Pragmatics of Social Media 9783110431070, 9783110439694

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Pragmatics of Social Media HoPs 11

Handbooks of Pragmatics

Editors

Wolfram Bublitz Andreas H. Jucker Klaus P. Schneider Volume 11

De Gruyter Mouton

Pragmatics of Social Media Edited by

Christian R. Hoffmann Wolfram Bublitz

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-043969-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043107-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043111-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Efetova/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface to the handbook series Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider The series Handbooks of Pragmatics, which comprises thirteen self-contained volumes, provides a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. It is meant to reflect the substantial and wide-ranging significance of pragmatics as a genuinely multi- and transdisciplinary field for nearly all areas of language description, and also to account for its remarkable and continuously rising popularity in linguistics and adjoining disciplines. All thirteen handbooks share the same wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour. Its purview includes patterns of linguistic actions, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, as well as organisational principles of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (that of the speaker, the recipient, the analyst, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time. Unlike syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and other linguistic disciplines, pragmatics is defined by its point of view more than by its objects of investigation. The former precedes (actually creates) the latter. Researchers in pragmatics work in all areas of linguistics (and beyond), but from a distinctive perspective that makes their work pragmatic and leads to new findings and to reinterpretations of old findings. The focal point of pragmatics (from the Greek prãgma ‘act’) is linguistic action (and inter-action): it is the hub around which all accounts in these handbooks revolve. Despite its roots in philosophy, classical rhetorical tradition and stylistics, pragmatics is a relatively recent discipline within linguistics. C. S. Peirce and C. Morris introduced pragmatics into semiotics early in the twentieth century. But it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that linguists took note of the term and began referring to performance phenomena and, subsequently, to ideas developed and advanced by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and other ordinary language philosophers. Since the ensuing pragmatic turn, pragmatics has developed more rapidly and diversely than any other linguistic discipline. The series is characterised by two general objectives. Firstly, it sets out to reflect the field by presenting in-depth articles covering the central and multifarious theories and methodological approaches as well as core concepts and topics characteristic of pragmatics as the analysis of language use in social contexts. All articles are written specifically for this handbook series. They are both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of their topic in the light of recent developments. Secondly, while we accept its extraordinary complexity and diversity DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-202

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Preface to the handbook series

(which we consider a decided asset), we suggest a definite structure, which gives coherence to the entire field of pragmatics and provides orientation to the user of these handbooks. The series specifically pursues the following aims: – it operates with a wide conception of pragmatics, dealing with approaches that are traditional and contemporary, linguistic and philosophical, social and cultural, text- and context-based, as well as diachronic and synchronic; – it views pragmatics from both theoretical and applied perspectives; – it reflects the state of the art in a comprehensive and coherent way, providing a systematic overview of past, present and possible future developments; – it describes theoretical paradigms, methodological accounts and a large number and variety of topical areas comprehensively yet concisely; – it is organised in a principled fashion reflecting our understanding of the structure of the field, with entries appearing in conceptually related groups; – it serves as a comprehensive, reliable, authoritative guide to the central issues in pragmatics; – it is internationally oriented, meeting the needs of the international pragmatic community; – it is interdisciplinary, including pragmatically relevant entries from adjacent fields such as philosophy, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology, semantics, grammar, discourse and media analysis as well as literary studies; – it provides reliable orientational overviews useful both to students and more advanced scholars and teachers. The thirteen volumes are arranged according to the following principles. The first three volumes are dedicated to the foundations of pragmatics with a focus on micro and macro units: Foundations must be at the beginning (volume 1), followed by the core concepts in pragmatics, speech actions (micro level in volume 2) and discourse (macro level in volume 3). The following six volumes provide cognitive (volume 4), societal (volume 5) and interactional (volume 6) perspectives and discuss variability from a cultural and contrastive (volume 7), a diachronic (volume 8) and a medial (volume 9) viewpoint. The remaining four volumes address methodological (volume 10), sociomedial (volume 11), fictional (volume 12), and developmental and clinical (volume 13) aspects of pragmatics: 1. Foundations of pragmatics Wolfram Bublitz and Neal Norrick 2. Pragmatics of speech actions Marina Sbisá and Ken Turner 3. Pragmatics of discourse Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron

Preface to the handbook series 

4. Cognitive pragmatics Hans-Jörg Schmid 5. Pragmatics of society Gisle Andersen and Karin Aijmer 6. Interpersonal pragmatics Miriam A. Locher and Sage L. Graham 7. Pragmatics across languages and cultures Anna Trosborg 8. Historical pragmatics Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen 9. Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen 10. Methods in pragmatics Andreas H. Jucker, Klaus P. Schneider and Wolfram Bublitz 11. Pragmatics of social media Christian R. Hoffmann and Wolfram Bublitz 12. Pragmatics of fiction Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker 13. Developmental and clinical pragmatics Klaus P. Schneider and Elly Ifantidou

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Acknowledgements This handbook represents the work of a large number of individuals over a fairly long period of time. It goes without saying that we owe each of our contributors a great debt of gratitude for accepting our invitation to contribute, for the time and patience they have invested in this project and for the excellent results of their hard work. They have made this handbook what it has eventually become. We have enjoyed working with you and, in this process, have learnt a lot about the pragmatics of social media. We would also like to express our gratitude to Barbara Karlson, Birgit Sievert, Wolfgang Konwitschny and Frauke Schafft of de Gruyter, who were as supportive and encouraging as they were professional in making sure that this volume materialized in a timely manner. Augsburg and Berlin, May 2017

DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-203

Table of contents  

Preface to the handbook series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix 1.

Log in: Introducing the pragmatics of social media Christian R. Hoffmann. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

I.

The nature of social media

2.

Participation as user involvement Daniela Landert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

3.

Participation as audience design Marta Dynel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

4.

Publicness and privateness Birte Bös and Sonja Kleinke. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

II.

Social media platforms

5.

Message boards Jenny Arendholz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

6. Blogs Theresa Heyd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 7. YouTube Marjut Johansson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 8. Twitter Michele Zappavigna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 9.

Social network sites/Facebook Volker Eisenlauer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

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III. Social media and discourse 10. Discourse and organization Maximiliane Frobenius and Cornelia Gerhardt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 11. Discourse and topic Elisabeth Fritz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 12. Discourse and cohesion Christoph Schubert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 13. Discourse and cognition Andreas Langlotz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 14. Discourse and ideology Stephen Pihlaja and Andreas Musolff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381 IV. Social media and identity 15. Facework and identity Miriam A. Locher and Brook Bolander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407 16. Evaluation Michele Zappavigna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 17. Politeness and impoliteness Sage Lambert Graham. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 18. Flaming and trolling Claire Hardaker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493 19. Narration Ruth Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523 20. Fandom Monika Bednarek. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 545

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Social media and functions

21. Getting “liked” Carmen Maíz-Arévalo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 22. Conflictual and consensual disagreement Brook Bolander and Miriam A. Locher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607 23. Compliments and compliment responses María Elena Placencia and Amanda Lower. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633 24. Requesting and advice-giving Phillip R. Morrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 661 About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691 Name index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699 Subject index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721

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 ComputerMediated Communication (HoPs 9) and Pragmatics of Social Media (HoPs 11), DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-001 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 1–28. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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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 scien­ tific 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,

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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 CMCbased 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.

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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 exploita-

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tion 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 Mandi­ berg (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 of Internet users, which is exactly what social media strive to achieve. To this end, previous scholars (e.g. Seargeant and Tagg 2014: 2) have defined social media rather broadly as “any digital environments which involves interaction between participants”. While this is, of course, very much true, we would still propose a slightly modified description of social media as any digital platform which actively promotes and enables the participation and interaction of Internet users. In the end, social media want to transform the individual user experience into a joint, collaborative social undertaking, in which form and content are not only chosen by the few (authors) but by the many (users). A social medium thus needs its authors to turn into readers and expects its readers to be authors, contributing texts, videos, music, links, etc. to the platform. This is why we often experience social media, e.g. Facebook, blogs, Twitter, etc., as communication hubs of larger

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social collectives rather than the single work of an individual. By now, we have become conscious of the (technologically empowered) potential of social media, which enables us to actively participate in generating and sharing information with myriads of other users, as the principal feature shared by all social media platforms. At the core of our own notion of social media are Internet platforms such as online message boards and discussion fora, blogs, microblogs (Twitter), social network sites (MySpace, Facebook), media-sharing sites (YouTube, Instagram) and instant messaging services (SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, Skype). Although this list is far from being exhaustive, we believe that it captures the most ubiquitous and widely used social media platforms today and serves as a veritable starting point for all pragmatic departures into the realm of social media. 3.

Defining pragmatics

In our view, pragmatics occupies a unique position among all fields of linguistic analysis in that it is both an art and a scientific approach. It is the language user’s art of understanding what is meant beyond what is explicitly said. Simplifying considerably, we contend that the meaning of what is said (dictum) and the meaning of what is not said but nonetheless meant (implicatum) can be referred to as ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic meaning’ respectively. While semantics is concerned with the dictum, i.e. the literal and pre-contextual meaning of sentences, pragmatics is concerned with the implicatum, i.e. the incommensurable (and frequently figurative) contextual meaning of utterances that is jointly negotiated and shared in situ by the participants involved. Pragmatic meaning is the outcome of a complex process of interpretive enrichment of semantic meaning. As language users, we are masters in the art of reading between the lines, viz. of ascribing meaning to what is not articulated in so many words. When understanding we cannot help but relating what we hear to our contextual knowledge as well as to the entrenched conceptual schemas and frames of our cognitive knowledge. As linguists, moreover, we employ pragmatics as an approach to describe the principles and mechanisms, the means and procedures that guide both the conveying speaker and the understanding hearer in their endeavour to establish and secure successful communication. Nonetheless, we have to acknowledge that (because of its dual nature as a science and an art) there is not one generally accepted definition of pragmatics as a unified and homogeneous field of study. As has been pointed out repeatedly, most studies tend to prefer a narrow or a broad reading of pragmatics (of which the former is sometimes allocated to an “Anglo-American” and the latter to a “Continental [European]” tradition of pragmatics, cf. Huang 2007: xi). According to the narrow view, pragmatics is a module of language theory on a par with and at the same time in juxtaposition to semantics. Its core issues include deixis, speech acts, presuppositions, implicatures and related types of inferences. In this volume,

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we thus adopt a much broader point of view and understand pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour. In this we follow the general outline guiding all volumes in the Handbooks of Pragmatics series as it is laid down in the series’ preface: All […] handbooks share the same wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour. Its purview includes patterns of linguistic actions, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, as well as organisational principles of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (that of the speaker, the recipient, the analyst, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time. Unlike syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and other linguistic disciplines, pragmatics is defined by its point of view more than by its objects of investigation. The former precedes (actually creates) the latter. Researchers in pragmatics work in all areas of linguistics (and beyond), but from a distinctive perspective that makes their work pragmatic and leads to new findings and to reinterpretations of old findings. The focal point of pragmatics (from the Greek prãgma ‘act’) is linguistic action (and inter-action): it is the hub around which all accounts in these handbooks revolve. (Preface to the handbook series)

As such, pragmatics also takes account of the interactional turn as a characteristic feature of the most recent development of interactive (Web 2.0-based) media formats, which is at the core of the present volume. In our pragmatic perspective, we adopt a constructivist point of view which allows for the inclusion of (given and new) contextual, situational, cognitive and notably media-technological variables. In line with the general politics of our handbook series, we do not set up any restrictions on methodology over and above the required focus on a pragmatic perspective. Contributors are free to choose from the established repertoire of analytical methods to take account of social media, among them quantitative and qualitative, empirical and more heuristic approaches. 4.

Overview of the handbook

This handbook consists of five main parts. The first part, “The Nature of Social Media”, sets up the conceptual groundwork as it explores key concepts such as social media, participation as well as privateness and publicness. The second part, “Social Media Platforms”, focuses on the pragmatics of the most influential types of social media, e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. The third part, “Social Media and Discourse”, sets out to cover the micro- and macro-level organization of discourse on social media, while the fourth part, “Social Media and Identity”, reveals the multifarious ways in which users collectively (re-)construct and reconfigure aspects of their online (and offline) identities. The final and fifth part, “Social Media and Functions”, surveys pragmatic studies on a selective collection of

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speech act functions, e.g. disagreeing, complimenting, requesting. Each chapter comprises a number of in-depth surveys, which are mostly large-scale overviews or else overview-cum-case-study papers. The following presents the content and purpose of each major part of this handbook in more detail, shedding more light on each chapter individually. 4.1.

The nature of social media

As indicated, to uncover the theoretical foundations, including the main features, of our principle object of study, the present handbook opens with an expositional section on the nature of social media. The authors of this section zone in on the three characteristics which have come to shape the very essence of social media communication, i.e. participation as user involvement, participation as audience design and publicness and privateness. In the first chapter of this section, Daniela Landert sets the scene by exploring the conceptual differences between user interaction, participation and involvement, explaining the various ways in which these concepts overlap and the different communicative configurations they assume in social media environments. She contends that while the concept of participation may be broader than the notion of interaction, the term usually addresses the emotional or evaluative user engagement. The distinctions Landert offers are helpful in contrasting social media’s technological potential to boost user participation (interactivity) with the actual degree of reciprocal user engagement and exchange on social media platforms (interaction and involvement). She equally clarifies the gradual communicative divide between professional and non-professional Internet users (vertical communication) and the more ‘egalitarian’ communicative relationship which holds between non-professional users (horizontal communication). While Landert reviews the ways in which social media have created and promoted new forms (and means) of participation over time, she likewise recognizes three main strategies which social media users frequently employ to create user involvement, i.e. interaction, linguistic immediacy and private content. Using a case study of political communication on Twitter, Landert exemplifies how the clever and strategic interplay between language use, accessible private content and participatory technologies can increase user involvement and boost the popularity of the social media channel. She also manages to show that these strategies are neither exclusively tied to social media nor to electronic communicative practices in general but are even applicable to pre-digital types of communication. In the second chapter of this section, Marta Dynel describes how the imperative drive of social media to facilitate and increase user-to-user interactions has led to a noticeable shift in the participation structure of online communication. If classic mass media have established well-defined production and reception roles to assess the quality and status of public media communication (e.g. producer,

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editor, author, printer vs. critic, addressed reader, unaddressed reader), social media continuously blur such divisions, clouding the audience design of online communication. Dynel argues that social media users must cope with “the loss of control over their messages and the easy transgression of the boundaries typifying the traditionally separate communicative frames” (Dynel, Ch. 3, this volume). In this vein, she critically reviews the conceptual evolution of participation frameworks in pragmatics, resketching their development from Erving Goffman’s theoretical insights, subsequent seminal work by Bell (1984), Clark (1996) or Clark and Schaefer (1989) to more recent amendments by Hoffmann (2012), Eisenlauer (2014), Dynel (2014) and Chovanec and Dynel (2015). Decomposing the production format in social media contexts, Dynel draws on the notion of collective producer, a collective of individual users whose individual contribution to the process of publishing social media messages is hard to fathom. She concedes that the reception format of social media is by no means less complex. In great detail, she explores the different participation configurations one encounters in social media, which raises questions of reader ratifiability (is the author of the message aware of the reader, and do they know them?) as well as audience design (does the author dovetail her message to a particular (ratified) target audience?). Birte Bös and Sonja Kleinke conclude the opening section of this handbook. In their chapter, they take an inside look at how our general perception of privateness and publicness has been altered with the rise of social media-based communication. Skilfully navigating the reader through the often messy web of terms and definitions, Bös and Kleinke manage to pin down the conceptual pairing of privateness and publicness with the help of a range of prototypical, often interrelated, characteristics, i.e. accessibility, visibility, persistence, replicability, scalability and searchability. While both authors give a first impression on how social media messages can be shifted from the private sphere to the public arena (or vice versa), they also stress the important difference between actual and perceived publicness/privateness in social media contexts. While the former refers to the actual, objective degree of technologically-induced publicness/privateness, the latter relates the degree of publicness/privateness which Internet users personally ascribe to a given interaction. Following recent research from pragmatics and communication science (cf. Papacharissi 2010), Bös and Kleinke proceed to add a third component to the key couplet of publicness and privateness, namely sociality, which serves as an intermediary concept between the private, characterized as the safety zone of intimacy and reclusion, and the political public, accessible and visible to anyone anytime. They claim that sociality is especially relevant to social media interactions in which users construe and negotiate collective norms and shared beliefs over time while keeping a median level of visibility and accessibility. At the same time, they often protect their personal interest and cover their local identities. In

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what follows, Bös and Kleinke first decompose the related concept of privacy into three integral sub-categories, i.e. informational privacy, social privacy and psychological privacy. On this basis, they can explain the notion of the “privacy paradox” (Barnes 2006), i.e. the contradictory effect that “the privacy concerns of users do not necessarily have an impact on their actual online behavior” (Bös and Kleinke, Ch. 4, this volume). They then shift their focus on various privacy management strategies social media users have applied in online settings. The final part of their chapter is devoted to a systematic overview of pragmatic research on the topic at hand, building on, but not restricted to, Koch and Oesterreicher’s seminal framework of the language of distance and proximity (Koch and Oesterreicher 1985), Dürscheid’s improved model of mediality (Dürscheid 2007) or Landert and Jucker’s recent model of participation (Landert and Jucker 2011). In this vein, the authors trace down the evolution of compatible frameworks, incorporating additional CMC-based approaches. 4.2.

Social media platforms

The second part of this handbook covers a number of comprehensive summaries of recent pragmatic research on the most popular types of social media today, including chapters on message boards, blogs, video-sharing sites (YouTube), micro-blogs (Twitter) and social-network sites (Facebook). In the first chapter of this second part, Jenny Arendholz retraces the technological and communicative development of message boards from their early beginnings to their contemporary state. She contrasts various competitive concepts, such as newsgroups and Internet forums, skilfully dismantling their technological, organisational and communicative differences. While she carefully discusses the most prominent features of message boards, she does not forget to acknowledge their impact on the interactive engagement of message board users as well as the communicative organization of message board topics in so-called threads. Having established a basic understanding of the technological and compositional infrastructure of message boards, Arendholz then continues to group and evaluate existing pragmatic research. Although she concedes that pragmatic studies are still comparatively sparse, she manages to detect three major lines of research on message boards: (a) (im-)politeness and conflict in message boards, (b) identity and face(work) in message boards and (c) advice and authority in message boards. She concludes her chapter with an additional glance at studies which “deviate […] from the mainstream trends” outlined before (Arendholz, Ch. 5, this volume), for instance Virtanen’s investigation (2013) of mock performatives in message boards or Arendholz and Kirner-Ludwig’s (2015) contrastive analysis of quoting strategies in message boards and medieval manuscripts. Similar to Arendholz’s approach, Theresa Heydt begins the second chapter with an outline of the evolution and relevance of blogging as one of the histor-

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ical benchmarks of social media interaction. Describing the difficulties of defining blogs using a limited and conclusive set of formal and functional parameters, Heydt resolves the issue by classifying different blog genres, featuring differing topical, linguistic and functional profiles, e.g. personal blogs, filter blogs, corporate blogs, etc. She draws on these generic distinctions between blog types as a conceptual point of departure for her ensuing critical reflection on pragmatic research on blogs in general. To this end, she first exposes more central readings on the language of blogs, moving toward a critical evaluation of studies which she allocates to more specialized pragmatic fields of interest. The research panorama which Heydt thereby unfolds spans from traditional pragmatic desiderata, such as Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory, politeness and deixis to closely related sociolinguistic topics such as identity, narrativity and authenticity. While, naturally, some of these themes may be explored in more detail in other parts of this handbook, Heydt’s chapter certainly proves that blogs are still one of the most widely researched types of social media, and the summaries she imparts are valuable shortcuts for those who wish to peruse the pragmatics of blogs in various directions. Marjut Johansson’s chapter discloses the social, technological and interactional features of video-sharing sites, using the most popular example of the social media site YouTube as a case in point. To do this, she explores the pragmatic nature of YouTube from three different vantage points, (a) the sociocultural context, i.e. the history and socio-technological development of YouTube, (b) the generic context, i.e. the processes of generic reconfiguration and hybridisation by YouTube videos and (c) the interactional context, i.e. the impact on user participation through comments in the construction and negotiation of meanings on YouTube. To this effect, Johansson starts out by giving a historical overview of the technological and communicative rise of YouTube over the last decades. She then uncovers the topical, structural and technological influence of YouTube’s generic predecessors, such as short films, music videos, humorous videos (pranks, candid camera) or home video compilations. In addition to the extensive and useful description of YouTube’s technological and interactional affordances, she exemplifies all three of the aforementioned perspectives, drawing on YouTube videos by the vlogger (videoblogger) PewDiePie. In the final part of her chapter, Johansson takes more recent pragmatic studies into consideration when she illustrates how identities are negotiated between users in YouTube videos and comment sections; how Internet users contextualize their verbal and visual contributions and how they try to address their contributions to different sections of the blogging audience, blurring or specifying participation types for their individual purposes. In the next chapter, Michele Zappavigna introduces the micro-blogging service Twitter. She starts with a short formal description of micro-blogging, eliciting the historical roots of this social media service and surfacing its technological con-

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straints and options, before turning to interdisciplinary and pragmatic research on Twitter. Most research sees microblogging as a “semiotic technology” (Zappavigna, Ch. 8, this volume) which enables users to engage in a complex range of multimodal activities, including the upload of images, photos, links, videos, verbal messages, etc. To this effect, Zappavigna introduces some essential functions and Twitter-exclusive moves, e.g. hashtags, retweets and @mentions, to show how social media users can exploit Twitter for their own interpersonal needs and individual identity-management practices. To illustrate her claims, Zappavigna consistently draws on a number of clear examples which indicate that twitter users not only attempt to convey and negotiate conceptual but also interpersonal meanings. She finishes her chapter by proposing that such personal alignments may not necessarily take on explicit forms but can equally be realized more implicitly. It is in such acts of “ambient affiliation” that Zappavigna claims “individuals […] may engage in mass practices such as hashtagging in order to participate in particular kinds of ‘belonging’” (Zappavigna, Ch. 8, this volume). The final chapter which concludes this second part of the handbook is Volker Eisenlauer’s critical review of pragmatic research on social network sites, probing the most prominent example of Facebook. Again, Eisenlauer begins his chapter with a thorough description of social-network sites, narrowing down their central technological, compositional and communicative characteristics. He convincingly couples the descriptive part of his chapter with an in-depth discussion of the conceptual nature of social-network sites lodged between genre and medium. To capture social-network sites as representatives of what he calls “meso-media”, he uses the term “form of communication” which he adopts from Ermert (1979). He additionally develops a pragmatic categorization scheme for social network sites to carve out their essential technological and communicative differences. On this basis, Eisenlauer can then draw up the findings of various recent pragmatic works on social media that focus especially on the most influential social network site today, i.e. Facebook. In the last section, Eisenlauer divides studies which investigate the impact and role of context in Facebook communication from pragmatic research examining the use of speech acts on Facebook. He describes, for instance, some new forms of speech acts he identifies on Facebook pages, i.e. “creative text actions”, which are largely controlled by users and “automated text actions” (Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this volume). They are mainly produced, sent and distributed by the software system. As to their structure and purpose, Eisenlauer points out the crucial ethical and interpersonal effects of using and re-using these action types on Facebook, arguing for a critical hypertext analysis of social media communication in general.

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Social media and discourse

The third part of this handbook is concerned with the interactional rules and regularities which provide structure to the discourse in social media. It is this structure which users mutually orient to in order to maintain a sufficient degree of mutual understanding and build up the cohesive texture of audio-visual discourse. In social media, such a structure is not only created individually by deploying a network of recurring cohesive devices on the computer screen, but also collaboratively by many different users through the reciprocal use of additions, amendments, quotes or comments. One of these interactional arenas is the sequential structure of two-way communication in various social media settings, highlighting the “central organizational principles of interaction” (Garcia and Jacobs 1999: 339). This is the topic of the first chapter of this part of the handbook by Maximiliane Frobenius and Cornelia Gerhardt. Within the broader research framework of conversation analysis, the authors first establish the identification of the sequential patterns of online interaction as an ethnomethodological practice (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1995). They then address the fact that the technological and communicative exigencies of social media impose on the written (text-based) organization of online interaction. Since social media widely enable asynchronous types of communication, the temporal immediacy of classic face-to-face conduct loses (at least some of) its regulative interactional force. To account for this communicative shift, the authors track the relevance of various degrees of (a)synchronicity on the turn-taking structure of social media interaction. They draw our attention to recent studies which centre on new turn-allocation strategies conducive to different online environments and manage to identify a number of compensatory moves, paramount to social media interactions, e.g. rhythmic content, bursts and breaks, the use of multi-unit texts, quoting strategies, terms of address (vocative cues), etc. Frobenius and Gerhardt continue to discuss pragmatic research on repairs, openings and closings in online interactions, illustrating their findings and conclusions with a large number of useful examples from tweets, chat, instant messages and emails. Their overview includes useful new concepts from Tanskanen and Karhukorpi’s “concessive repair” (2008), Greenfield and Subrahmanyam’s “slotfiller” (2003) to Rintel, Pittam and Mulholland’s novel “automated joining event (AJE)” (2003) and explains their significance for digital talk-in-interaction against the background of classic research in conversation analysis and ethnomethodological sociology. The chapter closes with a reflection on how interactions in spoken social media may differ from their written counterparts. Frobenius and Gerhardt relate to recent work by Sindoni (2014) or Licoppe and Morel (2012), for instance, to address differences between visually-enhanced digital telephone calls via skype and classic phone calls. Essentially, they capture the gradual formation of new interactional orders which emerge on social

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media fuelled by the incessantly changing and malleable technological and compositional evolution of online communication. As Frobenius’ own work on opening sequences in videoblogs convincingly shows (Frobenius 2014), the growing diversity of interactional moves and strategies which social media fosters are just as diversified as the ever-increasing technological and social granularity of online communication today. The next chapter by Elisabeth Fritz continues along the path set up by Frobenius and Gerhardt. She focuses on the relationship between social media interaction and topic management and explores this connection on two separate levels. On a micro level, Fritz explores the individual topic development strategies which social media users have adopted from face-to-face conversation to establish, negotiate and change topics in online settings. On a macro level, she explains how in social media, topics can drift away from initial posts, branching off into a myriad of subordinate threads. Fritz reveals how high numbers of users in message boards can potentially cloud their message’s relevance, reference or topical orientation in regard to what has been posted before and afterwards. More specifically, she structures her review of pragmatic research on topic development around three “prominent characteristics” (Fritz, Ch. 11, this volume) which can be said to impose on topical coherence in social media, i.e. synchronicity, polyloguicity and monotopicality. While Fritz first leads the reader through classic research on topic management, the main part of her chapter discusses the various ways in which users have been shown to apply compensatory strategies to secure cohesion and thus maintain a reasonable degree of topical coherence. The emphasis on topic connectivity, reference and coherence builds a suitable bridge to the ensuing chapter by Christoph Schubert. It focusses on means of (hyper-)cohesion within and between social media sites. Although Schubert begins his chapter with a conceptual introduction of key terms such as cohesion, coherence and texture, uncovering their origins in the seminal work by Halliday and Hasan (1976), he soon shifts his focus to more recent studies on cohesion in computer-mediated environments. Considering the use of cohesive devices on social media, he rightly acknowledges cohesion as a social phenomenon next to its classic lexico-semantic as well as technological dimension. The phenomenon at hand can thus equally be understood through the interpersonal bonds between users which it establishes by its textual, semantic or digital links. In a consecutive manner, Schubert explores the (hyper-)cohesive effects of multi-linear browsing in online contexts and discusses the cohesive challenges which typically result from interrupted adjacencies in asynchronic social media interactions. He explains the semantic/semiotic load in different types of electronic (hyper-)links and discusses their respective cohesive effects on users’ own forward-looking planning strategies (cf. Jucker 2005). He takes the discussion of link types as a starting point to explore various navigation tools which are meant to establish and maintain user orientation within and across hypertext pages

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and within as well as between social media messages. Based on van Leeuwen’s notion of “multimodal cohesion” (2005: 179), Schubert argues that cohesion on social media is not only a verbal and technological but also a semiotic concept. More recent audio-visual representations on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, for instance, allow for comprehensive sets of audio-visual, intermodal links which frame individual communicative parts as contextualization cues. In the remainder of his chapter, Schubert illustrates the actual use and texture of cohesion in four different social media settings, i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs, based on previous pragmatic research. He successfully reveals that cohesion is not a consistent feature of all online communication but that it is actually deployed in new ways, used for contrastive purposes and thus plays a very important social, interactional and discursive role on different social media platforms. As Schubert illustrates, cohesion should not only be seen as a purely textual concept but necessitates and activates the mutual cognitive engagement of social media users in order to become meaningful. Andreas Langlotz’s chapter on cognition and discourse takes this insight as a stepping stone to explore the socio-cognitive dimension of language use on social media. Langlotz organizes his chapter into three main parts which revolve around (a) the cognitive skills responsible for understanding social media discourse, (b) the cognitive processes which secure and drive users’ on-line discourse comprehension and (c) social media’s technological and communicative affordances which affect the sociocognitive processes of online users. Using this three-fold structure as a basic orientation scheme, ­Langlotz provides various sample analyses from Twitter to substantiate and exemplify his claims and findings. The first section of his chapter centres on introductory descriptions of the key terms of discourse and cognition. Drawing extensively on recent work in cognitive studies, he discusses the role of different cognitive skills in communication, e.g. perception, categorisation and conceptualisation, making inferences and judgments. He also provides useful overviews of research in cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, e.g. relevance theory, frame theory, cognitive semantics, etc. All of these approaches have tried to reduce the complexity of cognitive processing, accounting only for some of its parts or procedures. In the following section, Langlotz sketches the parallel historical evolution of pragmatic and cognitive research which has led to a “divide between social practices and individual cognition” (Langlotz, Ch. 13, this volume). He contends that this gap can be overcome by more recent socio-cognitive approaches which underscore the inseparable tie between individual cognition and social communication. To this effect, he outlines Herbert Clark’s theory of language use (Clark 1996), explaining how the systematic and conventional employment of grounding devices in Tweets (and Twitter Comments) builds up and maintains a consistent web of mutual understanding between the interlocutors. In the final section of his chapter, Langlotz shows how the technological and communicative affordances of social media (in general) and Twitter (in particular) affect the socio-cognitive

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activity of grounding. He thus lays out the socio-cognitive foundation of the cohesive texture in social media introduced by Schubert in the previous chapter. Stephen Pihlaja and Andreas Musolff’s chapter, which rounds off this third part of the volume, touches upon the ideologies of social media, which surface through the audio-visual representation or practice indicative of a particular set of social beliefs or values. The authors provide detailed definitions of the central terms of ideology and discourse. Focussing more on the discursive than the cognitive aspects of ideology, Pihlaja and Musolff hold that “[t]he ‘sharing’ of socially evaluative beliefs and attitudes is itself the product, not the pre-condition of ideology in discourse” (Ch. 14, this volume). Next to the ideological bias of specific social media platforms, e.g. Facebook’s “commodification of interaction”, the authors of this chapter also discuss ethical issues which are related to studying, selecting and analysing social media in an academic context. The chapter exemplifies the use of ideologies with a view to three separate social media platforms, i.e. Internet discussion forums, blogs and video-streaming platforms. Pragmatic research on the former has primarily scrutinized power asymmetries between the gatekeeping forum managers and the regular users. Studies have shown what users actually talk (or do not talk) about. Pihlaja and Musolff indicate the verbal strategies users regularly apply to stage, hide, mitigate or boost their opinions, evaluations and beliefs, positioning the individual user vis-à-vis their interlocutors’ type of action, feelings and points-of-view. In contrast, recent studies on blogs have revealed that the latter seek to “cultivate an insider-ethos” (Pihlaja and Musolff, Ch. 14, this volume). The last part of this chapter addresses critical issues and controversies concerning the study of ideology on social media platforms, such as anonymity, free speech, multiple identities and “context collapse”. With their chapter, Pihlaja and Musolff thus subtly shift our attention away from the organization, negotiation and comprehension of discourse in social media to a new topic, which shall govern the chapters of the next part of our volume, i.e. the construction, reproduction and negotiation of identity in social media contexts. 4.4.

Social media and identity

In the fourth part of this handbook, the audio-visual presentation, negotiation and ratification of user identities takes centre stage. It not only covers pragmatic research which overtly recognizes and classifies identity-related interactional moves and patterns, e.g. facework, positioning theory, but also looks at the specific means and strategies users apply when their identity is at stake, e.g. evaluation, (im-)politeness, flaming, storytelling. In many ways, the study of online identity has been gaining momentum in the last decade. It is thus not surprising to find that this part of the handbook is the longest, boosting a confection of different subsidiary topic areas, all of which constitute important research objectives in Internet pragmatics today.

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In their first chapter, Locher and Bolander survey the rich collection of pragmatic studies devoted to the change of users’ individual or group-related identities on social media. Their chapter shows the broad range of theoretical and methodical approaches to identity- and facework in digital environments. Narrowing down their conceptual roots, the first section retraces the historical evolution of identity and face, following up pragmatic research from the early 1970s to the present day. Identity can be viewed as a stable, de-contextualized social variable or as a transient, discursive, social phenomenon whose function and meaning is often tightly interwoven with the situational and cultural contexts in which it emerges. It is arguably the latter dynamic and interactional definition of identity which seems particularly amenable to the new communicative affordances of social media. Locher and Bolander proceed to pin down current pragmatic identity (and face) research, focussing on the most pertinent research themes, i.e. (im-)politeness, gender-specific language use as well as expertise, authenticity and trust. While reviewing and classifying central studies and their findings in all of these three subfields of identity research, the authors repeatedly acknowledge that all of them are highly interrelated. To illustrate, they substantiate some of the crucial results of the studies they have presented, using a range of sample excerpts from Facebook and Twitter. In the following chapter, Michele Zappavigna shifts our attention from the general description of how users construct, change and negotiate their online identities to the semiotic toolkit which sets this process into motion. More specifically, she explores how linguistic work on appraisal or evaluation can play a vital part in revealing how users present and manage their identities and how they ascribe face or identity to others. Zappavigna retraces the historical development of linguistic evaluation theories (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2005; Bednarek 2006, 2008) and recapitulates the conceptual groundwork of Martin and White’s “appraisal theory”. She takes us through the various systemic classifications, illustrating the categorical networks and choices with the help of various original tweets. In so doing, she manages to link up her conceptual introduction to a specific theory of evaluation to a successive description and discussion of current pragmatic research on user’s concrete evaluation practices on social media. In a number of consecutive steps, she moves from Knight’s study of evaluative “couplings” (Knight 2010: 219) to more recent studies on the evaluative nature of “social tagging”, closing her chapter with the novel concept of “ambient affiliation” (Zappavigna 2011). If Locher and Bolander already hinted at the fundamental importance of (im-) politeness in the co-construction of users’ joint online identities, Sage L. Graham provides a more substantial overview of pragmatic research on said topic in her chapter. It starts with a number of preliminary reflections on how the technological and communicative affordances of social media may impose on users’ (im-)polite behaviour. Closing in on all ‘digital factors’ which make social media interac-

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tion feasible, she creates a conceptual background for the following description of (im-)politeness theories. Her summary of influential (im-)politeness theories is often interspersed with reflections on how these may be applied to social media contexts, for instance concerning the difference between appropriate and polite user actions or how guidelines or FAQs may frame and restrict such behaviour on a meta-communicative, normative level. Graham then continues with a number of separate sections devoted to short overviews of current research trends in different types of social media, e.g. socialnetwork sites, blogs, message boards. The final section of her chapter applies the most essential insights she has imparted to a range of sample analyses of the popular social media site “Twitch”. She reveals the explicit and implicit codes of conduct which can be retrieved from the site and examines the ways in which violations of these regulations are sanctioned. In addition, we learn how moderators use a range of manual and automatic strategies to remove potentially face-aggravating content from their sites and find out about the technical and communicative difficulties such deletions may imply. Put briefly, Graham shows that (im-) politeness theories are, and continue to be, challenged by pre-programmed impoliteness detection software, e.g. BotMods, which need to be trained to identify the (im)polite nature of contributions and must be able to spot the communicative context in which specific impolite contributions are likely to emerge. Naturally, contemporary programs are neither fully capable of fulfilling these tasks, nor are our theoretical insights into the social nature of (im-)polite behaviour substantial enough. Graham fittingly ends her chapter with an outlook on future directions in (im-)politeness research on social media. In line with Graham’s account of (im-)politeness on social media, Claire Hardaker’s next chapter elaborates on the much debated phenomena of flaming and trolling, which, as she claims, are “particularly native to social media” (Ch. 18, this volume). Hardaker offers a critical view on various definitions of flaming and trolling which have come into usage in pragmatics during the last two decades. Her conceptual journey into the etymological and theoretical origins of both terms is informed by an examination of the elementary communicative characteristics of digital communication, e.g. anonymity, pseudonymity, disclosure, etc. It is believed that these framing conditions of social media interactions do not only influence users’ rights and obligations, expectations and interactional moves but also their proclivity to engage in online abuse. The main part of Hardaker’s chapter describes the central descriptive (and etymological) contours of flaming and trolling, accompanied by systematic discussions of both concepts in regard to two exemplary studies. Her discussion of methodological reflections as well as qualitative research findings does not only shed light on how pragmatic analyses of flaming and trolling can be conducted but also encompass larger sections dealing with current methodical and interpretative challenges in the field. The chapter ends with a brief look at future directions in related pragmatic research.

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Given the plethora of definitions and approaches to the study of narratives in pragmatics and discourse analysis, Ruth Page wisely begins chapter 19 with a historical overview of key definitions in the field. She sketches the conceptual change of narrative definitions from their early beginnings in structuralism and sociolinguistics (Labov and Waletzky 1967) to more current, poststructuralist models of narrativity (Ochs and Capps 2001), which stress the gradual, transient and cooperative nature of storytelling. Such an approach lends itself to an elaborate discussion of the ways in which stories are told in computer-mediated environments, more specifically how these contexts (and their socio-communicative exigencies) enhance or constrain the creation and understanding of stories online. With a view to social media, at least three main aspects come to mind: (a) the option to tell and categorize stories across time and space (in different posts, across posts and comments, across social media sites, by cross-referencing, linking, tagging stories), (b) the opportunity to tell stories across different modes of expression (verbal text, images, photos, videos, etc.), (c) the capacity to engage in collaborative, interactive storytelling, including multiple online users. Page gives due credit to all of these aspects and more. She discloses the potential “episodic nature” of storytelling on Facebook, distinguishes users’ “transportable” from their local “situated identities” and exposes the particular “technological formats” users routinely draw on to stage identities by telling a story online (Ch. 19, this volume). The final section of this chapter then reviews current trends in narrative research in Internet pragmatics. All of the previous chapters in this fourth part of the handbook have either dealt with identity (or identity-related concepts) directly (see for instance Locher and Bolander or Graham) or have focussed on particular linguistic strategies which are commonly used in online identity work (Zappavigna; Hardaker; Page). Monika Bednarek’s last chapter arguably takes a somewhat different approach to the subject of identity. In contrast to the preceding chapters, she draws our attention to a particular group of online users, i.e. fans. As Bednarek shows, fandom (in what fans represent and what they do) seems to be particularly visible on social media. Here, fans increasingly meet, communicate and, either explicitly or implicitly, forge their communal identity through recurrent exchanges. In many ways, it appears that social media are one of the main driving forces in the global growth, organization and orientation of fans today, and Bednarek makes a case for studying the pragmatic dimension of what they say, do and achieve on Facebook, Twitter or message boards. At the beginning of her chapter, she acknowledges that the concept of ‘fan’ is inherently fuzzy and in dire need of further intensional and extensional specification. Offering a number of decisive steps into this direction, she then informs us how fans, in the last two decades, have increasingly flocked to social media platforms to exchange their shared affection for television series, film stars or other celebrities. Bednarek sheds light on the various ways in which social media have changed the practices

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of fandom in recent times, which involves inter alia the new electronic options to search for like-minded aficionados, the international reach of social media as well as the quick and easy ways to get in touch with other fans. The main part of the chapter is devoted to studies which have focussed on fan audience responses to various different television series. Bednarek primarily addresses two different aspects of audience behaviour which are arguably constitutive of fan behaviour on social media: (a) the types of linguistic actions fans perform and (b) the stance fans express when talking about their idol or object of fascination. With a view to the former, Bednarek discusses the possible range and limits of fan-based action types. She reviews previous studies in narrative and discourse analysis as well as sociolinguistics, which have attempted to come up with suitable classification models (e.g. Gregoriou 2012; Androutsopoulos and Wei­den­höf­fer 2015). In the remainder of her chapter, we learn about the stances of fans we may connect with individual action types. Bednarek explains that fan culture on social media is increasingly a global and transnational phenomenon (Ch. 20, this volume), which enables her to talk of different “styles of fandom”. Such styles can find expression in the number and type of fan actions but equally in inscribed or evoked evaluations. In the end, Bednarek’s chapter could likely be seen as an exemplary application of the central insights established in the preceding chapters, since it clearly illustrates how the identity of a particular group of users (fans) can emerge through the interplay of self- and other presentation (facework) and the use of audio-visual strategies of evaluation, storytelling and (im-)politeness. 4.5.

Social media and functions

The final part of our handbook picks up the issue of important speech acts and their use and function on different social media platforms. Naturally, the scope of this handbook has forced us to constrain the types of speech acts we can consider, and we have done so in view of two main factors: Our selection of speech acts needed to be conducive to social media either in terms of their frequency and functional salience (“Getting ‘liked’”, “Conflictual and consensual disagreement”) or in light of the amount of pragmatic research devoted to their study in both offline and online contexts (“Compliments and compliment responses”, “Requests and advice giving”). We hope that this part of the handbook provides some general orientation on where these well-known pragmatic functions appear on social media and explain who uses them, in which numbers and to which end. We thereby knowingly continue and extend a growing body on pragmatic research which reaches beyond pragmatic studies in the digital realm and covers all types of human communication – spoken and written, offline and online, in past and present. Carmen Maíz-Arévalo’s chapter on “getting ‘liked’” on social media is naturally based on the premise that human beings strive toward becoming socially

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accepted and valued members of social groups and play a meaningful part in larger societies and organizations. Clearly, this view perfectly aligns with Brown and Levinson’s idea of a positive face every human member claims for themselves and it equally reverberates in Goffman’s idea of the ways and strategies human beings choose to assume, reject or ratify lines of identity in ongoing discourse. We can see how the function of liking and getting liked plays a central role on social media, whose interactions are by and large oriented to the establishment, maintenance or negotiation of users’ social, interpersonal bonds. Moving beyond this commonplace observation, Maíz-Arévalo dissects the various economic, narcissistic or other strategic reasons which may trigger acts of liking on different social media platforms. She gives structure to these various usages, reducing the multifarious motivations for liking individuals online to four essential “macro-strategies”: self-presentation (aka self-disclosure), social expressivity, implicitness and humour. The first of these strategies is introduced with the help of ample examples and described along four central parameters which define its identity effect on users. These are (a) the quantity of published (personal) information, (b) the level of intimacy or privacy of information, (c) the degree of ‘positive’ embellishment in the way personal information is presented and (d) the level of staged (or perceived) authenticity of information. As the author shows, the second macro-strategy of “social expressivity” is not concerned with self-presentation but with user activities which cater to the needs and feelings of others, expressing empathy, compassion and understanding. The third strategy of “implicitness” addresses the fact that often the (co-)construction of user identities on social media does not rest on users` explicit verbal maneuvers but on their implicit, more or less accidental online behavior. The final strategy covers the large field of humorous actions on social media which mainly contribute to the building and nurturing of friendships and even larger social networks. Maíz-Arévalo carefully describes each of these parameters in much detail intermittently pointing to relevant pragmatic research which has explored the relationship between each of these strategies and the function of liking in CMC. Her clear and nuanced descriptions as well as her balanced look at different pragmatic research traditions and findings make Maíz-Arévalo’s paper an excellent gateway to the chapters to come. Bolander and Locher’s chapter is devoted to the speech act of disagreeing in social media contexts, and they account for existing pragmatic research on this topic from a variety of angles. Their exploration of this fundamental function in social media begins with the consideration of socio-technological factors which give rise to either conflictual or consensual types of disagreements in online environments. This background conceptually frames the ensuing comprehensive overview of pragmatic literature on both of these subtypes of disagreement in social media. Three major lines of research, their respective objectives and foci are discussed, i.e. comparative studies of disagreements in online and offline environments, the

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relationship between social and medium factors, the link between disagreements, the gender-specific use of disagreements, disagreements in dialogic and polylogic interaction, disagreements in educational/pedagogical contexts and the contrastive analysis of disagreements across varieties, languages and cultures. While each of these emergent research traditions merits closer inspection, Bolander and Locher especially focus on two key issues which have surfaced in pragmatic research on disagreement in the last two decades, i.e. the context and contextualization of disagreements as well as the indexing of emotions. The research focus on the contextual configurations into which disagreements enter involves the use of various semiotic modes (text, pictures, film, etc.) from which users can draw to express themselves, but also different “lines” of communication, i.e. offline vs. online contexts (Bolander and Locher, Ch. 22, this volume). The various modal and medial parameters that constitute the communicative interface through which disagreements are voiced yield specialized “contexts of interaction” (Angouri and Tseliga 2010: 66) which affect the overall use as well as interactional placement and negotiation of disagreements. A different research strand, which has seen much attention in the last years, concerns the relation between the quantity and quality of disagreements in social media, their audio-visual display of emotions and the relational work to which they contribute. The topic of compliments (and compliment responses) has been at the forefront of pragmatic research over the last fifty years, from Manes and Wolfson’s seminal work on structural compliment prototypes (1981) and Holmes’ classic studies on the gender-specific use of particular types of compliments (Holmes 1986, 1988) to more recent work by Jucker and Taavitsainen 2008, Maíz-Arévalo and García-Gómez 2013 or Placencia and Lower 2013. Compliments have successfully retained their popularity as one of the most debated research topics in offline settings in the age of new media. The chapter by Placencia and Lower in this volume confirms this success story, critically presenting a growing body of pragmatic research on the subject in a principled fashion. Besides providing definitions of compliment types, forms and functions, the authors compile and evaluate existing research, stressing similarities and differences of the given findings. They also discuss the various methods of analysis with which scholars have tried to capture, count, assess and interpret compliments and compliment responses in online settings. Thereby, the useful classification schemes and tables we find in this chapter provide rich overviews of pragmatic studies, categorized according to the particular language variety, the social media platform as well as the number and types of compliments they investigate. The typical features of compliment behaviour are introduced and discussed in appropriate detail, including compliments’ structural make-up, topics and functions. The chapter then draws our attention to compliment responses on social media, again accounting for their quantitative, structural and functional differences in different online settings. The end of their chapter sees Placencia and Lower reflect on some of the more pressing ethical issues as well

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as methodological pitfalls which linguists can expect to encounter when studying compliments in CMC. Philipp Morrow’s final chapter of this handbook takes an insight look at the speech acts of requesting and advice-giving in social media. Morrow sets out to survey concurrent pragmatic research, including email requests in academic and other professional settings, requests on social network sites as well as health-related websites. Comparing and contrasting the results of the different studies in their different CMC settings, he also looks at research aimed at advice-giving in various CMC contexts. In this vein, he touches upon issues of pragmatic competence and cultural appropriateness, (in-)directness and (im-)politeness, social power and interpersonal rapport. His critical review allows us to catch a glimpse of the formal and functional variability of the two speech acts at hand. We find out that the way users shape and perform their requests or ask for advice depends on multifarious contextual details, such as our cultural background, our specific motivation and objective, our interpersonal rapport with the addressee(s), the relative social power divide between the interlocutors, the socio-technological affordances of individual social media platforms, the multimodal options for expressing our views, etc. Morrow’s chapter gives due credit to these different practices, and summarizes and appraises quantitative and qualitative findings in a diligent fashion. It completes the final part of this handbook, closing off a section which has compiled and revisited pragmatic research into the most ubiquitous and elementary speech acts on social media today. 5.

