Nexus Analysis

Discourse and the Emerging Internet

Suzie Wong Scollon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134360390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Nexus Analysis presents an exciting theory by two of the leading names in discourse analysis and provides a practical guide to its application.

The authors argue that discourse analysis can itself be a form of social action. If the discourse analyst is part of the nexus of practice under study, then the analysis can itself transform that nexus of practice.

Focussing on their own involvement with and analysis of pioneering communication technologies in Alaska they identify moments of social importance in order to examine the links between social practice, culture and technology. Media are identified not only as means of expressing change but also as catalysts for change itself, with the power to transform the socio-cultural landscape.

In this intellectually exciting yet accessible book, Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon present a working example of their theory in action and provide a personal snapshot of a key moment in the history of communication technology, as the Internet transformed Alaskan life.

1 Discourse analysis and social action

The president of an organization stretched across the span of Alaska with main offices in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau and six subsidiaries decides to save time and travel costs by using video conferencing to conduct routine monthly meetings with his vice-presidents in those other sites. After three months he decides that they will return to face-to-face meetings rotating among the three main offices. He has become uncomfortable with the quick rise in power within the group of one of his vice-presidents. The vice-president's easy video style coupled with a carefully placed background design for the video conferences has quickly, if subtly, begun to undermine the older president's well-practiced rough and ready ability to control the flow of discussions and the decision-making processes of face-to-face meetings.

A traditional university graduate seminar adds an email list discussion to the normal in-class discussions of readings and topics in the third week of class. A student who has not yet spoken in class sends a message that evokes a strong and interested response from many of the other students. In the energetic discourse which follows this student writes, ‘This is the first time in my life twelve people are paying attention to me at once. I feel like I am speaking for the first time.’

A legislative hearing is being held by audio conference. Legislators in the State Capitol, Juneau, are hearing from citizens as far away as two days’ air travel in the Aleutian Islands on current pending legislation having to do with changes in the delivery and accessibility of health services. A woman in Unalaska makes an impassioned plea not to cut the services of traveling doctors and nurses. As she makes her plea the only legislator remaining in the room stands up and leaves the room. Her plea is not recorded nor is it heard by anyone in Juneau other than the researchers who are present in the audience seating portion of the room.

Discourse and technology

The events in these three stories happened between 1978 and 1983. We were observers of these events in each case. In each case the events took place in English and in each case a form of social interaction – a business meeting, a university seminar, and a legislative hearing with regular and well-understood and well-habituated practices – was restructured through good intentions and for good purposes by using the very new technologies of the video conference, email, and the audio conference. In each case the social relationships, forms of power, and accessibility of some individuals was significantly altered in relationship to others within the same situation. While the business meetings using video were quite useful for the rising vice-president they were at the point of becoming disastrous for the president. A student who had interesting ideas found that he could express them to his classmates and the teacher for the first time. Conversely, of course, other students who were accustomed to holding the attention of the seminar group in face-to-face classes were somewhat sidelined. Perhaps legislators are quite accustomed to ignoring the representations given in public hearings, but rarely do they feel they may simply walk out of the room. Common face-to-face politeness practices tend to hold them to their seats and to hold a listening posture on their bodies. Freed from these restrictions by the audio conference, they were able to simply leave the room to do other things.

Discourse and technology are intimately related to each other, but in order to highlight this point we need first to clarify what we mean by the term ‘discourse’. In the simplest and most common sense we take discourse to mean the use of language in social interaction. We would refer to a ‘good morning’ greeting, a conversation, a telephone call, a personal letter from a friend, or an email message as discourse. But we would also include a municipal ordinance, a state law, a text assigned as a university reading, a memo from the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court to the Judicial Council, or a report on sentencing patterns based on ethnicity to be discourse as well. All of these entail the use of language to accomplish some action in the social world.

We will argue that for each of these forms of discourse and for all others we have not mentioned there is a supportive or enabling technology. When we think of technology perhaps it is most common to think of the video conferencing cameras and display screens (as well as the very complex and extended system of studios, satellite up- and down-linking equipment, and the satellites themselves) or the similar audio conferencing or email systems we now so often use to communicate. It is important for us to remind ourselves that all discourses are based on technologies, though some of them are considerably simpler and much older and more naturalized in our practice than others.

