Pragmatics of Social Media

Christian Hoffmann, Wolfram Bublitz, Christian Hoffmann, Wolfram Bublitz

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9783110431117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the pragmatics of social media, i.e. of digitally mediated and Internet-based platforms which are interactively used to share and edit self- and other-generated textual and audio-visual messages. Its five parts offer state-of-the-art reviews and critical evaluations in the light of on-going developments: Part I The Nature of Social Media sets up the conceptual groundwork as it explores key concept such as social media, participation, privacy/publicness. Part II Social Media Platforms focuses on the pragmatics of single platforms such as YouTube, Facebook. Part III Social Media and Discourse covers the micro-and macro-level organization of social media discourse, while Part IV Social Media and Identity reveals the multifarious ways in which users collectively (re-)construct aspects of their identities. Part V Social Media and Functions/Speech Acts surveys pragmatic studies on speech act functions such as disagreeing, complimenting, requesting. Each contribution provides a state-of-the-art review together with a critical evaluation of the existing research.

1.Log in: Introducing the pragmatics of social media

Christian R. Hoffmann

Abstract: This introduction to the handbook of the Pragmatics of Social Media is meant to explain its main structure, purpose and objectives, introduce the most important features of the collection and define the key concepts of pragmatics and social media. With research on social media gaining momentum, the introduction makes a strong case for a pragmatic approach to studying these new platforms for digital interaction, surfacing new insights into the way we interact, negotiate, evaluate, judge and change propositional, social and interpersonal meanings online. Considering the handbook’s five integral parts, it also provides short but comprehensive overviews of all individual chapters, acknowledging their topical and conceptual links and variances.

1.The aim of the handbook

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art pragmatic research on social media. It pays tribute to the growing influence of social media as a “new platform for socialization, public debate, and information exchange” (Quan Haase and Sloan 2017: 2) as well as to the fact that social media have become one of the primary objects for research in pragmatics over the last decade (cf. Zappavigna 2012; Page 2013; Seargeant and Tagg 2014; Page et al. 2014; Tagg 2015). The individual contributions of this handbook are meant to help students and researchers alike to find orientation in the wide range of research on social media. It enables them to detect and critically appraise pragmatic work on social media in a coherent and substantive manner. To this effect, all chapters emphasize the conceptual and methodological similarities and differences between pragmatic studies on the topic at hand while also evaluating and reflecting on their research findings and interpretations. Just as the other volumes in the series of Handbooks of Pragmatics (HoPs) have done, this handbook essentially aims to give structure and coherence to a novel and still emergent field of pragmatic studies. Accordingly, we have organized the handbook in ways consistent with this overall purpose.

At the very outset, we must acknowledge that this handbook is the series’ second instalment specifically dedicated to pragmatic research on computer-mediated communication (CMC); a fact which underscores the key relevance of the Internet for pragmatic research today. While both handbooks, Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication (HoPs 9) and Pragmatics of Social Media (HoPs 11), may share a mutual focus on computer-mediated communication, they are different in many respects.

First, as opposed to its forerunner, this handbook focusses on a different research object. While Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication (HoPs 9) reviewed pragmatic research on CMC in general, the present handbook (HoPs 11) takes an exclusive look at second-generation Internet platforms which foster and facilitate new participatory acts and forms of communication, i.e. social media. This means that we have deliberately cast aside all pragmatic studies which concentrate on classic Internet platforms, e.g. websites, Internet chats or email, for the benefit of research describing the pragmatics of language use in digital platforms such as social-network sites, blogs, microblogs, message boards, etc. In fact, most of these forms of communication (as well as pragmatic research about them) had not even fully evolved when HoPs 9 was devised more than ten years ago.

Second, this new handbook reviews linguistic research which captures the pragmatics of participation, which, as we contend, is native to social media. Unsurprisingly, most pragmatic research on social media has focussed, in one way or another, on the participatory nature of social media, i.e. the technological-compositional and social-interpersonal factors which generate and drive two-way communication between individual “produsers” (Bruns 2007: 3) online. Most pragmatic work summarized and classified in this handbook recognizes the versatile communicative moves through which Internet users reciprocally and collectively create, share, contribute and negotiate meanings rather than go online to “predominantly […] consume content and information” (Seargeant and Tagg 2014: 5).

In line with this interactional focus, pragmaticists today adapt and apply a broader range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, drawn not only from pragmatics per se but also from other neighbouring fields of scientific inquiry. Such points of origins may, for instance, include interactional sociolinguistics, comparative film and media studies, sociology or social psychology. Androutsopoulos (2008) referred to the contrast between earlier and more recent studies on CMC as a first and a second wave of linguistic research. While the first wave explored “features and strategies that are (assumed to be) specific to new media […]”, the second wave investigated CMC’s “situated language use and linguistic diversity” (Androutsopoulos 2008: 1–2). With respect to linguistic diversity, pragmatic scholars have increasingly accentuated the vast generic proliferation and dispersion that the Internet has undergone in the last two decades. As a result, the latter has spawned an astounding number of specialized (hybrid) genres and sub-genres online, each one designed for a specific set of purposes, equipped with its very own set of formal and functional features. The increased granularity of Internet communication, which results from this digital evolution, has had considerable consequences for pragmatic research in the last decade. As of now, pragmatic studies on social media are likely to make substantive claims about the socio-pragmatic contour of specific Internet genres, e.g. political blogs, celebrity Facebook profiles, academic tweets. However, (rather futile) attempts to sketch out the more general linguistic or communicative shape of Internet platforms, e.g. the language of Twitter, Facebook, message boards, have become rare. In many ways, Internet pragmatics has by now assumed a more constructive position between the two untenable extremes of technological determinism and social constructivism.