Concluding remarks

We hope that this handbook provides structure and coherence to a still young and growing field of research which – as we strongly believe – is not only trending but about to take full shape in pragmatics in the years to come. Its twenty-four individual chapters survey what we know about the pragmatics of social media at the present time. They provide readers with systematic insights into the socio-communicative nature of social media and describe striking differences in the way we talk or write about, read, share and negotiate meanings on different social media platforms. They reveal how we establish, keep, change and challenge different types of identities as social media users and shed light on how and when we tend to use and apply particular speech acts on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. The different parts, this handbook consists of, are meant to give scholars easy access to comprehensive overviews on pragmatic research, based on their individual conceptual, topical or functional interests. There are, necessarily, a wealth of conceptual and topical interrelations both between the chapters and between the parts, and this is not by chance but by design. The cross-references enrich our understanding of social media communication and invite readers to read ‘across’,

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exploring the pragmatics of social media platforms as well as new research topics and approaches to the study of digital communication. To this effect, we understand that this handbook may not only be useful to linguists but to scholars in other scientific disciplines as well. References Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2008 Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography. Language@ internet 5.8. Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Jessica Weidenhöffer 2015 Zuschauer-Engagement auf Twitter: Handlungskategorien der rezeptions­ be­glei­ten­den Kommunikation am Beispiel von #tatort. Zeitschrift für angewandte Linguistik 62(1): 23–59. Angouri, Jo and Theodora Tseliga 2010 “you HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!” From e-dis­ agreement to e-impoliteness in two online fora. Journal of Politeness Research 6(1): 57–82. Arendholz, Jenny and Monika Kirner-Ludwig 2015 In-between cognitively isolated quotes and references: Looking for answers lurking in textual margins. In: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, 319–342. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Barnes, Susan B. 2006 A privacy paradox: Social networking in the Unites States. First Monday 11 (9). http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1394/1312 (last accessed 15 February 2017). Bednarek, Monika 2006 Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London: Continuum. Bednarek, Monika 2008 Emotion Talk Across Corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bell, Allan 1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145–204. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruns, Axel 2007 Produsage: Toward a Broader Framework of User-Led Content Creation. Kelvin Grove, Queensland: Queensland University of Technology. Clark, Herbert 1996 Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert and Edward Schaefer 1989 Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science 13: 259–294.

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Chovanec, Jan and Marta Dynel 2015 Researching interactional forms and participant structures in public and social media. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 1–23. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Dürscheid, Christa 2007 Private, nicht-öffentliche und öffentliche Kommunikation im Internet. Neue Beiträge zur Germanistik 6(4): 22–41. Dynel, Marta 2014 Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 73: 37–52. Eisenlauer, Volker 2014 Facebook as a third author – (Semi)automated participation framework in Social Network Sites. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 73–85. Ermert, Karl 1979 Briefsorten. Untersuchungen zu Theorie und Empirie der Textklassifikation. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2014 The pragmatics of monologue: Interaction in video blogs (Doctoral dissertation). http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2014/5895/pdf/dissertation_ frobenius_scidok.pdf (last accessed 15 February 2017). Garcia, Angela C. and Jennifer B. Jacobs 1999 The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasisynchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 32: 337–367. doi: 10.1207/S15327973rls3204_2. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Greenfield, Patricia and Kaveri Subrahmanyam 2003 Online discourse in a teen chatroom: New codes and new modes of coherence in a visual medium. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 24(6): 713–738. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2003.09.005. Gregoriou, Christiana 2012 ‘Times like these, I wish there was a real Dexter’: Unpacking serial murder ideologies and metaphors from TV’s Dexter internet forum. Language and Literature 21: 274–285. Halliday, Michael A. K. and Ruqaiya Hasan 1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Herring, Susan, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.) 2013 Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 9.) Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Hoffmann, Christian R. 2012 Meaning and Interaction in Personal Weblogs. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Holmes, Janet 1988 Paying compliments: A sex-preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics 12: 445–465. Holmes, Janet 1986 Compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand English Anthropological Linguistics 28: 485–508.

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Huang, Yan 2007 Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunston, Susan and Geoffrey Thompson 2000 Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Henry 2006 Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) 2008 Speech Acts in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas H. 2005 Hypertext research: Some basic concepts. In: Lilo Moessner and Christa M. Schmidt (eds.), Anglistentag 2004 Aachen: Proceedings, 285–295. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher 1985 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36: 15–43. Knight, Naomi 2010 Wrinkling complexity: Concepts of identity and affiliation in humour. In: Monika Bednarek and James R. Martin (eds.), New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation, 35–58. London/New York: Continuum. Labov, William and Joshua Waletzky 1967 Narrative analysis. In: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Landert, Daniela and Andreas H. Jucker 2011 Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries. Journal of Pragmatics 43(5): 1422–1434. Licoppe, Christian and Julien Morel 2012 Video-in-interaction: “Talking heads” and the multimodal organization of mobile and Skype video calls. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(4): 399–429. Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen and Antonio García-Gómez 2013 “You look terrific!” Social evaluation and relationships in online compliments. Discourse Studies 15: 735–760. Mandiberg, Michael 2012 Introduction. In: Michael Mandiberg (ed.), The Social Media Reader, 1–12. New York: New York University Press. Manes, Joan and Nessa Wolfson 1981 The compliment formula. In: Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardised Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, 115–132. The Hague: Mouton. Martin, James R. and Peter White 2005 The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ochs, Lisa and Elinor Capps 2001 Living Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Reilly, Tim 2010 What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. In: Helen Donelan, Karen Kear and Magnus Ramage (eds.), Online Communication and Collaboration. A Reader, 225–236. London: Routledge. Page, Ruth E. 2013 Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. London: Routledge. Page, Ruth E., David Barton, Johann W. Unger and Michele Zappavigna (eds.) 2014 Researching Language and Social Media: A Student Guide. London: Routledge. Papacharissi, Zizi 2010 A Private Sphere. Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Placencia, María Elena and Amanda Lower 2013 Your kids are stinking cute. Complimenting behavior on Facebook among family and friends. Intercultural Pragmatics 10: 617–646. Quan-Haase, Anabel and Luke Sloan 2017 Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods: Goals, challenges and innovations. In: Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, 1–11. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage. Rheingold, Howard 2008 Using participatory media and public voice to encourage civic engagement. In: W. Lance Bennett (ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, 97–118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rintel, Sean E., Jeffrey Pittam and Joan Mulholland 2003 Time will tell: Ambiguous non-responses on Internet Relay Chat. Electronic Journal of Communication 13(1). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/013/1/ 01312.HTML (last accessed: 15 Oct. 2016). Sacks, Harvey 1995 Lectures on Conversation. Ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell. Seargeant, Philip and Caroline Tagg (eds.) 2014 Language and Social Media: Communication and Community Online. London: Palgrave. Sindoni, Maria Grazia 2014 Through the looking glass: A social semiotic and linguistic perspective on the study of video chats. Text and Talk 34(3): 325–347. Tagg, Caroline 2015 Exploring Digital Communication: Language in Action. London: Routledge. Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa and Johanna Karhukorpi 2008 Concessive repair and negotiation of affiliation in e-mail discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1587–1600. Van Leeuwen, Theo 2005 Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. Virtanen, Tuija 2013 Mock performatives in online discussion boards: Toward a discourse-pragmatic model of computer-mediated communication. In: Deborah Tannen and

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Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, 155– 166. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Zappavigna, Michele 2011 Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media and Society 13(5): 788–806. Zappavigna, Michele 2012 Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Bloomsbury.

Part I The nature of social media

2.

Participation as user involvement Daniela Landert

Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to explore the potential of social media for user participation from different perspectives. This includes technical factors that determine how much participation is possible on a given platform as well as the degree and forms of participation that can actually be observed. The chapter also addresses the relation between user involvement that results from interaction and other involvement strategies that can be found on social media, such as the presence of personal content and language of immediacy. It concludes with a case study that illustrates how different involvement strategies are combined in political communication on a social networking site. 1.

Introduction: Interaction, participation and involvement

The potential for users to participate in interaction and to contribute content is perhaps the main defining characteristic of social media (see also Hoffmann, Ch. 1, this volume). It presents a contrast to traditional mass media communication, in which communication is typically unidirectional from a professional text producer to a large anonymous mass audience. On social media, anyone is able to participate, to exchange messages and to interact with any number of other users. This chapter explores this potential from different perspectives, focussing on how it relates to user involvement. Three concepts are of central relevance when looking at participation as user involvement, namely interaction, (social) participation and involvement. There is some degree of overlap between these terms and all of them are used in various ways in different research traditions. Interaction, as understood in this chapter, refers to the exchange of messages between participants. In its most basic form, it consists of A sending a message to B and B being able to react to this message in a way that can be perceived by A. In other words, communication needs to be (at least potentially) bidirectional in order to qualify as interaction. Following this definition, a unidirectional communicative framework such as prototypical mass media communication without any opportunities for the addressees to respond to the message would not qualify as interaction. When looking at online settings it makes sense to distinguish further between the potential of interaction – i.e. whether the addressee has the option of responding to a message – and interactions in which this potential is actually realised – i.e. the addressee responds (see also Section 2 on forms and degrees of interaction and Section 3.2 on types of interactivity). From the point of DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-002 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 31–59. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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view of pragmatics, interaction is the most accessible of the three concepts, since it can be studied directly on the basis of observable communicative exchanges. In some instances, the term participation is used more or less synonymously to interaction in order to refer to the communicative activities of participants in a given communicative situation (see also Dynel, Ch. 3, this volume). Social participation goes beyond mere interaction, though. It involves a certain degree of power, which means that participants not only have the opportunity to exchange messages, but that their messages also have an effect or, more precisely, that participants have influence on social organisation and social processes (Carah and Louw 2015: 231; Stein 2013). This is the reason why increased access to the Internet in general and social media in particular cannot be equated with democratisation. As Tredinnick (2008: 124) points out, new forms of communication technology tend to become subject to the same power relations that used to control older forms. On a very basic level, online access is not available to everyone. In addition, access to social media is sufficient for sharing messages with a large public, but whether these messages are read and whether authors are able to exert influence through them is far from guaranteed. For pragmaticists, social participation is more difficult to investigate than interaction. The social effects of individual communicative exchanges are in most cases not visible immediately. As a consequence, it is hard to know to what extent specific messages allow their authors to participate in a given social context in a meaningful way. Involvement, finally, means that individuals engage with content, typically in a way that affects them emotionally. Again, uses of the term vary and sometimes involvement is used more or less synonymously with participation and interaction, referring to situations in which participants interact actively. However, involvement can also be used more specifically to refer to internal states and emotional engagement of participants, as well as to characteristics of texts that are associated with emotional engagement (for a critical discussion of these different uses of the term, see Caffi and Janney 1994). From a linguistic point of view, the problem with involvement is that we do not have any direct access to the emotional state of interactants. If and how readers are affected by the messages they read is a question that cannot be answered based on the message alone. As a consequence, linguistic studies of involvement tend to focus on characteristics of texts that are associated with involvement, such as involving content and involving and/or involved language. To give an example, involving content may deal with personal stories and emotions with which the addressee is expected to empathise. Involved language includes, for instance, emotionally charged vocabulary, expressions that explicitly refer to the sender and addressee (e.g. first and second person pronouns), expressions of emphasis such as exclamation marks and capitalisations, the use of emoticons, and so on (see also Section 4 below). Interaction, (social) participation and involvement can and do co-occur. For example, we can picture a situation in which users interact with each other on

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social media in a personally and emotionally involved way on a political topic that affects them directly. If such interactions gain sufficient momentum they can contribute to the formation of a larger social movement with the power to affect real social change. The Arab Spring is often presented in such a way, although views differ as to how large a role social media actually played for the political movement (see, for instance, Papacharissi and Blasiola 2016; Thurlow 2013: 237). However, this co-occurrence of involvement strategies is by no means a given in social media. Interactions on social media are not always tied to emotional involvement and cases in which they form part of the type of participation that leads to more substantial social change are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, even interaction in the narrow sense, i.e. with communication taking place in more than one direction, cannot be taken for granted on social media. While this is certainly the prototypical case, there are also instances in which the potential of interaction is not realised. Far from ‘going viral’, most messages posted by private individuals reach only a small audience and not all of them even receive a response. The relation between social media, new forms of interaction and participation needs careful consideration at various levels. These levels include whether there is technical potential of interaction on a given platform, to what extent users are free to shape their own interaction with others, whether or not users realise the potential of interaction, what content users publish and what effect this has, i.e. whether the content reaches an audience and whether it is able to lead to change. Not all these aspects are equally central to a pragmatic study of social media. Especially the last question concerning the wider social effects of social media participation is one that is more suitably dealt with in the context of social and political sciences. The remaining aspects will be discussed in Sections 2 and 3 of this chapter. Section 4 will deal with strategies of creating audience involvement through content and language, and with how these strategies are related to involvement strategies that are based on interaction. The connection between these different strategies is further illustrated with a case study on the use of social media in political communication in Section 5.

2.

Forms of interaction and participation

2.1.

The technical potential of interaction

Online interaction can take many different forms. One way of classifying these forms is to order them according to the degree to which user contributions are pre-shaped; or, put differently, the degree to which they allow users to contribute their own content. This classification is technical in the sense that it depends on the infrastructure of the social media platform. At one end of the scale, we find forms of interaction in which users do not contribute any content at all. An example of

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this is the tracking of user behaviour on websites, which can be used for arranging content according to what is most popular or liked. The contribution by users is very small in this case; in the case of most read articles on online news sites, for instance, users might not even be aware that their behaviour has an impact on how the content of a website is presented. Still, this immediate technical feedback is more interactive compared to offline media like books or print newspapers, where technical feedback about reader behaviour is restricted to overall circulation or sales figures. At the next level we find interaction of the type of (dis-)liking content, where users consciously submit their feedback by clicking pre-defined buttons. In this case, there is a clearer intention to contribute to the presentation of content (e.g. by increasing the visibility of certain items), but the actual content is still not changed. User polls are slightly more interactive. They present a way of collecting new content, but this content is aggregated over all participating users and participation is restricted to selecting among pre-defined options. User comments are perhaps the most basic form of individual user-generated content. Depending on the platform, there may be restrictions with respect to length and type of content, but the text can be formulated freely and users are free to choose the topic of their contribution, at least as long as they do not violate the guidelines of the platform. Even freer forms of participation can still be integrated on institutional platforms, for instance in the form of blog sections where users can freely contribute their own content. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, offer a range of different options for users to publish their own content, for instance in the form of profiles, status updates, messages and media uploads. Finally, at the opposite end of the scale, users are free to set up their own online spaces and publish content independent of any restrictions of existing platforms. Closely related to the purely technical dimension of participation is the question of user policy and regulations concerning the control over content. All major social media platforms have user policy documents that specify the degree and form of acceptable user participation. Violations of such policies can result in deletion of user content, blocking of user access and, in extreme cases, can even lead to legal action. While some common standards have developed over the last two decades, there are still marked differences across platforms in how acceptable content is defined and monitored (Buni and Chemaly 2016). In addition, Stein (2013) shows how policy documents grant users different degrees of control over their content depending on platform. Comparing YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, Stein finds that Wikipedia is the only platform of the three in which users have dominant control over the platform’s content and over user data.1 In addition,

1



However, this does not mean that every user succeeds in adding the content they want. Wikipedia has a user-based editorial system that monitors content quite closely, at least in some cases. Johnstone (2011) compares the representation of different types of

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policies are decided “through a process of discussion-based consensus” among the users of Wikipedia (Stein 2013: 367). In contrast, YouTube and Facebook grant their users very little influence over content and policies. Their user policy documents mainly serve to inform users about the company’s practices. Thus, social media platforms differ with respect to the degree of participation they grant to users on two levels: the purely technical infrastructure and the policies that regulate how this infrastructure can be used. 2.2.

Realising the technical potential: Degrees of interaction

The interactive potential of social media platforms is not always fully realised. In highly interactive settings, we would expect replies to occur very regularly and we would also expect to be able to observe long interactions between small groups of participants who develop ideas and arguments over the course of their interaction. However, most studies that investigate the degree of interaction in social media come to the conclusion that such interactions are the exception rather than the rule. The likelihood for messages to receive replies and to lead to interactions varies across different communication forms and platforms. Jucker and Dürscheid (2012: 43) argue that communicative acts are characterised by different uptake expectations depending on the context in which they occur. For instance, a status update on Facebook by a user who posts holiday pictures typically has a very high degree of uptake expectation; the user posting the message expects friends to react to the message by liking and perhaps even commenting on it. The uptake expectations can be further increased when specific friends are addressed in the post, perhaps even with questions. Likewise, on Twitter, uptake expectations can be increased through the use of hashtags and the address of other users with @-phrases (see Jucker and Dürscheid 2012: 48). There are various ways of measuring the degree of interaction. The overall number of users and contributions can serve as a first indication. This can be used to compare different platforms (e.g. number of users on Facebook and on Twitter) as well as sections within platforms (e.g. number of posts on different topics on a given message board; the number of followers on Twitter). Calculating the number of contributions per user can further help identify platforms that have a stable community of regular participants. Taking this approach one step further, grouping users by the number of messages they post is a way to identify user groups with

expertise in articles on Pittsburghese across different media, including print newspaper articles, a website and an email discussion forum. She comes to the conclusion that Wikipedia has the tightest editorial constraints on what types of sources are considered acceptable, and it is the only platform in her sample that does not regard personal experience as a valid source of expertise (2011: 12).

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different levels of participation on a single platform. For instance, McDonald and Woodward-Kron (2016) analyse data from an online message board on bipolar disorder by dividing the posts into sub-corpora according to “user’s post count at the time of posting” (2016: 162). Posts in the sub-corpus of first posts are contributed by new members, while posts in the sub-corpora of 220–559th and 560+ posts are contributed by veteran members. This allows McDonald and Woodward-Kron to compare the language use of users with different degrees of active participation in the online community. Their findings show that the different roles in the community are directly reflected in different communicative patterns of giving advice, in metadiscourse, and in the construction of identities in relation to bipolar disorder (McDonald and Woodward-Kron 2016). Another way to study the degree of interaction on a given platform is to analyse the length and branching of message threads. In highly interactive exchanges, users engage in interactions that span several turns, with later messages replying to earlier messages. This leads to deep structures with long message threads. In contrast, flat structures are indicative of exchanges with a lower degree of interaction, in which users tend to post messages which start new topics or which only reply to one starting point message (e.g. a newspaper article, a blog post). Marcoccia (2004) is an example of a study that investigates the length of message threads. He studied French-speaking newsgroups in 1997 and found an average length of 5 messages per conversational sequence. Some approaches to interaction further study how closely messages relate to each other. Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1997) propose a three-way distinction. In oneway communication no interaction takes place at all. In reactive two-way communication, the addressee replies to a previous message, taking into account that previous message, but no messages that preceded it. In contrast, in fully interactive communication, the reply to a message takes into account the entire sequence of previous messages and the way in which they were reactive or interactive. In their early study of three online discussion groups in 1993, Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1997) found different levels of interaction in the three groups and they relate the degree of interaction to the degree of user involvement, arguing that high degrees of interaction create engagement. Arendholz (2013) develops her own measure of the degree of interaction on message boards, which is calculated on the basis of the number of messages in a given thread and the number of users who created the messages. Her results show that only a small proportion of threads in her sample qualify as highly interactive according to her measure. Two out of fifty threads contain on average roughly four messages per user, which is the result with the highest interaction quotient of her sample. In contrast, in several of the threads the number of messages is only marginally higher than the number of users, which means that interaction between users is hardly possible. Repeated replies between users would have resulted in much higher numbers of messages per user.

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Similar results were found in studies of user comment sections on online news sites by Kleinke (2010) and Neurauter-Kessels (2013). Kleinke (2010: 202) observes in her data from BBC Talk and the Spiegel Online forum that messages that refer to previous messages usually do not receive a reply by the user who posted the earlier message. This results in largely unidirectional interaction, in which messages sometimes build chains without ambidirectional interaction: User A may post a reply to user B’s message, which was posted in reply to user C’s message, but C does not reply to B and B does not reply to A (Kleinke 2010: 202–205). A similar observation is made by Neurauter-Kessels (2013), who studies conflictive exchanges in user comments of five British online newspapers. All conflictive exchanges start with an initial message that contains a personal attack against other users, journalists or moderators. For four of the five newspapers, the percentage of such attacks that did not receive any response was very high, between 72 % and 88 %. Only for one newspaper, the Express Online, a clear majority of attacks received a response, namely 66 %. This was also the only newspaper for which conflictive exchanges regularly reached a length of four messages and more (21 %). Neurauter-Kessels (2013: 228–229) explains this difference with the smaller number of users that are active on the Express Online compared to the other news sites, and the fact that the users who were involved in the conflicting exchanges were all quite active on the site. In other words, the higher degree of interaction is likely to be related to a more close-knit community of users (2013: 263). Likewise, for blogs the general finding is that the interactional potential that is offered by the technical infrastructure is often not fully exploited by users (e.g. Bolander 2013; Hoffmann 2012). Studying data collected from ten different blogs, Hoffmann (2012: 202) observes that “interaction in comments is […] extremely limited”. In his data, most comments are directed at blog authors and if blog authors respond to these comments at all, their comments do not receive any further reply (2012: 202, 211–212). Bolander (2013) made very similar observations in her study of eight diary blogs. Of the 717 reader comments she analysed, 74 % were written in response to the blog post (2013: 106), which leaves only about a quarter of reader comments that can potentially be used for longer interactions. She also found that 75 % of readers in her data produced only one comment, and that cases in which readers submitted more than one comment in the same section are rare (2013: 107). The typical patterns of interaction that can be observed consist of two to three turns: a post by a blogger, responded to by a reader comment which, in some cases, receives a reply by the blogger (Bolander 2013: 113). In contrast, longer sequences and interactions between readers are far less common in her data. However, Bolander also observes differences across her data. The type of discourse move has an impact on the degree of interaction; more precisely, disagreements and criticisms are particularly common in reader comments directed towards other readers and they seem to be more likely to trigger further reader comments (Bolander 2013: 128–129, 204; see also Bolander 2012: 1614). In addition, she

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finds differences between the eight blogs in her sample. In one of the blogs, the largest group of comments are comments by readers in response to a previous reader comment. On this blog, this group accounts for 41 % of all comments – compared to less than 10 % for all the other blogs (2013: 114). Bolander relates this difference to group size and participant relationships, especially with respect to how well users know each other. Similar to Neurauter-Kessels’ (2013) findings mentioned above, the higher degree of user interaction in Bolander’s study occurs in the setting in which the number of active users is smallest. Bolander (2013: 115) is careful to point out that we cannot assume a simple causal relationship between these factors; not all small online communities of users who know each other well show a very high degree of interaction. Still, the available evidence so far indicates that social factors like group size, familiarity of users, the type of discourse move and the interactional norms within a given group play a very important role for the degree of interaction. In sum, the results so far show that it is certainly not enough to look at the technical infrastructure of a given platform in order to judge the degree of interaction between users. While a certain technical infrastructure is required for interaction, such technical potential is not sufficient to ensure that users actually engage in interaction. 2.3.

Horizontal and vertical communication

When approaching questions of participation, there is another aspect that becomes important, namely who interacts with whom. Chung (2012: 43) introduces the distinction between horizontal and vertical communication. Vertical communication describes interactions between journalists, public figures, and other professional communicators on the one hand, and users on the other. Typical examples are online newspapers, where readers can post comments in reaction to news articles, and social media profiles by politicians and political parties, which allow supporters to follow, like, share and comment on content. In contrast, horizontal communication refers to interaction between (non-professional) users. Typical examples are social media interactions between friends who also interact with each other offline and message boards devoted to a topic where users can meet other users who share their own interests. These two types of social media interaction create different forms of user participation. Vertical communication leads to a form of invited participation in which the previously largely invisible mass audience is given an opportunity to talk back. Motivations for inviting such user participation are manifold. Apart from gaining insights into the opinions and preferences of their audience, social media interaction with and among users can also be used to increase involvement and to create a sense of community, which can lead to a higher degree of identification with (and thus loyalty to) products, companies and political parties. In political campaign-

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ing, this use of social media has been gaining importance over the last decade to an extent that social media competence is now viewed as an important factor in winning elections (see also Section 5). In the case of public service providers, vertical communication can also be a way to fulfil their public service mandate (Enli 2008; Allan and Thorsen 2011: 29). As far as participation is concerned, vertical communication typically takes place on platforms that are maintained by institutions or professional communicators who consequently can control the degree and form of participation that is available to users. Horizontal communication takes place between peers who may or may not know each other outside of social media contexts. In some cases, social media simply provide an additional channel of communication alongside face-to-face interaction, phone conversations, and other forms of mediated communication. In other cases, social media enable users to interact with likeminded others with whom interaction would be unlikely, difficult or even impossible offline. Sometimes such interaction results in the formation of relatively stable groups or communities online, and sometimes interaction takes place in more ad-hoc groups, which are, for instance, based on specific hashtags. This latter option has been characterised as “ambient affiliation” by Zappavigna (2012, 2014; see also Zappavigna, Ch. 16, this volume). Social media can also provide spaces for horizontal interaction in contexts in which free speech is restricted through political control and censorship (see, for instance, Han 2016). While only accounting for a small share of all interactions, this is the dimension of social media that is most clearly tied to social participation and democratic processes and which, therefore, is of high symbolic value. To what extent social media interactions of this kind are actually able to influence political processes remains controversial, though (see Han 2016; Khiabany 2016; Papacharissi and Blasiola 2016; Thurlow 2013: 237). The distinction between horizontal and vertical communication is analytically useful, but it is important to note that most social media platforms do not fall neatly into one or the other category. Platforms which, at first sight, appear to be designed for vertical communication are sometimes used mainly for horizontal communication among users. User comment sections on online newspapers are an example. While some users explicitly address their comments to journalists, it is quite rare that journalists actually reply to such messages and it is often unclear if the comment is actually read by the intended addressee. In an early study on user comment sections on the New York Times website, Schultz (2000) found that comments were only contributed by readers, and most journalists he interviewed said that they did not even read the user comments. In contrast, interactions between users are more common, although they also tend to be limited to occasional short sequences of messages on most websites. At the same time, platforms which are often associated with interaction among friends, such as Facebook, also have frequent institutional uses by companies, associations and public figures who address their customers, supporters and voters. Such institutional uses of social media often show similar

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characteristics as user comment sections on news sites. Politicians may address their voters in the first post and users may respond to this by liking, sharing and commenting (vertical communication), but subsequent turns in the interaction in comment sections often take place between users (horizontal communication). In sum, horizontal and vertical communication lead to different forms of participation. Vertical communication is a form of invited participation between professional and non-professional individuals whereas horizontal communication takes place among equals. This distinction plays an important role for the analysis of wider social and political effects of social media interaction. 3.

New models for new forms of participation

Social media interaction and participation have a number of consequences in different areas. One that has already been mentioned and which will not be further discussed here is their potential to contribute to democratic processes. Other consequences relate to shifts of roles in the widest sense and are often characterised as blurring of boundaries of one type or other. A typical characterisation of this can be found in Chung: “Interactivity fundamentally challenges existing models of communication and blurs the lines between mass and interpersonal, sender and receiver, and traditional and new media” (Chung 2012: 37). It is certainly true that new media have led to various innovations and that they have had a profound impact on some areas of communication and social innovation. However, it is also true that many of these changes are not quite as categorical as might seem at first sight. Moreover, in some cases the speaking of a blurring of lines can block the view for the complexities of specific communicative constellations. Many of the apparently blurred distinctions can be disentangled, sometimes with the help of new models and concepts that are better suited to representing the new communicative forms. Recent years have seen a number of suggestions for such new frameworks, and some of these will be discussed briefly in this section. 3.1.

Interpersonal and mass media communication

First, there have been suggestions for new models of mass media communication and interpersonal communication. A traditional view of the two types of communication presumes that mass communication is publicly accessible, unidirectional, and addressed at an anonymous mass audience (Luhmann 1995; McQuail 1987: 31–32), while interpersonal communication is interactional and takes place between a closed group of participants. In social media interactions, this binary opposition is clearly not tenable. However, it is important to note that the clear dichotomy of mass and interpersonal communication has been challenged long before social media came into being. As early as 1972, Chaffee talks about the fact that mass media and inter-

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personal interaction are interrelated. Mass media try to integrate characteristics of interpersonal communication, for instance through letters to the editor, and people rely on knowledge acquired through mass media when engaging in conversations with others (Chaffee 1972: 95, 114). Referring to media change, he further comments on the fact that the audience also shapes the way in which media develop: “It seems that the influence of the audience on the medium will be at least as important in this case as will the more conventional question of the medium’s influence on the audience” (Chaffee 1972: 115). Still, social media present new challenges and make it necessary to reconsider mass and interpersonal communication. Lüders (2008) proposes a model in which she characterises the relationship along two independent axes. The fist axis distinguishes between institutional or professional content on the one hand and de-institutional or de-professional content on the other. The second axis describes whether communication is symmetrical interaction or asymmetrical quasi-interaction. Mass media are characterised as formal/professional content and asymmetrical quasi-interaction. In contrast, social media – called personal media by Lüders – contain de-institutional/de-professional content and can be placed at various points on the interaction axis. While Lüders’ model helps describe similarities and differences between mass media and social media, one of its limitations is the fact that it cannot accommodate social media use by institutional or professional users. Another limitation is that it cannot describe settings in which more traditional mass media communication is combined with interpersonal communication. Janoschka’s (2004) model of interactive mass communication deals with this aspect. She addresses the fact that many online settings provide at the same time one channel for unidirectional mass communication and other channels for interactive communication between sender and addressee. For instance, a corporate website may include many parts that are unidirectional, providing information about the company and its products. In addition to this, some interactional channels might be provided, too, such as the option of submitting comments online, or of engaging in an online chat with a support agent. In contrast to Lüders (2008), Janoschka’s model can account for such cases in which mass communication and interpersonal communication are combined on the same platform without giving up the analytical distinction between the two. Janoschka’s model has been further developed for the case of online news sites, which provide a particularly rich example of combining unidirectional mass media communication (e.g. publication of news stories) with various forms of user interaction and user-generated content (Landert 2014a). This revised model takes into account that not all sections of online news sites provide the same options for user interaction. Some online news sites have sections that are devoted to user comments and other forms of user-generated content. In these sections, users can actively participate and may even have a relatively high degree of control over their content, even though it is usually moderated by the news site. At the same

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time, online news sites always include sections devoted to editorial content, such as news articles, where the control over content lies entirely with journalists and other professional news workers. The relationship between editorial content and user content – in terms of relative space of each and degree of differentiation between the two – is one of the aspects in which online news sites differ from each other quite considerably (Landert 2014a). 3.2.

Users and collaborative content

Bublitz (2012a, 2012b) addresses another boundary that is blurred in social media, the boundary between readers and writers. He argues that the duality principle of communication is undergoing erosion in computer-mediated communication. Older forms of communication, such as handwritten letters or manuscripts, clearly distinguish between the person who writes and the recipient who reads. In social media communication, these roles are no longer clearly distinguished. Instead, the new concept of the user replaces both writers and readers; users receive and read messages, and they also participate in the interaction more actively. Bublitz (2012b: 155) adopts Eisenlauer and Hoffmann’s (2010: 103) distinction of three types of interactivity, cognitive, structural and productive. Cognitive interactivity refers to the cognitive processes of meaning making on the part of the reader which take place in all forms of communication. Structural interactivity occurs whenever readers take an active role in deciding in which sequence they read a given text, for instance by following hyperlinks to read texts in a non-linear fashion. This type of interactivity is typical of computer-mediated texts but not restricted to them. Examples of printed texts in which structural interactivity occurs regularly are, for instance, encyclopedias and gamebooks (Bublitz 2012b: 155). Finally, productive interactivity refers to the option of modifying and supplementing texts. In many online settings, the degree of productive interactivity is much higher than in offline mediated communication. This is the main factor that distinguishes interactivity in online settings from earlier forms of communication, and it is the reason why ­Bublitz (2012b) argues that participants in online interaction are more appropriately characterised as users than as readers and writers. A related tendency is noted on a slightly different level by Bruns (2008). He looks at collaborative content creation online and speaks of produsers, i.e. users who not only consume media products, but who actively contribute to them by producing their own content. Wikipedia is a prominent example of online content that is produced by its own users. Other examples of “participatory culture” that have been analysed include fan fiction (e.g. Barton and Lampley 2014; Jenkins 1992, 2006) and citizen journalism (e.g. Bruns 2005; Papacharissi 2009). Both forms have had precursors that predate the widespread use of the Internet, but social media have helped them gain momentum to a very considerable extent. From the perspective of pragmatics, such new forms of collaborative content

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creation have not been fully explored yet. The studies that have been carried out so far point to the potential of collaborative content to provide new insights on a number of issues. For instance, Bartlett (2012) presents a case study on the negotiation of the wording of a sentence that caused disagreements on Wikipedia. He draws attention to different ways in which the editors’ decisions are influenced by their role as “prosumers” of Wikipedia and points to the need to analyse the negotiation of objectivity and “neutral point of view” in the context of the norms of their community of practice. Page (2013) focuses on the open-ended and collaborative narration on Wikipedia. She analyses article versions from two different language versions of Wikipedia (English and Italian) and two points in time on one topic (“Murder of Meredith Kercher”) and shows how the relative prominence of different narratives varies across cultural contexts and how it changes over time. Like Bartlett (2012), she emphasises the importance of context for the analysis of the negotiations of dominant versions of the narrative and she argues that the analysis should not be restricted to the final product (one version of the article) but take into account the production process that is characterised by open-endedness and multiple tellership of the narrative (see also Page, Ch. 19, this volume). 4.

Strategies for creating involvement

In the previous sections of this chapter we looked at involvement that relied on actual user interaction through a social media platform. However, involvement can also be created in other ways. On the level of content, the topic of a message and the way in which the topic is presented play an important role. A focus on private topics and personal stories tends to create more involvement than abstract and generalised topics. And linguistic immediacy – i.e. language that is typically associated with informal private conversations – can be used to create involvement through language (see, for instance, Chafe 1982; Koch and Oesterreicher 1985; Tannen 1982, 1986). Both these strategies can be used to personalise mass media communication (see Landert 2014b). They foreground the individuals that participate in the interaction and they present them not as professional communicators, but as private individuals. Despite the fact that the author and the addressee are not co-present and that they may not even know each other, the communication shows characteristics that are typical of personal face-to-face interaction between friends, either in terms of topic or language.2 These alternative strategies for creating user involvement are not restricted to social media. For instance, tabloid newspapers are well known for using stories

2



For a detailed discussion of how these characteristics relate to orality and literacy, see Bös and Kleinke, Ch. 4, this volume.

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about the private lives of individuals as well as language that violates the journalistic norms of objectivity and detachment in order to involve their readers (see, for instance, Conboy 2003, 2006; Sparks and Tulloch 2000). Advertisement is an area in which linguistic strategies of involving the addressee are very prominent. Hermerén (1999) argues that print advertising uses questions and forms of direct address as personalisation strategies to “create the impression that the product or service promoted is tailor-made” for the recipient of the mass media message. Similar means of “[creating] the impression of personal communication” were found by Janoschka (2004: 132) in non-interactive forms of web advertising. Likewise, Barron (2012) demonstrates how public information messages make use of various linguistic strategies to create the impression of interaction, even though no interaction was taking place. The linguistic means that she identifies include, for instance, first person pronouns, deictic reference, questions, directives, and lexical references to the target group. Fairclough ([1989] 2001) coined the term “synthetic personalization” to refer to such linguistic means of simulating interaction. He describes synthetic personalisation as a linguistic strategy of mass media: Synthetic personalization simulates solidarity: it seems that the more ‘mass’ the media become, and therefore the less in touch with individuals or particular groupings in their audiences, the more media workers and ‘personalities’ (including politicians) purport to relate to members of their audience as individuals who share large areas of common ground. (Fairclough [1989] 2001: 160)

Thus, mass media use such linguistic strategies to address their anonymous mass audience as individuals and to simulate interaction linguistically. The three main strategies for creating involvement – interaction, linguistic immediacy, and private content – can be used independently. Business emails, while being interactive, may be formulated in very formal language and often deal with content that has little potential to involve the addressee emotionally. In contrast, a death notice published in a newspaper may present involving content in formal language and with no immediate options for interaction. Linguistic immediacy is often used in print advertising, where the content is not emotionally involving and where interaction is not immediately available. These differences can be visualised with a three-dimensional model, in which each axis stands for one of the three involvement strategies (see Figure 1, based on Landert 2014b). Each communicative act can be placed in this model with respect to how much it makes use of each involvement strategy. A communicative act that uses hardly any involvement strategies – such as a prototypical article in a print newspaper on a hard news topic – is placed at position A in the model. A business e-mail with some degree of interaction, non-private content and no linguistic immediacy can be placed at position B. A death notice would correspond to position C and an interactive print advertisement might correspond to position D.

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Figure 1. Visualisation of involvement strategies in a three-dimensional model (based on Landert 2014b: 30)

Despite this independence of the three strategies, they are often used in combination on social media platforms. Thus, a prototypical Facebook post deals with a personal story, written in informal and involving language, and posted with the intention of eliciting a reaction quickly in the form of likes, shares or comments. This corresponds to position E in Figure 1. The co-occurrence of strategies is not entirely coincidental. Social media tend to be very supportive of interaction, the quasi-synchronous nature of communication encourages the use of linguistic immediacy (Dürscheid 2007: 38), and the fact that social media are often used for informal interaction between friends and acquaintances means that private content is quite common. In this sense, the three strategies for creating involvement are closely related to social media. However, this does not mean that the technological development of social media is the sole driving force behind increased levels of linguistic immediacy and private content. Instead, we can look at the use of social media for involved interaction as a technically enabled continuation of the much older aim to simulate solidarity and to relate to members of the audience as individuals described by Fairclough ([1989] 2001). A deterministic approach to media change would assume that technological developments lead to changes in language and communication in a unidirectional way. Contrary to this, there is ample evidence that the relation between technological change, on the one hand, and social practices – including

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communication –, on the other, is more complex. Herring (2003) sees technology as facilitator of change. New forms of technologically-mediated communication can be “a site for the emergence and evolution of linguistic norms” (Herring 2003: 1). Other supporters of a weak social constructionist perspective argue that developments in technology and in social practices are interdependent, and that social factors often influence technological developments (e.g. Bijker 1997; Bolter and Grusin 1999: 73–77; Bublitz 2012a). Such a perspective sheds new light on the relation between social media and involvement. Rather than assuming that the new technological setting of social media has caused users to communicate in more involved ways, one can argue that the technological innovations enabling social media platforms were, at least in part, motivated by the aim to relate to the mass audience in more personalised and involved ways. Finally, the frequent co-occurrence of involvement strategies is a consequence of genre conventions that have developed. Many social media platforms are strongly associated with the private use by individuals who exchange personal content in informal language. This prototypical use has played an important role in establishing the norms of interaction on these platforms. Today, many social media platforms are also used by professional communicators, such as commercial businesses, organisations, politicians and celebrities (see also Thurlow 2013 for a critical discussion). For instance, Facebook states that there were more than 50 million active business pages on their platform by the end of 2015 (Facebook for Business 2015). There is not a great deal of research so far about the differences between the communicative practices of private individuals and professional communicators on social media platforms. However, it seems that professional communicators adjust to the involved style that is the norm on many platforms. To give an example, Puschmann (2010) analyses the use of interpersonal pronouns on corporate weblogs and identifies possible explanations for their strong presence. Similar to their use in advertising, they fulfil functions that help further the communicative goals of corporate weblogs by personalising the communication between companies and their customers. At the same time, Puschmann (2010: 188) emphasises the role of genre in shaping readers’ expectations about the texts. In other words, readers of corporate weblogs who are familiar with the norms of personal weblogs expect to find a certain degree of similarity between the two genres. 5.

Political communication on social media

Politicians are a group of professional actors for whom social media have gained importance over the last decade. A crucial point in this development was Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008 and his re-election campaign in 2012, in which social media are said to have played a decisive role – to the extent that Obama has been referred to as “the first social media president” (Rutledge 2013). Indeed, his

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election was in part attributed to the fact that he was able to mobilise new segments of voters through the successful use of social media (e.g. Bimber 2014; Enli and Naper 2016; Kaye 2011; Nagourney 2008). Since then proficiency in social media campaigning has become a key skill of any election team, even though only few politicians succeed in drawing attention to their social media presence on a large scale (Nielsen and Vaccari 2013). Larsson (2015: 151) points out that most research on social media use by politicians so far has focused on election campaigns, despite the fact that social media use has long become part of the everyday practices of many politicians. Everyday use of social media can serve different purposes. For instance, politicians regularly use social media to release information directly, without relying on news media as gatekeepers (Riboni 2015: 260), and sometimes strategic communication on social media is even used for agenda building and to influence the press (Kreiss 2016: 1475). How widespread the practice of releasing information on social media is could be seen at the conclusion of the Iran nuclear talks in April 2015. After a series of meetings over several days, the agreement on Iran’s future nuclear programme was announced by Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif via Twitter directly from the meeting. His tweet “Found solutions. Ready to start drafting immediately.” was quoted verbatim in a breaking news story on BBC News before the press conference could take place (see Figure 2). This example is particularly compelling if one takes into account that Twitter was banned in Iran at the time of this tweet (see Murgia 2016). By releasing the information on his Twitter account, Zarif was able to draw attention to his own role in the successful negotiations. Another function of social media use is to keep in touch with their electorate between election periods, which can make it easier to secure their support during election periods. Larsson (2015: 150) refers to this aspect as “permanent campaigning”. A successful election campaign can lead to a very strong emotional response of the supporters (see, for instance, Zappavigna’s (2012) analysis of the Twitter response to Obama’s first election). The hope is that if voters follow politicians on their social media profiles, then part of this emotion may be kept alive and could even lead to some sort of community building among supporters, which in turn would increase affiliation with the politicians and the likelihood of continued support in the future. 5.1.

Case study: The White House on Facebook

Obama was the first US president to communicate through Facebook. Less than three months after he assumed office, the page “The White House” was launched on Facebook. This Facebook page is only one of the channels of communication, together with the White House website, which also includes a blog, a Twitter feed, and presence in traditional mass media. It is also important to note that the Facebook page of The White House is not maintained by Obama personally, but by his

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Figure 2. Tweet by Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (left) and quotation of Tweet in breaking news report on BBC News (right)

staff. In addition, Obama has been present on Facebook with his personal profile since November 2015. In what follows, I present a very brief case study on the Facebook page of The White House. The case study is based on a small set of data consisting of 37 posts that were published by The White House between 8 March and 9 April 2015. The question that I will deal with is how and to what extent the posts create involvement. More specifically, I will look at how the posts make use of interaction, content and language to involve followers of The White House. Undoubtedly, interaction plays a very central role for creating involvement in the collected posts. The posts offer various opportunities for interaction through liking, sharing and commenting. All of these options were used very actively for all of the posts; every post received at least 10,000s of likes, 1,000s of shares and 100s of comments. The post that received most comments contained Easter greetings from the Obama family. It received 83,684 comments and more than 2 million likes within the year following the publication of the post. For technical and ethical reasons, comments to the posts were not collected and analysed separately. However,

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a cursory view at the top-listed comments indicates that some of them are addressed to Obama while others are addressed to the community of followers.3 There is also interaction between followers, with some of the top-listed comments receiving more than 100 replies. This high number of comments and replies suggests that the Facebook page succeeds in creating personal involvement through interaction, even though there is no indication that Obama or his staff reacted to the comments directly. In addition to enabling interaction, the communicative setting of the Facebook page plays a role for creating involvement in two more ways. First, it is relevant that most non-professional users of Facebook use the platform typically to stay in touch with friends and acquaintances. As a consequence, when they follow The White House, political posts are displayed on the users’ news feed in between their friends’ status updates on private topics. This reception of political posts together with private content is certainly a very important factor in presenting Obama in a personal way and in creating involvement. Second, the platform supports multimodal communication and hyperlinking. All of the posts in my sample contain either an image or a video, most posts contain hyperlinks, and many contain hashtags. In contrast, there is relatively little text included in the posts. The number of words (including hyperlinks and hashtags) ranges from 0 to 185 with an average of 40. Both multimodality and hyperlinking serve to increase involvement. Hyperlinks are a form of structural interactivity (see Section 3) inviting readers to select their own reading paths, to interact with content, and to follow up on stories by visiting other sites. Visual elements are generally associated with a higher degree of involvement compared to text, which is sometimes attributed to a more immediate perception of content (Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2008: 8) and a stronger reliance on association and higher emotional response compared to text (Kappas and Müller 2006; Müller and Kappas 2011). In addition, a study on Obama’s Facebook posts during the 2012 election campaign found that posts with photos of Barack Obama had a higher likelihood to receive likes, comments and shares than other posts, and for photos including Michelle Obama or one of their daughters, the effect was even stronger (Gerodimos and Justinussen 2015: 125). This suggests that this type of image can further increase involvement through leading to a higher degree of actual user interaction. The images and videos that are included in the posts from The White House further create involvement through their content and style. Out of the 37 images and videos, 27 showed Barack Obama and in 3 he appeared together with members of his family. Of the 10 remaining images and videos, 2 showed his handwriting and one showed Michelle Obama. This strong visual focus on Obama serves to foreground his person rather than his office. This is even more the case since

3



By default, two “most relevant” comments are displayed directly below each post. How exactly relevance is assessed by Facebook is not clear.