All of the texts in our lives are based on a very long tradition of printing technology. This technology of the printed text is so old that what Bourdieu might have called ‘phylogenesis amnesia’ has set in. He used the term ‘genesis amnesia’ to refer to an individual's erasure of the memory of having learned a practice. We were not born reading, but for most of us there is very little memory left of the process of learning this rather complex technology of moving from printed codes on paper or now computer screens to meanings. We have so deeply naturalized the processes of using this technology that it is all but invisible to us. We just use it as part of ‘ourselves’. We might think, then, of ‘phylogenesis amnesia’ as the process by which we have collectively lost our memory of when and how these technologies were first invented, implemented, and became embedded in the social matrix of our societies.

One reason the newer media technologies remain so visible in our lives and in television, magazine, and newspaper accounts is just because they are still so very new. They have not yet sunk into invisibility through genesis amnesia. Most of us have not yet fully naturalized our use of new media technology. Further, these technologies are still changing so rapidly that it is almost a liability to sink our ability to use them into patterns of habit as those habits will only need to be disrupted again in a short time when the new models come out running on different software and performing functions that are as yet almost unimaginable.

Even more fundamental than print technologies are the technologies of face-to-face social interactions that we recognize simply as ‘meetings’, ‘classes’, ‘clinical consultations’, ‘public hearings’, ‘arrests’, ‘court trials’, and the rest. We engage in these as common events and most researchers would likely refer to them as small group organizations, speech events, or genres of discourse. Here we are interested, however, in calling attention to the technological underpinnings of these speech events or common action genres. Why is it difficult to hold a clinical consultation in a classroom? Why would a seminar be difficult to hold in a courtroom? Why is it a problem to try to hold a business meeting of several participants in an airport lounge? Each of these and the other genres of social interaction we could name works best (not exclusively, of course) when it is supported by very specific requirements for the structure of the spaces in which it occurs as well as the material mediational means that are available for the participants to use in conducting their activities.

A face-to-face meeting must be supported by quite definable material requirements. If the meeting is among hearing participants they must be within hearing distance of each other. If they are not hearing participants but sighted ones, they must have line-of-sight contact. This, in turn, places a restriction on how many people can be participants on an equal basis within a specific-sized physical space. Because eye-gaze is so crucial for the sighted in managing turn exchanges and the social structures of showing attention, participants who are given open access to the gazes of others are positioned as more active and engaged participants. Conversely, control of interaction can be technologized as it is in a court room by building separate physical spaces for each interactive role – the judge, the jury, witnesses, and the like. In a medical clinic or in a hospital spaces and structures are supplied on which the patient can be examined, for example, in a supine position, with the examiner's medical instruments within easy reach. Typical lecture rooms are designed so that one person, the lecturer, may roam throughout as much as one-third of the total space in the room while listeners are confined in small chairs aligned in rows oriented panopticon-style (see Chapter 3) with a view only toward the lecturer.

Discourse, when we take it in the meaning defined above (‘the ways in which people engage each other in communication’), is technologized through a very wide range of material supports and extensions from the structure of the built environment and its furniture to the media by which communication may be moved across the distances of time and space such as printed texts, pictures, microphones, telephones, video and audio conferencing systems, and email or other digital-electronic systems.

But we have also said that we will use the term ‘discourse’ in a second level of meaning. James Paul Gee has defined a higher level of meaning for the term discourse which he refers to as ‘Discourse with a capital “D”’ (1999). For him this is:

different ways in which we humans integrate language with non-language ‘stuff,’ such as different ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, believing, and using symbols, tools, and objects in the right places and at the right times so as to enact and recognize different identities and activities, give the material world certain meanings, distribute social goods in a certain way, make certain sorts of meaningful connections in our experience, and privilege certain symbol systems and ways of knowing over others.

(Gee 1999: 13)

We are much in sympathy with Gee's concept and his definition and will use it throughout this book, but we feel that there is rarely any confusion between the two levels of discourse and so hereafter will dispense with the use of a capital ‘D’ in writing of discourse in this broader sense.

Jan Blommaert gives us what is perhaps a more useful definition of discourse in that it is more concise than that of Gee. For Blommaert, discourse ‘comprises all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with social, cultural and historical patterns and developments of use’ (forthcoming: 6). Like Blommaert, many authors would prefer to use the more general term, semiotics, to take in this broader concept of discourse. In Chapters 2 and 5 where we talk about ‘discourse cycles’ we will also use the term ‘semiotic cycles’ because there is much more than language involved in producing these discourses.

