In an interview with Simon Mottram, the founder and CEO of the British cycle clothing brand Rapha (2010), Paul Smith described how his fascination with cycling as a teenager was tied up with a new sense of identity that he experienced at the cycle club away from his parents and with further exotic associations with the European continent, including the media through which he accessed information about European cyclingâimported magazines. He explained as follows:
In the interview, as exemplified by this quotation, Paul Smith positions himself against the wealth of information provided by contemporary communications, or what will be referred to in this book as ânew media â. The kind of changes that he alludes to will be a recurrent theme throughout this book. What also interests me about this quotation and the interview from which it is taken is the way in which, while making this point, Smith is able to evoke other aspects of his identity . He presents himself as a cycling fan, as someone who holds a strong nostalgia for older forms of media (also, perhaps, signalling his age and generation) but who is, nevertheless, aware of newer forms, such as blogs and Twitter , and as someone from near Nottinghamâan identification evoked not only through the mention of the city but also through the accent with which he speaks (hence âmyâ becomes âmeâ in the transcript: âI had got me three quidâ). He uses an autobiographical narrative anecdote to make his point about how social media has changed cycling, and this also serves to underline his longstanding connection with cycling. As Paul Smith speaks these words in the video, the camera moves from the view of him and Simon Mottram to some old cycling magazines lying on the table in the room where Smith houses his extensive collection of cycling memorabilia, adding a further level of emphasis to his words. Ironically perhaps, given Smithâs declared anti-Internet stance, the interview itself is a video available on Raphaâs website and as such contributes to the way cycling is tied up with the brandâs corporate imageâor indeed âidentity â. The fact that in Britain Paul Smith is a well-recognised celebrity closely associated with cycling is arguably even more important for a company that targets amateur cyclists and fans (and probably also to Simon Mottram, an avid cycling fan himself) than the fact that both men are fashion designers. For this reason, the interview focuses on cycling and not fashion. A further relevant contextual consideration is that, as successful entrepreneurs in the global marketplace in the realm of fashion and leisure, Smith and Mottram are precisely the class of people who are able to thrive and benefit from what Bauman (2005) has characterised as a âliquid lifeâ in which identity itself is increasingly commodified and marketed to a range of middling classes while being denied to âfailed consumersâ (see Bauman 2004; Spracklen 2015: Ch.5).⊠I mean there is no way, I mean I used to go into Nottingham as, having saved up, go to a newsagentâs there, that occasionally had international magazines and then I heard about this ⊠[European cycle magazine name] or whatever it was, then now and again one would slip through the net, come in and it had to be the time I had got me three quid, or something like that, and it was just this bible that I carried aroundâjust so special. But I mean now we all know, you know immediately after the race, people are twittering, blogging, so in a way, it is not just about cycling it is just weâre just over-informed. (Rapha 2010)
Even from this cursory consideration of a very short extract, it is apparent that language and context are interacting in complex ways and that the speakers are drawing on them to evoke various aspects of identity . In order to explore identity in such texts, it therefore seems desirable to have a systematic approach to analysis that allows different dimensions of the text to be explored separately. This book is therefore not about Paul Smithâs views on cycling or media or this particular interview, but rather it is concerned with outlining an approach to exploring contemporary media texts like this and the ways in which language and other semiotic resources, such as the visual language of camerawork, are used to evoke multiple facets of identity . It is also about the interrelations among celebrity, corporate, community and personal identity within the subculture of cycling.
You may well be wondering why âLanguage, Identity and Cyclingâ? After all, language and identity often signal broad sociocultural concerns associated with education, culture, power and society, typically with implications for language policy, rather than with a sport or leisure interest like cycling. While this book does engage with a range of issues in contemporary society, it is concerned not with language policy matters, such as asserting the importance of minority languages for retaining specific cultural identities, but rather with the role of language use in evoking a sense of human identity more generally.
This book therefore explores the ways in which individuals, communities, celebrities and corporate commercial interests shape their identities through language use. It also looks at how online applications and mobile technology are creating new affordances for expressing or âdoingâ identity . The contention explored here is that identities have always been evoked and negotiated through language but that the evolving online media through which these identities are expressed and the communicative means they provide are enabling new ways of realising identities and relationships, impacting identities, power relationships within society and even language itself. This consideration of the ways in which identities are evoked through language also involves analysis of the ways in which both immediate and broader social contexts shape, facilitate and constrain language use and identity. The collection of studies described in this book was undertaken broadly within the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), an approach to linguistic and semiotic analysis that focuses on meaning use in context (Halliday 1977, 1979, 1994). An overview of some relevant features of SFL is provided later in the chapter to orient readers to the approach taken in this book towards its application.
This book illustrates this approach to exploring language and communication in contemporary media within the subcultures associated with bicycle riding (Edwards and Leonard 2009), particularly the sport of cycle road racing (Smith 2008). The focus on cycling is a deliberate departure from the mainstream preoccupations of applied linguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) with professional, educational, or political contexts (British Association for Applied Linguistics et al. 2006), but not an entirely unprecedented one, as many linguistic researchers have turned to nonacademic contexts that they find relevant to their needs. Some examples might include Pennycookâs (2007) account of hip-hop culture as an example of transcultural flow, Hutchby and Wooffitâs (1998) approach to conversation analysis described through a study of Gothic subculture or Plumâs (1988) account of conversational narrative genres developed through an analysis of talks with dog breeders. Like the musical cultures of hip-hop, Gothic culture or the world of Australian dog breeders, cycling has been an activity associated with fringe, underground or niche subcultures (Edwards and Leonard 2009). Cycling is arguably the ultimate form of physical escape in contemporary society, particularly in urban contexts, as Jon Day vividly depicted in his Cyclogeography : Journeys of a London bicycle courier (2013). Yet, just as Dayâs cycle courier work was shaped by the urban landscape and by the requirements of commercial institutions in London, cycling âlike other sports or areas of leisureâis increasingly colonised by commercial and political interests (Stanger 2011). Cycling is of particular interest for the exploration of language and identity because it is intimately related to a range of key issues in contemporary society, such as health and exercise (Friel 2015; Gerike and Parkin 2015), urban transportation (Shaka 2016) and environmental conservation (Norcliffe 2015), sport and nationalism (Bairner 2001; Earnheardt et al. 2012), drugs in sport (Coyle 2013; Walsh 2015) and gender discrimination in sport (Cooke 2016; Pendleton and McRae 2012), among others, embracing a broad range of discourse usage types and genres, and having implications more generally for our identity as human beings (Horton et al. 2007).
Like other sports, cycling also has its celebrities, whose identities are mediated through an expanding range of media formats from print and television to Instagram and Twitter . Finally, cycl...