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Figure 3. Two playful images posted on The White House Facebook page in April 2015

many of the images are quite informal and playful. To give some examples, one of the images shows Barack Obama with boxing gloves standing next to Michelle Obama who is holding a dumb-bell. In another picture we see Obama from behind sitting next to an Easter bunny in front of the Washington monument (see Figure 3). These are pictures that are designed to show Obama from a private side, rather than in his professional role as President of the United States. Some other pictures show him in professional contexts, but in situations in which it appears that he is not posing for camera. An example of this is a picture that shows him during a visit of a solar energy plant. Neither he nor the person who is with him look into the camera and the picture gives the impression of presenting a glance behind the scenes of the visit. Overall, the images and videos contribute to the creation of involvement by focusing on the person of the private, backstage Obama. In terms of topic and content, most posts deal with current affairs (see Table 1). These posts typically provide updates about ongoing political issues, often with quotes and sometimes with videos from Obama’s speeches. This group of posts is least involving, and it shows that despite the more personal and playful nature of some of the content, the main aim of the Facebook presence is still to transport political messages. The group of posts classified as ceremonial deals with anni-

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versaries and historically significant events, such as the 50-year anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, the start of a year-long space mission, and St. Patrick’s Day. The posts on these topics include quotes by Obama that acknowledge the significance of the event, sometimes taken from speeches. Posts dealing with events at the White House covered the White House student film fest and the fiveyear anniversary of the West Wing Week, a weekly behind-the-scenes video show of events at the White House. These posts do not focus on Obama but promote events and related web resources. The six Easter posts include Easter wishes by Obama and his family and Easter events taking place at the White House. They are among the posts that present Obama from a more personal perspective. Finally, the three posts classified as “other” include one post on the First Lady’s visit to Cambodia, an update of the cover photo, and Obama’s basketball tournament bracket. This last post is another example of focusing on Obama in a non-professional role as someone who is interested in basketball and who makes his own predictions about the tournament, noted down in handwriting. Table 1.

Content classification of 37 Facebook posts of The White House

Topic

Number of posts

Current affairs Ceremonial Events at White House Easter Other

15 7 6 6 3

Total

37

Concerning linguistic immediacy, 17 of the posts address readers directly by using second person pronouns, questions and imperatives (see Examples 1 and 2). While the overall language use is not especially informal, there are a few instances of creative word play, such as egg-cellent in the context of an Easter post (Example 2) and Baracketology when referring to Obama’s basketball tournament bracket. Such interpersonal and playful language use again contributes to involvement by staging an interaction with readers. In addition 19 of the 37 posts consist mainly of direct quotes, 16 of them quotes from Obama (e.g. Examples 3 and 4). (1) Share the good news: President Obama just announced new steps to train more Americans and veterans for clean-energy jobs → http://go.wh.gov/YYmtFD #ActOnClimate (4 April 2015) (2) Watch some egg-cellent highlights from today’s White House Easter Egg Roll! wh.gov/ EasterEggRoll #GimmeFive (7 April 2015) (3) “Today, the United States—together with our allies and partners—has reached an historic understanding with Iran.” —President Obama: wh.gov/irandeal #IranDeal (2 April 2015)

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(4) “Good luck, Captain. Make sure to Instagram it. We’re proud of you.” —President Obama Congrats to NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly as he takes off for the International Space Station and his #YearInSpace: go.nasa.gov/1xFtpnu (27 March 2015)

The presence of Obama’s own voice contributes to involvement to some extent. However, it is important to note that his voice is presented in quoted speech. Outside of quotation Obama is referred to in the third person. This is different on Obama’s own Facebook profile, which was created a few months after the end of the period from which I collected data, on 9 November 2015. Here, Obama appears as the first person author, and even comments on this fact in his first post (see Figure 4). This new Facebook presence marks a new degree of involvement. Obama appears as author and speaks about his personal attitudes, opinions and preferences in the first person. He combines his professional role (“I’m heading to Paris to meet with world leaders”) with aspects of his private person (“something I try to do at the end of the day before I head in for dinner”), positioning himself as “one of us”, so to speak. Readers are addressed directly and invited to share their own content. This new, even more involved channel of interaction was established almost seven years after launching the Facebook page of The White House, which shows that social media use by politicians is still gaining importance. This and similar newly developing forms of interaction, participation and involvement are only waiting to be studied. 6. Conclusion The potential of participation is a characteristic that all forms of social media have in common. However, this potential is realised to different degrees, in different forms, and with different effects across social media platforms. Such differences require careful consideration and critical examination. Perhaps the most important result of research so far is that there is often a considerable discrepancy between the degree of participation that is possible and the degree of participation that is actually realised. Truly collaborative and interactive online environments tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, such cases provide exciting new research opportunities for pragmatics. This chapter also addressed the fact that user involvement can be created in different ways on social media. Interaction is perhaps the most obvious factor in creating involvement, but content and language often play an important role, too. The relation between different strategies of creating user involvement presents promising avenues for future research, especially in the context of commercial and political uses of social media.

Participation as user involvement 

Figure 4. First post on new Facebook account of President Obama, 9 November 2015

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Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Zurich (Forschungskredit, grant no. FK-14–074). References Allan, Stuart and Einar Thorsen 2011 Journalism, Public Service and BBC News Online. In: Graham Meikle and Guy Redden (eds.), News Online: Transformations and Continuities, 20–37. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Arendholz, Jenny 2013 (In)appropriate Online Behaviour: A Pragmatic Analysis of Message Board Relations. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 229.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Barron, Anne 2012 Public Information Messages. A Contrastive Genre Analysis of State-citizen communication. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 222.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Bartlett, Tom 2012 Lay metalanguage on grammatical variation and neutrality in Wikipedia’s entry for Che Guevara. Text and Talk 32(6): 681–701. Barton, Kristin M. and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley (eds.) 2014 Fan CULTure. Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century. Jefferson/ London: McFarland & Company. Bijker, Wiebe E. 1997 Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs. Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bimber, Bruce 2014 Digital media in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to the personalized political communication environment. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 11(2): 130–150. Bolander, Brook 2012 Disagreements and agreements in personal/diary blogs: A closer look at responsiveness. Journal of Pragmatics 44(12): 1607–1622. Bolander, Brook 2013 Language and Power in Blogs. Interaction, Disagreements and Agreements. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 237.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin 1999 Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bruns, Axel 2005 Gatewatching. Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang. Bruns, Axel 2008 Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

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3.

Participation as audience design Marta Dynel

Abstract: This chapter presents a new look at the concepts of participation structure and receiver-oriented design of messages in social media, where the traditional dyadic model of communication is largely inapplicable. This fact necessitates new frameworks of participation in order to capture the nature of multi-party interactions on various social media platforms, which show many characteristics different from offline communication. However, the essential features of interaction hold also for the diversified social media formats. This chapter critically examines a selection of problems concerning the multifold reception end and production end in social media (in comparison to traditional media formats). Also, the issue of designing contributions in multi-party interactions among, frequently anonymous, participants is addressed. 1. Introduction There is no novelty in the observation that Web 2.0, the central concomitant of social media, has established various new forms of communication (understood in a commonsensical manner as verbal and non-verbal transmission of messages). These new forms promote different configurations of participants, i.e. participant structure, in online interactions (traditionally defined as all manner of mutual social action, here the focus being on those serving communication).1 These changes are consequent upon interactivity, i.e. active interaction with the medium that guarantees decision-based reception of messages (see Jucker 2003), and all interactants’ active involvement (see Landert, Ch. 2, this volume). As Johansson (2014: 43) puts it, “[p]articipation in Web 2.0, and thus the possibility for everybody to interact with each other and generate content, is ‘a defining principle of digital culture’ (Deuze 2006: 67)”. Social media are characterised by two features that directly impact on the different participation frameworks: the loss of control over one’s messages, and the easy transgression of the boundaries typifying the traditionally separate communicative frames (Chovanec and Dynel 2015). Even seemingly private exchanges via instant communicators between two participants can mutate into publically available discourse (see Bös and Kleinke, Ch. 4, this

1



Participation, as defined by Goffman (1963), concerns individuals’, i.e. participants’, involvement in an interaction.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-003 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 61–82. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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volume). Once communicated, messages can be transmitted further, whether in the original form or modified and recontextualised. All this has a bearing on the participant structure, which usually transcends the prototypical communicative dyad. The classical models of communication (e.g. Bühler [1934] 1965; de Saussure [1916] 1974; Jakobson 1960) depict human interactions as dyadic exchanges, whilst only tacitly allowing also for interactions of more than two participants. The standard dyadic framework involves the producer/sender at the production end and the receiver/recipient at the reception end, technically labelled speaker and hearer in linguistic research (regardless of the different modes and channels of communication and the human faculties involved). Moreover, a statement can be ventured that this prototypical constellation of two interactants lies at the heart of most linguistic theories that concern the production and reception of discourse and/or specific linguistic phenomena. However, natural face-to-face interactions very frequently cannot be reduced to exchanges of merely two participants, necessitating more complex frameworks (e.g. Goffman 1981; Levinson 1988; Clark and Carlson 1982; Schober and Clark 1989; Clark and Schaefer 1987, 1992; Clark 1996; Verschueren 1999; Dynel 2010, 2011a, 2014a). Further complications can be observed in interactions that arise thanks to traditional media epitomised by programmes and films broadcast to wide audiences. Such interactions rely on two levels of communication (on-screen interactions, which typically resemble non-televised interactions, and the level including the viewer) and are only intermittently restricted to two interactional roles, namely the speaker and the (collective role of) the viewer (see e.g. Scannell 1991; O’Keeffe 2006; Lorenzo-Dus 2009; Dynel 2011a, 2011c, 2011d and references therein). Nowhere else are the participatory frameworks more complex than in the diversified forms of social media interactions consisting in computer-mediated communication,2 where the standard communicative dyad is a rarity. Most formats of interaction in the various forms of social media inherently involve more than two participants. These are usually separated spatially and temporally, participating in interactions asynchronously (and less frequently synchronously). These features are not intrinsic solely to interactions in social media. For example, the traditional, and nowadays obsolescent, form of communication by letter writing evinces both these features, too. Also, a great proportion of communications in social media enjoy indeterminate, and frequently infinite, numbers of anonymous participants at the reception end. Because of these characteristics, the communication in social media has been dubbed ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ (see Chovanec 2010, 2011 and references therein). Essentially, this term refers to

2



This well-entrenched term may now be considered a misnomer insofar as contemporary Internet users tend to use equipment other than computers, such as smartphones or tablets (Chovanec and Dynel 2015).

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a range of strategies that simulate the impression of direct contact between participants who are removed in space and time. However, social media interactions should not be regarded as feigned interactions or pseudo-interactions despite of their indeterminate participation structure. The frequently indeterminate hearership, physical distance and asynchronicity should not be treated as reasons for rendering the notion of interaction inapplicable in social media contexts. They do display the intrinsic features of interaction: the sender’s production and the receiver’s reception of a turn, which is a minimal contribution to an interaction, whether written or spoken (e.g. Goodwin 1981; see Dynel 2010 and references therein). Thus, any message (however complex) sent via the Internet,3 such as posting a comment, may be compared to taking a turn in an ordinary conversation (Herring 2010; Dynel 2014b; Boyd 2014), even though this turn-taking may not be a matter of occupying time slots (with much communication being asynchronous) but space on the screen after a message/turn has been sent. Essentially, the users “experience CMC in fundamentally similar ways to spoken conversation, despite CMC being produced and received by written means” (Herring 2010: 2). An important complication is that turns in social media are very frequently multi-modal, involving images, videos, and sounds, next to verbalisations, whether typed or spoken, which amount to Internet discourse (see Hoffmann 2012),4 the focus of pragmatic analysis (see Herring 2013; Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2013). This questions the adequacy of the labels ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’, unless their basic semantic meanings are marginalised, and the two labels are treated as technical terms. In the present discussion, however, the labels ‘producer’ and ‘receiver’ will be used as the basic generic terms. The thrust of all this is that social media interactions show the characteristics of both everyday and mass-media communication, and their new forms never cease to challenge extant theory (cf. Poole and Jackson 1993). Although interactions in social media are frequently asynchronous and often enjoy large audiences, and the turns even in one interaction may manifest different formats (a video, an image, a long text, a post, or a hyperlink), these interactions otherwise bear strong similarity to everyday exchanges. The present chapter addresses the issue of participation framework, understood as the configuration of diversified production and reception roles. Also, some thought is given to the idea of how the producers of messages facilitate the understanding of receivers, indeterminate though they may be. The chapter is

As already signalled, one online message may be developed upon, or incorporate, previous messages. Social media allow infinite embedded messages, which have previously constituted independent turns, as one complex turn. 4 Essentially, discourse is the product of verbal (and non-verbal) communication in a given context. 3



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organised as follows. Section 2 addresses the production-reception frameworks in social media based on the numbers of participants in an interaction, proposing a simple dichotomy between two formats based on turn-taking. Section 3 is devoted to the frameworks focussing on the types of producers and receivers. The point of departure for this discussion is Goffman’s (1981) seminal framework, which is critically examined and duly applied to the salient forms of communication in social media as discussed in the existing scholarship. A number of general observations on the fundamental participatory roles will be made. Also, the construct of “audience” is examined, and a few arguments are provided in favour of a view that it is not a receiver category, in a technical sense. In Section 4, attention is paid to the strategies enabling multiple (anonymous) receivers’ understanding in the light of a number of proposals that concern the design of utterances given the prospective receiver’s needs. 2.

Number of participants

One of the prevalent assumptions reverberating across multidisciplinary research on Internet communication is that it is centred on one-to-many communication, with one message (such as an advertisement or online article) being addressed to vast audiences (see Webster and Lin 2002), or many-to-many communication, which places emphasis on interactivity (e.g. Venkatesh, Dholakia and Dholakia 1996). However, in linguistic studies that focus specifically on the forms of interaction, alternative number-based participation structures are proposed. Adopting the criteria of (a)synchronicity and the number of individuals involved, Morris and Ogan (1996) differentiate between one-to-one asynchronous communication (e.g. e-mail); many-to-many asynchronous communication (e.g. Usenet or electronic bulletin boards); synchronous communication that can be one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many (e.g. chat rooms); and asynchronous communication involving many-to-one, one-to-one, or one-to-many source-receiver relationships (e.g. website browsing). The categories of one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many as forms of communication may give rise to several misgivings. First of all, the distinction between ‘many’ and ‘few’ appears to be elusive, with no caesura between the two being determined. Secondly, and more importantly, the types of frameworks do not appear to be premised on the notion of turn-taking, as evidenced by ‘many’ at the production end. This may mean many contributors making contributions independently (which the authors most likely mean) and typically asynchronously, or it may denote a number of individuals communicating a joint message, with one individual actually publicising it online. The truth of the matter is that each message/turn shows one production end, however complex it may be (e.g. a YouTube film may be constructed by a group of people but is ultimately submitted originally from

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one account), and however many independent producers may be involved in an asynchronous interaction (e.g. a topical strand on a forum). Referring to notions previously mentioned by other researchers (Baron 1998, 2010; Herring 1996, 2007; Yates 2000), Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2012) propose that participation in CMC can be divided into three types: one-to-one communication, one-to-many interaction, and intergroup discussions. Apart from indicating different numbers of participants at the reception and production ends, these concepts appear to signal the nature of the communicative activity at hand. Nonetheless, technically, there do not seem to be any clear boundaries between communication, interaction and discussions, which is perhaps a narrower term, compared to the first two. Like the previous one, this proposal does not account for the turn-taking and changing participatory roles as an interaction unfolds. Intergroup discussions are predicated on constant turn-taking between a producer and the receivers, with each turn being communicated on a oneto-many basis (e.g. message boards, see Arendholz, Ch. 5, this volume). Also, in the ‘one-to-many interactions’, one turn is a (multi-modal) message (e.g. a review of a film on a personal website, a film on YouTube, see Johansson, Ch. 7, this volume; or a textual message on Twitter, see Zappavigna, Ch. 8, this volume) submitted for the consideration of receivers. Very rarely does an interaction terminate there, though. Typically, receivers may duly take the floor as producers, for instance by posting their comments under a video or a text, also in a one-to-many manner, possibly giving rise to an ‘intergroup discussion’. Therefore, irrespective of the seeming differences between them, both intergroup discussions and one-to-many interactions can be captured under one umbrella term: multi-party interactions. Essentially, most communication in social media can be seen as multi-party interactions based on one-to-many messages, even though one-to-one interactions are also possible (for instance, dyadic exchanges held on Facebook thanks to the private messaging function, see Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this volume). Admittedly, not very much diversified, one-to-one interactions basically coincide with the classic dyadic exchanges involving the speaker-hearer/sender-receiver dyad. In contrast, multi-party interactions comprised of one-to-many messages involve many producers of turns, with one user (or more in the case of joint production) taking the floor at a time, and many individuals participating (asynchronously or synchronously) at the reception end. The receivers may perform the same or different participatory roles. Thus, the different genres of social media display potential for multifarious participation frameworks. An important note on the terminology is in order at this stage. Whilst many authors resort to the labels ‘monologue’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘polylogue’ in reference to different forms of online and offline interactions depending on the number of participants, these terms are not endorsed here. Monologue (originally from a Greek word that means ‘speaking alone’), which is a useful term in literary studies to denote a longer stretch of text produced by a

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character, may not be an adequate term in participation research, insofar as it fails to bring out the necessary recipientship. As Bakhtin (1981: 279) rightly avers, “[t] he dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is of course a property of any discourse”. Elsewhere, he states that “an essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed at someone, its addressivity” (Bakhtin 1986: 333). Similarly, Duranti (1986: 243) states that “[t]alk, in fact, does not need to be exchanged between parties for us to say that communication was cooperatively achieved. The mere presence of an audience socially constitutes and ratifies the nature of a speech event (e.g. a sermon, a play, a class lecture, a story telling)”. Importantly, the addressee/audience need not be physically present when a message is actually produced, and may only be expected or imagined. This is saliently the case with the ‘monologues’ in vlogging (e.g. Frobenius 2011, 2014), where speakers typically talk to the camera eye, as if addressing the receivers, whom the speakers expect to take part in the interaction asynchronously as viewers. All messages in social media will qualify as the basis for an interaction between the sender and at least one receiver even if the latter should not make any contribution. Additionally, in practice, there are hardly any social media genres based on the unidirectional communication of only one sender to the receiver(s), with replies being possible. For example, (video) bloggers (see Heyd, Ch. 6, this volume) do allow for comments and if at least one does appear in reference to one entry, the single-sender communication is terminated. Similar to ‘monologue’, the recent coinage ‘polylogue’ (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004; Marcoccia 2004; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010; Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2011; Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012) used in reference to a multi-party interaction may be considered otiose. This is because it was originally proposed as the antonym of ‘dialogue’ understood as a dyadic interaction (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004). However, as the etymology of the term ‘dialogue’ indicates (‘dia’ means ‘across’), it does cover both dyadic interactions and those which involve more than two individuals (see Chovanec 2011). As already indicated, this is the most salient type of participation in new media interactions. A pending query is how these different individuals in multi-party interactions can be positioned in terms of their specific roles. 3.

Types of participants

Goffman’s 1981 collection of previously published essays marks a watershed in the studies of interaction across many disciplines. His writings are used as a departure point for studies of communication forms that Goffman cannot have envisaged, notably social media communication. One of the salient issues that Goffman (1981) addresses in his various essays is a selection of participatory problems

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and participant types representing the production and reception networks, which have been frequently revisited (e.g. Levinson 1988; Dynel 2010, 2014a). When his remarks scattered across his various essays are collated, Goffman may even be regarded as the author of the first fully-fledged participation framework that encompasses both ends of a multi-party interaction (see Dynel 2011a). The central tenets deserve to be briefly revisited here so that the more recent postulates concerning participation in social media can be critically examined. 3.1.

Goffman’s participant types

Goffman advocates a division of participants into the production format (1981: 145, 146, 226) and the participation network (1981: 226), also called participation framework (1981: 146). The latter label is somewhat misleading, since speakers are also participants, which Goffman does acknowledge. The production format decomposes the speaker into three distinct roles, viz. the animator, the author and the principal. The animator is somebody who articulates utterances, in Goffman’s words, “the talking machine, a body engaged in acoustic activity” (Goffman 1981: 144) or “the sounding box” (1981: 226). For the purposes of written, not spoken, verbalisations, such as those in social media, these metaphorical explanations might need to be broadened. Secondly, the author is “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded” (Goffman 1981: 144) or “the agent who scripts the lines” (Goffman 1981: 226). Thirdly, the principal is the party whose “position is established by the words” (Goffman 1981: 144) or “the party to whose position the words attest” (Goffman 1981: 226). Goffman (1981) points out that many forms of talk can be mapped onto several persons, entertaining different (albeit frequently meshing) roles. For instance, in fresh talk (i.e. when a person is producing an utterance spontaneously, presenting his/her own ideas), the three roles prototypically coincide, but when reading aloud from a script, the animator need not simultaneously perform the other two roles that the production format encompasses. Neat as this tripartite division may appear at a glance, more complexities loom large (see Levinson 1988; Verschueren 1999). As originally conceptualised, the reception end encompasses several listeners, hearers or recipients. These are the three labels which Goffman (1981) uses interchangeably. Most importantly, hearers are divided into ratified and unratified types (1981: 10, 226), which show subtypes. Bystanders are unratified participants “whose access to the encounter, however minimal, is itself perceivable by the official participants” (Goffman 1981: 132) and who should “politely disavail” themselves of any opportunities to listen (1981: 132). Technically, therefore, bystanders who do not engage in an act of listening are not participants. Nonetheless, a bystander may develop into an “inadvertent” overhearer or an “engineered” eavesdropper (Goffman 1981: 9, 1981: 132). Over-

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hearers “temporarily follow the talk, or catch bits and pieces of it, all without much effort or intent” (1981: 132), whereas eavesdroppers “surreptitiously exploit the accessibility” (1981: 132). This distinction is a bit vague, inasmuch is it not based on one criterion. In contemporary research, the distinction between overhearers and eavesdroppers rests on the speakers’ (lack of) awareness of the unratified activity. Unlike overhearing, eavesdropping is surreptitious in the light of the speaker’s obliviousness to an unratified hearer, let alone his/her listening in on the talk (Dynel 2010, 2011a, 2011d; cf. Bell 1984, 1991; Clark and Carlson 1982; Schober and Clark 1989; Clark and Schaefer 1987, 1992; Clark 1996). As regards the ratified hearer types, Goffman discriminates between the addressed recipient, i.e. “the one to whom the speaker addresses his visual attention and to whom, incidentally, he expects to turn over his speaking role” (1981: 133) and the rest of the official hearers who are not addressed (1981: 133). Whilst the differentiation between addressed vs. not addressed ratified hearers is an important one, Goffman’s conditions do not always hold. For example, direct eye contact is quite frequently absent and the addressee need not be expected to reply, both for instance in the case of the collective addressee (see Dynel 2010, 2014a for discussion). While discussing these roles in face-to-face contexts, Goffman (1981: 138, 144) rightly notes that talk manifests itself both in everyday conversations and in other communicative contexts, such as podium talk (a lecture, comedy routines, poetic readings) or media broadcast. Therefore, listeners to talk need not be fellow conversationalists but audiences, either addressed (lectures or TV news) or unaddressed (staged plays) (Goffman 1981: 137–140). This claim indicates audiences’ inherent ratified status, even though they do not normally take the floor. Nevertheless, sometimes members of addressed audiences have the right to take the floor (e.g. question time during rallies, or phone-in programmes). Also, as already signalled, addressees need not (be obliged to) take the floor either, whilst other ‘official hearers’ may (see Dynel 2010, 2011b, 2014a). Altogether, some doubt may be cast on whether an audience is a distinct hearer type if it evinces the different characteristics of the other roles, having a few subtypes. The audiences of non-mass-mediated genres could potentially be conceptualised as addressees (and in some contexts, secondary audiences may be official hearers). The unaddressed audiences of mass-mediated genres need to be tackled independently. In the context of programmes on television and on the radio, Goffman (1981) talks about the audience that bifurcates into remote and live (studio) types. Goffman (1981: 138) dubs the former “imagined recipients”, based on the assumption that broadcasters must talk to someone they cannot see, adopting a “conversational mode of address” (Goffman 1981: 138). Whether remote or live, the audience is “treated as if it were a ratified participant, albeit one that cannot assume the speaking role” (Goffman 1981: 234). On the other hand, Goffman (1981: 83) also suggests that audiences are “eavesdroppers” listening in on an actor who is delivering a soliloquy in a theatrical performance in accordance with a script.

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Words uttered by a character “are eternally sealed off from the audience, belonging entirely to a self-enclosed, make-believe realm” (Goffman 1981: 139), even if an actor performing on stage can appreciate the presence of an audience. While the soliloquiser is “really talking to self when no one is around; we members of the audience are supernatural out-of-frame eavesdroppers” (Goffman 1981: 83). Goffman’s observation that audiences are eavesdroppers rests on the (misguided) combination of the characters’ layer with the underlying production layer rendered by the film crew, who construct characters’ conversations especially for viewers’ benefit. If the two layers are kept separate, the audience cannot be perceived as being unratified hearers (see Dynel 2011d and references therein and the discussion in Section 3.3). Taking stock, ‘audience’ appears not to be a participatory role per se but a folk notion that needs to be classified under specific hearer categories. However, ‘audience’ is also a prevalent construct in the literature on communication via the Internet. 3.2.

Audience in social media

Communication in social media, like any other form of communication, necessitates the production and reception ends (see Herring 2007), which may be captured under different labels. For example, Morris and Ogan (1996) differentiate between producers and audiences. Generally, the prevalent term in the multi-disciplinary literature, as indicated also by the title of this chapter, is audience (Roscoe 1999; Webster and Lin 2002; Livingstone 2004), which seems to indicate the ‘many’ format at the reception end. Also, researchers tend to emphasise the multiplicity, anonymity and asynchronous participation of receivers by using labels such as “imagined ‘mass’ of ordinary users” (Burgess and Green 2008: 8), or “imagined audience” (e.g. boyd 2010; Marwick and boyd 2010; Brake 2012; Litt 2012). As Bell (1984, 1991) observes, in mass communication (on television), it is impossible to determine all members of the target audience (in his parlance, the “addressees”). The same applies to social media users at the reception end. Thanks to subscriptions and the follower status of chosen accounts and fan pages, a single message can reach countless receivers around the world. These numbers are further boosted by the possibility of reposting. Consequently, “the imagined audience” (i.e. the envisaged audience) “might be entirely different from the actual readers of a profile, blog post, or tweet” (Marwick and boyd 2010: 97). However, only those individuals who do access a given message can be conceptualised as receivers, that is participants at the reception end. This is one of the reasons why it may be wrong to conclude that the folk label ‘audience’ can be considered a proper receiver type in social media (or in other communicative contexts). When it is considered to be such, researchers end up making a seemingly paradoxical claim that audiences can be producers, which is typical only of

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social media interactions. Essentially, the same is possible in offline interactions as audience members take the floor and become speakers, the producers of turns (e.g. by asking questions during political rallies or sending letters to editors with a view towards a prospective publication). In this vein, a distinction is also sometimes made between active and passive participants (lurkers), depending on whether or not they make use of the communicative tools a social media service (such as YouTube) affords in order to mark their presence (Moor, Heuvelman and Verleur 2010; Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012). The passive vs. active distinction seems to correspond to whether or not participants ever join the production format in an interaction by contributing any messages, which they are entitled to do (typically, having registered). A query one may raise is whether these roles should really be assigned permanently, and thus having posted one comment, a user qualifies as an active participant. Participatory roles ought to be ascribed to individuals for each contribution/turn, not as a matter of a permanent property. In any case, the distinction tacitly indicates the importance of distinguishing between the production and reception ends. On the other hand, it is sometimes claimed that thanks to online interactivity, the distinction between producer and receiver is blurred, and the standard communication process involving the production and reception ends is a thing of the past, resulting in the “amalgamation of writer/author and reader/recipient into the fuzzy concept of the user” (Bublitz 2012: 26; see also Eisenlauer 2013, 2014). However, this is not to suggest that the different roles are actually conflated into one as long as the process of turn-taking is accounted for. Social media users can swiftly change the roles from receivers to producers and vice versa (just as participants in everyday conversations do). That being said, the production and reception processes, as well as the mechanics of turn-taking, are much more complex in social media than in offline interactions. The audience, that is technically the receivers of an original message (for example an article, a video, or another multi-modal message, such as an Internet meme), can communicate either with each other or with the producers or other receivers (cf. Chovanec 2015; Adami 2015), thereby reversing the standard one-way pattern of communication (Morris and Ogan 1996; Jucker 2003) typical of the traditional media.5 Thus, two types of basic participation frameworks dependent on an audience’s response to a message might be distinguished: receiver-to-receiver (e.g. two YouTube users having an exchange originally inspired by a YouTube video); or receiver-to-producer (e.g. a YouTube user commenting on a film), which may

5



However, viewers’ contributions to some televised programmes are nowadays possible thanks to phone calls on air, as well as texting and e-mails which are duly shown on the screen.

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further lead to the producer’s reply, possibly resulting in the receiver’s attaining the status of a (co-)author. In any case, as they take the floor, the individuals previously occupying the reception end should no longer be considered receivers in a technical sense but producers of the new messages (see Bublitz 2012), whatever forms these may take. The tendency to talk about audiences that contribute to interactions may stem from the fact that some proportion of the original senders starting an interaction have an institutional character (e.g. a TV channel’s fanpage on Facebook), or a celebrity status acknowledged in the public sphere also offline (e.g. YouTube or Twitter accounts of singers and bands) or developed from scratch in social media, sometimes only within very small circles (as is the case of fashion bloggers or YouTube presenters). However, from an interactional pragmatic perspective, in social media, these widely recognised produces have essentially the same status as ‘audiences’, the ordinary people, if they take the floor in order to interact with them, usually by posting comments.6 Additionally, the dichotomy between producers and audiences may be fostered by the message format, namely longer texts or articles (e.g. on blogs), pictures or combinations thereof (e.g. memes on humour websites), as well as videos, all of which are meant to attract many users, as opposed to brief textual posts, which stand little chance of being so widely recognised. By contrast, the notion of audiences is inapplicable, or at least less likely applicable, in the cases when numerous users, whether anonymous (hiding under nicknames) or not (providing what seem to be their real names and surnames) exchange numerous messages in the same format (for example posts on discussion forums). Even if a great proportion of participants never take the floor on such platforms, it is more difficult to conceive of them as audiences. Finally, when messages, whatever their format may be, are not made widely available, being restricted to chosen non-anonymous individuals, no matter how many (e.g. Facebook friends), these individuals are not typically considered audiences. On the strength of all these arguments, it is argued here, technical receiver labels need to be proposed for the different individuals at the reception end (and production end as well), taking Goffman’s lead. 3.3.

Reception and production roles in social media

Various participatory configurations and frames of communication obtaining in different social media formats have been proposed, for instance, with regard to weblogs (Hoffmann 2012), YouTube (Dynel 2014b; Boyd 2014), Facebook

6



Needless to say, in practice, it is dubious whether addressing a Facebook message to a world-famous person means that the message reaches the addressee and that the interaction envisaged by the sender does take place.

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(Eisenlauer 2013, 2014), discussion boards (Haugh and Chang 2015), and online broadcasts (Chovanec 2015). These frameworks are very complex and typically capture only part of the possible communicative processes, which keep changing as the social media platforms never cease evolving and allowing users new communicative options. It is impossible to propose an overarching framework for all media platforms, given their complexity and diversity. Therefore, only general observations are offered on how specific participatory roles can be assigned to producers and receivers. As regards the production format, one message may show different configurations of the three production roles discerned by Goffman (1981). Echoing Goffman (1981), Marcoccia (2004) provides a tripartite division of the individuals at the production end in newsgroups: the transmitter (or animator), who is the physical source of the message; the writer (or author), who formulates the message; and the enunciator (or principal), the participant to whose position the message attests. These roles do not always coincide in one person. By the same token, discussing the production side of weblogs, Hoffmann (2012: 62–63) argues that a blogger need not be the animator per se even though he/she “decides when, how and why to update her weblog’s content (principal) and writes – and links – the actual content of her posts (author)”. Further complications are possible in practically all social media genres. First of all, the collective producer may be involved. The ultimate message (e.g. a YouTube video) is the product of a number of individuals, who share the three Goffmanian roles in different configurations. In addition, one message may be modified and reposted in the same or a different social media service, thereby showing multiple animators and authors. Alternatively, users may be not the standard producers but carriers of messages produced by others (Ayaß 2012: 6), thus being animators but not authors. As regards the conceptualisation of reception roles, Marcoccia (2004: 115) lists “favored recipient”, “addressed recipient”, and the “eavesdropper” or “simple reader”.7 This tripartite division does not appear to be well-founded. The explanation provided for the first distinction is as follows: “[w]hen a message is addressed [to someone other than the host], hosts are non-addressed ratified recipients, and when a message is not addressed, hosts are main addressees or ‘favored recipients’” (Marcoccia 2004: 142). This seems to mirror Goffman’s distinction between the addressee and non-addressed official hearer. Nonetheless, lack of overt forms of address does not mean that an act of addressing has not taken place. In tune with Goffman’s postulate, if there is just one type of hearer at the reception end, it must be the addressee (see Dynel 2010, 2011a, 2014a). In the case mentioned

7

Apart from proposing the production and reception formats, Marcoccia (2004) lists independently three participant types in newsgroups: simple readers (or eavesdroppers), casual senders, and hosts.

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by Marcoccia (2004), the host will be the addressee, which renders the ‘favoured recipient’ category redundant. On the other hand, the conceptualisation of a ‘simple reader’ as an eavesdropper flies in the face of Goffman’s commonsensical definition of the eavesdropper as an unratified hearer. Marcoccia (2004) defines the eavesdropper as an individual whose identity the speaker does not know, an anonymous ratified participant that the sender of a message “knows to be listening” (2004: 140). This seems to be a tenuous claim in the light of how this hearer type is typically defined in interactional studies, namely: a hearer of whose presence the speaker is oblivious, whom the speaker does not know to be listening, and whom the speaker does not intend to listen (Dynel 2010, 2011a; and references therein). The producer of any online message must be mindful of the fact that it will be widely available and must ratify either selected individuals (e.g. followers, friends or subscribers) or an infinite number of (imagined/expected) anonymous Internet users (Burgess and Green 2008; Chovanec and Dynel 2015). The prospective receivers may be envisaged only to an extent depending on the content of a message and its purpose. Anybody who does receive an online message made available to him/her becomes a ratified participant, any personal, social or legal restrictions notwithstanding. By contrast, those who do not access the message, whether or not they are ratified, are not participants at all. This corresponds to the widely supported claim that participatory roles are negotiated by the parties at the production and reception ends. Ratified receivers can be divided into addressees and non-addressed ratified receivers. Importantly, forms of address will manifest themselves differently in Internet communication (see de Oliveira 2013), compared to face-to-face conversation. The addressee of a comment is determined in the light of a number of criteria, most importantly: the content of the message (i.e. its relevance to another user’s message), terms of address (e.g. the use of names and nicknames or second person pronouns), as well as the position of the message in the structure of an exchange, or simply its topical alignment to the previous posts. Some services allow choosing an option ‘reply’ under each post, whereby the previous speaker is addressed and one topical strand can develop with two or more participants contributing to it by clicking the reply button (see Fritz, Ch. 11, this volume). As any message is sent and addressed to a chosen individual, the addressee, or to chosen individuals, the collective addressee (i.e. distributed addressees performing the same function), other receivers of the comment (those who have access to it and do process it) enjoy the status of non-addressed ratified participants, dubbed collective third party, for instance. On the other hand, there may be no indication whatsoever that the addressee role is granted only to select individuals. In such cases, all receivers are ratified as the collective addressee. Also, visitors to any website, blog, or participants in the different social networks who get their newsfeed or look for content made available to them are ratified participants who can be conceived as the collective addressee.

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Among the ratified participants in social media, a separate role might need to be allocated to the interactants who, at a given point in an asynchronous interaction, play the role of viewers of videos on YouTube or other video-sharing sites (as opposed to being receivers of written texts). Needless to say, whether or not they duly take the floor by posting comments or adding reply-to videos, their interactional role in online interaction changes the moment they stop watching a video (Dynel 2014b). Although it allows for purely textual interaction as the users submit their comments, YouTube has been dubbed a form of ‘post-television’ (Lister et al. 2009; Tolson 2010), so it may be reasonable to define viewers watching YouTube videos (which may actually be previously televised programmes or screened films) as the same receiver type as traditional media viewers are (Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012). The relevant postulates on the participatory role of television viewers must be revisited in order to determine the characteristics of video viewers in social media. Regarding the hearer-related status of the television/film viewer, the claim prevailing in the literature on traditional media talk is that audiences are overhearers or an overhearing audience (see Dynel 2011d for references and criticism). As several authors (Scannell 1991; Hutchby 2006; O’Keeffe 2006; Lorenzo-Dus 2009) have rightly observed, the label ‘overhearer’ used with regard to ratified media audiences is inaccurate, if not misleading. In this vein, Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch (2011) are averse to the conceptualisation of (YouTube) viewers as overhearers, insofar as the discourse is produced precisely to be broadcast to them. Viewers should then regarded as ratified hearers and, in tune with Goffman’s (1981) ‘imagined recipients’ and Hutchby’s (2006) ‘distributed recipients’, they may be technically dubbed recipients, which is pertinent to the viewers of both television broadcast and films, series and serials (Dynel 2011b, 2011c, 2011d), to which videos in social media can be compared. Therefore, engaged in an act of watching YouTube videos, regardless of their character (e.g. vlogs, amateur recordings, reposted broadcast or film extracts), YouTube viewers can also be classified as recipients, i.e. ratified hearers external to the multimodal video message. Such recipients may take the floor on a different level of interaction by posting their comments (Herring 2011; Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2011; Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012; Dynel 2014b), and even videos in reply (see Adami 2015). On the whole, unratified receivers in social media are relatively rare. Publicising a turn, a speaker must be mindful of the fact that it will be widely available and may potentially reach even those to whom the speaker does not specifically intend to communicate a given message, that is whom the speaker does not wish to ratify (albeit not explicitly making them unratified, either). What the producer actually does by making his/her message publically available is then tacitly ratify potential receivers. However, ratification can be altogether denied to users, whereby they gain the status of non-participants to a given turn, or interaction taken as a whole.

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This pertains both to potential receivers (when access to a message is restricted to select users) and to senders whose messages may be blocked or deleted by other users (e.g. an owner of a YouTube channel) or authorised bodies who are not participants in the same frame of interaction (e.g. website owners or moderators). Nevertheless, unratified receivers may be individuals who get access to a password-protected service (e.g. a Facebook account) and take part in an interaction, assuming the role of an eavesdropper on each turn. Another possibility of unratified recipientship arises due to the fact that Internet communication allows seemingly private messages to be easily replicated and transformed into public ones via reposting (Chovanec and Dynel 2015). This happens when receivers take the role of transmitters, technically animators, reproducing the messages authored by others beyond the original communicative frame. This may involve the embedding of interactional frames (Goffman 1981; Chovanec 2015), whereby a message first communicated in one interaction becomes part of another interaction, whether on the same or on a different social media platform. Through the multiplication effect, a chain of several links of receivers is established as the message snowballs through social media. From the perspective of the original/previous producer, the new receivers ratified by the secondary producer, are indeed unratified. Such receivers are either eavesdroppers if the original produces are unaware of the recipientship, or overhearers, of whose receiver activity the producers are cognisant. The wide availability of a large proportion of messages in social media and the indeterminacy of the ratified recipientship are crucial for the formulation and comprehensibility of the messages. 4.

Being understood in social media

Speakers typically construct their utterances so as to be understood by their hearers. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) are credited for having first proposed the notion of recipient design in reference to how meanings are constructed for hearers in everyday conversations. By “recipient design”, that is utterance design inspired by the receiver’s needs, the authors mean “a multitude of respects in which the talk by a party of a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation or sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants” (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974: 727). Similarly, the notion of audience design (Clark and Carlson 1982; Clark and Murphy 1983; Clark and Schaefer 1992) refers to how speakers construct their utterances with the intention of being understood by particular receivers. Clark and Murphy (1983) define audience design as the attitude the speaker has in tailoring his/her spoken utterances for particular listeners, with whom the speaker shares momentary thoughts and beliefs. For his part, Bell (1984, 1991) proposes the notion of audience design for news media, according to which speakers adjust their speech styles to match the

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audience’s needs. Adjusting procedures are compatible with the degree to which the speaker recognises and ratifies the audience, in the context of the speaker’s linguistic choices, and sociolinguistic variables. In this vein, much has been written about recipient design for film discourse (e.g. Bubel 2008, Dynel 2011d). Participants tend to assume that they share a vast amount of common ground, which encompasses mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions (Clark and Brennan 1991; see also Lewis 1969; Clark and Marshall 1981; Clark and Carlson 1982). On a different axis, common ground is comprised of communal common ground held by members of a given society and personal common ground developed by individuals in their interactions, as well as the current common ground, i.e. that generated by consecutive utterances within a particular communicative exchange (Clark and Marshall 1981; Clark and Schaefer 1992; Clark 1996). It is also claimed that common ground cannot be properly updated without grounding (see Clark and Schaefer 1987, 1989; Clark and Brennan 1991). According to Clark and Brennan (1991: 129), grounding “is the collective process by which the participants try to reach” a mutual belief that “the partners [hearers] have understood what the contributor meant”. In the light of this review of theoretical literature, an important query arises about how audience design, common ground and grounding relate to communication in social media. A statement can be ventured that these theoretical proposals will apply to social media interactions just as they apply to the other domains of human communication, whilst lack of understanding or misunderstandings (whether or not discovered post factum) can happen in any form of communication. Producers of messages in different social media genres have a variety of tools at their disposal to get their meanings across, even if in many cases they know very little about the receivers. What helps achieve this aim is various verbal and non-verbal devices. For example, following in Clark and Carlson’s (1982) footsteps, Frobenius (2014) lists devices that fall into five categories (linguistic devices, conversational history, physical arrangement, gaze/gesture, and manner of speaking) that help vloggers allocate participant statuses, some peculiar to vlogging, and other ones possible also in other forms of interactions. In written formats, producers can make use of emoticons, for instance. Disregarding such cues, whether familiar with each other or anonymous, social media users capitalise on common ground available to them (see Hoffmann 2012). Although a great proportion of messages, whether multimodal or purely textual, in social media are communicated to anonymous, unknown receivers, and may be regarded as relying on a ‘leap of faith’ type of grounding, they are successfully communicated based on communal common ground, as is the case also with media discourse (e.g. programmes and films targeted at wide audiences). Needless to say, the availability of chosen messages, and thus the numbers of the ‘imagined audience’ and the actual receivers will depend on the character of a given message.

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Some messages, apart from depending on topical interests, rely heavily on various forms of expertise in different areas (e.g. specialist knowledge or familiarity with cultural or socio-political events), or knowledge of a jargon. Thus, users of chosen services or websites (e.g. those devoted to humour and entertainment) tend to develop their argot (abounding in neologisms, semantic shifts, or abbreviations, among other things), which newbies visiting these websites may find practically incomprehensible, thereby proving that they are not members of the ‘imagined audience’ even though they are essentially ratified participants. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Wolfram Bublitz and Christian Hoffmann for their careful reading of the previous version of this chapter and for their detailed comments and suggestions. References Adami, Elisabetta 2015 What I can (re)make out of it: Incoherence, non-cohesion, and re-interpretation in YouTube video responses. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 233–257. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Ayaß, Ruth 2012 Introduction: media appropriation and everyday life. In: Ruth Ayaß and Cornelia Gerhardt (eds.), The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life, 1–15. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. by Michael Holquist, transl. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Transl. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Baron, Naomi 1998 Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of email. Language and Communication 18: 133–170. Baron, Naomi 2010 Discourse structures in instant messaging: The case of utterance breaks. Language@Internet 7. Bell, Allan 1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145–204. Bell, Allan 1991 The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2012 Social interaction in YouTube text-based polylogues: a study of coherence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17: 501–521. boyd, danah 2010 Social Network Sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. In: Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. 39–58. New York: Routledge. Boyd, Michael 2014 (New) participatory framework on YouTube? Commenter interaction in US political speeches. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 46–58. Brake, David 2012 Who do they think they’re talking to? Framings of the audience by social media users. International Journal of Communication 6: 1056–1076. Bubel, Claudia 2008 Film audiences as overhearers. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 55–71. Bublitz, Wolfram 2012 Der ‘duale’ Internetnutzer: Ansätze einer dissoziativen Kommunikation. In: Konstanze Marx and Monika Schwarz-Friesel (eds.), Sprache und Kommunikation im technischen Zeitalter. Wieviel Technik (v)erträgt unsere Gesellschaft?, 26–52. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Bühler, Karl [1934] 1965  Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer. Transl. by Donald Fraser Goodwin 2011 Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green 2008 Agency and controversy in the YouTube community. In: Proceedings IR 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Conference. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen. http:// eprints.qut.edu.au/ 15383/1/15383.pdf. Chovanec, Jan 2010 Online discussion and interaction: The case of live text commentary. In: Leonard Shedletsky and Joan Aitken (eds.), Cases on Online Discussion and Interaction: Experiences and Outcomes, 234–251. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Chovanec, Jan 2011 Humour in quasi-conversations: Constructing fun in online sports journalism. In: Marta Dynel (ed.), The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, 243–264. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Chovanec, Jan and Marta Dynel 2015 Researching interactional forms and participant structures in public and social media. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 1–23. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Clark, Herbert 1996 Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert and Susan Brennan 1991 Grounding in communication. Perspectives on socially shared cognition. In: Lauren B. Resnick, John M. Levine, and Stephanie D. Teasley (eds.), 127– 149. Washington: American Psychological Association.

