the same time, it is affected and transformed by these changes. Many studies of language have been based on a set of fairly stable concepts, which are now rather strained as people's lives go online. For instance, on a website which combines images and words, basic concepts like text have to be redefined. The core units of sociolinguistics such as variation, contact and community need to be reassessed. Many researchers are aware that the central notions of interaction like turn-taking and face-to-face work differently with online data. Ideas of author and audience become even more complex. When to refer to language as written or spoken is not clear-cut and the activities of reading and writing are being redefined. This book is about understanding this contemporary change and the central role of language in it. Part of the book is also devoted to examining new data and methods in linguistic research, and new views of language more generally with respect to online spaces.

Starting from a view of language as situated practice, this book investigates how people's language use is changing as they participate in online activity. Covering a broad selection of online environments, it examines both online texts and people's practices around them, both how they create and how they use online texts. This book also focuses on specific language issues including language choice, language and identity, stance-taking, multimodal relations of language and image, and discourses of language and learning. Overall, the book demonstrates the importance of situated language analysis for understanding the dynamics of textually mediated online spaces. It shows how people integrate online and offline practices. The approach taken in this book focuses on how practices are located in the detail of people's everyday lives. For linguistics, it provides a theoretical framework of key concepts for researching online spaces.

The book covers the broad array of digital platforms that people use, examining sites where language is important in different ways and where the writing spaces have distinct affordances. These include primarily the platforms that we have researched and observed extensively such as Facebook, Flickr, and instant messaging. To understand what these tools mean in people's everyday lives and language use, we explore their ‘technobiographies’. These are detailed life histories and narratives of people's relations to technologies, how technologies are part of their lived experiences across their lives, and how such relations shape their language use online through different phases and domains of life. We also move beyond these three key platforms and draw on existing research from the emerging fields of digital literacies and computer-mediated discourse, which covers: studies of websites and discussion forums; mobile texting; blogging and micro-blogging such as Twitter; wikis, online dictionaries and encyclopedias such as Wikipedia; search engines such as Google; and multimedia sharing such as YouTube.

This opening chapter introduces readers to the general approach taken by this book to language, literacies, and the internet, focusing on what happens to language and practices when they move online. The next section starts with an overview of research that has been done on language online. Then we turn to the specific approach we draw upon. This is a social practice view of language and literacies with specific attention to writing done online, which explores what happens to texts and practices when people participate in online activities. The next chapter provides a set of 10 reasons why those interested in language need to pay attention to the internet. These two chapters are closely related to Chapter 3, which consists of an overview of the key theoretical concepts adopted throughout the book.

Approaches to Language Online: Three Key Directions

New online media have generated much multidisciplinary interest in recent years, from information science to media studies, psychology and sociology. Two areas that place emphasis on writing activities online are linguistics and digital literacies. Over the past two decades or so, works by linguists and literacy theorists have developed two seemingly separate yet complementary traditions of research, with their own sets of terminologies, theoretical frameworks and methodologies. These bodies of work have introduced new research methods, while at the same time reappropriating traditional theories and concepts in response to the changing affordances of new media. This section identifies and describes three key approaches to language online within linguistics. Traditions from literacy studies will be outlined in a later section.

(i) Structural features of computer-mediated communication

One of the earliest and perhaps most dominant traditions of language-focused online research is the identification and description of linguistic features and strategies that are not commonly found in other modes of communication. A topic of great interest within this early tradition was to compare language strategies in online media with existing modes of communication. A key topic under this strand is whether text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) should be treated as speech or as writing, or whether it is a hybrid of speech and writing (Herring 1996; Baron 2003). Thus the starting point of CMC research was to draw upon the existing concepts of linguistics to understand language online. In relation to this, another direction attempted to describe CMC as a ‘new’ variety of language that is characterized by features such as:

• acronyms and initialisms (e.g. GTG for ‘got to go’, LOL for ‘laugh out loud’),
• word reductions (e.g. gd for ‘good’; hv for ‘have’),
• letter/number homophones (e.g. U for ‘you’ and 2 for ‘to’),
• stylized spelling (e.g. I'm soooooooooo happy!)
• emoticons (such as:-) and :(),
• unconventional/stylized punctuation (e.g. ‘!!!!!!!!!!!!!’, ‘………………’).

As a result, many other labels have been given to describe the set of peculiar discourse features identified in CMC such as emailism (Petrie 1999), Netspeak (Crystal 2006), interactive written discourse (Ferrara et al. 1991), and other publicly recognized terms such as e-language, chatspeak, textspeak, cyber language, and internet slang, to name just a few. This body of work however took a somewhat deterministic view that it was primarily the new technological affordances that naturally foster new forms of language in CMC. In the beginning, there was almost no discussion of the contextual and social factors that might have also contributed to these linguistic features. Large quantities of publicly available online data (e.g. IRC chat rooms) were often randomly collected and analysed without considering their immediate discursive and social contexts. Generalizations were made out of statistical analyses of the distribution of different features in corpora. At this point, corpus data were combined with discourse analysis. The umbrella term ‘computer-mediated discourse analysis’ (CMDA) also emerged to describe discourse analytic approaches to CMC (Herring 2001). For example, Ko (1996) compares structural features of a corpus of synchronous CMC data collected from InterChange, an online educational platform, to existing spoken and written corpora collected in offline contexts. Findings from this body of work did offer important theoretical insights and opened up new opportunities for language research. However, there was sometimes a tendency to overgeneralize the findings from such studies, and to imply that there are static and predictable conventions across all CMC language. In fact, in real life what may be referred to as Netspeak features are not employed in all types of CMC and all contexts of use. There are varieties across individual users as well as across different online platforms.

(ii) Social variation of computer-mediated discourse

Written genres are not separable from their users and social contexts (Hyland 2002). CMC researchers began to realize that CMC language is shaped by various social factors and is situated in their specific contexts of use (Herring 2002; Giltrow and Stein 2009). This direction of research acknowledges that, on the one hand, regular similarities and differences occur within and beyond one single mode of CMC; on the other hand, in reality, users do not apply the same set of CMC features to all contexts; but they constantly reappropriate their ways of writing in different modes of CMC to suit different purposes. In view of this, studies of social variation in CMC language began to emerge. There have been detailed discourse analyses of particular types of CMC including blogging (Myers 2010a) and SMS texting (Tagg 2012). A growing body of work focuses on language and identity online, notably studies of gender differences in CMC (e.g. Herring 1996; Danet 1998), and how social identities are performed through adopting certain linguistic features and styles (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Nakamura 2002). Seeing social network sites as spaces for everyday storytelling, Page (2011) takes a narrative approach to identity performance in social media and examines how new narrative genres emerge as a result of people reshaping traditional ones in new media. Following this socio-cultural trend, another group of researchers has been investigating CMC features across cultures and linguistic backgrounds. Instead of examining CMC from a solely monolingual, usually English, perspective, a growing body of research is interested in how speakers of various languages have adopted such new forms of writing to differen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Language in the digital world
• 2 Ten reasons why studying the online world is crucial for understanding language
• 3 Acting in a textually mediated social world
• 4 Hello! Bonjour! Ciao! Hola! Guten Tag! Deploying linguistic resources online
• 5 Taking up the affordances of multiple languages
• 6 ‘This is me’: Writing the self online
• 7 Stance-taking through language and image
• 8 ‘My English is so poor’: Talking about language online
• 9 Everyday learning online
• 10 Language online as new vernacular practices
• 11 Language online and education
• 12 Researching language online
• 13 Flows of language online and offline
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index