In this broader sense of discourse there are several different discourses involved in the three examples we gave at the outset of this chapter. In the first we see a good example of what we might call ‘management discourse’. This is the way managers or administrators talk (as well as dress, move, and act) in and among themselves in carrying out their day-to-day work. And here it is important to note in Gee's definition that a central piece of this discourse, like all discourses, is producing and maintaining certain identities and power relations. In this vignette it was the shifting of these identities and power relations that led the president to abandon the video conferencing technology in conducting his monthly meetings.

Management discourse is sharply different from the ‘academic discourse’ we find in university classrooms. In the university seminar room one signals a positive identity through such means as displaying comfort and control with the assigned readings and their often new vocabulary and technical definitions. One of the central goals of this discourse which is expressed by university faculty is to bring students into membership in the academic and disciplinary community as we shall see in Chapter 6. What students say and how students talk is a crucial part of this socialization. As we shall also see, this is not the view taken by many students. Whereas faculty tend to see academic discourse as a means to make students more like faculty, particularly in their own discipline, students tend to see the university on analogy to a supermarket – a place where one goes to shop for ideas, concepts, and tools that will be useful for them to meet their own and different goals.

In the third example we saw a kind of ‘public discourse’ in which elected officials and citizens communicate toward the ostensible goal of improving governance and social life within the political jurisdiction. Again, this is a rather different discourse in Gee's broad sense. Roles and responsibilities are distributed differently – the citizen's role is to inform, plead with, or persuade the elected official. The legislator's role is to act on behalf of citizens within a highly complex discourse called the legislative process. Unlike management discourse in which an elite in-group of managers works to manage and control a complex system of employees and production processes, or academic discourse in which the goal of faculty is to bring apprentice outsiders into full membership on the basis of their ways of thinking, acting, talking, and writing, this public discourse requires a somewhat paradoxical role on the part of legislators. On the one hand they must be seen to be providing services and representation for citizens – often through giving the appearance of co-membership with them in the community – on the other hand, they must manipulate their continued rise in power within the political and legislative process both on behalf of those citizens and as a careful manipulation of those citizens. Put quite simply, a legislator who is seen as unable to be manipulative on behalf of his or her constituency would not be likely to be re-elected, but at the same time that legislator must never be seen to be manipulating that same constituency.

The technologies that underwrite these different discourses are as closely interwoven with them as the technologies that support discourse at the simpler level and in some cases they are the same. In one sense the talk exchanged between managers at a meeting, a citizen and a legislator, or a teacher and a student are organized in about the same ways. There are regular practices for the exchange of turns, the introduction of new topics, repairing misunderstandings, making hedges, stating imperatives, or asking questions. Whether it is a management meeting, a class, or a public hearing, introducing audio conferencing technology cuts out the possibility of using eye-gaze to manage who has the next turn to speak. At this ‘language-in-use’ level of discourse, there is one set of relationships between the discourse and the technologies that support it.

But at the broad level at which Gee or Blommaert define discourse there are also integral relationships between the discourse of management and technology, between academic discourse and technology, or public discourse and technology as we shall discuss throughout this book. Perhaps the clearest and longest established relationship of this kind is the use of the book, the text, as the foundation of academic discourse. While it would be exaggerated to say so, one could characterize academic discourse as consisting of texts and discussions of texts. In a sense all of the other genres of discourse (notes, letters, conversations, curricula vitae, syllabuses, lectures, and the rest) are supplementary to the core technology of the book. Similarly, as we have seen in the critical discourse research of the past two decades or so, public discourse is very deeply embedded in the texts of laws (and policies and positions) and the journalistic texts of newspapers and now primarily television news texts. Management discourse, of course, characterizes itself by a concern for ‘the bottom line’. That is, management discourse is undergirded by a large technological apparatus of accounting and data processing.

Much of the conflict that we observed in our research between and among these different discourses occurred at this higher level of discourse. Computing resources entered the organizations we researched as technologies of management. They were technologies for handling personnel data such as salaries of employees or data processing of the organization's ‘productive’ processes such as managing student enrollment information from tuition payments to grades and final credentials. Academic uses of these computing resources, in particular the messaging systems, were thought of as frivolous distractions at best and a serious drain on expensive resources at worst.

Discourse and technology are inseparable; yet to argue this is not the central purpose of the book. The ethnographic case studies we present in this book argue that any change in the technologies of discourse is inherently and necessarily a change in the discourse itself. We will take the term ‘discourse’ at two levels in this book, but at either level we argue that there are close ties between discourse and technology and that a c...