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Clark, Herbert and Thomas Carlson 1982 Hearers and speech acts. Language 58: 332–372. Clark, Herbert and Catherine Marshall 1981 Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In: Aravind K. Joshi, Bonnie Webber, and Ivan Sag (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding, 10–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert and Gregory Murphy 1983 Audience design in meaning and reference. In: J. F. LeNy and Walter Kintsch (eds.), Language and Comprehension, 287–299. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing. Clark, Herbert and Edward Schaefer 1987 Concealing one’s meaning from overhearers. Journal of Memory and Language 26: 209–225. Clark, Herbert and Edward Schaefer 1989 Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science 13: 259–294. Clark, Herbert and Edward Schaefer 1992 Dealing with overhearers. In: Herbert Clark, Arenas of Language Use, 248– 273. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Oliveira, Sandi Michele 2013 Address in computer-mediated communication. In: Susan C. Herring; Dieter Stein; Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 291–313. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. de Saussure, Ferdinand [1916] 1974  Course in General Linguistics. Trans. by Wade Baskin. London: Fontana/ Collins. Deuze, Mark 2006 Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture. Information Society 22: 63–75. Duranti, Alessandro 1986 The audience as co-author: An introduction. Text 6: 239–247. Dynel, Marta 2010 Not hearing things. Hearer/listener categories in polylogues. mediAzioni 9. Available at: http://www.mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/images/stories/PDF_folder/ document-pdf/2010/dynel_2010.pdf Dynel, Marta 2011a Revisiting Goffman’s postulates on participant statuses in verbal interaction. Language and Linguistics Compass. Sociolinguistics 5/7: 454–465. Dynel, Marta 2011b Entertaining and enraging: The functions of verbal violence in broadcast political debates. In: Villy Tsakona and Diana Popa (eds), Studies in Political Humour, 109–133. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Dynel, Marta 2011c Two communicative levels and twofold illocutionary force in televised political debates. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 47(2): 283–307. Dynel, Marta 2011d ‘You talking to me?’ The viewer as a ratified listener to film discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1628–1644.

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Dynel, Marta 2014a On the part of ratified participants: Ratified listeners in multi-party interaction. Brno Studies in English 40: 27–44. Dynel, Marta 2014b Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 73: 37–52. Eisenlauer, Volker 2013 A Critical Hypertext Analysis of Social Media. The True Colours of Facebook. London/New York: Continuum. Eisenlauer, Volker 2014 Facebook as a third author – (Semi)automated participation framework in Social Network Sites. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 73–85. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2011 Beginning a monologue: The opening sequence of video blogs. Journal of Pragmatics 43(3): 814–827. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2014 Audience design in monologues: How vloggers involve their viewers. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 59–72. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar 2010 The YouTubification of politics, impoliteness and polarization. In: Rotimi Taiwo (ed.), Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior and Digital Communication: Language Structures and Social Interaction, 540–563. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Goffman, Erving 1963 Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Goodwin, Charles 1981 Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press. Haugh, Michael and Wei-Lin Melody Chang 2015 Troubles talk, (dis)affiliation and the participation order in Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion boards. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 99–133. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Herring, Susan 1996 Two variants of an electronic message schema. In: Susan Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 81–106. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Herring, Susan 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@ Internet 4. Herring, Susan 2010 Who’s got the floor in computer-mediated conversation? Edelsky’s gender patterns revisited.” Language@Internet 7.

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Herring, Susan 2011 Computer-mediated conversation, Part II: Introduction and overview. Language@Internet 8. Herring, Susan 2013 Discourse in web 2.0: familiar, reconfigured and emergent” In: Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse Web 2.0: Language in the Media, 1–26. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Herring, Susan, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen 2013 Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Hoffmann, Christian 2012 Cohesive Profiling. Meaning and Interaction in Personal Weblogs. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Hutchby, Ian 2006 Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Glasgow: Open University Press. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Closing statement: linguistics and poetics. In: Thomas Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johansson, Marjut 2014 Reading digital news: Participation roles, activities, and positionings. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 31–45. Jucker, Andreas 2003 Mass media communication at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Dimensions of change. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4: 129–148. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine 2004 Introducing polylogue. Journal of Pragmatics 36(1): 1–24. Levinson, Stephen 1988 Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s participation framework. In: Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds.), Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, 161–227. Oxford: Polity Press. Lewis, David 1969 Convention. A Philosophical Study. Cambrige MA: Harvard University Press. Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kelly Kieran 2009 New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Litt, Eden 2012 Knock, Knock. Who’s there? The imagined audience. Journal Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56(3): 330–345. Livingstone, Sonia 2004 The challenge of changing audiences: or, what is the audience researcher to do in the age of the internet? European Journal of Communication 19(1): 75–86. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria 2009 Television Discourse. Analysing Language in the Media. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Patricia Bou-Franch 2011 On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 2578–2593.

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Marcoccia, Michel 2004 On-line polylogues: conversation structure and participation framework in internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 115–145. Marwick, Alice and danah boyd 2010 I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13: 96–113. Moor, Peter, Ard Heuvelman and Ria Verleur 2010 Flaming on YouTube. Computers in Human Behavior 26: 1536–1546. Morris, Merrill and Christine Ogan 1996 The Internet as a mass medium. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1(4). O’Keeffe, Anne 2006 Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge. Poole, Marshall and Michele Jackson 1993 Communication theory and group support systems. In: Leonard Jessup and Joseph Valacich (eds), Group Support Systems: New Perspectives, 281–293. New York: Macmillan. Roscoe, Timothy 1999 The construction of the World Wide Web audience. Media, Culture & Society 21(5): 673–684. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson 1974 A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50: 696–735. Scannell, Paddy 1991 Introduction: The relevance of talk. In: Paddy Scannell (ed.), Broadcast Talk, 1–13. London: Sage. Schober, Michael and Herbert Clark 1989 Understanding by addressees and overhearers. Cognitive Psychology 21: 211– 232. Tolson, Andrew 2010 A new authenticity? Communicative practices on YouTube. Critical Discourse Studies 7(4): 277–289. Venkatesh, Alladi, Ruby Roy Dholakia and Nikhilesh Dholakia 1996 New visions of information technology and postmodernism: Implications for advertising and marketing communications. In: Walter Brenner and Lutz Kolbe (eds.), The Information Superhighway and Private Households, 319– 338. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag. Verschueren, Jef 1999 Understanding Pragmatics. London: Hodder Arnold. Webster, James G. and Shu-Fang Lin 2002 The internet audience: Web use as mass behavior. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 46: 1–12. Yates, Simeon 2000 Computer-mediated communication: The future of the letter? In: David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds.), Letter Writing as a Social Practice, 233–251. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

4.

Publicness and privateness Birte Bös and Sonja Kleinke

Abstract: This contribution deals with the question of how social media have shifted and blurred the boundaries between public and private. It outlines attempts to tackle the notoriously fuzzy notions of publicness and privateness from a social media perspective and brings together models from communication science and pragmatics, thus shedding light on the different dimensions of publicness and privateness in social media contexts. These notions necessarily need to be conceptualized in a flexible way in order to take account of the fluid perceptions and practices users have developed of these issues. 1. Introduction As do the other contributors to this handbook, we adopt a broad perspective in the definition of social media, or “the social Web”, as it is sometimes also called (e.g. Thelwall 2011: 151). Hidden behind these terms are “rich genre ecologies” (Hoffmann, Ch. 1, this volume) which display an incredibly high degree of complexity. What they have in common is their (technical) potential for interactivity which allows users to create and share content online. The effects of the communicative opportunities opened up by the new technologies have been discussed by laypersons, media representatives and researchers alike. Baym and boyd declare: Old practices and patterns continue to thrive in new media. However, social media blur boundaries between presence and absence, time and space, control and freedom, personal and mass communication, private and public, and virtual and real, affecting how old patterns should be understood and raising new challenges and opportunities for people engaging others through new technologies (2012: 320).

There is a broad agreement that established (idealized) public/private dichotomies no longer hold true, although certainly not everybody would agree with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that “[t]he rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy” and that “privacy [is] no longer a ‘social norm’” (Johnson 2010). Indeed, privacy concerns are a question of high societal relevance, and the media provide ample evidence of the anxieties and controversial debates triggered by the social media. Yet, this is a phenomenon often observed at the introduction of new technologies, which – according to Jarvis (2011) and Tannen (2013: 101), among others – can be traced back as far as the introduction of printing in the 15th century. Such technologies essentially force DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-004 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 83–121. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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“human society to redefine the boundaries between the public and private and to re-conceptualize the concept of personal privacy” (Yao 2011: 111). Public and private and their related terms publicity/publicness and privacy/ privateness cover extremely fuzzy and complex notions, both in everyday language and as termini technici. Even their basic semantic definitions, as provided by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), already display a range of meanings. In the case of public, they include, for example, openness to observation and general accessibility, a relation to the community or nation, and a focus on official positions (OED, s.v. public, adj). In the case of private, semantic components such as restricted access, the involvement of one particular person or group of people, and the non-official capacities of persons, are highlighted (OED, s.v. private, adj). Derived from the adjectives, publicity/publicness and privacy/privateness are often treated as synonyms with certain discipline-related preferences, privacy being more common in communication science (CS) and privateness being more often found in linguistic contexts.1 Of course, it is not just the terms themselves that differ; they also lack consis­ tent definitions (Papacharissi 2010: 35) and their conceptualizations are often perceived as “contested and messy” (boyd 2010: 40, in relation to ‘public’), resulting from different “theoretical languages or universes of discourse, each with its own complex historical cargo of assumptions and connotations” (Weintraub 1997: 3). As the basic semantic definitions show, publicness and privateness can only be conceptualized in relation to each other. Yet, we also have to accept that we are not dealing with “a single paired opposition, but a complex family of them, neither mutually reducible nor wholly unrelated” (Weintraub and Kumar 1997: xii). Thus, in view of the wide range of social media formats and interactions and the diverse perceptions of their users, a flexible approach to issues of publicness and privateness is required. For a start, we will outline some major characteristics of social media from the public/private perspective. With roughly 40 % of the world population having internet access today (http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/), technical accessibility to social media – and therefore to “new public spaces” (Bateman, Pike and Butler 2010: 81) – is generally high. The access points to this “virtual public” (2010: 81) are located in “a private media environment […] within the individual’s personal and private space” (Papacharissi 2010: 306). However, with more and more users accessing the internet via their smartphones, the private is increasingly removed from the domestic setting in a form of “mobile privatization” (Papacharissi 2010: 133, in reference to Raymond Williams’ (1974) term). Instead, usage patterns are determined by sociodemographic aspects such as gen-

1



This contribution adopts privateness/publicness as flexible umbrella terms, but it will follow the usage of the respective authors, where necessary.

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der, age, socioeconomic and ethnic background, and factors such as experience and skills, self-efficacy and motivation, which we will not go into here.2 Accessibility clearly goes beyond technical aspects. Social media, in a very basic conceptualization, provide a floor for the consumption and distribution of public and private information (see Table 1). On the one hand, they allow individuals to gain unprecedented access to public information of any sort at any time. Beyond the mere informational function, the Web, with its public discussion spaces, simultaneously invites users to participate in public discourse in ways that were not open to them before (cf. Androutsoupolous 2013: 49, see also Landert, Ch. 2, this volume), providing them with a ‘new visibility’ in the public sphere (Thompson 2005).3 On the other hand, by distributing private, often personal information, individuals gain visibility in online networks (of various sizes and densities) and with that increase their chances to access private information from other users (see also Arendholz 2013: 111 on “interactional accessibility” and Androutsopoulos 2013: 48 on “low entry-requirements”). Table 1.

Access and visibility in the social media Social media

Individuals gaining access

Individuals gaining visibility

Access to public information

Participation in public discourse

Access to private information

Distribution of private information

The ever-growing number of users essentially magnifies the impacts of accessibility and visibility. While some social media platforms rely on “exclusive membership”, e.g. ASmallWorld, which requires peer recommendation, blogs with access restrictions in corporate and organizational spaces (cf. Puschmann 2013: 83) or online medical support groups (cf. Kleinke 2015), many allow for free access and aim for as many users as possible. In fact, some virtual communities have attracted millions of users, among them well-known Western representatives like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Youtube, but also Asian platforms like Tencent QQ or WeChat, which can boast more than a billion registered users.4

2



3



4



But see e.g. boyd (2007), Hargittai (2008) and Perrin (2015) for findings and further references on this subject. But see Papacharissi (2010: 19) on emancipation in private rather than public spaces and Johansson (in press) for a critical account of the liberating effects of the internet. Thurlow (2013: 243–244) speaks of “synthetic media” and “pseudo-sociality”. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_ million_active_users (last accessed 5 September 2016).

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With regard to social media content, the following properties (originally defined for Social networking sites) have important impacts on publicness/privateness considerations: Persistence: Digital expressions are automatically recorded and archived. Replicability: Digital content is easily duplicated. Scalability: The potential visibility of digital content is great. Searchability: Digital content is often accessible through search engines. (boyd and Marwick 2011: 9)

Clearly, these characteristics pose a challenge to users’ control over (potentially private) data, but they do not grant large-scale public audiences per se. As Baym and boyd (2012: 322) point out, social media have public and quasi-public qualities, as the potential for visibility is not necessarily fully exploited. Much of what users communicate online is, in fact, only noticed by a small number of people, and it is hard to determine “who is out there and when” (Baym and boyd 2012: 323). Additionally, there might be different levels of “perceived publicness”, i.e. “the degree to which users believe that others have unrestricted access to their information” (Bateman, Pike and Butler 2010: 81–82; cf. also Puschmann 2013: 94, who observes a “discrepancy between popular perception and everyday use” in blogging). The potential conflicts arising from these communicative constellations have been much debated. Quite generally, Petronio states that “individuals must balance the usefulness of privacy with the utility of openness” (2000: 37). From the social media perspective, the conflict is that “users desire social interaction and connectivity and disclosing information plays an essential role; yet users may not wish to have their information made publicly accessible to an unknown audience” (Bateman, Pike and Butler 2010: 79). One of the best available ways to explore how actual users balance privateness and publicness is through an analysis of language use. With their complex technical constellations and participation structure, social media combine “elements of interpersonal and mass communication” (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010: 252), again blurring boundaries. In fact, language use in social media has often been associated with the immediacy and conceptual orality of casual faceto-face communication. However, Crystal (2001, 2006) – though still adhering to an overarching notion of Netspeak – already discussed scalar phenomena on an oral/written axis more than a decade ago. More recent studies on specific social media formats (e.g. Hoffmann 2012 on conceptual writtenness in personal blogs and Sindoni 2013 on the multimodality of videochats, blogs and YouTube comments) provide a far more differentiated picture. It is therefore vital to reconsider the notions of orality and literacy and of immediacy and distance in the light of publicness and privateness. Given their prominence, the special dynamics of their communicative constellations and practices, and their diversity and multi-modal complexity, it is not

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surprising that social media have attracted research in a broad range of academic fields and inspired interdisciplinary perspectives. This contribution will focus on two major, well-established research strands: linguistic, (micro-)pragmatic investigations and studies in the field of communication science (CS).5 As Sections 2 and 3 show, these research strands have provided different contributions to the modelling and analysis of privacy and publicness in social media. While up to now, pragmatic conceptualizations have essentially been text- and context-based, communicative science shapes its models with a strong user- and context-orientation, including psychological, social scientific and marketing-oriented aspects of privacy and publicness. Section 4 demonstrates where the models and concepts of the two disciplines meet and benefit from each other. It summarizes findings from selected case studies which illustrate attempts to link CS and pragmatic findings as well as briefly discussing authenticity, reliability and research ethics at the interface of both strands. 2.

Publicness and privateness through the lens of communication science

2.1.

Extending the dichotomy

Notions of public and private – and the supposed opposition between them – can be encountered “in contexts that run from the most abstract theorizing to the most practical and immediate arenas of life” (Weintraub and Kumar 1997: xi). Our goal here is to explore interpersonal aspects of the construction of privacy and publicness in social media contexts.6 The categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ play an essential role in the way communication shapes interpersonal relations, as they serve to “qualify and distinguish manifested choices in everyday life” (Papacharissi 2010: 25). Following Weintraub (1997: 5), they can be defined by the two basic criteria of visibility (hidden, withdrawn, i.e. private vs. open, accessible, i.e. public) and collectivity (pertaining to an individual, i.e. private vs. a collectivity of individuals, i.e. public), which were already displayed in the OED definitions (see Section 1) and reflect entrenchment in language use. Publicness and privateness are best understood as overlapping, scalar notions, which are shaped by cultural, historical and

5



6



We understand communication science as the social study of communication, which investigates the fundamental processes, codes, functions, and contexts of human communication (cf. Berger, Roloff and Roskoss-Ewoldsen 2010). For the purposes of this contribution, we necessarily have to take a limited view. For discussions about public and private spaces based on Habermas’ influential ideas see Schmidt (2011a: 97), Cooke (2011: 300) and Papacharissi (2014: 152–155).

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linguistic contexts (Papacharissi 2010: 25, 35, see also boyd and Marwick 2011: 25). Their conceptualization as scalar is also useful from a linguistic perspective. Given the two poles, Papacharissi (2010, drawing on Wolfe 1997: 196) suggests a further addition, which breaks up the dichotomy and extends it into a trichotomy with a third component of sociality, “a realm of distinct publics”, defined in the following way: These publics are partially collective in that they share norms and common goals, but the basis of this collectivity is social, not political. They are also partially private, in that they may shield the individual from the public realm in ways that enable the development of self-interest and private identity. (Papacharissi 2010: 49–50)

This extension proves fruitful from a social media perspective, where it surfaces as one of the special characteristics of “networked publics”, defined not only as “(1) the space constructed through networked technologies”, but also as “(2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (boyd and Marwick 2011: 7),7 with potential audiences fixed in users’ profiles as “privileged publics” (boyd 2010: 43). In this context, Lange (2008), investigating how YouTube users manipulate technical features and social mechanisms in negotiating membership in social networks, provides a further differentiation of “publicly private” and “privately public” behaviour. “Publicly private” behaviour is displayed in YouTubers’ exposure of private identities hardly accessed by other users, whereas “privately public” behaviour relates to limited private information which is widely accessible (Lange 2008: 361). Sociality furthermore finds a counterpart in the notion of communities of practice, a concept widely used in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, which manifests itself in research on computer-mediated discourse (CMD) in the notion of Virtual Communities (first introduced by Rheingold 1993):8 A community of practice is a collection of people who engage on an ongoing basis in some common endeavor. Communities of practice emerge in response to common interest or position, and play an important role in forming their members’ participation in, and orientation to, the world around them. They provide an accountable link, therefore, between the individual, the group, and place in the broader social order, and they provide a setting in which linguistic practice emerges as a function of this link. (Eckert 2006)

The shared idea of the social motivation and “the semi-private and semi-public social needs of these multiple private publics” (Papacharissi 2010: 50) thus pro-

For an outline of the development and examples of internet communities cf. Johnston (2014: 20−28). 8 For an empirical study on the potential construction of virtual communities in two online contexts and a critical discussion see also Herring (2004: 5−6). 7



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vides a bridge between the two approaches under scrutiny in this contribution. Social media have not simply catapulted their users into a post-privacy era, as it is sometimes decried, but have shaped new hybrid spaces “neither conventionally public nor entirely private” (Papacharissi and Gibson 2011: 75). These spaces of sociality require giving up privacy to some extent (Papacharissi 2010: 133),9 but fulfil users’ needs to connect and interact, in that they replace former “public spaces of political expression” with “private spaces” from which they broadcast “individual opinions on public and private affairs” (cf. Papacharissi 2010: 38 on new forms of civic engagement, and also Johansson 2015, in press). 2.2.

Dimensions of privacy

In CS research (just as in laypersons’ debates), the concept of privacy, as “a basic human need” which “leverages well-being” (Trepte and Reinecke 2011a: v), has clearly attracted much more attention than its counterpart.10 Trepte and Reinecke (2011b) outline three dimensions of privacy which prove particularly relevant from a social media perspective: informational privacy, social privacy and psychological privacy (cf. also Debatin 2011: 48). To date, informational privacy has been the primary focus in social media research. It relates to individuals’ control over the kind and amount of information about them available to others online, which – given the properties of persistence, replicability, scalability and searchability – are strongly influenced by technical affordances and users’ ability and willingness to handle these efficiently. Social privacy covers users’ possibilities to manage their interpersonal relationships online. Psychological privacy refers to users’ perceived potential of sharing contents of their choice (thoughts, feelings, etc.) without being censored (Trepte and Reinecke 2011b: 61). Additionally, a physical, spatial dimension is postulated in several models (cf. Loosen 2011: 206), which also proves relevant from a social media perspective: a spatial meaning of ‘private’, which takes account of the fact that social media communication, both thematically private and public, is typically created in a private space and returns to the private space (Papacharissi 2010: 37–38). This multi-dimensional conceptualization of privacy sheds light on a phenomenon described by Barnes (2006) as the “privacy paradox” of social media.

Drawing on Zhang et al. (2010), Papacharissi and Gibson (2011: 80) report a “newer paradigm for sociality” equating “disclosure with being social”. 10 But cf. Schmidt (2011a: 107−133) on “personal publics” as essential characteristics of social media, which can be distinguished from “traditional publics” at three levels of how information is handled: “selection by personal relevance”, distribution to explicit network ties and communication in a “conversational mode”. They prove especially relevant for Twitter interaction (Schmidt 2014: 4). 9



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It relates to the apparent contradiction that the privacy concerns of users do not necessarily have an impact on their actual online behaviour.11 Based on a range of empirical studies, Trepte and Reinecke assume that users may indeed perceive a lack of control regarding informational privacy. However, “the Social Web seems to foster feelings of psychological and social privacy” (2011b: 65), the subjective feelings of anonymity and intimacy lower users’ inhibitions, and thus private disclosure is often encouraged in such online contexts. 2.3.

(Self-)disclosure, privacy risks and privacy management

The disclosure of private information in social media is described by Debatin as “a kind of bargaining process” (2011: 56), with the major motivation – “the expected benefits of social networking” (2011: 56) – often outweighing potential risks involved in optional self-disclosure. Social networking sites (SNSs) are generally considered to have greatest potential for conflicts in this regard (Thelwall 2011: 255) and will therefore be our focus here. On SNSs, dynamic disclosure by active participation is vital to enhance the social capital gained, whereas mere consumption of other contributions leads to social isolation (Ellison et al. 2011: 24). The main loci of privacy management on SNSs are users’ profiles. The information users are willing to reveal on SNSs can be characterized with regard to its amount, depth and duration (Bateman, Pike and Butler 2010: 80). As regards depth, Bateman, Pike and Butler (2010: 90) identify three layers of disclosure: peripheral disclosure (e.g. name, age and gender of the user), intermediate disclosure (e.g. religious views, political orientation) and core disclosure (including emotions, feelings, values, etc.). Self-disclosure is often encouraged by site settings (Joinson et al. 2011: 34–35) and participants often provide identifiable, detailed information in their personal profiles (Ellison et al. 2010: 130), on shared past referents (e.g. schools attended), their interests (favourite books, films, etc.), and contact options (even including their offline location) (Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield 2007: 438). Users post and share photographs depicting themselves and other people, provide intimate information in their status updates and even discuss personal relationships in semi-public environments such as walls or include reports about illegal activities (Joinson et al. 2011: 34−35). Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield’s study of Facebook profiles reveals that the kind and amount of information shared have an impact on users’ connectedness, as reflected in their friends

11

But cf. Dienlin and Trepte (2015), who confirm these findings but discover a link between more specified privacy attitudes and privacy behaviour on Social networking sites using a more refined methodology which includes informational, social and psychological privacy and their impact on participants’ online behaviour.

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lists. Providing more information helps to reduce “the costs of connecting” and promotes larger networks (Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield 2007: 437). On the other hand, the kinds of network connections have an impact on the management of private information. Petronio, in her description of a general rule-based privacy management system, points out that “[s]trong linkages reflect a higher level of responsibility for managing disclosed information” (2000: 41). This might help to further explain why the loose networks often found in social media sometimes promote disclosure more than face-to-face communication in high-density networks. Still, [t]he relation between privacy and a person’s social network is multi-faceted. In certain occasions we want information about ourselves to be known only by a small circle of close friends, and not by strangers. In other instances, we are willing to reveal personal information to anonymous strangers, but not to those who know us better. (Gross and Acquisti 2005: 2)

Simply withdrawing from interaction by refraining from frequenting SNSs is obviously not an option for users who want to profit from the social benefits of SNSs. Thus, they need to rely on other mechanisms of privacy management (cf. Debatin 2011: 49), negotiating ethical self-regulation, i.e. “a context-appropriate flow of personal information” (2011: 50), within the legal framework and technical settings of SNSs. For that purpose, users might resort to self-censorship, “performing for the lowest common denominator so as to produce a performance that will comply with the expectations of the broadest possible audience” or to “polysemic performances, presentations of the self that contain layers of meaning, signifying different impressions to various audiences” (Papacharissi and Gibson 2011: 81). In addition, privacy management in social media is not just a matter of deciding which information users would like to make visible to others. While contributions by other users might often be welcome (boyd 2010: 43), the possibilities of co-creation – an essential characteristic of Web 2.0 – have sometimes been considered a “greater risk than disclosure by users themselves”, as social media encourage “unfettered sharing of personal information that intrudes upon other users” (Joinson et al. 2011: 35−36). Furthermore, the technical affordances of most SNSs allow for the fine-tuning of individual privacy settings, with options ranging from “truly public” to “semi-public” (boyd 2010: 43). However, research shows that a majority of users keeps the default settings (cf. e.g. Light and McGrath 2010: 301 or Zimmer and Proferes 2014: 173 for Twitter). This might be due to a perception of the environment as “safe and closed worlds” (Light and McGrath 2010: 302). However, it might also be related to the fact that users need to acquire the necessary technical expertise themselves (Yao 2011: 115), which is further impeded by the frequent changes in interface design, making it increasingly more difficult to even

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locate the options for privacy settings.12 Peer pressure is another influencing factor (Gross and Acquisti 2005: 2). The situation is rendered even more confusing for users by the inconsistent privacy policies and practices on the different SNSs as well as modifications over time, which have an impact on their perceived publicness (Bateman, Pike and Butler 2010: 89) and stir insecurities and sometimes also anger among their users. This was the case, for example, when it became evident in August 2016 that the messaging service WhatsApp was supposed to pass on personal information, including users’ names and phone numbers, to its parent company Facebook as part of plans to allow businesses to send messages to users (e.g. reported in Tynan 2016). Such data harvesting for economic purposes constitutes another component of unwanted outside access and intrusion (cf. Joinson et al. 2011: 35; Thelwall 2011: 256) – one not generating social, but economic capital (Andrejevic 2010: 84). Yet, there is also another side of the coin, as many private users have started earning money by click-baiting via (self-)disclosure in the social media. Section 2 has shown that, drawing on neighbouring disciplines, CS research mainly focuses on informational, social, psychological and physical components of users’ social media interaction, providing valuable insights into the gains and risks of (self-)disclosure, the kinds of information revealed by users as well as the interplay of their on- and offline aspects of identity. However, actual linguistic practices are largely neglected in CS. Section 3 now turns to the pragmatic perspective on privateness and publicness. 3.

Publicness and privateness through the lens of pragmatics

While both CS and pragmatics stress the scalar and often fuzzy nature of publicness and privateness, their respective treatments of the concepts tend to highlight different aspects. Whereas CS research mainly foregrounds the levels of access and content management (e.g. in the sense of privacy management), pragmatic research focuses on the linguistic characteristics of digital discourse (DD)13 and their potential for constructing private and public aspects of communicated content within the broader framework of pragmatic meaning, including users’ virtual identities. Still, some CS approaches already hint at pragmatically relevant See Light and McGrath’s documentation of changes in the Facebook interface (2010: 302–303). 13 Thurlow and Mroczek’s (2011) term ‘digital discourse’ is used in this contribution to broadly cover the diverse channels and modes (i.e. computer-mediated communication systems and their social and cultural practices, cf. Herring 2007: 3) of electronically mediated communication. (But see Herring 2013: 6 for a discussion of varying terminologies and their limits.) 12

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phenomena. For example, Papacharissi and Gibson acknowledge the performative character of privacy management and evoke a link to the pragmatic notion of face wants, defining privacy as “the right to be left alone”, distinct from “the desire to be left alone” (2011: 78). The authors also link up digital literacy and privacy, suggesting “that an advanced form of digital literacy can enable individuals to redact performances of the self online, so as to navigate public and private boundaries fluently” (2011: 76, their emphasis). The idea that identities are created on the keyboard (cf. boyd and Ellison 2007: 211) along with notions of conceptual orality and literacy and thus authenticity is also taken up by Mallan and Giardina (2009) and Trepte and Reinecke (2011b). Pragmatic social media research approaches the public/private domain mainly from four different angles, rather than providing a comprehensive and coherent model: (1) the framing conditions of online interaction, especially with reference to accessibility by the public as well as mass audiences and patterns of participation such as lurking (e.g. Crystal 2006: 31 for DD in general, and more specifically, e.g. for forum discussions, Gruber 2013; Bös and Kleinke 2015); (2) the oral–written/immediacy–distance paradigm relating to private and non-private uses in early linguistic internet research (e.g. Crystal 2001, 2006; Danet 2001) and their extension into enriched models of immediacy and distance which differentiate the facets of access and content (e.g. Dürscheid 2007; Landert and Jucker 2011); (3) multimodal aspects of publicness and privateness, investigating multimodality at the interface of the oral/written and public/private axes (e.g. Yus 2011; Sindoni 2013); (4) complex models of computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) and facetted classification schemes of CMD/DD, which incorporate the public/private dimension in various facets and at various levels of analysis (e.g. Herring 2004, 2007 and 2013).

Empirical pragmatic research on social media discourse relevant from the publicness/privateness perspective has mainly focussed on the three broad perspectives already outlined above: immediacy and distance, multimodality and the framing conditions of specific applications. Some examples of research are provided in Table 2, which also indicates the types of application studied. Furthermore, recent studies include issues of visibility and access (cf. our Table 1) into the analysis of collaborative text-production, see e.g. Herring (2013: 15) on Wikipedia as “massively multi-authored by internet users who usually do not know one another”, which relates privacy concerns to issues of authenticity and reliability.14 Last but not least, empirical studies on specific (ranges of) applications scrutinize privateness issues within complex patchwork approaches, which increasingly also use corpus-linguistic means of content analyses in order to reveal language practices related to self-disclosure (e.g. Sindoni 2013; Pusch­

14

See also Johansson (in press) on participation and access in online newspapers.

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mann 2013; Herring et al. 2006). To cover the relevant perspectives, this chapter, unlike Herring et al. (2013), draws on a “wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour” (Bublitz, Jucker and Schnei­ der, Preface to the handbook series, this volume: v), which includes structural and socio-pragmatic as well as increasingly socio-semiotic (Page et al. 2014: 18) patterns of language use. Table 2.

Examples and surveys of empirical pragmatic research perspectives

Feature

Author and year, type of application

Application-related elements as framing conditions Patterns of participation, ­accessibility

Arendholz 2010, Kleinke 2010, Arendholz 2013, Bös and Kleinke 2015, Kleinke and Bös 2015: Forum discussions Locher 2013: Advice fora Kleinke 2015: Advice fora, medical self-support groups, Twitter

Orality/Literacy – Immediacy/Distance Genre

Pérez-Sabater 2012: Facebook

Genre and structure

Bieswanger 2013: CMD (various applications) Gruber 2013: Mailing list communication

(Sub-)Genre and content/topic/ audience

Baron 2013: Instant messaging Sindoni 2013: Blogs, YouTube Arendholz 2010: Forum discussions/message boards Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: Blogs Hoffmann 2012: Blogs Puschmann 2013: Blogs (personal and corporate)

Genre and narrativity

Jucker 2010: Life-ticker Arendholz 2010: Message boards Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: Blogs Hoffmann 2012: Blogs

Authenticity and identity

Leppänen et al. 2015: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, forum discussions, blogs

Multimodality Authenticity/content/ ­accessibility/virality

Sindoni 2013: Videochat, Personal Blogs, YouTube and Vlogs Lange 2008: YouTube

Complex semiotic practices Accessibility, collaborative story- Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: Blogs telling, personal and public narra- Page 2012: Forum discussions, Twitter, blogs, tive spaces SNSs, Wikis

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Perspective (1) has often merely been mentioned in passing, explaining the general context conditions of online interaction. Perspectives (2) − (4) indicate the pragmatic complexity of the private/public dimension and its interfaces with CS research and will therefore be in the focus of our discussion here. 3.1.

Early accounts of publicness and privateness in the immediacy/distance paradigm

Focusing on the textual make-up of various modes of online applications, early linguistic research on CMD approached the concepts of publicness and privateness rather indirectly. Crystal (2001, 2006), in his discussion of Netspeak, uses the terms public and private only with regard to the accessibility of early applications of DD (e.g. e-mails and chats). Yet, he contributes to our understanding of more comprehensive notions of publicness and privateness by positioning Netspeak on a continuum of speech and writing15 (which, he acknowledges (2001: 25), is necessarily an oversimplification) and by linking its diverse realizations to scales of personal/non-personal subject matter and formal/informal style. Applying prototypical spoken and written language criteria to the different applications of Netspeak, Crystal (2001: 42–43)16 offers a rough categorization based on bundles of characteristics such as time- and space-boundedness, spontaneity, information density, interactiveness and revisability. He furthermore links micro-structural characteristics to their socio-pragmatic dimensions, which form fluent continua on scales of (non)personal and (in)formal characteristics, indicating different potentials for immediacy and distance (cf. Table 3). Crystal’s approach reflects the majority of the prototypical communicative conditions and linguistic features already outlined in Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1985) seminal work on conceptual orality and literacy. Koch and Oesterreicher correlate the communicative conditions and linguistic elements with the aspect of accessibility (“not public”/“public”), and associate them with the two poles of communicative immediacy and communicative distance. Welcoming this distinction of “public”/“not public” (instead of “private”), Dürscheid (2007: 30−31) The hybrid nature of DD and its perceived intermediate but independent position on a scale of speech and writing is also manifested in other terms suggested, e.g. ‘interactive written discourse’, ‘electronic language’, ‘computer-mediated communication’ or ‘keyboard-to screen communication’ (KSC), a term coined by Jucker and Dürscheid (2012) focusing on users’ activities. See Danet (2010: 146) for an overview of earlier uses and Crystal (2011: 2–3); Herring, Stein and Virtanen (2013: 5) and Page et al. (2014: 17) for a critical discussion of these terms, which allude to different analytical levels. 16 In his second edition (2006: 45, 47), Crystal adds blogging and instant messaging, yet, as it works mainly with ‘yes/no/variable’ distinctions, his characterization still remains relatively general. 15

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Table 3.

Crystal’s (2001) characterization of Netspeak (our summary)

Immediacy

Distance (Non)personal characteristics

– Discussion of sensitive (personal, religious or political) topics – Certain knowledge of each other’s virtual (sometimes also real) identities – Direct reference to other participants possible – Personal letter formats (terms of address, salutation) – Some phatic communication

– Discussion of safe topics – Addressee(s) often unknown – Little direct reference to other participants – Official announcements

(In)formal characteristics – Informal lexis, nonsense words – Less complex grammatical structures – Often highly liberal spelling conventions (sometimes in-group conventions) – Use of emoticons to compensate for loss of visual contact

– Formal lexis – Complex grammatical structures – Formal terms of address, formal salutations – Academic style-features (e.g. numerical structuring of texts, scientific terms)

points out that communicative contents do not necessarily coincide with social closeness (as might be suggested by Koch and Oesterreicher’s idealized scheme). She therefore differentiates “public”/“partially public”/“non-public” (relating to accessibility) from “private”/“non-private” (relating to communicative content and relationship of communicative partners) and establishes a category of “secondary intimacy” (topics perceived as intimate in a culture, which are spread into the public realm, e.g. on a private homepage or blog). This differentiation is already suggested in earlier works (e.g. Schütte 2000: 149; Dürscheid 2003: 1517) and taken up by Landert and Jucker (2011) in their development of a more complex model (see below). From a genre perspective, Crystal’s early, relatively rough categorization of Netspeak has invited some justified criticism (cf. e.g. Dürscheid 2004). However, his major observations have been verified by empirical studies on selected applications (e.g. Danet 2010; Jucker 2010; see Sindoni 2013: 39–40 for a detailed discussion). Thus, Crystal’s parameters, next to general patternings of orality/literacy and immediacy/distance (e.g. Chafe 1982; Koch and Oesterreicher 1985)

17

However, in line with her differentiation of the private/non-private and public/non-public dimensions, Dürscheid (2003) argues for a fine-grained classification of online applications on a scale of orality/literacy rather than immediacy/distance.

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still prove relevant and have found their way, in an adjusted form, into more recent and complex approaches and models accounting for privateness and publicness issues in DD, which also have to cope with the new phenomena raised by Web 2.0. Further input has been provided by developments in corpus-based research on registers, e.g. the pioneering work by Biber (1988), originally focussed on offline registers, but increasingly adopted for the linguistic-pragmatic descriptions of social media applications18 (cf. also Sindoni 2013 for a comprehensive overview of research on English language data). 3.2.

Enriched models

More recent linguistic approaches incorporate privateness and publicness explicitly in their models, in line with a more general trend of linguistic(-pragmatic) research from text-oriented to activity-oriented approaches, as demanded, e.g., by Thurlow and Mroczek (2011: xx−xxvii), Page et al. (2014: 108) and reflected in Herring, Stein and Virtanen (2013: 9), among others. The first comprehensive, three-dimensional linguistic model of privateness and publicness is offered by Landert and Jucker (2011). It is inspired by Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1985) model, which contributes the axis of language with communicative immediacy and communicative distance as its poles. Additionally, Landert and Jucker integrate two further dimensions into their model by drawing on Dürscheid’s (2007) differentiation of accessibility (public/non-public) and content (private/non-private), which was also postulated in CS approaches (see Weintraub’s 1997 dimensions of visibility and collectivity and Lange’s 2008 notions of “publicly private” and “privately public” behaviour described in Section 2). Landert and Jucker’s model still focuses primarily on the text itself (as the product of the interaction to be analyzed) and views accessibility, immediacy and content as characteristics of the text itself rather than of users’ activities in the production of the text (cf. e.g. Jucker’s 2010 analysis of live-ticker commentaries as real-time narratives). Despite this text-as-result orientation, their enriched model is suited to coping with issues such as the much discussed topical phenomenon described by Dürscheid (2007: 30−31) as “secondary intimacy”, i.e. topics usually considered in a particular culture as private but leaving the realm of non-public communication in DD and especially in social media. In her study on personalization in the mass media, Landert (2014: 29) modifies the model, replacing the dimension of accessibility (despite public access being a defining criterion of mass media communication) with an interpersonal dimension of involving vs. non-involving communicative settings (see also Landert, Ch. 2,

18

For attempts at using Biber’s model more systematically for the analysis of online forum communication, see e.g. Collot and Belmore (1996).

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this volume for a graphic representation of the model). Involving settings are those “which invite their audience to interact with text producers and to contribute their own content”, often in multimodal ways (Landert 2014: 29). The non-involving pole of the scale denotes non-interactive settings. By changing Landert and Jucker’s (2011) primarily text-oriented model into one that can account for users’ participation practices, Landert’s adjusted model allows for a more systematic investigation of linguistic output in relation to participation patterns. However, in order to account for the public/private dimension of social media use beyond participation, the level of access is central and indispensable for the social and psychological dimensions of privacy discussed in CS. The incredibly complex dimension of content is still somewhat fuzzy in Landert and Jucker’s model. Eisenlauer and Hoffmann show that even one of the most traditional applications, blogs, have to be considered as “intermediary genres in fusing both internal and external information, private and public topics” (2010: 82). For example, they observe that in blogs, stories from the news media are occasionally retold as “news narratives”. This is personal in that it reveals something about the attitudes and the identity of the blogger (2010: 85–86), and yet, the content of what is being retold can be considered as entirely non-private (in Landert and Jucker’s sense of “(traditionally) … suitable for discussion in public contexts”, 2011: 1427). The same holds true for other social media applications. YouTube postings, to name yet another example, can combine the public content of an artist’s performance in a video sequence with the personal comments launched by the original poster and other users. At a deeper (ontological) level, public and private contents also tend to blur from the perspective of users’ digital, often anonymous or invented identities. On the one hand, digital identities are constructed to enhance users’ visibility and their ability to act in public. On the other hand, it is precisely their practiced anonymity that disguises users’ non-virtual private identities and disembodies private content, which is thereby hidden from the public eye and resists access. Allowing for a pragmatic perspective on DD that goes beyond the roots of research on conceptual spokenness/writtenness, Landert and Jucker’s (2011) model can be placed in the context of two further developments central for pragmatic DD-research on publicness/privateness: Firstly, the emergence of new multimodal practices in social media to be accounted for, and secondly, the formation of multi-facetted classification models for DD. 3.3.

Publicness, privateness and multimodality

Technological developments and the advent of Web 2.0 have encouraged both massive media convergence and multimodality in the past two decades. Whereas people used to initiate social media contact deliberately, by logging into their user accounts, now many users take it for granted that everyone is permanently logged

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in. Multimodal practices are deeply entrenched in users’ social media behaviour; they usually handle the complex semiotic practices of social media very easily, and the choice of the medium “becomes communicative intent” (Madianou and Miller 2013:169; cf. also Yus 2011: 113). It is thus important that constant user engagement and multimodality are accounted for in new media studies (cf. Thurlow and Mroczek 2011: xxv−xxvi), even if their complexity defies the creation of lean, streamlined and comparatively stable models of description. Yet, while Crystal (2001: 202) already hinted at the features of multimodality in early applications (e.g. the use of hypertext links to enhance interactivity), this aspect was long neglected in pragmatic social media research. Landert and Jucker’s (2011) model, for example, disregards the dimension of channel, simply pointing out that its focus is on language realized graphically and not phonically (and thus implicitly supporting a dichotomous understanding of spoken vs. written, 2011: 1426) – clearly, this is a practical decision (based on the nature of the data analyzed there). Whereas researchers agree that multimodality in contemporary social media exceeds the anchoring of spoken and written discourse by far, the relation between different semiotic resources is less clear. In their KSC-model, Jucker and Dürscheid (2012) postulate a quadro-modality consisting of two main modalities with two realizations each (pictures, still/animated, and language, graphic/phonic), within which, however, the “boundaries between these codes are clear-cut”.19 Sindoni (2013: 2) includes a broader range of semiotic resources (“speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze […] in spontaneous web-based interactions”), but characterizes them as integrated in “unprecedented ways enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users”, see also Stæhr (2015). These modes pose new questions regarding the nature of their interaction and integration and (degrees of) users’ responsiveness to verbal and non-verbal resources. From an analytical perspective, the question “at what level […] integrative analyses of the meanings and functions of the complex whole take place, and what theories and models exist to guide it?” (Herring 2013: 19) requires clarification. Multimodality is obviously not a characteristic of new media applications per se, but Web 2.0 has tremendously facilitated the combination of different semiotic resources, especially the use of pictures, thus making “complex semiotically hybrid textures” possible (cf. Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: 83 on vlogs, fotologs and audioblogs). Thurlow and Mroczek attribute “the potential in new media for invention and creativity” to “[a]ll texts, all communicative events [which] are always

19

But see e.g. Dürscheid and Frick (2014: 173–174) on pictorial writing as a form of iconographic communication in WhatsApp, for which the application provides the necessary technical prerequisites, or Page et al. (2014: 16) on visual icons in Facebook update templates.

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achieved by means of multiple semiotic resources, even so-called text-based new media like instant- and text-messaging” (2011: xxvi). Multimodality can thus be considered an outstanding, but not isolated phenomenon of social media, which has to be analyzed against the background of other new media principles such as multi-linearity, fragmentation and interaction (see Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: 93–100). Which semiotic modes prevail is strongly influenced by the different social media platforms (see Page et al. 2014: 16–17 for a detailed discussion). However, this is not just a question of technical affordances; it is also a matter of “the ways in which people take-up and create the possibilities which they perceive” (Page et al. 2014: 18, drawing on Barton and Lee 2013, see also Lee 2011: 120−121). Thus, users’ choices regarding the opportunities an application offers must be considered in a dynamic, user-centred perspective on social media genres that goes beyond text-based approaches. The multimodal and linguistic choices users make are meaningful in the process of balancing privacy and sociality in social media environments. For example, research by Sindoni (2013) on videochats shows that the written channel is often preferred in cases of secrecy (e.g., when potential overhearers are in the vicinity), and when the perceived intimacy of the contents is high (informants often reported that “written chat proved a ‘safer’ way to express confidential or private feelings”, 2013: 66–67). Systematic considerations regarding users’ choices thus have to be embedded in a multi-layered and fluid notion of context framing users’ handling of multimodal affordances. Page et al. (2014: 33) subsume six levels of context, which all may have an impact on users’ pragmatic privacy choices: participants (people involved in the interaction “and their relationship to others in the group”), imagined context (“projected context created cognitively by participants on the basis of their world knowledge and the cues provided in CMC” – possibly including projected audiences and assumed communities and community membership), extra-situational context (“offline social practices”, including macro- and mesolevel cultural values), behavioural context (i.e. the physical situation in which the participants interact), textual context (co-text) and generic context (i.e. the social media site in which the interaction takes place, including its “stated purpose, rules and norms for conduct”). Current research discusses the impact of multimodal interaction on privateness and publicness primarily as a challenge to the traditional oral/written and immediacy/distance paradigm (e.g. Sindoni 2013). Additionally, linguistic research – just like CS research – has acknowledged another aspect of multimodal devices as significant with regard to the privateness or publicness of an interaction: the capacity of multiple semiotic resources to enhance the construction of new types of contents, such as status updates and profile information (Herring 2013: 5). From a relevance-theoretical perspective, the multiple semiotic resources typical of social media applications provide the context for the construction and inter-

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pretation of pragmatic meaning. This includes, for example, visually transmitted private information at the content level. As Yus observes, pictures, videos and links to further web-applications provide “more and more options for contextualization” (2011: 31) and thus create more assumptions that are mutually manifest for the participants in an interaction. Contextualizing items can be placed in different slots in SNS profiles such as the profile picture, personal information, friends, name and status or the contents of individual comments (Yus 2011: 113). Taking a Gricean perspective in her analysis of YouTube comments, Sindoni postulates a “multimodal relevance maxim” which “assumes that relevance needs to encompass all semiotic resources that are deployed in web-based interactions” (2013: 205, 211). Thus, successful privacy management has at least a twofold impact on pragmatic meaning construction: On the one hand, private contents serve as contextualization cues enhancing the socio-pragmatic construction of meaning. On the other hand, the way a user handles their private information (e.g. the impact of their photos and texts on other users on a SNS) helps to construct and index their identity and status (Yus 2011: 36). At a third level, again quite in line with CS findings, the multimodal resources users exploit in their privacy management of SNSs also have an impact on authenticity and reliability of social media interaction. Pictures, videos or links to further web-applications play a part in contextualizing users within their “hybrid (physical-virtual) personal networks of interaction” (Yus 2011: 26) with “offline identities very much carry[ing] over to online behaviour” (Hargittai 2008: 277). 3.4.