Finally, a third important difference between this handbook and its CMC-based predecessor (HoPs 9) concerns the organization of the two handbooks. Both feature a consecutive number of in-depth overviews on various different pragmatic phenomena in and about CMC. This handbook, however, also includes a thorough and systematic introduction to its central notion of social media. The first part is thus dedicated to explaining what social media are, eliciting and describing their conceptual basis and key features, such as participation, involvement as well as publicness and privateness. We hope to establish common ground on the forms which social media comprise over time, show what they have been used for and which role they now play in our everyday communicative practices. This central, explanatory part provides a suitable springboard for the subsequent parts of this handbook, making what comes more approachable and tangible in light of what has been established before.

We need to remind ourselves that when HoPs 9 (Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication) was published in 2013, the editors pointed out that pragmatic research on computer-mediated discourse was still very much “in flux” (Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2013: 4), which made the identification and organisation of emerging pragmatic trends such a challenging endeavour. Today, the evolution of discourse on the Internet (as well as the development of compatible pragmatic research) is still in its early stage of development.

However, the body of research on social media which pragmatics has accumulated over the last decade alone is substantial, and it is high time to compile and review the existing pragmatic work to structure this novel field of pragmatic inquiry. We hope that this handbook will play a part in this effort. It can provide guidance to those who seek to know how social media have transformed our meaning-making practices, those who wish to probe the interactional order of social media discourse or those who aim to scrutinize the creative ways in which users collaborate to share and negotiate meanings, feelings, values and beliefs in different online settings. After all, the pragmatics of social media has much to offer not only to linguists alone but to everyone who shares our interest in the way language is currently used on social media, regardless of their scholarly provenance.

2.Defining social media

Before we cast our eye on social media, we feel it is necessary to clarify some of the more conspicuous terms in electronic discourse which have been circulating in linguistics over the last two decades, with varying meanings and uses. We thus propose our own taxonomy of terms without, of course, making any claim to its originality or completeness. We simply wish to illustrate what we intend to mean when we use the terms and show how they are connected.

On the Internet, communicators use material, immobile (desktop computers) or mobile devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets or smartphones) to perform networking and socializing practices. In doing so, they rely on predetermined software. These digital platforms, e.g. weblogs, message boards, social-network sites, etc., come equipped with particular technological affordances and provide specific compositional templates for users. The platforms’ preconfigured text design does not per se determine, restrict or preclude content, topic or function of any kind, and it usually gives rise to a plethora of different text genres. As a result, rich genre ecologies have taken root within the realm of each platform over time. Blog templates, for instance, have been used for a variety of different purposes, such as the semi-public revelation of personal experiences (personal blogs), the promotional activities of companies (corporate blogs) or the journalistic documentation of political events (journalistic blogs).

In the pre-digital era, linguists traditionally used the concept of medium to relate to the material device or code system which enables human beings to produce, store, access and engage in communication over time, e.g. paper, voice, computer screen or spoken and written language. In contrast, the term social media refers to (the totality of) digitally mediated and Internet-based platforms which are interactively used (by individual and collective participants) to exchange, share and edit self- and other-generated textual and audio-visual messages. It is this rather broad meaning of social media that we would like to adopt for the purpose of this handbook.

In a sense, most media are, of course, social in that they can be used to provide and share communicative content and thus to socialize. However, over the last two decades, the epithet social has acquired a significant extension of its meaning due to considerable technological expansion of the Internet and its concurrent communicative affordances. As a convenient “buzzword” (Mandiberg 2012: 4), it has attracted all kinds of narrow definitions depending on the technical, conceptual, linguistic, industrial- or business-related interests and needs of its users. As a result, a number of competing concepts have been emerged over time and continue to co-exist beside social media, e.g. “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly 2005), “user-generated content” and “convergence culture” (Jenkins 2006) or “participatory media” (Rheingold 2008: 97). However, all of these concepts have focussed on slightly different aspects of social media, such as their potential for commercial exploitation by enriching user experiences (Web 2.0), their general use in promoting business/corporate-related objectives (user-generated content), the ethical responsibilities and challenges which come with blurring the author-user divide (convergence culture) and the social upshots of a collaborative multi-authored Internet (participatory media). Despite these different colorations of the concepts, they all seem to share a common descriptive basis which is perhaps best summarized by Mandiberg (2012: 1):

These new frameworks have become more and more focused on enabling media creation, as this so-called amateur media becomes the raison d’être of these very professional media organizations. These sites are pointless without audience participation: from the audience’s perspective in order to experience the site you have to become a media producer, and from the organization’s perspective, without audience participation, their sites will fail.

In contrast to ‘classic’ Internet websites then, social media encourage Internet users to post, comment, evaluate, link and contribute self-selected (audio-visual) content. They are deliberately designed to encourage and enable non-expert users to create, share and disseminate digital content (text, images, photos, videos) on the platform. Social media thereby characteristically feature new technological, participatory interfaces, including participatory tools such as opinion polls, comment sections, guest posts, retweets, etc. It is through these participatory options that social media manage to bridge the old productive divide between ‘active’ authors and ‘passive’ readers, with the self-proclaimed aim to neatly interlace the processes of writing and reading (not only temporally but also conceptually).

In light of the relative activity and passivity of Internet users, it is useful to distinguish between the two terms of interaction and participation, frequently evoked in this context. While the former refers “to the exchange of messages between participants” (Landert, Ch. 2, this volume), the latter is either used synonymously with the former, or, more frequently, goes beyond it. The notion of participation, in other words, reflects the technological and interactional empowerment ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to the handbook series
• Acknowledgements
• Table of contents
• 1. Log in: Introducing the pragmatics of social media
• I. The nature of social media
• II. Social media platforms
• III. Social media and discourse
• IV. Social media and identity
• V. Social media and functions
• About the authors
• Name index
• Subject index