Publicness and privateness in multifeature classification schemes for DD

Clearly, multi-facetted, fine-grained classifications are necessary to account for the complexities of social media, including multimodal practices, new criteria for media textuality, such as hypertextuality, and complex patterns of narrativity as, for example, outlined in Bublitz (2008), Eisenlauer and Hoffmann (2010) and Page (2012). The gradually growing development of research paradigms in this vein was pioneered by Herring’s multi-facetted classification of CMD (2007), an early attempt to do justice to the complexity of social media. It exemplifies the development from primarily text-centered to primarily user-centered approaches by incorporating technological (medium-) as well as social context-factors as relevant facets of CMD-genres20 systematically (for a detailed review see Page et al. 2014: 10–11).

20

See Herring (2001: 612) on her preference of ‘computer-mediated discourse’ (CMD) as the term which focuses on language and language use in computer-networked environments, analyzed by methods of Discourse Analysis to address that focus, and Herring (2013: 6) on why she continues to use the term despite other more recent notations such as DD used in our paper.

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Herring’s scheme offers a suitable starting point of analysis for current social media privacy practices. Already the self-contained facet privacy settings in her system links up with the dimension of access (“public”, “semi-public”, “semi-private”, “private” contexts). Further aspects of privacy discussed in CS are anchored in several other medium-factors suggested in Herring’s (2007) model: message transmission (“one-to-one”, “one-to-many”); persistence of transcript (“ephemeral” vs. “archived”); channels of communication (words, image, sound, video); and anonymity (extent to which the participants’ identities are represented within a site). In addition, privacy issues link up to all situation factors (though to varying degrees): participation structure (number of participants involved and their patterns of active/passive and collaborative participation); participant characteristics (stated and assumed demographic and ideological characteristics, alluding to the problem of whom to tell what); purpose (goals of interaction as a volitional attitude concerning a (group of) user(s)); topic (adhering to the contents of what is posted); tone (“formal” or “informal”, illuminating whether the user perceives the interaction as private or non-private); norms (e.g. accepted (privacy) practices established by the group); and code (the language variety a user chooses, which may be interpreted as an indirect and possibly unintended form of self-disclosure) (Herring 2013: 621; Arendholz 2013: 111). Herring’s (2007) classification scheme still lacks the explicit linguistic dimension outlined in Landert and Jucker (2011); however, it has to be considered against the background of Herring’s (2004) model of CMD analysis (CMDA), a “set of methods (a toolkit) grounded in linguistic discourse analysis […] organized around four levels (structure, meaning, interaction management and social phenomena)”21 (Herring 2013: 4). It includes orality, formality, complexity, efficiency, expressivity as well as genre characteristics to be dealt with at the level of structure, but without relating these factors explicitly to issues of privateness and publicness. Consequently, for Web 2.0 applications, Herring suggests two extensions of the 2007 model and the CMDA toolkit: language structure as a third group of facetted dimensions (though like Landert and Jucker 2011 without going into detail about any structures related to privateness), and the inclusion of multimodality as one more level of systematic analysis in CMDA (2013: 20). However, adopting a privateness/perspective, it is useful to adjust the model slightly by carving out facets related to the public/private dimension, linking these up more explicitly to CS-findings and enriching the model by elements drawn from empirical research as outlined in section 4.

21

To this set, Herring adds a further level of participation patterns (2004: 3, 2013: 4).

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Pragmatics and Communication Science as input spaces for models of publicness and privateness

By now, the “inadequacy of any single or dichotomous model of the public/private distinction to capture the institutional and cultural complexity of modern societies” (Weintraub and Kumar 1997: xiii) has become abundantly clear. In this vein, authors such as Herring (2013: 5, 20), Page et al. (2014: 14, 48–50), Puschmann (2013: 85–86) and Androutsoupolous (2013: 47) argue strongly for inter-, intraand partly also transdisciplinary approaches and for “incorporating findings from neighbouring disciplines such as communication, ethnography, sociology, and social psychology, […] to contextualize language-based approaches” (Puschmann 2013: 102). Some of these contextualizations can be associated with the different disciplines relatively straightforwardly (see Table 4). What all these different disciplines (apart from computer science) have in common is their focus on the user rather than the digital text as the output of users’ online practices (even in the broadest sense of electronic textuality and multimodality discussed in Section 3). Linguistic pragmatics and CS both have a long tradition of including the findings of these neighbouring disciplines into their research paradigms. However, incorporating their “potential of researching how language is used in social media contexts is not always easy to handle” (Page et al. 2014: 48). As Herring (2013: 4) already observes for her model of CMDA, adequate models usually require input from a wide range of studies revealing potentially relevant dimensions of description “in principle from any relevant discipline that analyses discourse”. However, even with a much narrower focus on just one facet of the linguistic description of privateness/publicness (spoken and written discourse and multimodality in online interaction), Sindoni feels that the “textual web-galaxy” with its ever-changing strategies of personal expression and performance does “not allow for stable theories or for the elaboration of models of analysis belonging to one specific field of studies” (2013: 171). Thus, what currently looks like patchwork approaches to privateness and publicness, determined by shifting descriptive interests, requires re-evaluation from a linguistic perspective, (re-)adjusting the linguistic toolkit to a fluid, highly complex online environment shaped by flexible user practices. Herring (2013: 21), for example, exemplifies different foci in analyses of more traditional Web 2.0 applications vs. discourse-focused approaches to contemporary convergent media web phenomena, pointing out that “each is a lens with a central focus and a periphery, and certain phenomena are outside the scope of each”. Whereas the former tend to concentrate on user-created content, user control of content, collaborative processes and folksonomies to distribute public contents, the core areas of convergent media analysis comprise descriptions of media coactivity anywhere online (including mobile phones), communication, social interaction and the language used therein.

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Table 4.

Contributions of various disciplines to public/private conceptualizations

Disciplines

Accounting for

Computer science

medium factors potential of constantly emerging new technical affordances

Socio-semiotics

multimodal privacy practices

Management and business studies

economic and social functions of privacy management (users as customers exploited by or benefitting from massive data mining practices)

Information studies, media studies, journalism, political sciences

users’ gaining access to public and private information as well as visibility through participation in public discourse and the distribution of private information therein

Sociology and (social) psychology

(group-related) aspects of privacy management in virtual communities

Psychology

psychological mechanisms motivating users’ balancing of risks and gains of online disclosure

Anthropology

ethnographically motivated privacy practices (e.g. genderor age-related preferences)

Education and pedagogy

privacy practices in educational contexts; acquisition of culturally determined privacy norms; degree of computer literacy needed for successful privacy management

4.1.

Converging the input spaces

The complexity of privateness and publicness in fast-changing social media applications and the fluid, overlapping and rapidly changing research interests thus require models that provide a framework that possesses exactly this flexibility. We therefore suggest that categories for the analysis of social media in CS and pragmatics, whether already established or newly emerging, should be conceived of as flexible, dynamic input spaces, which researchers can resort to as well as add to, depending on their particular research questions. The notion of input spaces is inspired by the flexibility of cognitive linguistic models as outlined in conceptual-blending theory, which brings together elements from two mental spaces by various cross-space mappings, linking incoming contextual information and more permanent cognitive models “as online conceptual representations” (cf. Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 259). Figure 1 illustrates the categories and facets of description for the input spaces deduced from models from both strands (CS and pragmatics), enriched by categories employed in empirical work on privacy/privateness and publicness, which may serve as a starting point for the further elaboration of both input spaces. In addition it depicts selected cross-space mappings already revealed by empirical research.

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Figure 1. Pragmatic and CS input spaces for the description of publicness and ­privateness/privacy

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Input space 1 is informed by a wide notion of pragmatics and takes into account the relation between the two main dimensions of language and context of interaction, including a socio-semiotic dimension with medium- and situation-factors as meaning-constructing entities. It builds on Landert and Jucker’s (2011) and Herring’s models (2004, 2007, 2013), adjusting the latter to the private/public dimension and adding elements from empirical research. The dimension of language is based on two of the elements outlined in Landert and Jucker’s (2011) model: content/topic (related to Herring’s 2007 facet of ‘subject matter’) and language of immediacy/distance (including e.g. Herring’s facets of ‘tone’ and ‘code’, structural elements of CMDA such as orality, formality and complexity, as well as the categories of deixis and addressivity (Puschmann 2013)). Context of interaction, the second major element of the pragmatic input space, includes user-related and application-related elements. The user-related elements comprise Herring’s participant/participation-related facets (e.g. participant structure and characteristics) and “demographic and ideological factors” (Page et al. 2014: 10), which may be deduced or merely inferred from users’ on- and offline activities. It furthermore comprises activity type, including Herring’s ‘purpose/ goal of interaction’, but slightly broader in the sense of dynamic interactional genre characteristics and hence also relating to ‘norms’, i.e. “conventional practices within the computer-mediated environment” (Herring 2007: 21). Application-related elements include Herring’s ‘message format’, i.e. how contents and user activity are organized on the screen, the display and accessibility of affordances, templates and archiving principles, cf. also Page et al. (2014: 17−18). Furthermore, Landert and Jucker’s (2011) third dimension of publicness/ privateness, ‘access’, is related to Herring’s ‘privacy settings’, her facet ‘persistence of transcript’ (2007), extended by social media characteristics such as persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability,22 and her facet ‘channels of interaction/multi­modality’ (2007, 2013). This last facet involves various semiotic resources and “media richness” (i.e. the combination of resources such as text, image, video), which opens up different choices in terms of amount and depth of personal disclosure invited by different types of social media (Kaplan and Haenlein 2009: 62; see also Page et al. 2014: 15–16). Of course, this list is by no means comprehensive and even though the elements are presented here as separate independent entities, they are closely intertwined. Categories may merge into each other, also depending on the research question, as is the case with the elements content/topic and language (of immediacy and

22

Persistence, replicability, scalability and searchability have also been discussed from a CS-perspective, but as they are inherently application-related we prefer to deal with them in the pragmatics input space.

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distance), with overlapping semantic aspects of meaning revealed in lexical content analyses (cf. e.g. Sindoni 2013 for blogs and YouTube comments). Also, the user- and application-related elements cannot be seen as completely clear-cut dimensions. In order to become pragmatically relevant for the construction of privateness and publicness, application-related elements such as ‘privacy settings’ depend on users’ ability and willingness to handle them successfully. Input space 2 is inspired by the interdisciplinary approaches in CS and includes aspects of privacy/privateness and publicness rooted in psychological, sociological, media and communication categories. Drawing on the vast CS research output, including empirical studies, we have identified seven elements that feed into a pragmatic interpretation of social media content from a privacy angle (the list is, of course, open). Unlike those common in linguistic-pragmatic approaches, all these levels are primarily user-oriented, as they either focus on users’ social and psychological conditions or foreground users’ handling of the different affordances. As outlined in Section 2, dimensions of privacy and privacy concerns include informational privacy and social, psychological and physical privacy. They link up to the pragmatic input elements ‘access’ and ‘content/topic’, but go beyond these in specifying individual elaboration sites of the abstract concept of privacy and in offering a quantitative level, ‘amount’, which relates to Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2009) notion of “media richness”. Layers of disclosure ranks contents and topics of self-disclosure from a psychological, user-oriented (rather than data-protection) perspective as ‘peripheral’ (name, address, friends, etc.), ‘intermediate’ (political views, past-time preferences, etc.) and ‘core disclosure’ (emotions and attitudes). Connectedness may be instantiated in social media applications in many ways, including ‘lists of friends and followers’, which, according to Jucker and Dürscheid (2012), may also lead to asymmetrical (privateness) constellations. Connectedness also becomes manifest as ‘virality’, i.e. the uncontrolled, perhaps also unintended popularity of a particular social media contribution (Sindoni 2013: 181). Privacy management includes ethical self-regulation/self-censorship, i.e. privacy protection strategies (often dependent on internet literacy) such as the use of initials, nicknames and social roles to protect others (Schmidt 2011b: 167–168). Further strategies include providing fake or inaccurate information, excluding personal information, sending private messages within an application instead of posting messages to a friend’s wall, blocking former contacts, providing contacts with access to limited profiles, changing default privacy settings activated by an application, untagging from images and/or videos posted by contacts for self-protection (Young and Quan-Haase 2009: 271) and polysemic performances (constructing different virtual identities for different types of audience on different – or maybe even within the same – social media application). Another element of the CS input space is audience design, which relates to Bell’s (1984) model. It illuminates how speakers’ expectations concerning their

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audience shape their language style (cf. also Puschmann 2013: 93–96 and Page et al. 2014: 23–24) and links up to the idea of users constructing privileged publics. In contrast to ‘purpose of interaction’ as one aspect of the activity type/genre in the pragmatic input space, (large-scale) interactive goals comprise users’ communicative intentions related to ‘self-expression/gaining visibility’ and the social capital they may gain thereby (cf. e.g. Puschmann 2013: 102 for blogs). Using multimodal resources, both goals are easily pursued across different affordances in one and the same application or even across different social media (“cross-media practice”, cf. Lee 2011: 120–121 for Facebook, blogs and MSN). Such cross-over phenomena link up to the element context collapse, i.e. uniting large numbers of users in the context of one social media application, who in offline, face-to-face environments would never get in touch with each other. This is, for example, the case in contexts such as forum discussions and comment sections on online newspapers, blogs or YouTube, where users often interact anonymously and reveal little personal information. The input space model (similar to models used in cognitive semantics) offers not just flexibility, but also the bonus of providing an additional explicit slot, crossspace mappings, which can account for both links between elements of spaces on a single level, such as those connecting pragmatic and CS input spaces, as well as vertical links connecting independent sub-spaces on different levels. After all, as Yus (2011: 288) argues from a relevance theoretical perspective, humans have a “biologically rooted […] cognitive principle of relevance”. Thus, just as in offline interaction, social media users’ practices and choices of interpretation draw on the entire social-cultural context available, including elements from the CS-input space, which as part of “the context and the qualities of the medium […] can influence the estimation of relevance and the very choice of an interpretation” (Yus 2011: 288) and thus the mutual construction of meaning. Therefore, also extra-situational and general context-factors, discussed by Page et al. (2014) and spelled out by Puschmann for blogs, such as the “motivation to blog, the role blogging plays for a community, and the reflection of practitioners on their practice” (2013: 87), are part of the context of the medium also in a relevance-theoretical sense and “call for the addition of ethnographic, sociological, and psychological research approaches” (2013: 87) to exclusively linguistic approaches. Privacy has been an independent research issue in CS for quite some time, with empirical studies covering literally all elements and dimensions of input space 2, sometimes also including user- and application-related aspects of the context of interaction from the pragmatic research paradigm (see e.g. Trepte and Reinecke 2011 and Papacharissi 2011 for an outline). In empirical linguistic-pragmatic research, however, the privateness/publicness dimension has mainly been treated rather indirectly and as secondary to the construction of interpersonal meaning (see e.g. Gruber 2013: 60 with reference to users’ awareness of the public nature of the ‘communicative situation’ in mailing lists and the survey in Table 2 above).

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Figure 1 exemplifies cross-space mappings between the pragmatic and the CS input spaces from empirical research by Puschmann (2013) and Sindoni (2013). Puschmann (2013) provides examples of how elements from both the pragmatic and the CS input spaces can be linked in the analysis of privacy-practices. For example, profile information (such as title, text, author, time of publication and previous postings) provides deictic centres which enhance deictic language (e.g. first-person pronouns, temporal and spatial adverbs, etc.) as one linguistic characteristic of blogs (2013: 91−92). Audience design is shown to correlate with language choice in terms of addressivity/orality in an example of a goal-oriented blog in corporate communication (2013: 93−96, see also Puschmann 2010). (Large scale) communicative goals such as self-expression and gaining visibility typical of the “controlled discourse environment” of blogs (2013: 98) are interlinked with the context-related conditions of access-control in a “topic-centric style” or “author-centric style” with their respective linguistic manifestations (2013: 98−102). Sindoni (2013) correlates elements from both input spaces, e.g. by analysing the impact of privacy concerns (and other factors such as internet literacy, technical problems) on users’ swapping between the written and oral mode in spontaneous web-based video interactions and its effects on face-protection, an important aspect of the psychological dimension of privacy (2013: 64−68). Furthermore, she scrutinizes the virality of a video on YouTube against the background of managing private content from a multimodal perspective including elements from input space 1, i.e. text, gaze, and visual and audio elements in remakes (2013: 181−184, see also Lee 2011 for managing private contents on Facebook, in blog entries and in MSN). Puschmann’s and Sindoni’s work already attest to the utility of an input-space model correlating elements. Relations between other elements from both inputspaces such as ‘content/depth of disclosure’, ‘participation patterns’ and ‘(expected) audiences’; ‘anonymity’, ‘persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability’, and ‘multimodality’ have not been studied systematically and are very likely to yield interesting results. 4.2.

Authenticity, reliability and research ethics

Our discussion has repeatedly touched on authenticity and reliability as aspects of privateness and publicness in the social media, which has turned into “a core value in the production of discourse for a personal public” (Androutsopoulos 2015: 74). Social media authenticity is created in multiple ways, and as users have developed a high sense of normativity and reflexivity, it is also subject to metapragmatic negotiation, as Kytölä and Westinen (2015) observe in Finnish Twitter data. Pragmatic research has just started to understand the complexities of authenticity and identity construction, i.e. “in what particular ways and under what conditions

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authenticity is made locally meaningful, and how it is oriented to, indexed and communicated to in linguistic and semiotic action and interaction” (Leppänen et al. 2015: 1). From a pragmatic perspective on privateness, all the major elements outlined in input space 1 prove relevant. Relating to the dimension “language”, pragmatic studies (not just) of social media have shown, for example, that linguistic features of immediacy enhance authenticity, as users appear to present themselves in the unfiltered, instantaneous ways typically associated with personal face-to-face communication. For example, authenticity is created by cross-over phenomena, including e.g. the use of vernacular language, and other phenomena of linking up virtual to offline identities (e.g. Arendholz 2010: 118; Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: 84). At the content level, the discussion of personal topics with substantial personal detail also enhances authenticity and obviously reduces privateness. Application-related features like multimodality can further boost authenticity, yet, at the same risk. Also visual elements such as photos and videos provide proof and enrich contextualization (cf. Yus 2011: 31). This is also acknowledged in CS studies (e.g. Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010: 267) and, hence, “authenticity” provides a suitable candidate for the cross-mapping space of our model: From a CS perspective, the elements outlined in input space 2 are important as well. CS research has shown that authenticity, e.g. via core disclosure, raises social and economic capital, but obviously impedes privacy. Just like in pragmatic research, topic-dependence has been emphasized in CS, with authentic information “more likely to occur in user-centric than in primarily interest-centric SNSs” (Ziegele and Quiring 2011: 181). For example, “the idea of personal authenticity and subjectivity” belongs to the central norms and expectations in blogs (Schmidt 2011b: 167). As far as connectedness and largescale communicative goals are concerned, offline identities have been found to transmit to the online world much more than originally assumed (Hargittai 2008: 277), and SNSs are often preferred as means of maintaining offline networks instead of making new, online acquaintances (2008: 290). Still, there is, of course, also “impression management” going on (Walther 2011: 7). The information provided via a range of semiotic resources is usually carefully filtered and thus highly subjective (cf. Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010: 252). This might cause (unintended) effects of perceived unauthenticity, which – as Walther (2011: 7) points out – are more easily forgiven among close friends than with less well-known acquaintances, who might be suspected of hypocrisy. Yet, intentional deceitfulness is quite rare in SNS profiles, which tend to be if not honest, then playful or ironic (Young and Quan-Haase 2009: 271). Both pragmatics and CS have been more critical of the reliability of data users distribute when participating in public discourse (e.g. Papacharissi 2010; Herring 2013: 19 or Arendholz 2013: 112 on degrees of reliability in users’ self-portrayal; and Johansson in press).

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The easy accessibility of social media data, their persistence and replicability might appear appealing to researchers, yet, as Eysenbach and Till already pointed out in 2001, “[i]nternet communities’ members do not expect to be research subjects” (2001: 1103), at least not that of research other than marketing studies. Social media research thus requires careful ethical consideration, even more so nowadays when people are constantly logged in and search engines have become much more powerful. As summarized by Rosenberg, social media researchers tend to negotiate the nature of their data between two major positions: “online phenomena can be considered public either (1) if publicly accessible or (2) if perceived as public by participants” (2010: 24). That the de- and recontextualization of social media can be perceived as a violation of privacy has not only been documented in CS studies (cf. e.g. boyd and Marwick 2011: 6, reporting a case where teachers, in order to discuss privacy issues, had shown extracts from the Facebook profiles of US teenagers and thus evoked their anger). It is certainly not easy to find the balance between the two positions outlined above. Eysenbach and Till (2001: 1105) provide a summary of issues to be considered by researchers: intrusiveness, perceived privacy, vulnerability, potential harm, informed consent, confidentiality, intellectual property rights. That the consideration of user perspectives is a necessary step “into the right direction” is also emphasized by Rosenberg (2010: 24). In fact, this step certainly also proves beneficial for researchers’ insights into the fluid notions of privateness and publicness – just like the first-order perspectives recently suggested in other fields of pragmatic research (e.g. on (im-)politeness phenomena). 5. Conclusion Privateness and publicness are incredibly complex notions affected by cultural, socio-historical and linguistic contexts and highly user-dependent. Their conceptualization thus needs to be flexible and multi-layered. As our discussion has shown, it is essential to consider different disciplinary perspectives. Drawing particularly on insights from CS and pragmatics, the input-space model brings together userand text-focused approaches and allows for a more comprehensive understanding of publicness and privateness in the social media. CS, with its predominant user-orientation, helps us to capture the multi-dimensional nature of privacy, including informational, social, psychological and physical components. It offers insights into the gains and risks of (self-)disclosure, the kinds of information revealed by users, the way online and offline aspects of users’ identities are mingled, and the authenticity and reliability of their (self-)presentation. It also provides comprehensive accounts of strategies of privacy management in social media. Yet, actual linguistic realizations are largely neglected in this research strand. In this regard, our understanding of publicness and privateness

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benefits from linguistic (micro-)pragmatic analyses, which are largely – though not exclusively – text-oriented. Pragmatic approaches have considered the impact of the framing conditions of social media discourse. They outline access, content and language dimensions, focusing particularly on linguistic patterns of orality/ writtenness and immediacy/distance. They also consider multimodal aspects of publicness and privateness. Their description is enriched by multifeature classification schemes, incorporating socio-technical facets and thus accounting for the complexity of DD. Overlaps in the conceptualizations of both approaches are made visible in the cross-mapping space of our model, which indicates the proximity of the two research strands under scrutiny and their beneficial correlation. Insights from neighbouring disciplines can further advance the conceptualization of publicness and privateness and thus might demand still more attention in future research. The same is true for the notion of publicness, which so far has often been conceptualized in a rather parasitic way, as the opposite end of the privateness/privacy scale, and certainly deserves more systematic treatment in linguistic pragmatic studies. References Andrejevic, Mark 2010 Social network exploitation. In: Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, 82–101. New York: Routledge. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2013 Participatory culture and metalinguistic discourse: Performing and negotiating German dialects on YouTube. In: Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0. Language and New Media, 47–71. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2015 Negotiating authenticities in mediatized times. Discourse, Context and Media 8: 74–77. Arendholz, Jenny 2010 Need to put this out there (my story). Narratives in message boards. In: Christian R. Hoffmann (ed.), Narrative Revisited. Telling a Story in the Age of New Media, 109–142. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Arendholz, Jenny 2013 (In)appropriate Online Behavior: A Pragmatic Analysis of Message Board Relations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Barnes, Susan B. 2006 A privacy paradox: Social networking in the Unites States. First Monday 11 (9). http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1394/1312 (last accessed 15 September 2016). Baron, Naomi S. 2013 Instant messaging. In: Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 135−161. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

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Locher, Miriam A. 2013 Internet advice. In: Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 339–362. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Loosen, Wiebke 2011 Online privacy as a news factor in journalism. In: Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds.), Privacy Online. Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web, 205–218. Heidelberg/Dordrecht/London/New York: Springer. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller 2013 Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169–187. Mallan, Kerry and Natasha Giardina 2009 Wikidentities: Young people collaborating on virtual identities in social network sites. First Monday 14 (6). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/2445/2213 (last accessed 17 September 2016). Mendelson, Andrew I. and Zizi Papacharissi 2010 Look at us: Collective narcissism in college student Facebook photo galleries. In: Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, 251–273. New York: Routledge. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com (last accessed 19 September 2016). Page, Ruth 2012 Stories and Social Media: Identities in Interaction. London: Routledge. Page, Ruth, David Barton, Johann W. Unger and Michele Zappavigna (eds.) 2014 Language and Social Media. A Student Guide. London/New York: Routledge. Papacharissi, Zizi 2010 A Private Sphere. Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Papacharissi, Zizi 2011 A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York: Routledge. Papacharissi, Zizi 2014 On networked publics and private spheres in social media. In: Jeremy Hun­sin­ ger and Theresa Senft (eds.), The Social Media Handbook, 144–158. London/ New York: Routledge. Papacharissi, Zizi and Paige L. Gibson 2011 Fifteen minutes of privacy: Privacy, sociality, and publicity on social network sites. In: Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds.), Privacy Online. Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web, 75–89. Heidelberg/ Dordrecht/London/New York: Springer. Pérez-Sabater, Carmen 2012 The Linguistics of social networking: A study of writing conventions on Facebook. Linguistik online. 56(6). https://bop.unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/ view/257/347 (last accessed 5 September 2016). Perrin, Andrew 2015 Social media usage 2005–2015. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/2015/Social-Networking-Usage-2005–2015 (last accessed 29 September 2016).

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Thompson, John B. 2005 The new visibility. Theory, Culture and Society 22(6): 31–51. Thurlow, Crispin 2013 Fakebook: Synthetic media, pseudo-sociality, and the rhetorics of Web 2.0. In: Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0. Language and New Media, 225–249. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Thurlow, Crispin and Kristine Mroczek 2011 Introduction: Fresh perspectives on New Media Sociolinguistics. In: Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek (eds.), Digital Discourse. Language in the New Media, xix–xliv. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Trepte, Sabine and Leonard Reinecke (eds.) 2011 Privacy Online. Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web. Heidelberg/Dordrecht/London/New York: Springer. Trepte, Sabine and Leonard Reinecke 2011a Preface. In: Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds.), Privacy Online. Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web, v–vi. Heidelberg/ Dordrecht/London/New York: Springer. Trepte, Sabine and Leonard Reinecke 2011b The Social Web as a shelter for privacy and authentic living. In: Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds.), Privacy Online. Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web, 61–73. Heidelberg/Dordrecht/London/New York: Springer. Tynan, Dan 2016 WhatsApp privacy backlash: Facebook angers users by harvesting their data. The Guardian, 26 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2016/aug/25/whatsapp-backlash-facebook-data-privacy-users (last accessed 13 September 2016). Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jörg Schmid 2006 An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 2nd ed. London/New York: Pearson Longman. Walther, Joseph B. 2011 Introduction to privacy online. In: Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds.), Privacy Online. Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web, 3–8. Heidelberg/Dordrecht/London/New York: Springer. Weintraub, Jeff 1997 The theory and politics of the public/private distinction. In: Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds.), Public and Private in Thought and Practice. Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, 1–42. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Weintraub, Jeff and Krishan Kumar (eds.) 1997 Public and Private in Thought and Practice. Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Wikipedia List of virtual communities with more than 100 million active users. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_ million_active_users (last accessed 5 September 2016). Williams, Raimond 1974 Television, Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.

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Part II Social media platforms

5.

Message boards Jenny Arendholz

Abstract: This chapter provides readers with an introduction to the origins, technological exigencies and communicative challenges of message boards from a pragmatic point of view. Furthermore, it offers an in-depth state of the art report about literature regarding various pragmatic investigations of message boards (and related online platforms), spanning the period of their inception in the mid 1990s until today. Most studies cited in this chapter focus on interpersonal pragmatics, including analyses of interpersonal relations, identity construction and advice giving or seeking. There are only a handful of papers that adopt a different perspective, which shows that in contrast to other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) such as emails or blogs, scholarly research on message boards is still limited, both topically as well as in terms of figures. Message boards still need to gain a fixed place in standard literature about CMC. 1. Introduction Over the past two decades, websites inviting discussions have become an integral part of the Internet. Even pages with a different agenda, such as online newspapers and certain businesses, have set up sections on their website to bring together like-minded people with similar interests. The topics which are being discussed are as diverse as the names users give to these kinds of discussion platforms: To that effect, you can contribute to Internet, Web, online or discussion forums/fora,1 but also message or discussion boards, bulletin boards and (electronic) discussion groups, or, as Crystal (2006: 134–156) likes to call them, asynchronous chatgroups. Unfortunately, there is only very little scholarly research and literature (see part 3 of this chapter) dedicated to investigating, let alone defining these different notions. Consequently, this type of social media is still to large parts uncharted territory. To guarantee legibility, this chapter will give preference to the notion message boards, which is among the prevalent terms used in the relevant literature. The aim of this chapter is twofold: providing readers with a technological introduction to the social media platform message boards from a pragmatic point of view and offering an in-depth state of the art report about literature regarding

1



Note that there is no agreement on the formation of the plural among message board users, let alone in scholarly research, as both terms seem to be used in equal measure.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-005 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 125–149. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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various pragmatic investigations of message boards (and related online platforms), spanning the period of their inception in the mid 1990s until today. In detail, Section 2.1 sets out to give an overview of the historic roots. The technological prerequisites of message boards and their implications for studies in pragmatics are depicted in Section 2.2, which also outlines users’ options to partake in message board interaction in order to exchange information, establish relationships and present themselves. Section 3 is dedicated to the documentation of the (surprisingly slim) array of pragmatic research on message boards. After some general remarks about the status of message boards within the comparatively vast amount of literature dealing with CMC in general (3.1), the following sections bear witness to the fact that interpersonal pragmatics takes pride of place in the investigation of online message boards. In particular, Section 3.2 summarizes a relatively large quantity of monographs and papers which explore facework, politeness, impoliteness, flaming, conflict and codes of conduct, in short the negotiation of interpersonal relations, from various angles. Most of them base their analyses on standard literature such as Goffman (1967), Brown and Levinson (1978) and Locher and Watts (2005). Section 3.3 recapitulates or references to several studies about identity construction. As this topic is closely related to interpersonal relations, a clear-cut differentiation between the two cannot always be effectuated. The same holds true for Section 3.4, in which literature about advice and authority are summed up. Finally, Section 3.5 is a multifaceted compilation of studies which go beyond mainstream (i.e. interpersonal) pragmatic topoi. In contrast to previously mentioned studies, the ones cited in 3.5 vary also in that message boards do not necessarily take center stage. Last but not least, Section 4 rounds off this chapter by offering some concluding remarks. Thus the reader will be introduced to the technological exigencies and communicative challenges of this type of social media while, at the same time, gaining a substantial overview of pragmatic research about this particular Internet platform.

2.

Some technological essentials reviewed from a pragmatic perspective

2.1.

Origins and early developments

The roots of message boards, as we know them today, can be traced back to the Usenet, a network of host computers which enables users to “post messages to newsgroups that can be read (and responded to) by anyone who has access to the system through a newsreader” (http://harmsen.net/ahrc/news.htm, 02 February 2016). The Usenet, which was originally set up as an experimental bulletin board system at the University of North Carolina in 1979 (Jasper 1997: 12), comprised the ever-expanding newsgroups, now hosted by Google and covering every conceivable topic. The current status of these newsgroups, which reached their prime

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in the mid 1990s (Crystal 2006: 135), is somewhat obscure. Some users insist on their unbroken existence, others perceive them in decline (cf. Yus 2011: 223) or even as electronic ghost towns. A newsgroup should not be confused with contemporary message boards and is defined by Marcoccia (2004: 217) as follows: A hierarchically-organized forum open to users interested in a specific topic. Discussions take the form of electronic messages (e-mails), which are sent to the forum by users and filed on internet sites. Users can read the messages filed on the site and also post new messages. Newsgroups are, in fact, a hybrid of interpersonal and mass communication. The newsgroup’s usenet address indicates its content (for example, fr.rec. arts.litterature) and defines the forum’s frame, which is essentially thematic.

Although the latter aspect of newsgroups is also shared by message boards, an important difference between newsgroups and present-day message boards is the need for a newsreader (cf. MS Outlook Express©, NewsAgent© etc.), a program to decipher the contents of the newsgroups (cf. Schütte 2000: 150). Since the year 1996, however, web-based versions of this application gained popularity, rendering the need for newsreaders obsolete. Another forefather of message boards can be seen in mailing lists, or a Listserv, which is “a collective repository of e-mails. Users need to register on a list, and then they will receive the messages sent by any of its members to its electronic address” (Yus 2011: 224). Present-day message boards and their predecessors are thus platforms of communication for self-selected participants who collect, categorize and offer contents relevant for other members, thereby shaping their very own communicative environment both topically as well as interpersonally. 2.2.

Message boards today: Forms and functions

Nowadays, message boards are web based applications which “serve the same purposes as a face-to-face club meeting, where participants share information and enthusiasm” (Biber and Conrad 2009: 190). Most of them have administrators (also known as moderators), i.e. experienced users who monitor ongoing discussions and check the content and form of contributions with regard to their appropriateness. The existence of administrators and their extended set of opportunities of action creates a power differential between users, which can find expression in constant processes of users’ negotiations of desired form and contents of posts. Even in cases in which those processes are not argued out publicly and are therefore not part of the ongoing discussion, their mere existence and results can be witnessed: Some users get a negative reputation (which might even be publically displayed, see below), some posts read “content deleted” (or similar) and other posts vanish altogether. Naturally, all of this can lead to severe disturbances of topical coherence, topic shifts or even the temporary or permanent end of the communicative exchange (cf. Fritz, Ch. 11, this volume).

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Some but not all message boards require the user to register before actively participating in online discussions. In some cases, this registration is even necessary just to read other users’ contributions. This leads to highly divergent degrees of commitment, participation and also willingness to open up. Then again message boards which do not ask for any kind of registration allow for users to never indicate their presence and merely read posts without ever becoming active themselves, thereby remaining lurkers. The number of (registered) users is therefore hard to tell and varies greatly from board to board and from topic to topic. For that reason, users can never be sure who and how many people they actually address. Despite the strong tendency towards a geographically dispersed, ever-changing crowd of participants, “the research to date shows that intimate relationships and development of community are possible online, and that online forums can be productive and sustainable” (Fayard and DeSanctis 2005). All message boards share a common goal: They help working professionals, scholars, researchers, students or, in general, any community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) that is based on shared (sets of) interests to get and stay in touch with each other, to exchange information and to present themselves. Still, they differ considerably in layout and structure. Besides a myriad of layout options which follow the tastes of host institutions and support the purposes of every individual message board, there are two prototypical, classic structures that can generally be differentiated, as illustrated in Figure 1 and 2: As can be seen in Figure 1, the tree structure discloses a chronological and referential order of the ongoing discussion and thus visualizes the argumentative maze. This means that all chronologically ordered chains of contributions pertaining to one particular topic, the so-called threads, can be perceived at once. Owing to the tree structure, message board users can establish reference relatively quickly and can recognize at a glance which entry refers to which. Most of these types of message boards allow for readers to know immediately who started a thread or commented on it (see the nicknames in italics such as Pat and Wendy in the first bullet point in Figure 1) as well as how fast other users picked up on that topic. These pieces of information, nicknames and timestamps, reveal not only how many users are involved in a discussion but indicate also how urgent and heated the topic is. This kind of contextual information (see also below, Figure 2) can prove valuable and illuminating for the interpretation of discourse set in a communicative format which is otherwise rather context-deprived. Furthermore, this schematic representation of headings (standing for complete entries) perfectly visualizes the nature of the ongoing online discussion, which can be flat at times, for example, when all users respond to one entry (see sixth bullet point in the lower half of Figure 1), or rather complex, as in the first bullet point. In the latter case, users do not only respond to the original post itself, but take comments and responses to the first post as a springboard for new contributions. This convenient technique of structuring polylogues, viz. visualizing the conversational

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Figure 1. Message board with chronological tree-structure, http://www.network54.com/ Forum/358339/page-14, 02 February 2016.

nodes, can also become a source of misunderstandings when inexperienced users choose the wrong place for their contributions, thus creating unintended links between unrelated posts and disturbing the conversational coherence. To see the full text version of the entries, users just have to click on these headings. If one page is filled, a new one is opened automatically with new opening posts always positioned on top of the latest page. Older contributions usually do not vanish but are meticulously stored, as they are relegated to other pages posterior to the first page or even to an archive. Discourse produced on such pages should always be retrievable, and is thus less fleeting than its face to face counterpart. In this regard, oral communication and discourse produced in message boards can be seen as two opposite poles of a scale, on which (hand- and type-)written communication as well as that produced on a computer keyboard take middle positions. Discourse generated in hand- and type-written documents is certainly less fleeting then the spoken word and can be read as often as necessary. It is, however, not stored automatically but instead dependent on individuals’ manual filing systems. This cannot be said about discourse created with the help of computers. Although not fleeting either, computer documents can rely on semi-automated, computer-assisted storing possibilities. After all, someone has to click on “Save” for the document to be neatly and (hopefully) permanently stored on the hard drive. In this respect at least, discourse produced with word processing comes closest to message board interaction. The second prototypical message board structure offers their users a thematic

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approach: Choosing from overarching categories first (e.g. sports, university, health etc.) and subordinate topics second (e.g. football, spring break, headache etc.), users are directly led to the full content of the thread discussion. The opening post can always be found on top of the page with comments being numbered (see numbers on the upper right of each post in Figure 2) and positioned strictly chronologically (see timestamp) underneath it. Accordingly, and in contrast to the tree structure, the latest contribution of a long discussion is shown at the bottom of a page or even on the next page, which might take a little bit to get used to. In fact, it is important for users to understand this conversational structure and layout, as it is the prerequisite for their keeping track of the conversation and producing topically relevant contributions. In order to (re-)establish topical coherence, users can click on the reply button, thus creating a quoting box with the original content (see post number 5 in Figure 2). Users even have the liberty to shorten the original post, if they wish to comment only on a certain part of it. Tailor-made quotes can also be used strategically in order to twist somebody’s words or to support one’s own argumentative point by highlighting some and neglecting other parts of someone else’s thoughts. Making use of the quote button in general also helps to address a fellow user explicitly and thus to avoid communicative aberrations. After all, posts are by default addressed to anyone on the board if not marked in any way. What is also shown in Figure 2 is personal information about the contributors (see left hand side of each post), which tries to compensate for the lack of social context cues always present in face to face encounters: Besides nicknames, users can – at least in some message boards – add a profile picture (also known as the avatar) and even more intimate – or fake – details about themselves in a profile section. Profile sections can be used to disclose nationality, current location, study subjects, join date, and star sign, to name but a few. Depending on the number of contributions (which is counted automatically and is sometimes even openly displayed) and “likes”, contributors can also earn reputation gems or diamonds (the actual forms depend on the board), indicating not only their social status in the group but also whether their posts are generally appreciated or not. Some systems even distribute negative credits (e.g. red gems) to warn others of aggressive users. Another option to further personalize a post, which is available in a lot of message boards, is individualized signatures. According to Kollock and Smith this template is “a combination of business card and bumper stickers that members use to display their interests, opinions, and occupations” (1999: 10). Signatures are filled creatively, set to be automatically inserted in every post and appear underneath the entry. Contextual clues of this nature can serve as a basis for investigations into aspects of identity construction, self-presentation and face (cf. Goffman 1967). It should go without saying that the number and shape of these templates is highly dependent on the respective message board and needs to be considered individually for every single investigation. Message boards are a highly chameleonic,

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Figure 2. Message board with topic-driven structure, http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/, 22 February 2016.

multifunctional and alterable type of CMC and escape generalizations and classifications. One common denominator, however, is the asynchronicity of communication (cf. Crystal 2006: 135). Users are not pressured by time constraints when composing or commenting on entries. Consequently, discussions can be continued with or without interruptions over days, months or even years, a fact that users must know in order to avoid wrong expectations. Interlocutors can but do not necessarily have to answer immediately, within the next hour or day. In marked contrast to spoken conversation, users usually cannot know when or even if (or from whom) to expect an answer. What is more, this temporal freedom puts users – at least theoretically – in the comfortable position of composing and editing as well as interpreting and reflecting on complex and well-wrought entries while taking their time (Tanskanen 2007: 89, cf. Suler 2005). Another feature shared by a lot of message boards is sections that help newcomers (so-called newbies) to find their way around. “About”, “Help” or “FAQs” sections gather information about technical details of the board and suggest guidelines for appropriate behavior (the netiquette) in order to avoid alienating the more experienced crowd and to uphold a certain social norm (cf. Spiegel and Kleinberger Günther 2011; Schütte 2000, 2002 for newsgroups and mailing lists; for

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netiquette in the context of the Usenet see McLaughlin, Osborne, and Smith 1995). Among other things, people are advised to avoid flaming (i.e. hostile behavior towards others, cf. Hardaker, Ch. 18, this volumne) and to stay on topic. In case of topic drifts, it is recommended to open a new thread rather than to lead an existing thread into a (probably) unintended direction. Should a user violate the rules of the game time and again, administrators have the right to ban that user, be it temporarily or permanently. As the two examples taken from the netiquette show, online behavior – all differences in the communicative setup aside – should not differ from social norms prevalent in face-to-face conversations, which users take as a blueprint both in creating as well as comprehending contributions. Last but not least, posts are basically phrased with the help of users’ keyboards, although most of the message boards also allow for multimodality, i.e. the insertion of audio-visual elements, such as pictures, graphics, sound bites, videos, links etc. Verbal input is thus complemented with stimuli for other senses, which clearly enrich communicative exchanges via message boards, widen the possibilities for individuals’ needs for expression and thus go far beyond options offered by spoken or written texts. Since links to all kinds of websites can be embedded, users can effortlessly choose from a wide range of prefabricated contents on the Internet, all of which lend themselves to making contributions more vivid and diversified.

3.

Pragmatic studies of message boards

3.1.

General observations

Despite the fact that message boards have been enjoying great popularity ever since, they still take a back seat to the ‘classic’ types of CMC such as chat, websites and email. These are the Internet platforms which are discussed in most detail and oftentimes even in separate chapters in introductory handbooks and edited volumes (e.g. Runkehl, Schlobinski and Siever 1998; Crystal 2001; Thurlow, Lengel and Tomic 2004; Beißwenger, Hoffmann and Storrer 2004; Androutsopoulos et al. 2006; Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2013). Although this is not the case for message boards and their namesakes, they still seem to be gaining momentum in terms of scholarly perception, at least to a certain degree. This can be seen when looking, for example, at David Crystal’s publications: While there was no reference to message boards in 2001, the second edition of the same introduction mentions newsgroups and bulletin boards and gives an introduction to asynchronous chatgroups (Crystal 2006: 134–156). In his latest publication, a student guide from 2011, message boards are again only mentioned in passing. There are, however, other introductory volumes dedicating at least some space and thought to message boards, such as Herring (1996), who mentions bulletin board systems, discussion lists, electronic forums and the Usenet and who presents several studies that

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include forums. Misoch (2006) cites a list from the Internet (but does not comment on it) summarizing aspects of newsgroup netiquette. Page et al. (2014) also use examples from message boards, among other types of CMC. A systematic and comprehensive introduction to the language and linguistics, let alone pragmatics of message boards, is still missing, though. We do, however, find very detailed and highly practical, yet mostly outdated introductions to the Usenet and newsgroups (Bins and Piwinger 1997; Jasper 1997; Fabrot 2001). In addition to that, very few (online) publications deal with practical aspects of message boards, i.e. advice and support services on how to access, join or create a message board (e.g. Donnerhacke 1996; Münz 2002). A great part of that literature focuses on the technical side of online communication, mostly stressing computer programming. On the one hand, there are surprisingly few monographs but quite a few papers which investigate message boards in its own right as a stand-alone subject. On the other hand, there are also publications that make use of this type of CMC – most of the time along with others (e.g. email or blogs) – to illustrate their respective object of investigation with the help of online examples, sometimes contrasting them with examples from oral and/or written contexts. Both of these two broad categories have one thing in common, though: the distinct focus on interpersonal pragmatics, mirrored by studies about facework, (im)politeness and conflict (see Section 3.2) as well as about identity construction (see Section 3.3). The preference for this field of research is also expressed by a special issue of Pragmatics, edited by Locher, Bolander and Höhn (2015), whose introduction reviews literature on (im)politeness and relational work in the context of CMC. Publications addressing other branches of pragmatics are in the minority and will be reviewed separately (see Sections 3.4 and 3.5). 3.2.

Facework, (im)politeness and conflict in message boards

Baym (2000) was the first to adopt an interpersonally pragmatic perspective when looking at message boards – without even using the terms interpersonal, pragmatics or message boards, though. Her longitudinal study pioneered in presenting the ethnography of an Internet soap opera fan group which interacted via the female-dominated soap newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps, or r.a.t.s. for short. She offers an in-depth description of the inner workings of this particular online community and focuses on functions of posts (such as informative and interpretive as well as their interplay), interpersonal relationships (including creating friendship and managing conflict), group norms and the development of individual identity (cf. precursory studies by Baym from 1995a, 1997, 1998). Since Baym’s study is not a pragmatic analysis per se, introductions to basic analytical frameworks one might expect in this context (e.g. Goffman 1967; Brown and Levinson 1978) or terminological discussions about central notions such as identity or norm are evidently missing.

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These can, however, be found in Maricic (2005), who, when comparing three discussions each of a moderated “Musiclassical” mailing list and the non-moderated alt.news-media newsgroup, focuses on facework, (im)politeness and conflict (cf. also, respectively, Locher and Bolander, Ch. 15, Graham, Ch. 17 and Bolander and Locher, Ch. 22, this volume). After a short introduction to CMC and discourse, Maricic reviews the development of the complex notion politeness, a core concept in linguistic pragmatics, with reference to classic models proposed by Lakoff (1973), Grice (1975) and Leech (1983), to name only three. She presents Brown and Levinson’s (1978) face-saving model as the theoretical foundation of her analysis and discusses verbal conflict and flaming, i.e. hostile language in the broadest sense. Her examination of the two discussion groups shows fifteen different types of facework, which she subclassifies as confrontational, cooperative and evasive – categories which serve as complements to Brown and Levinson’s original model. Linguistic resources used to execute these different types of facework include terms of address and salutations for cooperative politeness strategies and indefinite pronouns and passive constructions for evasive expressive behavior (2005: 202). Her in-depth analysis of the six threads further shows different functions of facework as well as various conflict management styles. In conclusion, Maricic disagrees with “the popular belief according to which predominantly textual computer-mediated interaction […] is a ‘faceless’ kind of interaction” (2005: 213). Instead, she shows that “the participants’ self-, other-, or mutual face concerns did transpire quite clearly in their messages” (2005: 213), leading her to argue for increased facework due to the absence of non-verbal cues. Strategies for controversies in two competing message board threads about historical arms and armor, both regulated by moderators, are central for Khorasani’s (2009) investigation. He tries to find out “to what extent the new medium of the Internet has changed the nature of […] controversies” (2009: 12) from the early modern period to present-day online discussions, with “pamphlets as an early medium for carrying out controversies” (2009: 17) being the object of comparison. So far, this is the only study which has been authored by a moderator of an online discussion group dedicated to that particular topic. After introductions to social networks, the socio-cultural context of message boards and the object of investigation on the one hand and to the topic of conflict and controversies on the other, “a framework to explain the nature of human conflict and its different forms” (2009: 17) is provided. Khorasani also shows communication principles for both time frames and explains how they changed over time. His main goal is, however, identifying and analyzing (as well as comparing) individual moves and strategies in (pamphlets and) message boards, among them “opening moves, attacking moves, defensive moves, counterattacks, deflecting moves, accusations regarding the violation of certain principles, neutral moves, the usage of rhetorical questions, and the usage of direct questions” (2009: 181). Khorasani comes to the conclusion that “online discussion forums seem to be a modern substitute for pamphlets to carry

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out controversies” (2009: 280), although the communicative principles did change over time, which is partly due to medium-dependent structures (2009: 278). On a related note, there are quite a few studies which are interested in (the verbal expression of) (im)politeness and/or rudeness, disagreement and conflict, among them Angouri and Tseliga (2010), who analyze “impolite talk” produced deliberately in two communities of practice, i.e. Greek students and professional academics, and Kleinke and Bös (2015), who want to know “how participants use intergroup rudeness as a means of in- and outgroup construction [and] how intergroup rudeness is metapragmatically negotiated” (2015: 47, cf. LeBlanc 2010). In her pioneering and oft-cited paper, Herring (1994) puts special emphasis on the difference between men and women with regard to (im)politeness and flaming, i.e. “hostile and abusive message content” (1994: 278). She proves the claim that “men and women have different ideas of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior on the net” (1994: 278), concedes, however, that these gender differences cannot be explained by politeness alone (1994: 279). In order to avoid conflict in the first place, users have to negotiate their code of conduct. Schütte (2000, 2002) takes a closer look at meta-communication in newsgroups and mailing lists which attempts to set norms among the users in the form of netiquettes and FAQs. Although a reasonable and necessary step in online communication, Schütte also shows that merely addressing diverging concepts of normative behaviour can in itself create new potential for conflict (2000: 144). The same holds for quotes. Despite the fact that they are a convenient means for establishing (mostly) unambiguous reference between utterances, they also bear the risk of polarizing positions between interlocutors. Similarly, Kleinke (2012b, cf. Arendholz 2015) examines the interface between interpersonal/intergroup functions (including criticism), quotations and the construction of coherence. Two sample threads from an English and a German message board accompanying non-tabloid broadcast media (cf. Kleinke 2007 and 2012a) were subjected to a qualitative study in order to determine how posts are coherently linked via various cases of cognitive metonymy to be found in specific patterns of quotations. In Arendholz (2013), I set out to validate the commonplace remark that communication via the Internet is hostile rather than helpful, let alone interpersonally appropriate (cf. Zywiczynski 2007). I present a detailed introduction to the technical and social background of message boards and to classic and more recent approaches to the whole range of interpersonal relations, including face(work), (mock-)politeness, (mock-)impoliteness and flaming. Instead of choosing between the existing models of politeness, I pursue an integrative approach, incorporating both Brown and Levinson’s seminal model (1978) as well as Goffman’s approach to face and facework (1967) in one framework. I thus attempt to benefit from both models’ advantages regarding their view of interpersonal relations. In addition to that, I also take Locher and Watts’ (2005) model as a valuable blueprint for a classification of different kinds of interpersonal relations, among them negatively/

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positively marked and unmarked behaviour, all of which allow for their evaluation as either appropriate or inappropriate. To account for the vital importance of context in the evaluation of interpersonal behavior, I shed light on contextual factors in general and refer to their concrete realizations in the message board environment under investigation, i.e. one of the largest British message boards, The Student Room. My quantitative analysis of 50 threads (ca. 3300 posts, amounting to ca. 285,000 words) shows that 92.3 % of all behavior is indeed appropriate (of which 85.6 % is unmarked behavior) and only 7.7 % is inappropriate – as estimated by fellow message board interlocutors present in the discussions, who serve as the basis for the evaluation of their co-users’ behavior. In the qualitative part of the analysis, I also detail the various kinds of facework with ample examples from my corpus. In follow-up studies based on the same message board, Arendholz (2014) details processes of face negotiation, whereas Arendholz (2015) investigates the interface between interpersonal relations and quoting (cf. Kleinke 2012b) by asking how the latter can serve as a tool for participants to redefine their relationships. The latest monograph about facework in message boards is presented by Fröhlich (2015). In terms of overall research question as well as structure and content of the first part of the book, this publication is quite similar to Arendholz (2013), as it (also) offers a detailed overview of the field of linguistic politeness and facework on the one hand and the ins and outs of communication in message boards on the other. However, Fröhlich’s study (written in German) puts special emphasis on “Multicodalität”, i.e. the interplay of different codes, such as written texts and pictures, by detailing her reading of code as opposed to mode (cf. e.g. Stöckl 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) and by discussing features and relevant approaches to images, including the pictorial turn (cf. e.g. Sachs-Hombach 2003, 2009). Also, her analysis is based on eight Spanish-speaking threads, amounting to 1003 postings, which deal with the topics cinema, film and TV-series. The computer-assisted qualitative and multicodal data analysis conducted by the software program MAXQDA shows that users are rather concerned with the protection of their own face, i.e. self-face (as opposed to other-face, 2015: 331). They do so verbally as well as non-verbally (2015: 337). Then again the topic shared in these threads promotes what Fröhlich calls “collective-face” (2015: 331). The author also details the use of different codes in that particular online environment and stresses that facework is a continuum, which is why politeness should never be investigated as an isolated phenomenon but as one component of a larger framework, including also impoliteness (2015: 343). A contrastive field study by Kleinke (2012a) supports the idea that, similar to face-to-face communication, interpersonal relations are also negotiated among the participants in message board discussions (cf. Launspach 2000). She compares 900 postings to 22 German and 22 English message boards, paying attention to the special framing conditions of message boards. In investigating frequencies

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and patterns of responses to rhetorical questions, the author illustrates differences and similarities between the two groups and distinguishes between ‘true answer’ and ‘replies’, both of which were given not only by the addressees but also by the addressers. In an earlier study of the same German message board, Kleinke (2007) focuses on hurtful comments to express rejection of the contents of interlocutors’ posts. Kleinke’s survey from 2008, which can be allocated a peripheral place in the field of interpersonal communication, investigates how emotional commitment is articulated in political discourse among laypersons found in 180 posts in three political message boards. She sets out to cover the continuum between emotional attachment and emotional detachment and draws comparisons to related registers, i.e. private conversations and newspaper registers. There are also studies that pay attention to only one particular pragmatic marker, among them Landone (2012), who looks at discourse markers imported from oral conversations in order to regulate politeness in a Spanish message board. She concludes that the technological setup and the participation framework create medium-specific discourse markers (2012: 1799). Grozeva (2015) is interested in hedges as a verbal expression of politeness, fuzziness and vagueness in political discourse found in selected blogs and message boards. 3.3.

Identity construction in message boards

Identity construction in social media in general is investigated in Locher and Bolander (Ch. 15, this volume). But there are a number more specific studies which discuss identity construction in message boards. Hanna and De Nooy (2009), for instance, focus on public Internet discussion boards attached to media websites, which they regard as “a neglected genre” despite their intriguing “possibilities for authentic language and intercultural contact” (2009: 1). As both authors are lecturers in French, they are interested in the pedagogical potential of message boards (cf. Nguyen and Kellogg 2005; Farrell Whitworth 2009 for pragmatic awareness in the context of L2). They try to find out, “[h]ow […] intercultural communication [is] negotiated in online discussion” (2009: 2). By analyzing English (The Guardian) and French (Le Monde) websites, they explore cultural differences and draw up “some guidelines for teaching with and for the use of such sites” (2009: 2). An outline of the interplay between culture and the Internet – in general and with a focus on language learners in particular – is followed by a short discussion of identity construction, which, in accordance with Goffman (1967), is viewed as “a discursive practice” (2009: 124). Since identities are not “the expression of a pre-existing, stable, unified, authentic self” (2009: 124), Hannah and De Nooy give examples for creating oneself online. In a case study, they touch upon Goffman’s concept of footing (1981: 128), which they define as “a stance or an alignment […] with other participants through [contributors’] projection of a self in their message” (Hannah and De Nooy 2009: 148). Among other things,

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the authors conclude that the renegotiation of footing is constant in public Internet discussions and can be ascribed to the complex participation framework in this particular communicative environment (2009: 148). Chandrasegaran and Kong (2006, cf. Chandrasegaran 2006) also focus on stance in online discussions, their target group being, however, high-school students with non-native English-speaking backgrounds. The authors learn that “stance-taking and stance-support are a part of the average high school students’ repertoire of social interaction skills” (2006: 389) and find evidence for stance-projection acts such as the evaluation of issues and the expression of attitudinal meanings, to name only two. Identity construction in message boards also plays a role in Benwell and Stokoe’s (2006) monograph about discourse and identity. Different theories and types of identities (cf. Taylor 1989) are exemplified with the help of three contexts, among them virtual identities. Following the discussion of central notions such as virtual, virtual identity as opposed to real identity, the authors set out to “explore how the absence of face-to-face interaction impacts on identity construction” (2006: 13), leading to the description of unique linguistic characteristics and defining features to be found in their message board data. They also outline, among others, selected pragmatic dimensions by touching on Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975) and its implications for this particular context and offer a case study about newbies’ identity constructions as opposed to those by regular users in various kinds of message boards. Finally, Benwell and Stokoe briefly discuss the newbie identity within the two classic frameworks to politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978 and Goffman 1967). In addition to that, we find lots of loosely connected case studies. Matthews (2010), for instance, explores effects of group identity among computer professionals in contrast to a group of New Age supporters. She concentrates on the types of exchange in order to find out whether the content of the boards matches the communicative intentions (e.g. information exchange or a mere chat). Haugh, Chang and Kádár (2015) analyze deference (cf. Brown and Levinson 1978) as a relational practice and as a means of identity construction in a Chinese message board. In doing so, and focussing on participation order and preferred responses to troubles talk in Taiwanese-Chinese parenting discussion boards, they provide support for the position that relational practices may intersect with the emergence of identities. In his qualitative and quantitative analysis of health identity construction, Marko (2012) examines discussion forums on headache and migraines, perceiving those forums as “a potential site for challenging roles defined by medicine and institutional healthcare” (Marko 2012: 245). Sawyer (2013) presents a microanalysis of linguistic cues in message board contributions which are used by one individual poster to construct identity. According to Sawyer, “identity is not a personal projection of beliefs, values and stances but is instead a collaborative effort between self and others” (2013: 194). Burkhalter (1999) takes as a spring-

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board the fact that physical cues are lacking in online communication, which is, however, not an obstacle for the creation of racial identity as can be found in Usenet discussions. The same underlying assumption is expressed in a very influential paper by Donath (1999). She also has a look at discussion groups at Usenet but pays attention to the special case of identity deception, i.e. the deliberate act of misguiding other users by pretending to be someone else, also called trolling (cf. Herring et al. 2002, also Hardaker, Ch. 18, this volume). Baym (1995b) explores the performance of humor in this type of CMC, disproving the claim that “the medium is inhospitable to humor” (1995b). Her analysis of five exemplary humorous messages (taken from r.a.t.s, see Section 3.2) shows that humor can even be seen as a key component to the creation of social bonds and “facilitates self presentations, common understandings, group solidarity and identity and discussion of problematic aspects of the social world” (1995b). For that reason, Baym labels her analysis “a response to constructions of computer-mediated communication as a socially-impoverished domain” (1995b). Fayard and DeSanctis (2005) apply Wittgenstein’s (1953) language game framework to document the three dimensions roles, social identity, and linguistic style in a case study on an Indian knowledge management message board as a gathering place for information systems professionals. Paying special attention to gendered practices, Herrmann (2007) is interested in finding out about the creation and maintenance of identity and community in a discussion board populated by stockholders. His analysis of 18 threads reveals three main identities taken up by users, viz. mentor, intelligent investor and admirer in predominantly masculine discourse. Eisenchlas (2012) adopts a similar perspective when exploring the impact of CMC in the construction of gendered identities in the context of advice giving in an Argentinean message board (cf. Section 3.4) and examines how men and women produce and are given advice in terms of directness, politeness considerations and affect display (cf. Section 3.2). 3.4.

Advice and authority in message boards

Another branch of interpersonal pragmatics that caught the interest of quite a few scholars is advice giving (cf. Locher 2006, also Morrow, Ch. 24, this volume). Harvey and Koteyko (2013), for instance, explore health communication in spoken, written and computer-mediated contexts, as represented by doctor-patient encounters, patient records and information leaflets as well as online support groups respectively. The latter ones, subdivided into peer-to-peer communication and contacts with health professionals, focus on “the types of advice-seeking routines […], how peers provide emotional support and advice […], how individuals communicate problems to health professionals [and on] the expressive potential of electronic discourse” (2013: 3). Rather marginally, Harvey and Koteyko’s analysis also touches upon notions such as politeness and credibility, concluding that self-introductions are not just lists of facts about users’ medical conditions but acts of storytelling

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(cf. Arendholz 2010), including different kinds of facework (2013: 186). The authors also emphasize the fact that in peer-to-peer advice giving, predefined hierarchies to draw on with regard to authority and expertise do not exist (2013: 187). Discursive moves in a Japanese online advice forum about divorce take center stage in Morrow’s study (2012, see also Morrow 2006 about British users in threads about depression). These moves are analysed in terms of their frequency, sequencing and syntactic forms (e.g. requests and suggestions but not imperatives) in order to identify “distinctive characteristics of advice-giving in the context of the Japanese internet discussion forum” (2012: 275). The most frequent move found in the data was assessment, followed by advice. Morrow points out that his findings are reverse to Locher’s (2006) findings for an American Internet advice column. These contradictory results are, however, ascribed to differences in the classification procedure but also to the fact that Morrow investigated peer-advice, whereas Locher focused on expert advice-givers (2012: 275). This may also explain why Locher did find imperatives in her 2006 study. Japanese cultural values also serve as a backdrop for the investigation of the establishment of relationships and of the expression of stance such as showing empathy and presenting oneself as a fellow sufferer (2012: 276). An additional intercultural momentum to this topic can be perceived in Ruble’s (2011) analysis of English-speaking language assistants in French schools. Among other communicative functions to be found in these message boards exchanges, the author lists gaining necessary information about life and work, ranting about difficult circumstances, commiserating with others in similar situations, and developing relationships, so-called weak ties, which would not exist, if it were not for the online contact (2011: 415–416). Ruble also points out that weak-tie support (as opposed to strong ties between interactants who know each other really well) tends to be superficial and runs the risk of being inaccurate. 3.5.

Message boards beyond mainstream pragmatic topoi

With very few exceptions, the remainder of this chapter summarizes basically isolated studies which investigate various topics that display a pragmatic perspective that deviates from the mainstream trends outlined in the previous sections. What these studies have in common, though, is their (at times marginal) discussion of message board examples. Virtanen (2013) proposes the term mock performatives, i.e. the doing of an act by typing it, for utterances such as “I hereby grant you permission to blow cash on how you look” (2013: 155) and investigates their forms and discourse-pragmatic functions with the help of data from a discussion board on beauty and fashion. In this regard, she also explores discourse transformers, a term she coined to account for “the work that mock performatives do in signaling a shift to a play mode” (2013: 156).

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Arendholz and Kirner-Ludwig (2015) contrast present-day message board signatures with medieval manuscripts in view of (what looks like) quotes to be found in both text types. They use examples from both periods to illustrate that classifying, let alone interpreting the communicative functions of these quotes turns out to be quite complicated, since the presence or even the absence of formal conventions such as verba dicendi or inverted commas is not always a reliable indicator. Thus, the term cognitively isolated quote/reference seems adequate to account for that phenomenon. For instance, one example taken from a message board signature reads “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine” (2015: 325). Although characterized by the absolute absence of formal markers, this statement will easily be classified as a quote by members of one particular group, i.e. Star Wars connoisseurs, but remain a – cognitively isolated – mystery to outsiders. The fact that message boards can also be used as a worthwhile object of study for investigating narratives is shown by Arendholz (2010) and Page (2012). In successfully applying two frameworks originally designed for narrative structures in spoken exchanges, Labov and Waletzky (1967) and Ochs and Capps (2001), my case study shows that, at least in this regard, message boards should be considered a hybrid genre between spoken and written language. After all, four message board posts of varying lengths (ranging between 28 and 2497 tokens), all taken from www.oprah.com, clearly exhibit features of oral narratives as proposed by Labov and Waletzky’s model (e.g. orientation, complication, resolution, coda and evaluations), thus serving as valid examples for online narratives. Interestingly enough, applying Ochs and Capps’ model led to different results, positioning the sample posts in the vicinity of “default narratives”, which are normally encountered in monologic, static and above all written contexts (Arendholz 2010: 140). Page (2012) dedicates one chapter of her anthology about stories in social media to second stories told in message boards. Second stories follow a preceding narrative and “establish clear parallels with the first story” (2012: 30). The author reports about how the collaborative potential of message boards reshapes the narrative dimensions of tellership, focusing particularly on sequenced storytelling created in dialogic structures, which leads to multiple tellers. Page also considers second stories in the context of face, politeness and relational work (cf. Section 3.2). She interfaces them with giving or seeking advice, face-enhancing and face-threatening acts, and in the context of creating identity (cf. Section 3.3). Text samples from message boards also serve as examples for discussions of the notions register, genre and style by Biber and Conrad (2009). They dedicate ten pages of their monograph to the investigation of the situational characteristics (i.e. the communicative setting) and linguistic features of what they call “E-forum postings” (cf. Brock and Seidel 2002 for a discourse analytic study about the text type of message boards).

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Last but not least, Tanskanen (2007) presents a study about metapragmatic utterances in asynchronous CMC, viz. in a selection of mailing lists and message board discussions, asking how and for what purposes participants use meta­ pragmatic utterances. In the end, the author suggests a collaborative purpose in that users anticipate potential problems, try to avoid misinterpretations and work towards successful communicative exchanges (2007: 103–104). 4. Conclusion This chapter about message boards consists of two parts. It explores their historic technological and communicative development over the last two decades and assembles as well as documents the pragmatic research dedicated to the study of this particular type of CMC. A vast amount of different shapes and forms of message boards in terms of layout, topical orientation, but also pragmatic functions is attested in both of these parts. As a consequence, it does not come as a big surprise that message boards enjoy great popularity and are mushrooming all over the Internet. What is really surprising, however, is the relatively limited amount of pragmatic literature which covers message board communication. Most studies cited in this chapter focus on interpersonal pragmatics, including analyses of interpersonal relations, identity construction and advice giving or seeking. There are only a handful of papers that adopt a different perspective, which shows that in contrast to other forms of CMC such as email or blogs, scholarly research on message boards is still limited, both topically as well as in terms of figures. A whole range of different names referring to basically the same type of online platform as well as the inconsistent use of the plural in the word forum is a case in point for the fact that the establishment of a homogeneous research tradition for message boards is still underway. References Androutsopoulos, Jannis K., Jens Runkehl, Peter Schlobinski and Torsten Siever (eds.) 2006 Neuere Entwicklungen in der linguistischen Internetforschung. Hildesheim: Olms. Angouri, Jo and Theodora Tseliga 2010 ‘you HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!’ From e-dis­ agreement to e-impoliteness in two online fora. Journal of Politeness Research 1: 57–82. Arendholz, Jenny 2010 ‘Neeed to put this out there (My Story)’ – Narratives in message boards. In: Christian R. Hoffmann (ed.), Narrative Revisited: Telling a Story in the Age of New Media, 109–142. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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Arendholz, Jenny 2013 (In)Appropriate Online Behavior. A Pragmatic Analysis of Message Board Relations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Arendholz, Jenny 2014 ’You sound very talented’ – Negotiating face in online message boards. In: Christiane Maaß, Gudrun Held and Kristina Bedijs (eds.), Face Work and Social Media, 213–234. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Arendholz, Jenny 2015 Quoting in online message boards. An interpersonal perspective. In: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, 53–69. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Arendholz, Jenny and Monika Kirner-Ludwig 2015 In-between cognitively isolated quotes and references: Looking for answers lurking in textual margins. In: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, 319–342. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Baym, Nancy K. 1995a The emergence of community in computer-mediated communication. In: Steven G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, 138–163. Thousand Oaks/CA: Sage. Baym Nancy K. 1995b The performance of humor in computer-mediated communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1 (2). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1995.tb00327.x/full, 12 January 2016. Baym, Nancy K. 1997 Interpreting soap operas and creating community: Inside an electronic fan culture. In: Sara Kiesler (ed.), Culture of the Internet, 103–120. Mahwah/NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Baym, Nancy K. 1998 The emergence of online community. In: Steven G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, 35–68. Thousand Oaks/CA: Sage. Baym, Nancy K. 2000 Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks/ CA: Sage. Beißwenger, Michael, Ludger Hoffmann and Angelika Storrer (eds.) 2004 Internetbasierte Kommunikation. Special issue, Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 68. Benwell, Bethan and Elizabeth Stokoe 2006 Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad 2009 Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bins, Elmar and Boris-A. Piwinger 1997 Newsgroups. Weltweit diskutieren. Bonn: International Thomson Publishing. Brock, Alexander and Beate Seidel 2002 Text types in computer-mediated communication. The case of discussion forums. In: Christian Todenhagen (ed.), Text – Text Structure – Text Type, 13–28. Tübingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag.

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Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson 1978 Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In: Esther N. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness, 56–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burkhalter, Byron 1999 Reading race online: discovering racial identity in Usenet discussions. In: Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, 60–75. London: Routledge. Chandrasegaran, Antonia 2006 Secondary school students’ stance-support strategies in online discussion: implications for the composition classroom. English in Education 40(2): 22–39. Chandrasegaran, Antonia and Kah Mun Clara Kong 2006 Stance-taking and stance-support in students’ online forum discussion. Linguistics and Education 17(4): 374–390. Crystal, David 2001 Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David 2006 Language and the Internet. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David 2011 Internet Linguistics. A Student Guide. London/New York: Routledge. Donath, Judith S. 1999 Identity and deception in the virtual community. In: Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, 29–59. London: Routledge. Donnerhacke, Lutz 1996 Usenet: Die Einrichtung von Diskussionsforen. In: Martin Rost (ed.), Die Netz-Revolution: Auf dem Weg in die Weltgesellschaft, 70–75. Frankfurt/Main: Eichborn. Eisenchlas, Susana A. 2012 Gendered discursive practices on-line. Journal of Pragmatics 44(4): 335–345. Fabrot, Bernard 2001 Newsgroups: The.little.Internet.guide. London: Cassell Illustrated. Farrell Whitwort, Kathleen 2009 The discussion forum as a locus for developing L2 pragmatic awareness. In: Lee B. Abraham and Lawrence Williams (eds.), Electronic Discourse in Language Learning and Language Teaching, 291–316. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Fayard, Anne-Laure and Gerardine DeSanctis 2005 Evolution of an online forum for knowledge management professionals: A language game analysis. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10 (4). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00265.x/full, 2 November 2016. Fröhlich, Uta 2015 Facework in multicodaler spanischer Foren-Kommunikation. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

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Khorasani, Manouchehr Moshtagh 2009 The Development of Controversies: From the Early Modern Period to Online Discussion Forums. Bern: Peter Lang. Kleinke, Sonja 2007 Sprachliche Strategien verbaler Ablehnung in öffentlichen Diskussionsforen im Internet. In: Steffen K. Herrmann (ed.), Verletzende Worte. Die Grammatik sprachlicher Missachtung, 311–336. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag. Kleinke, Sonja 2008 Emotional commitment in public political Internet message boards. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27(4): 409–421. Kleinke, Sonja 2012a Responses to rhetorical questions in English and German Internet public news groups. Functions of Language 19(2): 174–200. Kleinke, Sonja 2012b Metonymic inferencing and metonymic elaboration in quotations: creating coherence in a public Internet discussion forum. In: Sonja Kleinke, Zoltán Kövecses, Andreas Musolff and Veronika Szelid (eds.), Cognition and Culture: the role of metaphor and metonymy, 87–98. Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó. Kleinke, Sonja und Birte Bös 2015 Intergroup rudeness and the metapragmatics of its negotiation in online discussion fora. Pragmatics 25(1): 47–71. Kress, Gunther R. and Theo van Leeuwen 2001 Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London/New York: Routledge. Kollock, Peter and Marc A Smith 1999 Communities in cyberspace. In: Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, 3–25. London: Routledge. Labov, William and Joshua Waletzky 1967 Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In: June Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lakoff, Robin T. 1973 The logic of politeness: Or minding your p’s and q’s. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: 292–305. Landone, Elena 2012 Discourse markers and politeness in a digital forum in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 44(13): 1799–1820. Launspach, Sonja 2000 Literal or loose talk: The negotiation of meaning on an Internet discussion list. In: Lyn Pemberton and Simon Shurville (eds.), Words on the Web: Computer Mediated Communication, 87–95. Exeter/Portland: Intellect Books. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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6. Blogs Theresa Heyd Abstract: This chapter provides an overview on blogging, both as a digital practice and as an object of research in computer-mediated discourse analysis. It sets out by providing a historical overview on the emergence of weblogs and their typical forms of occurrence, topical reach, sociotechnical constraints, and communicative characteristics. It also retraces how blogging has been understood and analyzed, both from a scholarly perspective and in wider public understanding. The article then moves on to identify key topics which are central for pragmatic analyses of weblogs as part of the social media canon: performance of identity and a narrated self; patterns of interaction and participation; the management of civility and conflict; finally, the pragmatic implications of monetization and commodification. 1.

Blogging: traditions of practice, traditions of research

Weblogs or blogs as a genre1 and blogging as a digital linguistic practice can be considered among the most long-standing forms of social media communication. Indeed, their emergence can be dated to the late 1990s and early 2000s (Blood 2000) and thus precedes the Web 2.0 era and its conventionalized understanding of the emergence of social media, as described by Hoffmann (Ch. 1, this volume). Thus after an initial phase where blogs were largely found among users from tech communities, the practice soon gained social traction and became available to the popular imagination as a quintessence of ‘innovative’ digital communication. This public visibility of the genre probably contributed to its digital “enregisterment” (Squires 2010) as a kind of digital diary. The metaphor of the diary was fueled by certain structural aspects of blogging such as its counter-chronological ordering, and reverberated in the naming of early-day blogging platforms such as LiveJournal. This notion of blogging as an online journal informed many early academic explorations of the practice, and a critical engagement with folk-linguistic notions such as “the diary on the Internet” (McNeill 2005) has constituted a substantial part of pragmatic analyses of blogging. Indeed, the academic exploration of blogging started relatively early and includes not just approaches from media and technology studies, but an attention

1



This account is following approaches such as Herring et al. (2005) in categorizing blogging as a digital genre.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-006 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 151–171. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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to discourse-linguistic and pragmatic aspects. As early as 2004, Kumar et al. treat blogs as “a remarkable artifact of the Web” (2004: 35) and thus as a practice that was well entrenched in the scholarly field of inquiry by that time. In that vein, they describe blogs as Web pages with reverse chronological sequences of dated entries, usually with sidebars of profile information and usually maintained and published with the help of a popular blog authoring tool. They tend to be quirky, highly personal, typically read by repeat visitors, and interwoven into a network of tight-knit but active communities. (Kumar et al. 2004: 35)

In contrast to other similarly longstanding sociotechnical modes, in particular web forums and message boards as described by Arendholz (in Ch. 5, this volume), blogging is thus very strongly associated with the notion of social media practice: From the earliest references to Web 2.0, social networking, social media and related popular terms for participatory digital linguistic practice, blogs have been perceived as one of the substantial pillars of such forms of interaction and participatory “produsage” (Bruns 2007). In this sense, blogging is a persistent communicative practice that precedes the age of social media, yet has robustly survived the advent of later sociotechnical modes such as microblogging and audiovisual formats. The notion of blogging as a “bridging” genre, proposed by Herring et al. (2005), was thus prescient. In their genre analysis of blogging, the authors propose that the blog is neither fundamentally new nor unique, but that it – along with other emergent genres expressed through interactive web technologies – occupies a new position in the internet genre ecology. Specifically, it forms a de facto bridge between multimedia HTML documents and text-based computer-mediated communication, blurring the traditional distinction between these two dominant internet paradigms, and potentially contributing to its future breakdown. (Herring et al. 2005: 143)

The concept of blogging as a bridging, or hybrid, genre will therefore be taken as a cue and starting point here in order to summarize some of the central insights from research on blogs and their pragmatics within a social media context. Section 2 sets out by providing a concise overview on blogging as a social media practice, including facts and figures about usage and distribution, as well as some major approaches to defining blogging, and a brief review on important discourse-linguistic contributions to the analysis of blogs. After that, Section 3 zooms in on a number of specific angles for the pragmatic analysis of blogging, including performance of identity and a narrated self; patterns of interaction conflict; and finally, the issue of blogging and discursive authenticity, including controversial topics such as monetization strategies of bloggers.

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Usage, distribution, definitions

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Basic figures

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As noted above, blogging has emerged as an identifiable and labeled practice since the late 1990s (Blood 2000; see also the timeline provided in Myers 2010: 16). In these early instantiations, blogging was understood primarily as a practice of sharing and filtering existing material, in particular link sharing. In this scene, blogs constituted an early form of informal and personal feeds, rather than sites centered on the creation of content. While the strong embedding of links, and the redistribution of material remains a central feature of later forms of blogging, the primary purpose of link-sharing migrated on to other social media practices, including social networking sites, folksonomies, and visually driven platforms such as Pinterest. The quick and pervasive evolution of blogging from this niche practice to a digital mass phenomenon in the following years is strongly tied to sociotechnical factors. Specifically, the early 2000s saw a quick increase of widely available software and digital platforms that provided easily usable templates to enable blogging. Such early platforms included OpenDiary (founded in 1997, defunct as of 2014) and LiveJournal (founded in 1999); these early sites, whose names carry overt references to writing as a journaling activity, were first and foremost conceived as communities focused on the primary practice of life-writing. In their wake, blog hosting services such as Blogger (launched in 1999, later acquired by Google) and WordPress (launched in 2003) became a motor of blogging as a widespread and everyday practice. It can be assumed that the combined sociotechnical features of such services were crucial to this development, offering easily usable templates that made blogging available to a wide audience, while also providing an inbuilt online community through their social network aspect. This had profound and lasting effects on blogging as a digital genre: despite the continued importance of multimodal practice and the embedding of pictures, videos and external material (see Section 2.3 below), blogging has become a practice that is first and foremost conceived of as a genre of text production, so that a prototypical understanding of a blog is a collection of (self-)authored text, and blogging is seen as a writing activity. Since these early days, blogging has remained one of the staples of social media practice, and has endured through the rise and spread of competing sociotechnical modes such as microblogging and the central role of Facebook in the social media landscape. It has been notoriously difficult to provide reliable statistics on the number and distributions of blogs, because blogging is distributed between many different hosting contexts, ranging from major blog hosters such as the ones mentioned above, to smaller sites, as well as many individual and decentralized blogs. In this sense, blogging as a global practice is much harder to measure than social

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media genres geared toward single-site usage such as microblogging through Twitter. With this caveat in mind, widely quoted estimates give a number of blogs between 150 million and 200 million. For example, a statistic provided by Nielsen (NM Incite 2011) indicates a total of 173 million blogs worldwide as of October 2011, and suggests an almost linear rise through the years from 35 million blogs in October 2006. As Puschmann (2013: 79) stresses, the relevance of such numbers is limited not just because of their lack of precision, but because the sheer existence of a blog says little about its vigour as a site of active linguistic practice. Thus many blogs are quickly abandoned, dormant or entirely fossilized. By consequence, a more meaningful metric may concern the number of blog posts written daily: here, frequently quoted estimations range around 2 million blog posts per day. However, this number may well be underreported, given that the platform WordPress alone self-reports a figure of 65 million new posts per month on its own web-hosting platform (https://wordpress.com/activity/posting). Finally, such figures centered on production do not factor in the reach and reception of blogging. From a pragmatic point of view, the consumption of blogs by readers and the redistribution of texts through sharing practices on social media also needs to be taken into account. Indeed, wider psychological factors have been applied to blogging as a discursive practice. Studies such as Guadagno, Okdie and Eno (2008) align blogger identities with personality trait paradigms such as the Big Five and suggest “that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers” (Guadagno, Okdie and Eno 2008: 1993). While such psychological categorizations are almost certainly painted with too broad a brush, it seems crucial to keep in mind that blogging does play an important role in identity construction and negotiation; this issue is taken up again in Section 3. 2.2. Definitions Attempts at defining blogs as a genre, and blogging as a digital practice, vary according to different research perspectives, as Puschmann (2013: 77–79) has noted. Thus blogging may be understood through its form and sociotechnical constraints, its genre particularities, its (pre-digital) genre antecedents and (digital) genre neighbors, its prototypical domains of content,2 its role as a social practice or through its socio-pragmatic effects and regularities.

2



While specific types of content are not perceived as a particularly meaningful or salient predictor for genre status by many genre theorists, it seems likely that at least certain topic-based subgenres of blogging (such as fashion blog, travel blog, corporate blog etc.) become relevant in the perception of users.

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As many others, an early definition proposed by Herring et al. (2005) is strongly focused on the technical givens of blogging, describing blogs as “frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (Herring et al. 2005: 142). This minimalistic definition highlights the reverse chronological display of blog entries that is part of the template which blogging software provides; it likens blogging to web pages as a neighboring genre; and it touches on the social practice of blogging, noting the frequent modification that is part of prototypical blogs. A slightly later definition by Schmidt (2007) starts out with a remarkably similar approach, yet includes a much stronger focus on the social and particaptory features afforded through blogging, including digital-performative acts such as commenting, referencing and sharing blog posts: Weblogs […] are frequently updated websites where content (text, pictures, sound files, etc.) is posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Readers often have the option to comment on any individual posting, which is identified by a unique URL. Through such comments and references to other online sources in the postings, as well as through links to favorite blogs in the sidebar (the “blogroll”), blogs form a clustered network of interconnected texts: the “blogosphere”. (Schmidt 2007: 1409)

As noted above, many theorists have sought to define blogging with reference to antecedent or neighboring genres. The early, folk-linguistic notion of blogging as a form of diary-keeping, as outlined in Section 1, can be found in many early discourse-linguistic approaches (see e.g. Yus 2007:15, who describes blogging as “mostly a kind of diary”). In later treatments, this homogeneous notion has been replaced with more nuanced models that attend to the vast variation in audience design that can be found among bloggers. Thus Puschmann (2009) proposes a differentiation between “ego blogs” and “topic blogs”, which may vary dramatically in audience design, reach, and a continuum of intimacy vs. openness. Other genre analyses of blogs have likened them, amongst other forms of textual practice, from journalism and letters to the editor, to websites (see above) and online communities/newsgroups (see Herring et al. 2005 for an overview). The genre analysis conducted by Herring et al. (2005) ultimately situates blogs as a “bridging genre” that is not only generally hybrid in different ways, but which specifically unites properties of static HTML documents (such as personal homepages) and the lively interaction and easy handling of text-based online communities. This assessment, delivered just before the dawn of social media as the new central paradigm of research into digital linguistic practice, still seems to captivate some of the most relevant genre features of blogging. Definitions have also attended to the typical domains or fields of content that blogging has covered, a topic that is closely connected to the different types of audience design mentioned above. In keeping with the notion of a “digital diary”, many attempts at definition have focused on personal blogs as a seminal content

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category. Herring et al. (2005), based on structural analysis of a random sample of publicly available blogs, found over 70 % to be such personal, or “diary” blogs. As Scheidt (2006) highlights, these personal blogs are characterized by “their ability to blend personal narrative with performance characteristics”. Within this personal domain, variation in terms of topic choice and content is considerable, and the personal blogosphere is accordingly differentiated into a complex network of digital communities of practice. These can cover topics including personal feelings and family matters (see e.g. Scheidt 2006 on adolescent blogs; Friedman and Calixte 2009 on “mommy” blogs), sports and leisure (e.g. Cox and Blake 2011 on food blogs), popular culture, health and sickness (e.g. Page 2008 on narratives of illness on personal blogs), lifestyle and fashion (e.g. Rocamora 2012), career and worklife, and many others. As Scheidt (2006) points out, it can be a feature of such personal blogs that some or all entries may not be open access but password-protected or entirely private. While the emphasis placed on personal blogs in existing research is justified through the importance that the practice holds, other forms of blogging also exist. In particular, this concerns blogs that are communal efforts, written by a team of contributors or in the style of a (relatively) open platform. Communal blogging was a focus of early research (e.g. Krishnamurthy’s 2002 analysis of content aggregation blogs such as Metafilter); it is particularly relevant to those domains of blogging which intersect with online journalism (Wall 2005; Gillmor 2006) and open science on the web (Shema, Bar-Ilan and Thelwall 2012). Finally, corporate blogs have attracted considerable research (Puschmann 2010): in this case, blogging serves a company’s self-representation, and pursues organizational goals, in contrast with the individuated domains outlined above. The communicative design and implications of corporate blogs crucially touch on issues of monetization and commodification of blogging as a genre, which will be taken up for further inquiry in Section 3. Finally, blogs can be described and defined in terms of the semiotic resources they make use of and that make up the bulk of their material. A duality can be noted here: on the one hand, many definitions have emphasized the almost inherently multimodal and heterogeneous potential of blogging. Thus the sine qua non condition of enriching blog posts with links to extraneous material is stressed routinely in descriptive accounts of blogging (e.g. “verbal-visual discourses”, Yus 2007: 18). Indeed, some approaches focus on subforms of blogging that are characterized by the reliance on a specific audio/visual mode. This concerns in particular the realm of video blogging or “vlogging” (see studies by Frobenius, e.g. 2010; 2014), but also subforms of blogging such as photo blogs (e.g. Heyd 2014) or generally “visual blogs” (Badger 2004). In this sense, multimodality and the incorporation of heterogeneous sources and semiotic codes can be considered one key feature of blogging as a genre, even more so as visually oriented blogging platforms such as Tumblr are gaining in relevance. At the same time, it is perhaps

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not surprising that the bulk of linguistically oriented, and in particular pragmatically oriented, research has been directed toward the other end of the modality spectrum, namely toward blogging as discourse and discursive practice in a narrower sense. Within this framework, blogs are primarily understood as a social media practice that is shaped by textual entities. These textual entities – first and foremost blog entries, but also metadata and commenting sections, sidebars and blogrolls, and other discursive elements – are seen as interacting building blocks which, taken together, constitute blogs as a complex text-oriented genre. As an example of such text-centric approaches, Grieve et al. (2010: 303) formulate that “[blog] postings tend to consist primarily of raw text, but may also contain hyperlinks and other media, including picture, video and sound files”. As a consequence, much of the discourse-linguistic literature on blogging has oriented toward the analysis of such text-based features by examining them with the tools available to discourse linguistics: through concepts such as genre and narrativity; through pragmatic accounts of deixis, speech acts and cooperation; through analysis of interaction, intertextuality and conflict. Myers (2010: 4) epitomizes this tendency by noting that “despite all the possibilities open to bloggers for inclusion of pictures, sound and video, written language remains central to most blogs”. Discourse-centric approaches to blogging, understood in this vein, thus form the basis for the remainder of the overview provided here. 2.3.

Key texts in discourse-linguistic research on blogging

Blogging can be considered, overall, as a well-studied phenomenon within the tableau of social media studies. With blogging as a digital linguistic tradition well in its second decade, a number of book-length studies have been published. Not including the myriad practical guides and other purely popular books (which address topics such as how to design, improve or monetize a personal blog), scholarly publications have often taken a broad perspective that also includes accounts coming out of the community of practice, and addressing a wide audience. This is the case in We’ve got blog: How weblogs are changing our culture, edited by Rodzvilla (2002), which probably constitutes the earliest book-length treatment of the subject, but also the edited volume by Friedman and Calixte (2009) on Mothering and blogging. Rettberg’s (2014/2008) monograph Blogging gives an overview from a broad communication and digital studies perspective, and thus contains a number of observations that are relevant for discourse-linguistic and pragmatic researchers. Finally, Myers (2010) on The discourse of blogs and wikis is an explicitly discourse-oriented monograph which includes pragmatic and sociolinguistic analyses of blogging; because the book is conceived primarily as a coursebook for students, it gives a sweeping overview rather than in-depth analyses. Apart from these broad perspective monographs, there is a growing number of book-length studies that adopt a more specific approach to blogging. In many

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cases, these monographs are the result of PhD work and similar project-based studies. Amongst others, some of the influential topic-based monographs here include Bolander (2013) on Language and power in Blogs; Frobenius (2014) on The pragmatics of monologue: interaction in video blogs; Hoffmann (2012) on Meaning and interaction in personal weblogs; Puschmann (2010) on The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication; or Scheidt (2016) on Scholarly and producer perceptions of genre in female and male adolescent weblogs. Regarding blogging as it is represented in handbooks, the contribution by Pusch­mann (2013) to the handbook of Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication stands out, in that it provides the most concise yet complete overview on blogging from a broad pragmatic perspective. Handbook entries are also found in the volumes edited by St. Amant and Kelsey (2008) and Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2015). Finally, individual articles on blogging that adopt a discourse-linguistic or pragmatic perspective have become so numerous that they are not easily condensed into an overview. Many of these individual papers are referenced and/or discussed in Sections 2 and 3 of this chapter. To single out two seminal works that did much to set the scene for ensuing discourse-linguistic work on blogging, mention must be made here of the two coordinated studies by Herring et al. (2005) on “Weblogs as a bridging genre”, and Herring and Paolillo (2006) on “Gender and genre variation in weblogs”. These two papers, with their respective foci on more pragmatically oriented genre analyses and more sociolinguistically oriented variation studies, remain foundational works in assessing the language and discourse of blogs. 3.

Analyzing blogging: pragmatic and discourse-analytical approaches

The following overview presents an aggregation of research into blogging from a (more general) discourse-linguistic and (more focused) pragmatic perspective. In this sense, the overview begins with those contributions which examine blogging within the paradigm of ‘core’ pragmatic reasoning, i.e. Gricean and post-Gricean theories. This includes the exploration of blogging in the framework of speech act theory and cooperation, relevance theory and politeness, as well as deixis. The overview then moves on to approaches which have a wider and more general overlap with pragmatic research, including analyses of interaction and conflict, genre and narrativity. Finally, by considering ongoing dynamics in blogging such as monetization and commodification, the section concludes with an account of neighboring sociolinguistic approaches to blogging.

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Blogging and Gricean pragmatics

3.1.1. Speech Act Theory While no fully-flegged speech act-centered account of blogging has so far been proposed, the analysis of speech acts and linguistic performativity in general has been incorporated into pragmatic analyses of blogging. This seems in particular relevant for specific topic-oriented types of blogging such as journalistic and political blogging. Thus Chiluwa (2011) analyzes the online platform Nolitics as a Nigerian blogger community engaged in political and social argument; in this context, he comes to the conclusion that [b]ecause Nolitics involves a form of social mobilization, the post writers adopt persuasive strategies that tend to ‘direct’ or ‘plead with’ people to perform their civic responsibilities […]. This form of discursive strategy is also evident in the ‘suggestion/ recommendation’ category where post writers suggest how Nigeria’s social and economic problems might be solved. (Chiluwa 2011: 88)

In a methodical paper aimed at extracting speech acts from large blogging corpora, Anand et al. (2011) come to a similar conclusion, noting that “there is likely to be practical value in detecting attempts to change belief or attitude using blog posts” (2011: 3). In other words, where speech act theory is used to assess blogging practices, the focus is likely to be on the “megaphone” character (Puschmann 2009) of blog texts, e.g. on their capability of reaching out and activating communicative networks. 3.1.2. Cooperation and Maxims of conversation Gricean and post-Gricean frameworks have been used to model communicative moves in blogging. Thus Puschmann (2009) examines bloggers’ styles according to the paradigm of cooperation. He argues that, because of the asynchronous nature of blogging, the users here have an option of conforming to the cooperative principle, or of choosing “non-cooperation”: In a blog, where interaction (via comments or trackbacks) is technically possible but not formally required and the possibility to inform is clearly given but not mandatory, the blogger is faced with a choice between cooperation and non-cooperation with his [conceptualized audience]. (Puschmann 2009: 4)

In his analysis, Puschmann loosely aligns these diverging approaches to cooperative behavior with ego blogging vs. topic blogging, suggesting that topic bloggers, eager to get their message out, are more invested in establishing common grounds with their conceptualized audience, and thus more likely to adhere to conversational maxims. Petersen (2011), exploring the notion of blogs as “conversations”, goes even further in this vein of reasoning. Referring to Crystal (2006), he sug-

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gests that “webloggers routinely disregard Grice’s maxims concerning the quality, relevance, quantity, and manner of conversational speech” (Petersen 2011: 14). It should be noted, however, that Petersen does not offer any further interpretation with regard to possible underlying reasons or patterns of interpretations for such potential non-cooperative behavior, other than noting the spontaneous and somewhat unregulated nature of early-days weblogs. In this sense, it may be critically questioned for both accounts sketched here whether blogs indeed routinely can and do show such radical divergence from the cooperative principle. If we understand the Gricean framework in its traditional sense, it is to be interpreted as a very general and fundamental heuristics of all human communication, so that clear and on-record disregard of its maxims usually constitutes the exception rather than the norm in communicative practice. By contrast, Myers (2010: 42–45) uses a more nuanced and specific approach to incorporating the Gricean framework into blog analysis. Specifically, he considers links, as they are habitually embedded in blog posts, through the paradigm of conversation maxims. As Myers rightfully points out, violations of Grice’s framework are always interpreted by the reader as purpose-driven; as a consequence, his analysis focuses on practices of flouting and implicature that are strategically achieved by bloggers. Myers then links this to aesthetic and stylistic effects achieved through nonstandard linking practices in blogs and reaches the conclusion that “(m)uch of the wit and personality of blogs comes in the flouts of the maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner” (Myers 2010: 43). 3.1.3. Relevance Theory Even more so than the traditional Gricean framework, a more specifically relevance-theoretical approach has informed pragmatic research into blogging. While relevance-theoretical approaches share many of the assumptions of the Gricean framework, and in this sense show a considerable conceptual overlap, they are more explicitly oriented toward cognitive foundations of relevance and its implications for intentions and cognitive affordances of bloggers and their audiences. Yus (2007), in his programmatic paper “Towards a pragmatics of weblogs”, lays out such a cognitively oriented work program: What can relevance-theoretic pragmatics do to explain the weblog phenomenon? Firstly, it should be able to trace the [blogger’s] intentions when including information in the weblog. For that purpose, the weblog itself should be used only as a blueprint for the actual intended interpretation. […] Secondly, it should be able to analyse what processing effort is demanded and what hypothetical interest is eventually provided by the information coded in the weblog, basically related to what will be called the “contextualisation potential” of the weblog, that is, the balance of interest and mental effort that the specific verbal-visual qualities of the weblog produce in the readers. […] Finally, relevance-theoretic pragmatics should also be able to decide whether the information coded (and the

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way this information is coded) will eventually be interesting, worth the processing effort (in other words, relevant), basically weighing the balance of the hypothetical reward from reading the weblog in exchange for the effort it demands. (Yus 2007: 16)

As Yus demonstrates in his ensuing essay, this approach can be helpful in modeling certain communicative aspects about blogging as a communicative practice, such as the intentionality behind blogging efforts, or the “relevance-oriented inferences” (2007: 26) that blog readers make. In a similar vein, blog discourse has been used as a test case to explore more specific aspects of relevance and its mechanism. For example, Greenall (2009) proposes a new conceptualization of flouting that is focused on Alfred Schutz’s notion of communicative relevance. While Greenall’s interest is geared toward theoretical reasoning rather than empirical analysis, his treatment nevertheless reveals interesting insights into flouting and other pragmatic mechanisms in blogging practice. He also remarks on a specific pattern of stance-taking that he identifies in many blogs, namely how bloggers typically introduce themselves in terms of making excuses for being excessively wordy, i.e. making sure the reader knows that by entering into the activity of blogging, the writer is opting out of the first maxim of Quantity. It may be the case that when the activity type of blogging has become more established, the first maxim of Quantity will disappear from the frame that constitutes this particular activity type, thus eradicating the current felt need to opt out. (Greenall 2009: 2306)

In this sense, it can be summarized that both Gricean and more general approaches to pragmatic principles of relevance can act as a window onto certain mechanisms found in blogging – mechanisms that may either be very generizable, or that manifest themselves in highly genre-specific discursive moves. 3.1.4. Politeness Politeness can be seen as a further pragmatic approach that connects the Gricean maxim of manner with an interest for facework and relational aspects of communication. As previous research has pointed out, the notion of (im-)politeness in blogging is not an unproblematic one, given the dual involved-yet-detached communicative status of blogs. Puschmann (2013: 89) spells this out in detail: While a blog can serve as an effective tool for active face work from the perspective of the blogger, the capacity for [face-threatening acts] is somewhat constrained by the fact that blogger and audience are relatively removed from each other. Inside the space of her own post, the blogger is in charge – she cannot be interrupted, pressured, threatened or interrogated except via comments, over which she has a high degree of control. […] Thus face threat understood in a way that presumes parties who are aware of each other’s presence does not really apply to blog posts, which may serve to explain their popularity as a personal space that is both visible to others and at the same time protected from undesired intervention.

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Despite this notion of blogs as a “safe space” that affords the blogger with considerable liberties in terms of his or her identity work, analyses have found that politeness can be a significant factor in understanding the pragmatic dynamics of blogging. However, in accordance with the above statement, such issues of facework are often deferred to marginal or residual discourse features of blogging, rather than the nucleus of text-based blog posts. For example, Kavanagh (2010; 2016) provides a comparative analysis of facework done through emoticons in American and Japanese blogs, and Luzón (2011) analyzes social presence and antisocial behavior in academic weblogs. What unites both approaches is that they focus on the comments sections of the analyzed blogs, rather than the original contributions. In other words, facework and face threats become much more salient in those discursive elements of blogging which are explicitly framed as participatory, and where interaction and conflict between a blogger and his or her audience is possible and, sometimes, even encouraged. The same principle holds for works such as Kouper’s (2010) analyses of advice-seeking on LiveJournal: here, the relational work done by bloggers is not so much concentrated on the blogging sections of the platform, but rather on its dual functionality as an online community and network. In this sense, we can conclude that politeness research can make an important, and indeed highly relevant, pragmatic contribution to the understanding of blogging (cf. also Graham, Ch. 17, this volume). However, this is crucially tied to aspects of participation and interaction, and thus pertains highly to the social media nature of blogging. 3.1.5. Deixis Finally, deictic elements and strategies of discourse are often considered as part of the core concerns of pragmatic research. Unsurprisingly, the issue of deixis and deictic anchoring of blogs has inspired pragmatic and discourse-linguistic research. This is in part due to an established notion that digital communication in general is ‘displaced’, detached and separate from the physical world, and that it takes place in a more or less abstract ‘cyberspace’ that bears little or no connection to our physically grounded and anchored everyday lives (see e.g. Heyd and Honkanen 2015 for a discussion of this research tradition). While this view from early digital research has given way to a more convergent approach through the rise of mobile computing, the notion of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as “placeless” still informs many texts. Myers’ analysis of deixis in blogging thus begins by positing that [b]logs […] are placeless by default; they have to do something to signal place or we don’t think about it. […] When I say blogs are placeless, I mean it in two senses: (1) the writing is not situated in a particular location and (2) they have the global vision of the blogosphere. (Myers 2010: 48–49)

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Despite such conceptualisations of blogging, discourse-analytical readings of blogging do find that deictic anchoring plays a crucial role both in the discursive design of blog postings, and in the way that readers perceive and process them. As Puschmann (2009: 2) points out, the very “physics of blogging” prompts the inscription of deictic information into the discursive fabric of the texts. Because typical blogging software packages add a timestamp and concomitant metadata to any blog posting, the deictic origo of a given blog text is not only available, but made explicit through the very act of posting. As Puschmann expounds: Author, time of publication and the location of the post differ from the other fields [such as title and text] by constituting extra-textual […] information that is automatically associated with the situation and not freely assigned by the blogger. This information makes deictic language possible, i.e. use of the first person pronoun (always referring to the blogger-publisher credited with the post), use of temporal adverbs (relating to post publication date as the point of reference) and spatial adverbs (either relating to the blogger’s location at the time of publishing or conceptualizing the blog or the Internet as a whole as a space). (Puschmann 2009: 2)

The idea that anchoring through metadata “makes deictic language possible” has been explored in qualitative studies. Thus Myers (2010), after the initial caveats delineated above, provides numerous examples of very explicit and highly engaged place-making in blogs that takes place through features of place, but also person and temporal deixis. Beyond this deictic anchoring of blog posts to the material world and its place, time and person constraints, it may also be noted that blog features such as links and blogrolls are analyzable as a dense network of discourse-deictic pointers. Finally, multimodal forms of blogging have other and more complex deictic exigencies. While the focus of this contribution is on text-centered blogging, research into more audiovisual forms has reavealed intricate deictic strategies. Thus, Frobenius (2013) provides a detailed account of gestures and the deictic implications of pointing in video blogs; as her study points out, such deictic features make even more tangible the physically situated nature of blogging, because the deictic space here can and does include pointing to real-world objects and frames of reference. 3.2.

Blogging and discourse-linguistic analysis

3.2.1. Blogging as interaction Within more broadly discourse-linguistic frameworks, the general notion of interaction stands out. It is noticeable that, despite the folk-linguistic conception of blogging as journal-writing or ego-blogging, many studies have nonetheless focused on the interactional pragmatic strategies that blogging affords. In this

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regard, the notion of blogging as interpersonal communication, as a means of reaching out and engaging with others, takes center stage. Some of the studies in this domain intersect with approaches already described, e.g. the facework that ensues in acts of advice-giving (see Section 3.1.4). Within this paradigm, there are numerous approaches, some of which come to differing conclusions. For example, Petersen (2011) applies a Jakobsonian analysis of communicative functions to the entire genre of blogging, in order to explore the popular notion that blogs are conceptually close to conversation. He concludes, however, that while blogging may have a certain conversational potential, this is by no means pervasive or constitutive. Thus Petersen points out that [i]n weblogs, addressees determine the extent of their participation as readers in what can range from close and regular reading to distracted and intermittent scanning. […] Readers and writers maintain this non-linear, discontinuous, and asymmetrical contact in weblogs because they find such interaction meaningful. (Petersen 2011: 9)

Nevertheless, Petersen does conclude that blog authors and readers engage and interact in manifold ways. In an empirical study, Stefanone and Jang (2008) focus on the notion of using blogs for relationship maintenance. Based on survey data by a sample of bloggers, they show that this interpersonal and interactional purpose of blogging is particularly strong where the blog authors display personality traits prone to extroversion and self-disclosure, and have social networks with strong ties. Stefanone and Jang conclude that “blogs have been adopted as a mode of communication for strong tie network contacts, similar to email” (2008: 135). Conceiving of blogging as interactional and interpersonal communication, however, should not automatically be equated with constructive and civil discourse. In this sense, reseach on interactional pragmatics in blogging has also focused on issues of conflict and disruption that can accompany blog discourse in interpersonal communication. In particular, the studies by Bolander on language and power in blogs (2013) and forms of responsiveness in disagreements (2012) highlight this issue. As noted in the earlier discussion on politeness, research on conflict in blogs gravitates toward those discourse features which are naturally prone to interactional episodes, namely the comments sections (cf. also Bolander and Locher, Ch. 22, this volume). 3.2.2. Blogging as identity work If blogging can be conceptualized through the lens of interpersonal work, as outlined in Section 3.2.1 above, the inverse perspective is also possible and has generated a body of discourse-linguistic research: namely the notion that entertaining and writing a blog is crucially tied to matters of identity work (cf. also Locher and Bolander, Ch. 15, this volume). In other words, the linguistic output that a blog constitutes can be seen as a way of establishing and performing a voice, and

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thereby doing identity work, by a blogger. Indeed, this discursive aspect of blogging appears to be so central that it is more or less tacitly assumed in many analytical approaches and has found its way into many models and general overviews of blogs as a genre (see e.g. Puschmann’s notion of “ego blogging”, Section 2 above). Those accounts of blogging which explicitly focus on the concept of (discursive) identity do so via a range of different approaches. Thus, Siles (2012), in a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews with bloggers, explores identity formation in the emergence period of blogging in the late 1990s. Within this media-historical approach, he distinguishes clearly between “online diaries” and “blogging” as two historically distinct forms of identity constitution. Nevertheless, in his explicitly Foucauldian framework, he describes both online diaries and blogs as “web technologies of the self” (Siles 2012). By contrast, Schmidt’s (2007) “analytical framework” of blogging takes a strikingly different approach to identity in blogging. In this account inspired by sociological structuration theory, Schmidt (2007) identifies a set of rules, relations and codes that govern the process of blogging. In this framework, the notion of blogger identity plays a central role in the context of “publication rules” (Schmidt 2007: 1412–1413). Schmidt points to “general strategies of identity management in a mediated environment” while pointing out that “publishing a blog is a way of self-presentation that has to meet certain expectations about personal authenticity while maintaining a balance between staying private and being public” (2007: 1413). In this sense, identity work is described not so much as a basic communicative need, but rather as strategic option for optimizing a blog’s attainment of certain felicity conditions (and, by extension, success on the blogging market). Finally, there is a range of discourse-linguistic studies which focus on more or less specific identities that can be performed through blogging. Researchers have studied identity work performed through blogging by teenagers (e.g. Scheidt 2006; Huffaker and Calvert 2005) and mothers (Friedman and Calixte 2009), politicians (Nilsson 2012) and academics (Kirkup 2010), and others, thus spanning both ‘professional’ as well as ‘private’ social roles. 3.2.3. Blogging and narrativity As many digital genres have become the focus of narrative analysis, it has been noted that story-telling as an anthropological universal resurfaces strongly in online environments (see. e.g. Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010; Nünning et al. 2012; Dayter and Mühleisen 2016 for overviews). In this vein, it is not surprising that blogs have been subjected to narrative analysis (indeed from early on – see e.g. Huffaker 2004), but in the case of blogging as a digital genre, this connection may be particularly obvious. As Rettberg remarks, there is (at least) a twofold connection between blogs and storytelling, “both in terms of narrative structure and in terms of the uneasy relationships between fiction, self-representation and authenticity”

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(Rettberg 2014: 3). Thus in structural terms, the sequential nature of postings that preimposes a certain timeline to the discursive structure can be said to work in conjunction with the text-centric nature of conventional blogging. Put simply, a genre that is organized around large chunks of text with temporal sequencing can be said to be inherently prone to narrativity, much more so than genres into which narrativity is inserted in spite of their sociotechnical constraints (such as Twitter or Instant Messaging). Rettberg’s second point sketches aspects of self-representation through narrative on blogs. Here, discourse-linguistic examination of blogs may be focused on the concept of particularly authentic and unmediated discourse; for example, Burgess (2006: 208) emphasizes the importance of vernacular voices and “the decentralised, accretive and networked, but equally ‘ordinary’ kinds of storytelling made possible by personal weblogs”. At the same time, this conceptual feature also raises issues with regards to veridicality and fabrication in the kind of narrativity found in blogs. The most comprehensive account of narrativity in blogs is put forward by Eisenlauer and Hoffmann (2010). Echoing the perspective sketched above, they argue that “[in] weblogs, narration seems to be particularly crucial, simply because ‘bloggers’ […] usually draw on short stories to report the latest news to an (often undefined) virtual audience” (Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2010: 79). Based on the four dimensions of multi-linearity, fragmentation, interaction and multimodality as textual “principles of new media” (2010: 87), they explore narrative episodes in blogging both through a Labovian structuralist framework and more recent constructivist approaches. 3.2.4. Blogging and authenticity Section 3.2.3 above makes mention of authenticity as a category that is perceived to be important for blogging. As a final analytical focus, notions of authenticity and inauthenticity have played a role in analyzing the discourse of blogs, and it can be hypothesized that this topic may gain in relevance in years to come. In the section on narrativity, authenticity in blogging was conceptualized as a putative quality of a blogger’s “voice”. This relates, in a pragmatic framework, to issues of veridicality and trustworthiness, and encapsulates the assumption that producing a blog is based on sincere, transparent and ultimately cooperative illocutionary acts. In a more sociolinguistic framework, authenticity might be understood as an idealized stance that readers expect bloggers to take: a stance that is vernacular and ‘real’, and, by extension, grounded and legitimized within a community. In a larger sense, such assumptions have often been tied to more general hopes and tropes associated with social media, as well as their participatory and democratizing effect. In particular in early days, political blogs and early journalism through blogging were sometimes framed as counter-hegemonic discourses that might take an opposing stance toward existing print formats. As blogs have become absorbed

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into the converged field of media consumption, this perspective becomes less relevant. One enduring topic related to authenticity and inauthenticity in blogging is that of commodification processes, specifically of the monetization options that blogs afford. As Rettberg (2014: 135) remarks, “[i]f you search a bookstore for books on blogging, you’ll quickly find that most of them are about how to make money from blogging”. The underlying idea that blogs can become a marketable and sellable good, and that the voices and stances of a blogger persona can ultimately be worked into a branded image, are of central concern for many blogging communities. These insights are not recent: as early as 2005, Marwick discussed the implications of “online identity in the age of a commodified Internet”, with explicit reference to blogging (Marwick 2005). Analyses of corporate blogging have particularly highlighted the institutionalized dimension of such commodification strategies (see analyses by Puschmann, in particular Puschmann 2010). However, it is in the domain of personal blogging that the discrepancy between authenticity expectations associated with the genre on the one hand, and monetization strategies which commodify it for strategic purposes, are perceived as the most striking form of instrumentalization. In returning to the starting point of this overview, however, it may be noted that a certain level of commodification and artificiality has been presented almost from the earliest days of blogging. As Marwick (2005: 163) points out, “many of the structures that we think of as ‘independent’, such as blogging software, are actually owned by larger corporations”. In this sense, blogs will remain a substantial and in some ways typical genre of the social media tableau: participatory yet motivated and shaped by the stances of the blogger; creative and malleable yet firmly couched in the socio-technical givens of the respective software template; perceived as highly individuated yet part of small and large communities of practice. 4. Outlook This chapter has given an overview on blogging as part of the social media canon. Moving from a general perspective on traditions of practice and traditions of research to more technical facts and figures about usage, demographics and definitions, the chapter has attempted to capture the discourse-linguistic essence of blogging. Based on this, Section 3 has highlighted some of the key research traditions that have emerged from the scholarly community with a focus on pragmatic and discourse-linguistic interests. As with all writing on topics of digital communication, overviews on specific genres or practices afford no more than a snapshot of the status quo at a given moment. Yet whatever direction blogging will take in the coming years, this discursive practice has proven robust over almost two decades, and has not

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been vitally threatened by other socio-techncial modes such as social networks, microblogging or podcasting. It seems likely, then, that blogging will remain a staple of the social media spectrum; its future evolution in terms of structure, spread and reach will provide new research sites for pragmatics and discourse linguistics. References Anand, Pranav, Joseph King, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Earl Wagner, Craig Martell, Douglas W. Oard and Philip Resnik 2011 Believe me: We can do this! Annotating persuasive acts in blog text. The AAAI 2011 Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument. 1–5. http:// www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/docs/persuasion.pdf. Badger, Meredith 2004 Visual blogs. University of Minnesota. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://hdl.handle.net/11299/172839. Blood, Rebecca 2000 Weblogs: A history and perspective. Rebecca’s Pocket. Retrieved from http:// www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html. Bolander, Brook 2012 Disagreements and agreements in personal/diary blogs: A closer look at responsiveness. Journal of Pragmatics 44(12): 1607–1622. Bolander, Brook 2013 Language and Power in Blogs: Interaction, Disagreements and Agreements. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Bruns, Axel 2007 Produsage: Toward a Broader Framework of User-Led Content Creation. Kelvin Grove, Queensland: Queensland University of Technology. Burgess, Jean 2006 Hearing ordinary voices: Cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 20(2): 201–214. Chiluwa, Innocent 2011 On political participation: Discursive pragmatics and social interaction in politics. Studies in Literature and Language 2(2): 80–92. Cox, Andrew and Megan Blake 2011 Information and food blogging as serious leisure. Aslib Proceedings 63: 204 – 220. Crystal, David 2006 Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dayter, Daria and Susanne Mühleisen 2016 Personal Narrative Online. Topical Issue of Open Linguistics. https://www. degruyter.com/page/1252. Eisenlauer, Volker and Christian Hoffmann 2010 Once upon a blog. Storytelling in weblogs. In: Christian Hoffmann (ed.), Narrative Revisited. Telling a Story in the Age of New Media, 79–108. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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Friedman, May and Shana Calixte (eds.) 2009 Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Art of the MommyBlog. Toronto: Demeter Press. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2010 Beginning a monologue: The opening sequence of video blogs. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 814–827. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2013 Pointing gestures in video blogs. Text and Talk 33(1): 1–24. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2014 The Pragmatics of Monologue: Interaction in Video Blogs. Dissertation; Saarbrücken: Universität des Saarlandes. http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=5895. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra and Tereza Spilioti (eds.) 2015 The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication. London: Routledge. Gillmor, Dan 2006 We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media. Greenall, Annjo 2009 Towards a new theory of flouting. Journal of Pragmatics 41(11): 2295–2311. Grieve, Jack, Douglas Biber, Eric Friginal and Tanya Nakrasova 2010 Variation among blogs: A multi-dimensional analysis. In: Alexander Mehler, Serge Sharoff and Marina Santini (eds), Genres on the Web. Computational Models and Empirical Studies, 303–322. Berlin: Springer. Guadagno, Rosanna, Bradley Okdie and Cassie Eno 2008 Who blogs? Pesonality predictors of blogging. Computers in Human Behavior 24(5): 1993–2004. Herring, Susan C., Lois A. Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus and Elijah L Wright 2005 Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information, Technology and People 18(2): 142– 171. Herring, Susan C. and John Paolillo 2006 Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 439–459. Heyd, Theresa and Mirka Honkanen 2015 From Naija to Chitown: The New African Diaspora and digital representations of place. Discourse, Context and Media 9: 14–23. Heyd, Theresa 2014 Folk-linguistic landscapes. The visual semiotics of digital enregisterment. Language in Society 43(5): 489–514. Hoffmann, Christian 2012 Cohesive Profiling. Meaning and Interaction in Personal Weblogs. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Huffaker, David and Sandra Calvert 2005 Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10 (no pagination). Huffaker, David 2004 Spinning yarns around the digital fire: Storytelling and dialogue among youth on the Internet. First Monday 9(1) (no pagination).

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Kavanagh, Barry 2016 Emoticons as a medium for channeling politeness within American and Japanese online blogging communities. Language and Communication 48: 53–65. Kavanagh, Barry 2010 A cross-cultural analysis of Japanese and English non-verbal online communication: The use of emoticons in weblogs. Inter-Cultural Communication Studies 19: 65–80. Kirkup, Gill 2010 Academic blogging: Academic practice and academic identity. London Review of Education 8(1): 75–84. Kouper, Inna 2010 The pragmatics of peer advice in a LiveJournal community. language@internet 7: 1–21. Krishnamurthy, Sandeep 2002 The multidimensionality of blog conversations: The virtual enactment of September 11. Internet Research 3 (no pagination). Kumar, Ravi, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan and Andrew Tomkins 2004 Structure and evolution of blogsphere. Communications of the ACM 47(12): 35–39. Luzón, María José 2011 ‘Interesting post, but I disagree’: Social presence and antisocial behaviour in academic weblogs. Applied Linguistics 32(5): 517–540. Marwick, Alice 2005 Selling Your Self: Online Identity In the Age of a Commodified Internet. MA thesis. University of Washington. http://www.academia.edu/421101/Selling_ Your_Self_Online_Identity_In_the_Age_of_a_Commodified_Internet. McNeill, Laurie 2005 Genre under construction: The diary on the Internet. language@internet 2: 1–11. Myers, Greg 2010 Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum. Nielsen (NM Incite). n.d. Number of blogs worldwide from 2006 to 2011 (in millions). In: Statista – The Statistics Portal. Retrieved November 18, 2016 from https:// www.statista.com/statistics/278527/number-of-blogs-worldwide/. Nilsson, Bo 2012 Politicians’ blogs: Strategic self-presentations and identities. Identity 12(3): 247–265. Nünning, Ansgar, Jan Rupp, Rebecca Hagelmoser and Jonas Ivo Meyer (eds.) 2012 Narrative Genres im Internet. Theoretische Bezugsrahmen, Medien­gattungs­ typologie und Funktionen. Trier: WVT. Page, Ruth 2008 Gender and genre revisited: Narratives of illness on personal blogs. Genre 41: 149–175. Petersen, Eric 2011 How conversational are weblogs? language@internet 8: 1–18. Puschmann, Cornelius 2009 Diary or megaphone? The pragmatic mode of weblogs. http://www.cbpusch mann.net/pubs/diarymegaphone.pdf.

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Puschmann, Cornelius 2010 The Corporate Blog as an Emerging Genre of Computer-Mediated Communication: Features, Constraints, Discourse Situation. Göttingen: Uni­ver­si­täts­ ver­lag Göttingen. Puschmann, Cornelius 2013 Blogging. In: Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Handbooks of Pragmatics 9, 83–108. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Rettberg, Jill Walker 2014 Blogging. 2nd. ed. New York: Wiley. Rocamora, Agnès 2012 Hypertextuality and remediation in the fashion media: The case of fashion blogs. Journalism Practice 6(1): 92–106. Rodzvilla, John (ed.) 2002 We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture. London: Basic Books. Scheidt, Lois Ann 2006 Adolescent diary weblogs and the unseen audience. In: David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett (eds.), Digital Generations: Children, Young people, and New Media, 193–210. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Scheidt, Lois Ann 2016 Scholarly and Producer Perceptions of Genre in Female and Male Adolescent Weblogs. Ann Arbor: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Schmidt, Jan 2007 Blogging practices: An analytical framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12: 1409–1427. Shema, Hadas, Judit Bar-Ilan and Mike Thelwall 2012 Research blogs and the discussion of scholarly information. PLoS ONE 7(5): e35869. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869. Siles, Ignacio 2012 Web technologies of the self: The arising of the ‘blogger’ identity. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17: 408–421. Squires, Lauren 2010 Enregistering internet language. Language in Society 39(4): 457–492. St.Amant, Kirk and Sigrid Kelsey (eds.) 2008 Computer-Mediated Communication Across Cultures: International Interactions in Online Environments. Hershey: Information Science Reference. Stefanone, Michael and Chyng-Yang Jang 2007 Writing for friends and family: The interpersonal nature of blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 123–140. Wall, Melissa 2005 ‘Blogs of war’: Weblogs as news. Journalism 6(2): 153–172. Yus, Francisco 2007 Towards a pragmatics of weblogs. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis Lingüístics 12: 15–33.

7. YouTube Marjut Johansson Abstract: In this chapter I will first give an overview of the timeline of YouTube and its predecessors in the film and media history, of popular phenomena on YouTube and of its technological affordances in order to pave the way to the pragmatics of YouTube. I will discuss pragmatic studies of YouTube videos by focusing on their categorization as communicative genres, their relation to micro-celebrity and fame, and their function as a representation of the cultural ‘other’. Finally, I will consider YouTube videos from the perspectives of networked audiences, participation frameworks, comment discussions, conflicts and commentary videos. 1. Introduction YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms in contemporary digital culture. Although it is usually associated with user-generated content, it also carries professionally produced content such as music, news, and commercial ­videos. Its vast and ever-growing collection provides a rich source of material for linguists, as many of the videos portray ordinary communication situations. These can be studied from a great variety of perspectives, from spoken language and interaction to multilingual uses and language variation in everyday life. YouTube offers instant access to new phenomena in popular culture, in professional media, and user-generated content. Many of these phenomena, such as bullying and hate speech, are important research topics in pragmatics. Many social media platforms have been studied in pragmatics and related fields, but YouTube videos, user discussions, and debates in video comment sections have been rather rare objects of study. Several studies have focused on the written forms and text-based interaction of social media, such as blogs, chat rooms, Twitter, wikis and Facebook (Giltrow and Stein 2009a and 2009b; Myers 2010; Yus 2011; Page 2012; Eisenlauer 2013; Marcoccia 2016; cf. also Arendholz, Ch. 5, Heyd, Ch. 6, Zappavigna, Ch. 8 and Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this volume). Online spoken interaction has been considered, for instance, in research on videoconferencing and Skype calls (Develotte, Kern and Lamy 2011; Jenks and Firth 2013). But YouTube videos and videos in general have received little attention and are mostly only mentioned in passing in review articles or in articles intended to describe the field of social media research in pragmatics (Jucker and Dürscheid 2012; Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2013a). There are, however, a couple of handbook articles which consider aspects such as YouTube participation framework, discourse DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-007 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 173–200. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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structure, multimodal recontextualization practices (Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015) and identity performance (Leppänen et al. 2014). Additional studies in various other domains, such as digital literacy and video games, multimodality, visual analysis, and analysis of news videos (Gee 2014; O’Halloran 2004; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Jewitt 2009; Kress 2010; Johansson 2012), have also paved the way for a growing interest in research on videos. From a pragmatic, discourse analytic or sociolinguistic perspective, researchers use approaches such as computer-mediated communication (CMC), multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA) and digital discourse analysis (DDA) to explore interactivity and multimodality as characteristic features of YouTube, videos as communicative genres and texts, online identities, the use of different languages and the activity of commenting. In the following sections, I will furthermore consider studies that describe theoretical notions such as communicative settings, genre, representations, and ideological discourse. Digital culture has transformed our everyday lives and continues to do so (Gere 2002). Media convergence (Jenkins 2006) has affected communication practices in such a way that they are intertwined with technological practices (Cardoso 2008; Lievrouw 2009; Thurlow and Mroczek 2011). The logic of social media has been widely examined in media and digital culture studies, particularly as regards its ability to change contemporary communication and social interaction (Cardoso 2008; Lievrouw 2009; Livingstone 2009; Kaplan and Haenlein 2010; Couldry 2012; Couldry and Hepp 2013; Dijck and Poell 2013). One could consider YouTube – as well as many other forms of social media and other digital forms of communication – as a complex, hybrid combination of mass communication on the one hand, and interpersonal and personal social interaction on the other (Helasvuo, Johansson and Tanskanen 2014). This chapter focuses mainly on presenting communication, interaction and discourse on YouTube using a pragmatic approach which comprises three different yet interrelated perspectives. The first perspective is that of sociocultural context. For pragmatic studies, it is important to understand not only the history and publishing logic of this social media platform, but also the most common trends in YouTube’s popular content world-wide. These factors affect the video productions of both professional and amateur users. The latter reflect currently popular material and adapt, imitate and comment on what they have recently watched (cf. Section 2). The second perspective concentrates on videos as communicative genres. Pragmatic research has not fully addressed YouTube videos from this viewpoint, even though genre is one of the central notions in pragmatic studies on CMC (for example, Herring 2007; Giltrow and Stein 2009a; Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2013b). This perspective helps to understand video content because video genres may be familiar, emergent or reconfigured (Herring 2013) when they appear on YouTube. When videos are studied, their interaction, storytelling and multimodal features

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are as important as the way in which they are composed. I will also pay attention to online identities, self-representations and discourses as well as to micro-celebrities and famous YouTubers (Section 3). The third perspective centres on YouTube’s user comments. YouTube commenting can create networks of audiences and different kinds of communities, depending on the topics covered by the respective videos as well as on what users as members of various communities actually do with their comments. I will discuss commenting as sequential and investigate the ways in which discussions turn into debates (Section 4).

2.

YouTube: from “broadcast yourself” to entertaining yourself

2.1. Timeline The timeline is well-known: The three big social media platforms were founded over a short period, with YouTube starting in 2005 and Facebook and Twitter in 2006 (cf. boyd and Ellison 2007: 212). Since YouTube, which started as an alternative to television, was purchased by Google in 2006, it has grown to be part of the global media entertainment industry (Dijck 2013: 127–130). YouTube’s novelty, its unique selling point, was user-generated multimodal content. New and easy access to the Internet enabled individuals and groups to upload content in private spaces, and online video-sharing spread very fast (Dijck 2013: 110–113). This was displayed in the company’s early logo: Broadcast yourself (2006–2012). Today, the logo simply contains the company name YouTube. Almost from the start, however, users did not confine themselves to their own productions. Very early on, they copied material from television and were accused of uploading content originating from media companies, which led to ethical and legal controversies about this type of practice (Burgess and Green 2009: 31–32; Dijck 2013: 118; Suominen et al. 2013: 89). Apparently unable to prevent such piracy, media companies and television channels simply adopted YouTube as one of their means of distribution and promotion of commercial material (Dijck 2013: 127; Suominen et al. 2013). In a similar vein, other institutional actors adopted YouTube and other social media sites to promote their products, whether political, religious, educational or commercial (Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015: 342). The main YouTube categories are related to entertainment and news: Music, Sports, Gaming, Movies, News, Live, and the latest addition, 360° Video (launched in 2015) are all offered on the YouTube home page. More targeted sections are Home, Trending and History, in which the content is proposed to users (YouTube Statistics). The technology is “steered by search engines and ranking algorithms” that filter and promote content based on its popularity on YouTube, as well as on

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the user’s viewing experience (Dijck 2013: 113). Users may also refer to their History, which lists the videos that they have watched previously as long as they were signed in at the time of watching. YouTube user activities and user-generated content are part of produsage, a term Bruns (2008) proposed to refer to collaborative work and the sharing of knowledge through social media sites. Even though YouTube is part of its users’ daily life all over the world, most users are no more than consumers of the video content. YouTube has therefore launched new services targeted at these users. YouTube Red, a subscription-based service in the United States of America, started in 2014 to allow users to watch videos, including reality TV and YouTube celebrities, without advertisements (YouTube Red). Other services, such as YouTube Gaming and YouTube Kids, which began to take effect in 2015, allow parents to control and restrict content. The huge popularity of YouTube is overwhelming, with more than one billion users. Most are in the 18–34 age group but many are older. YouTube is present in 88 countries in 76 languages (YouTube Statistics). Its popularity is based on its flexibility and the many videos of diverse content created by ordinary users for other users to share and follow. Its professionally-produced content makes it even more popular. In the next section, I will explore the history and predecessors of YouTube. To understand why the main features of YouTube are popular today, it is necessary to understand the timeline because much of the current content is deeply rooted in film and television history. In other words, video genres have migrated to social media from other media spaces (cf. Giltrow and Stein 2009b: 9). 2.2.

YouTube predecessors, professional and user-generated content

YouTube is an online video-sharing platform that contains all types of video formats ranging from clips, trailers, and mash-ups to live feeds, entire films, and many others. Short videos are not novel, but have had several predecessors (see Burgess and Green 2009). Short forms that portray everyday life and funny incidents have been popular in TV and film since the dawn of the moving picture. When Louis and Auguste Lumière first showed a train arriving at a station and workers leaving a factory (Lumière 1895a, 1895b), the audience was shocked, because moving images resembling real life appeared for the first time on the screen. The Lumière brothers also filmed the first pranks, such as The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1896). These resemble scenes of everyday life and give the impression of not being staged productions. Several different kinds of developments paved the way for YouTube videos. The first is linked to humor, which has a long media history. For example, Candid Camera has been on and off the air in the United States since the early years of television. Humorous videos moved online and became popular on YouTube:

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babies, animals, weddings, pranks and fails, i.e., videos of somebody failing to do something and creating a humorous situation. The second development arose from the first. The TV format of compilations of home movies and videos, although extant from an earlier date, became hugely popular in the United States in the 1990s. These shows opened the door to ordinary people, as their privately-shot media portrayals could now be viewed by a public audience. The success of TV shows based on ‘ordinariness’ and the presence of ordinary people in reality TV programs, confessional talk shows, and so on, has produced the shift that Turner (2010: 12–13) calls the “demotic turn”. In addition, the celebrity culture of ordinary people in television talent and reality TV programs such as American Idol gave rise to the social media celebrity culture that has created competitions of its own (Dijck 2013: 117). The third development, which created one of YouTube’s most popular features, came from professionally produced music videos, which also have a long history. They had their roots in early cinema musicals as well as in the pop music that emerged in the 1960s and was in need of promotion. Filming music scenes and promoting pop singles were the precursors of television, especially the video channel MTV. The first music video was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles (1979), followed by several videos that were firsts in their genre, both musically and visually: Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie (1980), Thriller by Michael Jackson (1982), and Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel (1986). Music videos opened up different ways to combine performance and storytelling with new types of visual expression. Their addition to visual culture paved the way for the ordinary user. These developments have underpinned the numerous ways in which the ordinary and professional users construct their video blogs and other types of videos, such as parodies and imitations. The next section describes the first videos and discusses the most popular videos, as well as the popularity ranking that is at the core of YouTube. Knowledge of these factors will help us to understand audience choices and the way in which YouTube videos and channels develop. 2.3.

Popular videos and popularity ranking on YouTube

The first video ever uploaded on YouTube was Me at the Zoo (April 23, 2005). In its 18-second run time, a young man stands in front of the fence at the elephant exhibit and says that the cool thing about these animals is their very long trunks. This very short clip shows one of the reasons that users upload videos: to tell about things and events in their life. In pragmatic terms, this is a mediated digital interaction. The young man faces the camera directly, turning his head from the camera to the elephant as he speaks. He creates in these couple of utterances a fragment of a narrative in which he situates himself in a place (a zoo) and expresses an evaluative stance (Du Bois 2009; Page 2015: 331, 338).

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One of YouTube’s most popular features is its viral videos, pieces that gain instant success worldwide, supported by stories in newspapers, magazines and other media. The first, a rap song called Lazy Sunday, was viewed by more than one million people in 2005 before it was removed due to copyright issues, as the material came from a TV show (Burgess and Green 2009: 2–3). Among the most widespread viral videos are the Evolution of Dance, Sneezing Panda, David after Dentist, and parodies of the film Hitler’s Downfall (Time Magazine). These videos represent some of the most popular topics on YouTube, such as talented performances, cute animals, incidents in daily life, and parodies of films used to comment on all types of issues. Today, the most popular user-generated video that is not a music video is Charlie Bit Me (2009), with more than 840 million views (September 2016). Despite this huge popularity, it is not even in the top 30 most-viewed videos of all time. Two small boys, Harry and Charlie, sit in a chair, Charlie in Harry’s lap. The baby brother Charlie bites Harry’s finger twice, the second time on purpose as Harry pushes his finger into Charlie’s mouth. Charlie giggles in a rascally manner, while Harry complains “Charlie bit me and that really hurts Charlie and it’s still hurting”. Sindoni (2013: 182) points out the multimodal interaction that takes place: Harry makes eye contact with their father who is filming the scene, while Charlie switches his focus between his brother, the camera, and an unspecified target. Sindoni (2013: 182) discusses the video through comments that doubt the video’s authenticity. Home and family are major themes in YouTube user-generated videos. Among other subjects, family members, teenagers, babies, cats and dogs are popular (Strangelove 2010: 40–63) and users often post footage for their families and friends to watch (Lange 2007: 365–376). YouTube videos represent all aspects of human life, ranging from hobbies such as archery to comments on video games, from health-related videos of surgical operations to tips for a healthy lifestyle. They can also depict the dark side, such as terrorism and war. Participation on YouTube and similar networking sites has generated a vernacular creativity and do-it-yourself (DIY) culture that has several predecessors in sociocultural life in general, not just in broadcast media (Burgess and Green 2009: 3, 23, 26). YouTube is a site for communities of all sizes and for participatory culture of all kinds (Jenkins 2008: 3; Burgess and Green 2009: 10). Today, the popularity of YouTube is measured by several ratings and rankings. Popularity lists abound, including Most responded and Most discussed as well as What is trending on YouTube at this very moment (see Burgess and Green 2009). The list of Most viewed videos of all time consists mostly of professionally-produced music and children’s music videos from 2010 onward. At the top of the list is the music video Gangnam Style by Korean singer Psy, with 2.70 billion views since its upload in December 2012 (December 2016). On YouTube, the content of a particular video can be viewed and discussed across diverse periods – from a

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week or less, to several years (Burgess and Green 2009: 39). Comments can keep on building long after a video’s original upload. The List of the most subscribed users on YouTube differs somewhat, as it lists smaller scale independent producers as well as the professionals in the media and music industries. This list of 25 users currently includes nine video game commentators, vloggers, and sketch comedy producers among the professional pop stars and other entertainment-related producers. These may have started as ordinary amateur users, but successful videos and growing audience members have turned them into professional video-makers. Video gamer PewDiePie tops the list with more than 49 million subscribers (December 2016). Originally from Sweden, this YouTube celebrity talks in English, as do almost all the top-ranked vloggers, though the Chilean Germán Garmendia, who has two channels on the list – one vlog, one commentary on video games –, broadcasts in Spanish. I will next move on to users’ main YouTube activities, all catered for on the site. These include language-related and other semiotic activities undertaken when viewing or producing videos, posting and reading comments, and interacting in other ways with the site. 2.4.

YouTube site activities and technological affordances

YouTube offers users several simultaneous activities. They can engage in language-related and other semiotic activities: viewing videos, commenting and interacting (Gibson 1979; Hutchby 2001; Eisenlauer 2013; Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015). YouTube’s main activity consists of viewing and producing videos that can contain multisemiotic material: visual, audio and written (cf. Dynel 2014: 39; Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015: 342). A smaller number of users produce, on their own or with others. Dynel (2014: 40) points out that a video may document real life or create a fictional world. As videos are the results of various productive activities, such as scriptwriting, acting, directing, camerawork and editing, they usually contain several layers of cinematic storytelling (Dynel 2014: 43). This is especially true if the videos are produced professionally, but ordinary users are quite capable of filming very carefully scripted videos; they can also edit, mix or create mash-ups. The second activity concerns the posting and reading of comments. A YouTube discussion is a written, text-based activity that depends on the participant having viewed the video (cf. Johansson forthcoming). For example, Adami (2009) considers a video to be a prompt to which users react when posting comments. The comments are organized either in sequential order according to the newest or the oldest comment or according to the Top comments, those most frequently viewed. There are several other activities, grouped as various technologically based affordances, “functional and relational aspects which frame” the possibilities for activities and actions on the platform (Hutchby 2001: 444). Technological affor-

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Screen capture 1. PewDiePie video and associated information (June 2016)

dances allow users to enhance their experience and to express their opinions. For instance, when they click the like or dislike buttons, they are commenting by algorithm-based means and sharing their opinion with other users. An example of this form of commenting appears below in PewDiePie’s YouTube site. Screen capture 1 is a still from a video produced by PewDiePie, I React to My Old Videos, posted in July 2014. On this page, users can see the video channel and subscribe to it. They can also see the basic presentation: publishing date, title, link to the next video, and playlist. This information and the Subscribe button enhance the viewer’s experience. Screen capture 1 also shows user activity in regard to this particular video. The total numbers of views, likes and dislikes are listed below the still image of

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the video. PewDiePie has more than 46 million subscribers. The video has been viewed more than 22 million times, liked more than 600,000 times and disliked by more than 9,000 viewers (June 2016). The comment section is still active two years after the publication of the video and holds more than 51,000 comments. Although these figures are very high, only 27 % of all viewers have chosen to click the like button and only 2.3 % have posted a comment to the video. Thus, it appears that the majority of viewers have done no more than watch the video. When users upload a video, YouTube proposes a preset category for them to choose from, thereby designating the subject of the video. This will depend on the basic information about the downloaded video. They are Music, Entertainment, Gaming, People and Blogs, Sports, Comedy, Film and Animation, How to and Style, News and Politics, Cars and Vehicles, Science and Technology, Education, Pets, and Animals. This particular PewDiePie video is categorized as People and Blogs. PewDiePie uses several other categories as well and he will be discussed as a YouTuber later on (Section 3.2). The following main Section 3 looks at YouTube videos as communicative genres (several video genres are described in terms of their particular features) and will also cover self-presentation, other forms of presentation, the popularity phenomenon, micro-celebrity and fame on YouTube.

3. Videos 3.1.

Videos as a digital communicative genre

Video is a technical format that does not represent a particular communicative genre – there is no unique video genre. There are many video genres, although none has been much studied from the perspective of communicative genre. I propose below that it is possible to consider video game commentaries, battles, parodies, question-answer and clickbait videos as communicative genres. In many different theoretical approaches, genre has been understood as a form of social action (e.g., Miller 1984); it is one of the basic approaches in pragmatics and in CMC. Giltrow and Stein (2009b) present different conceptions about genre, from corpus-based linguistics to rhetorical and literary theories. They address the issues of genre change and the effect on genres when the Internet becomes their communicative setting (Giltrow and Stein 2009b: 8–9). In Herring, Stein and Virtanen (2013a, 2013b: 4), CMC genres (or modes) form part of the basic questioning of the language on the Internet. Both these edited volumes consider mainly written or text-based CMC genres (or modes) and their characteristics (cf. Myers 2010). In this chapter, the notion of genre is understood as a basic analytic construct of an activity type. A communicative genre is defined, first, as a situated activity

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type that contains spoken and written language use (e.g., Levinson 1992: 69, 71; Bergmann and Luckmann 1995; Linell 2009: 198–203). According to Gumperz (1992: 43–45), activities organize discourse in a specific way and can be described in relational and indexical terms. Second, the communicative genre informs us about the situation, the participants and frames of social interaction. The social interaction in a situation depends on the communicative goals, contributions and the type of verbal and other semiotic means of expression (Linell 2009: 198–203). The notion of a digital genre refers to the context in which a genre is situated. Digital genres are realized in digital texts that are mediated, multimodal, and contain technological affordances. Within a specific genre, there can be variation in the way it is realized, and a genre can have several sub-genres. It is possible to consider this variation as a generic feature. How can video genres be recognized? In YouTube, several videos align with television genres. In this sense, they have migrated from mass media to this social media platform (Giltrow and Stein 2009: 8–9; Herring 2013). This is particularly true for most professionally produced news videos which are same as or similar to television news genres, such as news interviews but can be shorter, for instance when presenting sound bites of press conferences (Johansson 2012). Slightly reconfigured video genres are based on the ideas presented in TV programs, such as Mythbusters. In the video channel Smarter Every Day, the presenter Destin introduces everyday physical phenomena and tests them in ordinary settings. His videos range from The Backwards Brain Bicycle to Poop Splash Elimination. The bicycle video starts with a personal narrative of riding a bike as a youngster and continues with a challenge to ride a bike with reversed steering. In the other video he drops playdough, which looks like feces, into water and explains the physics of splash formation, while offering a way to prevent it. One popular genre on YouTube are video blogs, or vlogs, the audio-visual offspring of text-based blogs (Giltrow and Stein 2009), which can be presented in several different ways. The communication is commonly organized according to the main topic, which includes preset categories, for example lifestyle, beauty and travel. When users reify these categories by producing video clips, their outputs depend on the type of self-presentation they adopt, the way they address their viewers, and their position toward the objects they are discussing. Bloggers and vloggers can topicalize their private life and be oriented toward a restricted audience of friends and family. Presenters of this “Dear Diary” type concentrate on personal and identity construction (Griffith and Papacharissi 2009). Frobenius (2011) conducted one of the rare analyses of ordinary vlogs. She studied the opening sequences of 41 monologic vlogs which were all filmed indoors (Frobenius 2011: 818). Using a conversation analytical framework, she focused on the interactional activities between vlogger and user. More specifically, she elicited the discursive strategies vloggers employ to address and involve their online audiences. She investigated greetings, terms of address, self-identi-

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fication and linguistic markers of discourse particles that draw attention to the monologue`s opening (Frobenius 2011: 819–820). Vlogs can be produced professionally by vloggers trying to earn a living. These vlogs tend to relate exciting travels or contain promotional material aimed at consumers. In Driving a Chevy Caprice Police Car in the video channel Regular Cars, a group of young men test a car, discussing its model history and functionalities while driving it. Their interaction provides consumer information as they review the car and talk about their personal experiences with it. This contrasts with the focus on driving featured in Haddington’s (2010) study on turn-taking and embodied action while driving and arriving at a junction where the object of talk is which way to take or turn. In another vlog, 3 Years of Travel in 3 Minutes (Lessons and Adventures), the vlogger presents amazing travel scenes from all over the world. He interrupts its background music to give advice on living: “You can choose to be in a place of attraction and of abundance”. This video also uses the presenter’s personal experience to promote tourist sites to potential consumers with a mash-up type visual narrative. Social media have also affected news videos, which often use production techniques that are typical of digital culture, such as mash-ups and remixes (see Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015). The French télézapping videos are built on short digital clips from different video news and put together into a new video. One such video is based on a TV interview of the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy (Télézapping 2011). Such a remix has at least two frames of interpretation (see Johansson 2013). Firstly, it resembles the traditional news genre by showing and informing the viewer about the political comments that have been made on president Sarkozy’s interview. Secondly, it involves the ordering of clips to build up a new story in which the political opponents of the president express their opinion forming a constructed dialogue between parties who have not discussed together. This mash-up video is an example of the bricolage of digital texts using copy-paste techniques (cf. Deuze 2006; Adami 2012: 28; Johansson 2013). It is part of the popular video culture of recontextualization. In linguistics and pragmatics, the notion of recontextualization is based on the notions of context and contextualization. Context has been a central concept in pragmatics (Levinson 1983: 5, 9; Goodwin and Duranti 1992). Fetzer (2004: 4) considers context to include not only linguistic, but cognitive, social and sociocultural contexts. As for contextualization, it is a dynamic process by which the participants make relevant or otherwise show the meaning of the context in their actions and situated interactions (Gumperz 1982: 130–152; Gumperz 1992; Auer 1992: 4). In his definition, Linell (1998: 154) considers recontextualization as “a dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/textin-context (the context being in reality a matrix or field of contexts) to another. Recontextualization involves the extrication of some part or aspect from a text or discourse, or from a genre of texts and discourses, and the fitting of this part or

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aspect into another context”. In recontextualization, the meaning of the recontextualized item or discourse inevitably changes as it is placed in another context. This has been referred to as resemiotization (Iedema 2003). In other words, the process gives the video a multi-layered new meaning. Recontextualization and resemiotization are similar in several other cases, as will be shown below. (See Leppänen et al. 2014; Androutsopoulos and Tereick 2015: 344–346). A widespread video genre is, of course, humor videos, which are familiar from their TV and film history. Their dominant features, in addition to humor, are playfulness and parody. These core factors create the success of viral videos, such as Charlie Bit Me, Hitler’s Downfall or David after Dentist (see Section 2.3). Very often, the humor in YouTube videos is derived from an unexpected incident, caught on camera, caused by the subject’s failure to achieve a goal (Shifman 2012: 196). Where the event is caused by a deliberate practical joke or prank, the victim’s reaction provides the source of laughter. Microphone gaffes also provide humor, but in a slightly different way. These media situations occur when someone is next to a live microphone but believes that it is off and makes a private comment. Chovanec (2016) analyzed cases in which sports commentators committed such gaffes. In his paper, Chovanec (2016: 99) explained that the humor derives from the fact that the media audience, normally a ratified listener, has become an eavesdropper. He based his explanation on Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and on the way a media situation is organized. The speakers’ footing changes from public frontstage performance to private backstage talk in which the audience is neither addressed nor ratified (Chovanec 2016: 99). The humor is a result of talk that deviates from the norm of a public media situation (2016: 99). In a series of different parodies of the film Hitler’s Downfall (2004), the basic scene is the one in which Hitler realizes his defeat when the Russian army closes in on Berlin. The parodies are a result of combining the film scene, depicting Hitler’s extreme emotional reaction, with a description of a recent social or other event, creating a remix. In the video channel Hitler Rant Parodies, the topics range from political parodies, for example imagining Hitler’s reaction to Donald Trump’s election victory (2016), to parodies of hit songs. The last genre that I cover in this section is the hoax, familiar from textbased genres: Heyd (2009: 247) mentions virus hoaxes, giveaway hoaxes, charity hoaxes, urban legends and hoaxed hoaxes. This last sub-genre is a parody of hoaxes (Heyd 2009: 247). The video example of The Hoax Hotel belongs to none of these categories, but is a hoax of the hoaxers. In these videos, one Peter Green calls persons who themselves are trying to cheat others. Visually, the videos are lively, very carefully constructed stories, usually illustrating the parties on the telephone and providing subtitles to enhance the audio. In the telephone interaction, the caller plays along with the scam up to the point at which the cheat realizes that they have been exposed. The verbal interaction and visual presentation are cut by

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written comments that recontextualize the thoughts of the caller or show how the tentative scam is progressing. The video Finally Baiting a Ridiculous Electric Bill Scammer! ends with the advice “If you receive a sketchy phone call demanding an immediate payment over the phone to avoid a power disconnection within the hour, it’s a scam”. Videos that have built ‘ordinary’ people into star presenters will be the topic of the following section. Researchers have used the terms authenticity and micro-celebrity to describe the rise of individual performers on YouTube. 3.2.

From micro-celebrity to “Internet famous”

Discussing one’s life and personal thoughts about private and current societal matters in video blogs is one of the main ways in which the self-presentation of ordinary persons is performed on YouTube. According to Turner (2004: 8), ordinary people and their lifeworlds have become a main topic of interest in the last decade because of the influence of reality TV, a format that made the “private self” the “privileged object of revelation”. Turner (2010: 3) coined the term demotic turn to describe the rise in fame of such users on social media, reality TV, talk radio and websites. In this light, common people emerged as the center of public interest in television shows, becoming active performers and presenters of their everyday lives in more or less staged, scripted and edited scenes. In media studies, authenticity refers to publicizing a private life, providing an apparently truthful disclosure of oneself while doing so (cf. Marwick 2013: 248). This type of performance includes the creation of an interesting persona, one that appeals to the public and potential fans (Marwick 2013: 114). When ordinary individuals post videos, they keep their presentation close to their everyday personalities and create videos that are different from professionally-produced videos (Marwick 2013: 119). Users’ identities on social media have been one of the main topics of research on videos and YouTube. In one of the first media studies analyses, Senft (2008) examined the home webcams of women who opened up their private lives to make friends. They adopted a very intimate tone and confessional practices about their ordinary life stories that would usually remain in the private sphere (Senft 2008). A famous example was Lonelygirl15’s vlog with its confessional and authentic style. It was followed by a large audience, but was later revealed to be a performance by actors (Senft 2008: 28–31). However, this particular vlog demonstrates the use of videos for any user desirous of fame (Senft 2008; Burgess and Green 2009: 28–29). The rise in popularity of YouTubers, or YouTube celebrities, is the basis of Internet famous or becoming a micro-celebrity. According to Marwick (2013: 115), micro-celebrity is “a way of thinking of oneself as a celebrity, and treating others accordingly”. She considered professional video gamers, wannabe pop

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stars, beauty bloggers and political activists as current examples of micro-celebrities (Marwick 2013: 115). However, gaining fame on social media is not necessarily the result of a conscious act; it can even be unwanted (Marwick 2013: 115). One example of a micro-celebrity is Saara, formerly known as Smokahontas, who has so far produced 59 videos mainly in English on her video channel. She is a young Finnish YouTuber who started posting in 2014, and one of her very first videos, What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners, went instantly viral. In this video, she imitates 14 different languages in a mash-up type video. Her other videos include, first, professional type of funny and talented performances of role play, and since she has tried to pursue a musical career, she has music videos as well. Second, she has confessional videos where she tells about her health issues and weight loss. Third, she has interactional Q-A videos, in which she replies to snap chat messages sent by her fans. She builds up her public identity through these different types of videos. In addition, the micro-celebrity is built through polymedia presence (Madianou and Miller 2013) as she tries to reach her audience through other accounts – Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – and in a broadcast media context, such as her appearance as a talent-show judge (Östman and Johansson 2016). The game vlogger PewDiePie has gained the highest level of popularity on YouTube (see Section 2.3). Why is he so popular? There are several reasons. His main productions are video games commentaries; he makes his comments while playing. In addition, he produces several types of videos that represent different popular video genres. Their topics can be categorized into commentary, humor and parody, explanations of social media phenomena, responses to fans and vlogs about his daily life. His commentary videos document his reactions to a variety of subjects, including hate videos and his own previous videos. When he explains social media phenomena in his Clickbait videos, he reveals the hidden strategies by which YouTubers attract users to click on their videos. In fan videos, he addresses his followers and fans directly, reads their comments, performs IQ tests, etc. When he vlogs about his personal life, he describes how he was kicked out of his apartment and talks with his girlfriend. His wide range of different types of videos enables him to speak to many different audiences. He has created an offline community, mostly young boys and gamers, that he calls his “Broarmy”. While presenting, he can be humorous, parodic, aggressive and satirical. In other words, his style-switching performance recalls many comedy shows that rely on vernacular humor. He frequently crosses lines of appropriateness and often curses. This creates a kind of public ‘off-stage’ talk, using vernacular language in public (cf. Johansson forthcoming). The huge Internet fame has brought about a lot of video commentaries and parodies about PewDiePie himself. Two studies on the representation of the other, which adopt the double frames of presentation in portraying persons in a transcultural world, will be examined next.

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Representations of the other

One type of work presented in video performances is based on the discursive construction of the transcultural representation of the other, especially in the work by Chun and Walters (2011) and Leppänen and Häkkinen (2012). In this type of video, humor and parody are the main means of representing a ‘distant other’ as stereotypical or in a simplified version. These presentations bring out an essentialist representation of the other, but through the use of polyphonic voices, the videos can force the audience to reflect on their own conceptions of the performer or of the other put on the stage. A representation of the other is given in Chun and Walters’ (2011) article on Arab Orientalism in stand-up comedian Wonho Chung’s videos. The videos are recordings of live performances by a comedian who plays with complex indexical positionings. His background is Korean and Vietnamese, he has perfect knowledge of the local Arab culture, and he presents himself as a Filipino (he says he is constantly mistaken for one). One of these videos is Wonho Chung Performs at Friday Night Live, in which he constructs his complex identity. This allows him to present humorously ideological alignments with what these researchers call an Oriental figure (Chun and Walters 2011: 251, 261). When explaining the parody, Chun and Walters refer to Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis and Bakhtin’s (1984) polyphony. According to both authors, the video parody is based on a play frame of a double voice, in which the performer puts himself and the parodied figure on the stage while acknowledging the ideological alignment of the Arab audience (Chun and Walters 2011: 251, 254). The humor results from two figures that do not coincide, as the expressed stances are close to racist discourse (Chun and Walters 2011: 254–255, 261). However, the play frame also includes a satirical stance, and the performer’s stylized performance reduces the risk of his being judged as racist (Chun and Walters 2011: 261). Some of the comments that this video performance has received raise the issue of the problematic nature of stereotypical representation; in others, the users react positively to the act (Chun and Walters 2011: 262). In the user comments, the affective stance is very strong, and they convey their surprise based on the imbalance between their own knowledge of Arab culture and the performer’s physical appearance, which differs from the “typical” appearance (Chun and Walters 2011: 264–266). Another type of analysis was conducted by Leppänen and Häkkinen (2012) on “buffalaxed videos”. The latter are defined as “parody versions of snippets of motion pictures, TV broadcasts or musical performances which are originally broadcast in a language incomprehensible to most westerners and which feature such Others as Bollywood characters or oriental pop singers” (Leppänen and Häkkinen 2012: 17). One example of this type of video is a song, Kalluri Vaanil, presented in Tamil by an Indian actor and performer named Prabhu Deva and remixed into a video parody. It was renamed Benny Lava, and contained subtitles in a completely different

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language, English. The subtitles do not portray the original meaning, but ‘translate’ the phonetic meaning heard in the lyrics, thus creating a parodic effect. They are imitations of the original words but are spelled out in the video’s subtitles in the language of the target audience, thus producing a new meaning (Leppänen and Häkkinen 2012: 17–18). In their analysis, the authors pointed out that these types of videos focus on social and cultural groups to create humor based on hierarchies of value and humor that is not politically correct (Leppänen and Häkkinen 2012: 20). They considered that the videos represent stereotypes containing features that can be culturally racist, but are confusing because they can be interpreted in multiple ways (Leppänen and Häkkinen 2012: 20). This explanation is similar to the one given by Chun and Walters (2011) about the polyphonic play frame. In the following main Section 4, I will examine how videos are commented on in the light of several research studies, covering networked audience and participation framework, as well as the methods of text-based and video-based comment production.

4.

Commenting on YouTube videos

4.1.

Networked audiences and participation frameworks

Different social media platforms construct interaction between users in different ways, and even an individual platform has to cater for different audiences, as Marwick and boyd (2011) and Page (2012) have shown with Twitter. Twitter forms a networked audience that can be conceptualized as a fan base, but audience members can participate in promoting users’ (professional) identities and marketing goods in celebrity- or company-related Twitter accounts (Page 2012). Between these kinds of audience members, there is a simulated dialogue instead of a true participatory discussion (cf. Page 2012: 194). However, audiences might turn into counter-audiences that dislike or attack the video in comment posts. They also remain unfamiliar to each other and engage in discussions without knowing each other. This is called context collapse by Marwick and boyd (2011: 124), who point out that “[s]ocial media collapse diverse social contexts into one, making it difficult for people to engage in the complex negotiations needed to vary identity presentation, manage impressions, and save face”. In sum, the audiences are situated. They can respond to the content, communication acts, and other users’ comments, but also to all the contextual information that the situation carries with it. When studying participation frameworks, Dynel (2014) and Boyd (2014) both separated production and reception into different levels based on Goffman’s participation framework. They considered viewers to be ratified participants. Dynel (2014: 42) acknowledged some of the problems of applying different participation roles, such as the inadaptability of eavesdroppers within YouTube communica-

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tion. However, Chovanec (2016) demonstrated that participants can be assigned an eavesdropper’s role, in his case of microphone gaffes, where the users are put in the position of eavesdroppers (see Section 3.1). YouTubers can assume a writer’s role if they post a comment in the video comment section (Dynel 2014: 46). However, if they post a video, they would instead adopt a speaking role – video comments were possible until recently (see Section 4.3). In his article, Boyd (2014) expanded the description of participation roles according to the comment’s function in the interaction. He distinguished, among others, disruptive roles such as spammer and troll. I will now turn to YouTube comment discussions and their threads. They will be considered as debates and conflicts (research in pragmatics has shown the issues that give rise to the evolution and development of the latter). I also describe the sequentiality of video comments. 4.2.

Comment discussions and conflict as a sequential phenomenon

YouTube comment discussions are online multiparty discussions (cf. Marcoccia 2004). They are determined by the video’s genre, its topic and its social interaction. They have been studied as text-based comments and massive polylogues (Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012). They can have different types of referential targets: the video itself, other users’ comments, or a target that is neither of these, but is outside of the situation (cf. Johansson forthcoming; Section 4.3). These kinds of comments can be about the vlogger’s former videos, video culture, or the commenter’s own videos. Comment discussions also vary in their scope: they can concentrate on local issues or more global ones. Pihlaja (2014a) analyzed one comment discussion within a community of users and their membership categorization that turned into a conflict. Benson (2015: 85) considered YouTube interaction in the framework of multimodal discourse analysis. His analysis is based on the model of analysis of spoken interaction developed in the Birmingham school by John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard (1975). Benson investigated turns, response moves, and patterns of interactions in data on the Cantonese Word of the Week YouTube series, which presents discussions around the use of this language (Benson 2015: 87). Several studies have focused on controversial interactions, impoliteness, incoherence and conflict management (Lorenzo-Dus Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2011; Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014) or on metaphor use in antagonism (Pihlaja 2014b). What these studies have in common is that they focus on digital interaction based on the kinds of topics that deal with questions of sociocultural values, morals, and ethics, such as homosexuality, politics, and religion. Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014) examined the unfolding of a conflict in an online discussion on YouTube. They studied the conflict as a

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sequential phenomenon, paying attention to how the conflict began, developed, and ended in a discussion that centered on teen homosexuality portrayed in a public announcement by a Spanish LGBT association. The scholars’ objective was to develop a new method of analysis that would be based on this type of material, replacing the methods originating in studies of face-to-face models and previous CMC-based analyses on flaming. The authors’ decision to focus on conflict was based on research into CMC, discourse analysis and politeness theory. Here, conflict is related to social practices and individuals with differing worldviews on certain topics. Anonymity and deindividuation are the key factors leading to polarization in online discussions (Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014: 20–21). According to this study, a conflict arose in a second move that opposed an initial argument (2014: 24). Conflicts contain views, stated aggressively, that support or deny the ideological positions presented in the video and in its comments (2014: 24–26). Multifunctional utterances in the posting contributed to the analysis; the three stages, beginning, middle and end, were shown as reified constructs in which the conflict remained unresolved (2014: 33). The two authors proposed, therefore, that the conflict did not unfold as in face-to-face situations but was concentrated in the ongoing struggle of the “middle” (2014: 33). Section 4.3 describes comment threads posted in video format. The practice is no longer available, but does provide information about the types of replies that users post to an initial video. 4.3.

Video blogs and their video threads

Since YouTube’s launch, users have been able to respond to videos by uploading another video, a practice called video interaction that ended recently. When commenting in this way, a series of videos builds up, forming video threads. A number of studies investigated this particular phenomenon, among them Adami (2009, 2014, 2015). Her approach to video interaction is based on Kress’s (2010: 33) view of multimodal communication, in which a prompt, in this case the video, catches the attention of a participant, who frames and interprets the prompt in his or her response. Adami’s data consisted of videos called Where Do YouTube? by ChangeDaChannel and The Best Video EVER by Chris Crocker. Both have been among the most downloaded videos of all time. In Where Do YouTube?, video blogger ChangeDaChannel invited users to share information about their location. He showed a written note about his own location in California, thus providing an example of the kind of reply he anticipated (Adami 2009: 386). He received 550 responses in one month, and those responses were followed by their own responses (2009: 381). According to Adami (2009: 383), the video thread that followed consisted of responses directed at the initial video, because the users did not engage in interactions. The answers came from 59 countries, most from the United States (Adami 2009: 387). In the responses, the users oriented themselves to the prompt

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(the initial video) but displayed their distinctiveness in different multimodal ways, by creating a themed performance or giving a playful answer to the prompt (2009: 388–392). In her 2014 and 2015 articles, Adami studied the relatedness of the video responses to Chris Crocker’s The Best video EVER. In this extremely short video, the only thing Crocker does is blink twice. Adami distinguished several types of relatedness (or its absence). She asserted that the main way in which a video response is related to the initial video is adjacency. In these cases, the response video followed the same action as in the initial video: the users blinked, as Crocker did in the initial video. They did it in either a positive or negative manner, and some added other non-verbal actions, such as drinking or eating (Adami 2015: 240–241). In this sense, the response videos are related to the original one. Video responses can also show a deviation from the initial video action. Here, Adami (2015: 242–243) considered videos in which users commented on the action they witnessed in the initial video. For example, they might comment on the video’s ‘bestness’ by speaking to the camera. The video responses, however, could deviate from the main topic of the initial video by adopting another topic without any explanation (2015: 245). According to Adami (2015: 246–249), the initial video can be used for creative responses or for transformative remixes and parodies. Responsiveness can be implicit, for example, when a video response does not have an explicit link to the initial video but refers to a background element or a character or has no connection whatsoever to the initial video (2015: 250–254). 5. Conclusion For linguists, YouTube is an extremely important and largely unexplored terrain, interesting for several reasons and offering a variety of possible research subjects. First, videos are digital multimodal texts that are interesting from the perspective of visual and verbal expression. The monological expression or interactional situations in video blogs open up new ways in which to look at language use from the pragmatic perspective. Indeed, vloggers also present exciting material for study: for instance, how they talk about the world and how they address audiences. The video channels of different YouTubers reflect different domains of everyday life, too. They may be professionally produced, aiming at a specific field in entertainment, such as in the case of comedy-based YouTubers. Common phenomena on YouTube, such as micro-celebrity and viral videos, can be approached in pragmatic terms. In addition, videos merit study from the perspective of communicative genre: identifying genres could help in identifying genre ecology and other social media-related phenomena. Today, video culture is spreading far beyond YouTube. Several sites, such as Vimeo or Ted Talks, are devoted to videos. Videos are important in online news sites and are gaining momentum as an important means of professional communi-

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cation. For example, research nights and company events are streamed for larger audiences. After the events, videos such as EU Science and Innovation, a video channel that presents science news and gives information about research funding, make them accessible to larger audiences. Another example is Slush, an annual international event to promote start-up companies and their investors; in the videos, it uses all kinds of contemporary video genres and narratives to promote their business. Videos are rather independent forms on YouTube, where they form video channels and are commented on. On other social media sites, they are integrated with other content; they are, e.g., fused with tweets and Facebook posts or digital news texts (Johansson 2012). The material that is remediated or shared with means of expression typically found in other social media can be studied from the perspective of polymedia (Madianou and Miller 2013). The line between professional and ordinary users’ videos could also be considered as the relation between online and offline language situations. Overall, both theoretically and methodologically, research should cross more borders and adopt interdisciplinary perspectives that have the potential to open up new research objects and new explanatory models in digital communication studies. Videos and video channels 3 Years of Travel in 3 Minutes (Lessons and Adventures). Channel High on Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJF5NXygL4k. Charlie bit my finger 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM. Chung, Wonho 2010 Wonho Chung performs at Friday Night Live. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-BbJoJFu1Vc. David after dentist 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs. EU Science and Innovation. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1lhGQ0C_OOlaS1rbxlXM5Q. Evolution of Dance 2006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg. Hitler Rant Parodies 2009–2016 https://www.youtube.com/user/hitlerrantsparodies/videos?sort=p&view= 0&flow=grid. Lava, Benny 2008 Crazy Indian Video, Buffalaxed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= pzd6CgrNcU0. Lumière, Louis and Auguste 1895a La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon [Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwRAUniWJPY.

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Lumière, Louis and Auguste 1895b L’arrivée du train à la gare de Ciotat [The Arrival of the Train]. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=b9MoAQJFn_8. Lumière, Louis and Auguste 1896 Arroseur arrosé [The Sprinkler Sprinkled]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =UlbiNuT7EDI. Me at the zoo 2005 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw PewDiePie 2014 I react to my old videos. (Fridays With PewDiePie – Part 80). https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=0mJiPcKybzU. Regular cars https://www.youtube.com/user/RegularCars. Saara https://www.youtube.com/user/SmoukahontasOfficial. Slush https://www.youtube.com/user/KickNetwork. Sneezing Panda 2006 https://www.google.fi/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv= 2&ie=UTF-8#q=Sneezing+panda. Smarter Every Day  https://www.youtube.com/user/destinws2/videos?sort=p&view=0& flow=grid. Télezapping 2011 Sarkozy attaque, ses adversaires répliquent [Sarkozy attacks, his a­ dversaries reply]. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwt97g_telezapping-sarkozyattaque-ses-adversaires-repliquent_news. The Hoax Hotel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnNlJNSRxa3PF8XrKHOEPug.

YouTube and popularity rankings List of most viewed YouTube videos. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ most_viewed_YouTube_videos. Accessed May 6, 2016. List of the most subscribed users on YouTube. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_the_most_subscribed_users_on_YouTube. Accessed September 16, 2016. Music videos. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_video#1926.E2.80.931959:_ Talkies.2C_soundies.2C_and_shorts. Accessed September 27, 2016. Time Magazine s.  a. YouTube’s 50 Best Videos. Accessed May 6, 2016. YouTube Red. https://www.youtube.com/red. Accessed September 16, 2016. YouTube Statistics. https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html. Accessed June 24, 2016.

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Gee, James Paul 2014 What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gere, Charlie 2002 Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Gibson, James 1979 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Giltrow, Janet and Dieter Stein 2009a Genres in the Internet. Issues in the Theory of Genre Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Giltrow, Janet and Dieter Stein 2009b Genres in the Internet. Innovation, evolution, and genre theory. In: Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein (eds.), Genres in the Internet, 1–25. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk. London: Basil Blackwell. Goodwin, Charles and Alessandro Duranti 1992 Rethinking context: An introduction. In: Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John 1992 Contextualization revisited. In: Peter Auer and Aldo di Luzio (eds.), The Contextualization of Language, 39–54. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Griffith, Maggie and Zizi Papacharissi 2009 Looking for you: An analysis of video blogs. First Monday 15. . Accessed: 13 Oct. 2016. doi: 10.5210/fm.v15i1.2769. Haddington, Pentti 2010 Turn-taking for turn-taking: Mobility, time, and action in the sequential organization of junction negotiations in cars. Research on Language and Social Interaction 43(4): 372–400. Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa, Marjut Johansson and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen 2014 Johdatus digitaaliseen vuorovaikutukseen. [Introduction to digital interaction]. In: Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Marjut Johansson and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.), Kieli verkossa. Näkökulmia digitaaliseen vuorovaikutukseen [Language in the Net. Perspective on to Digital Interaction], 9–28. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura. Herring, Susan 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@ Internet. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761. Herring, Susan 2013 Discourse in Web 2.0: familiar, reconfigured, and emergent. In: Deborah Tan-

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nen and Anna M. Tester (eds.), Discourse 2.0. Language and New Media, 1–24. Washington, DC. Georgetown University Press. Herring, Susan, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen 2013a Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Herring, Susan, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen 2013b Introduction to the Pragmatics of Computer-mediated Communication. In: Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of ComputerMediated Communication, 3–32. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Heyd, Theresa 2009 A model for describing “new” and “old” properties of CMC genres. In: Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein (eds.), Genres in the Internet, 239–262. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Hutchby, Ian 2001 Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology 35: 441–456. Iedema, Rick 2003 Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication 2(1): 29–57. Jenkins, Henry 2006 Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenks, Christopher and Alan Firth 2013 Synchronous voice-based computer-mediated communication. In: Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 217–241. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Jewitt, Carey 2009 The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge. Johansson, Marjut 2012 Political videos in digital news discourse. In: Anita Fetzer and Lawrence N. Berlin (eds.), Dialogue in Politics, 43–67. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Johansson, Marjut 2013 Remixing opinions: Video quotations and stances in video press reviews. Recherches en Communication 39: 95–115. Johansson, Marjut forthcoming  Everyday opinions in news discussion forums: Vernacular public discourse. Discourse, Context and Media. Jucker, Andreas and Christa Dürscheid 2012 The linguistics of keyboard-to-screen communication. A new terminological framework. Linguistik Online 56. http://www.linguistik-online.de/56_12/juckerDuerscheid.html. Accessed: 13 Oct. 2016. Kaplan, Andreas M. and Michael Haenlein 2010 Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons 53: 59–68. Kress, Gunther 2010 Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London/New York: Routledge.

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Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen 2006 Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Lange, Patricia G. 2007 Publicly private and privately public: Social networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13: 361–80. Leppänen, Sirpa and Ari Häkkinen 2012 Buffalaxed superdiversity: Representations of the other on YouTube. Diversities 2: 17–33. http://www.mmg.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Subsites/Diversities/ Journals_2012/2012_14-02.pdf#page=19. Accessed: 13 Oct. 2016. Leppänen, Sirpa, Kytölä Samu, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen and Elina Westinen 2014 Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In: Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (eds.), The Language of Social Media, 112–136. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen 1992 Activity type and language. In: Paul Drew and John Heritage (eds.), Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lievrouw, Leah A. 2009 New media, mediation, and communication study. Information, Communication, and Society 12: 303–325. Linell, Per 1998 Approaching Dialogue. Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Linell, Per 2009 Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically. Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Livingstone, Sonia 2009 On the mediation of everything. Journal of Communication 59: 1–18. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich and Patricia Bou-Franch 2011 On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama reggaeton YouTube video. Journal of Pragmatics 4: 2578–2593. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller 2013 Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169–187. Marcoccia, Michel 2004 On-line polylogues: Conversation structure and participation framework in Internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 115–145. Marcoccia, Michel 2016 Analyser la Communication Numérique Écrite. Paris: Armand Colin. Marwick, Alice E. 2013 Status Update. Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Marwick, Alice E. and danah boyd 2011 I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 1: 114–133.

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8. Twitter Michele Zappavigna Abstract: This chapter explores the language of microblogging by focusing on discourse produced via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. In the first section I consider microblogging as a semiotic practice, trace its historical development and investigate the interdisciplinary research into this form of communication. My focus will be on linguistic work in the areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis which explores the dominant communicative conventions that have arisen via Twitter, such as retweeting and hashtagging. I will then turn to the social concept of what Zappavigna (2012) terms ‘searchable talk’, i.e. discourse which renders opinion and sentiment readily findable through resources such as social tagging. The chapter concludes by suggesting the important role that ambient affiliation plays in microblogging by forging communities through negotiating values, an issue to which I will return in my chapter on evaluation in social media (cf. Ch. 16, this volume). 1.

Introduction: Microblogging as a semiotic practice

The advent of social media has seen a proliferation of semiotic resources for construing experience, negotiating values, and enacting identities and communities online. Microblogging is a short-form social media technology, involving the posting of small, typically episodic, messages aimed at internet-mediated audiences. These texts appear on social media services, such as Twitter and Weibo, as chronologically unfolding streams of posts associated with a user’s social profile. Microblogging services are “specifically designed to broadcast short but regular bursts of content to particularly large audiences well beyond a user’s direct social network” (Murthy 2013: 12). Users subscribe to the feeds of different accounts, and search posts in the public stream with native or third party applications. An example of a post is the following, taken from a corpus of tweets about coffee (Zappavigna 2013):1

1



Examples used in this chapter are drawn from this corpus unless otherwise noted. This corpus of ‘coffee tweets’ has been used to investigate how people use language to forge social bonds online, here by aligning around shared feelings about the positive effects of morning coffee. This has been explored as a shared process of ‘ambient affiliation’ that we will return to at the end of this chapter.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-008 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 201–224. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Figure 1. An example of a microblogging post

As Figure 1 suggests, different kinds of textual elements augment the ‘body’ of a post, including social tags (e.g. #needcoffee in the above), various types of metadata (e.g. timestamps), and material relating to the author’s profile such as an icon and username. At the time of writing in 2016, the range of genres deployed via microblogging is vast, and correspondingly challenging to map them exhaustively. By deploying a particular instantiation of a genre “an individual user establishes a contract with a particular social group or a segment of social media users” (Artemeva 2015: 282). These genres span most domains of social life from the personal and domestic, to the political and national, incorporating a range of linguistic functions, from ideational broadcasting of content, to interpersonal sharing of feelings (Zappavigna 2015). Descriptions of microblogging usually imply that these genres are conversational, and that microblogging involves some kind of ‘conversational exchange’ (Honeycutt and Herring 2009). The practice has been described as “lightweight chat” (Starbird et al. 2010: 242), as “prompting opportunistic conversations” (Zhao and Rosson 2009: 251), as “a specific social dialect, in which individual users are clearly singled out and engaged in a conversation” (Holotescu and Grosseck 2009: 163), and as constituted by “dialogue acts” (Ritter, Cherry and Dolan 2010: 172). This chapter begins by broadly surveying interdisciplinary research into microblogging and the kinds of features/dimensions of communication as well as research methods that have been applied in this domain. It then historically contextualises microblogging as a semiotic practice, introducing Twitter, one of the most popular platforms, as a semiotic technology. Some of the main communicative conventions that have arisen on Twitter (such as @mentions, retweets, and hashtags) are then introduced, alongside linguistic studies incorporating these features. Since the social function of social media communication is, broadly speaking, about forging relationships (across a large variety of often quite niche-like domains), linguistic studies of social media are necessarily bound by the need to locate theory and analytical methods that are able to account for how such social affiliation is enacted in discourse. The final section of this chapter thus considers attempts to understand how people use language to forge (and disrupt) social bonds, i.e. issues that are currently at stake in social media research.

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Interdisciplinary research into microblogging

Research into microblogging is a multidisciplinary arena, spanning domains outside linguistics such as psychology, media studies, marketing, and many others. It often focuses on snapshots (Popescu and Pennacchiotti 2010) of ‘real-time’ microblogging communication at particular temporal or contextual moments, for instance during natural disasters (Shaw et al. 2013), elections, or as a backchannel during live entertainment (Highfield, Harrington and Bruns 2013). The diverse and extensive range of naturally-occurring discourse available on Twitter has also meant that work has been conducted on this platform across most major fields in linguistics, ranging from pragmatics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics to computational linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics. These studies explore communication about every conceivable topic from the nature of people’s discussion of e-cigarettes (Cole-Lewis et al. 2015) to the interactions of athletes (Hambrick et al. 2010). Much research has investigated a wide range of pragmatic issues such as the nature of Twitter corporate apologies (Page 2014), politeness in tweets (Sifianou 2015), the speech act of self-praise (Dayter 2014), linguistic features associated with sexual aggression in tweets, e.g. the language patterns seen in rape threats, (Hardaker and McGlashan 2016), gender representation, and issues of perceived linguistic authenticity (Kytölä and Westinen 2015). Public access to Twitter’s Application Programming Interfaces (API)2 means that tweets are relatively easy to collect and hence a vast array of domain-specific research into particular niche issues has built up around Twitter.3 Thus it is unsurprising that the dominant research strategy has been to analyse (both quantitatively and qualitatively) social media corpora (see for example Baker and McEnery 2015; Page 2012a, 2012b; Seargeant and Tagg 2014; Zappavigna 2012). Some of this work adopts a sociolinguistic interest in exploring variations in tweeting practices across variables such as gender, ethnicity, and language variety (Adnan, Longley and Khan 2014; Bamman, Eisenstein and Schnoebelen 2014; Neubig and Duh 2013) and individual variation (Kelsey and Bennett 2014). There has also been some interest in exploring social media texts in terms of narrative theory that 2



3



The API is the language that software tools use to communicate with Twitter’s back-end database in order to assemble subsets of posts from the public feed. The ‘garden hose’ is the freely available access provided by Twitter to its data, and is a random sample of posts (collected according to Twitter’s particular algorithm defining randomness) and a subset of ‘fire hose’ access to all publically available tweets. Most Twitter corpora are produced by creating what Popescu and Pennacchiotti (2010) refer to as a Twitter ‘snapshot’, featuring some entity, a time period, and a selection of tweets. Payment, however, is obligatory if an exhaustive set of tweets is required, beyond the ‘random’ sample offered by the ‘garden hose’ feed of tweets that Twitter makes freely available.

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has developed out of early research into narrative such as Labov and Waletzky’s (1967). For example, in accord with Page’s work, Dayter (2015) approaches tweets as instances of “small stories” and suggests that these stories can span multiple tweets and be analysed using the orientation, complication, evaluation and resolution genre structure regularly used to characterise narrative. She also identifies two types of stories that she claims are typical of an ‘eyewitness microgenre’. The first is a ‘delayed resolution narrative’ in the form of live commentary which can only be seen as a single coherent narrative once completed. The second is a ‘tiny story’ which is a fragmented account of an everyday activity in which the narrative stance is not clear. A detailed survey of research methods used to explore social media is provided by the textbook Researching the Language of Social Media (Page et al. 2014). Despite the accumulation of linguistic research into social media, the majority of studies investigating Twitter do so from a communication theory or media studies perspective without applying a particular theory of language to the communicative patterns observed. The detailed linguistic analysis of particular types of social media texts is a complex undertaking from which a wide range of methodological challenges can arise. These include ethical issues due to the intimate material revealed in posts, problems related to the multimodal nature of the data, and the complexity of accounting for the relationship between online and offline contexts (Bolander and Locher 2014). An ongoing and important consideration for linguistic projects exploring social media is how “bespoke” the analytical instrument to be applied should be, given the fast pace at which social media practices and platforms change (Giles et al. 2014: 49). Tools that are designed specifically for analyzing particular types of social media communication, rather than for exploring general shifts in meaning-making, risk redundancy. This is particularly perilous in view of the effort required to develop methods to capture the multimodal nature of social media texts.

3.

Tracing the historical development of microblogging

3.1.

Twitter and older media practices

The attempt to identify its historical antecedents is a characteristic feature of the initial phases of research into new fields. This also applies to the new technology of microblogging and leads to the question how it evolved from older media practices (see for example Murthy 2013). Commentators have been keen to historicise Twitter in terms of older restricted forms of communication prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These include the telegraph, and forms of record keeping, such as diaries (Murthy 2013). Unravelling the multidimensional interaction between the evolution of communicative potential (the meanings we

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can make within a particular culture) and changes in technological platforms supporting communication is no easy task. Historically, communication has always been intimately connected to the material and semiotic particularities of different media. This means that, on the one hand, it may be productive to think about the shifts in meaning potential over time that are afforded by each new reading or writing technology. However, on the other hand, this line of thinking can tend to background the fact that the interaction between technical platforms and communicative practices is a complex feedback loop, evolving in tandem with other contextual factors. Microblogging has now been around long enough that it features a broad range of human expression, involving a wide range of communicative genres and contexts, as noted earlier. Because it spans areas as disparate as personal feelings about daily routine (Zappavigna, 2014) and discourse about elections (Bruns et al. 2015), microblogging has been seen as blurring the public and private realm in novel ways (Baym and boyd 2012). However, public and private domains have regularly intersected throughout history to differing degrees. Communicative channels that we might characterise, with modern eyes, as highly personal, such as diaries, in fact have emerged out of traditions in which diaries were often public documents intended to be shared (Humphreys et al. 2013). A comparison of tweets with eighteenth and nineteenth century diaries suggested that both condense personal experience into small texts intended to be distributed in the public realm, and thus form part of the history of “personal writing for public consumption” (Humphreys et al. 2013: 414). What is most distinctive about microblogging, if we are to situate it within the history of communication, is the level of interactivity enabled with potential audiences for any given text, and the potential reach of that text to an audience of millions. Facebook’s ‘status update’ feature is one of the earliest forms of microblogging that was available to a large cohort of users. This feature invited users to respond to the prompt question (sometimes referred to as a tagline) “What are you doing right now?”. Prior to 2008, responses were restricted to a template featuring the verb form ‘is’, constraining the type of updates that could be fashioned to posts. This structure created a relationship of attribution, linking the account profile to the content of the post. The examples below are posts conforming to this structure by the author from 2007:

is listening to the rain is having her morning coffee

And, due to the limitations imposed by the template, ungrammatical constructions occurred, as in:

is just ate BBQ pineapple

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Later, the verb form was abandoned, and the prompt shifted to the command “Share what’s on your mind”, which allowed any type of grammatical construction in the response. At the time of writing, the prompt is the question “What’s on your mind?” The choices in response made available by these “invocations to participation” (Burgess 2014: 283) offer insight into the types of semiotic behaviour a particular microblogging service is constructing as normative, as well as the way the service is hoping to brand itself as a media platform. The restrictions imposed are not necessarily static and “[w]hen they do change, they are often accompanied by public relations materials alerting us to shifts in business logic” (Burgess 2014: 283). 3.2.

The advent of Twitter as a microblogging service

Shortly after status updating on Facebook had begun to develop as a practice, Twitter, a social media service designed purely for microblogging, was released. It would emerge as “a key player in the colonization of the internet by corporate social media” (Sharma 2013: 49). Moving from “a niche service to a mass phenomenon” (Weller et al. 2013: xxix), Twitter has integrated itself into important domains of social life such as journalism, public communication, politics, and activism, as well as corporate domains such as market research, advertising, and branding. It has become largely synonymous in most countries with the broader practice of microblogging, having outlived other nascent services, with the exception of China where Sina Weibo is the dominant platform (Weller et al. 2013). Figure 2 below shows founder Jack Dorsey’s notes relating to the initial design of Twitter. These are an interesting historical document in terms of the development of Twitter as a semiotic platform. As this image suggests, the initial design concept for Twitter was focused on the notion that a user has a ‘status’ that they wished to share. The reference to the chat protocol, jabber, suggests that this concept had been drawn from instant messaging, where a status indicated a user’s conversational availability and was part of the maintenance of online ‘social presence’ (Baron at al. 2005). For example an ‘away message’, indicating that a user is unavailable might be classed as informational or expressive (Nastri, Peña and Hancock 2006: 1028):

At the library [informational] I hate this weather [expressive]

These short texts featured a range of speech functions, with assertives being the most common type (Nastri, Peña and Hancock 2006). A quick search of Twitter at the time of writing easily retrieves similar posts to the above away messages, indicating that this early function remains:

been at the library for 4 hours … I hate this weather

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Figure 2. Twitter design notes produced by Jack Dorsey in 2006. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/in/photostream/

Twitter posts, which came to be known as ‘tweets’, were constrained in Dorsey’s design to 140 characters, in order to allow messages to conform to the 160 character limit set for SMS on most phones in 2006 (factoring in 20 characters for the account username). Figure 3 is the first tweet by one of Twitter’s co-founders. The tweet features a brief message, “Ok we are in the car”, which has been retweeted 8 times, and ‘liked’ 5 times. At this stage of development there was no technical or communicative convention for replying to other users or aggregating tweets into types using social tags.

Figure 3. An example of a tweet. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/biz/statuses/10345

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Many early tweets functioned as experiential status updates directly related to a user’s activities, for example, this tweet from 2006 by Twitter founder Biz Stone:

walking the dog

However, just as the Facebook prompt question evolved, Twitter’s prompt shifted from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” Users had begun to post about topical events and a wide range of phenomena not limited to their personal activities (Tagg 2015). At the same time the business model underlying Twitter, and also Facebook, began to increasingly rely on forms of data mining used to collect material relevant to corporations and brands (Burgess 2014). Figure 4 details the basic functionality of a tweet as made available via the Twitter website in 2016. Tweets incorporate the user’s account name, username, and a timestamp indicating when the message was posted, as well as a range of interactive elements providing options to subscribe to the user’s stream of posts, or to interact with it in some way. This functionality will look different depending on how the user is accessing the service, for instance either via the web interface or by a mobile device, or by using a native or third party application. In addition, it should be noted that Twitter is a moving target in terms of research, since social media platforms are constantly evolving alongside shifts in contexts of use (Hogan and Quan-Haase 2010). While this is essentially the case with any form of commu-

Figure 4. The anatomy of a tweet.

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nication, it is highlighted by social media discourse since constant change seems to be part of maintaining the popularity or social relevance of the media employed. 4.

Twitter communicative conventions

While first generation microblogging services were not designed to directly support ‘conversational’ exchanges between users, perhaps with the exception of Jaiku’s (another microblogging service) message threading capabilities, the ability to reference and address posts to particular users has now become a fundamental feature of microblogging. This is part of a more general social need for microblogging to manage discursive heteroglossia (Kristeva 1980), in other words to allow users to engage with other voices, opinions, and information available in the social stream. Bruns and Moe (2014) suggest that there are three structural layers of communication possible with Twitter, corresponding to the types of information exchange and user interaction: micro (follower-followee networks), meso (hashtagged exchanges), and macro (@reply conversations). This section reviews research into key conventions used in Twitter communication that have been developed both by the system designers and organically through community use. As Zappavigna (2012) notes, these conventions center around three linguistic markers: addressing and referencing other users with @, republishing other tweets with RT, and labelling topics with #. 4.1.

Addressivity and @mentions

The first convention marks address with the @ character when a user wishes to explicitly direct their micropost at another user. In these instances @ will be deployed as a deictic marker, as in the following example: @User1 there will always be time for #coffee #beer and #wine ☺

Used in this way, the @ character indicates that the username which it precedes is directly addressed in the tweet.4 As such it functions to mark a vocative, often occupying initial position in a clause, though it also can occur in medial or final position. When not in initial position, @+username is more likely to indicate a reference to a particular user rather than to explicitly inscribe a direct address. For example:

4

Tried to make coffee this am..complete user malfunction – coffee ALL over the kitchen counter..leaving that job to @User2 from now on



All usernames in this chapter have been anonymized.

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This tweet is not directly addressing ‘User2’ and instead indirectly refers to this user with what is termed a ‘mention’. Mentioning a user with the @ character in this way is a kind of ‘amplified’ reference and potential tool for self-promotion since, depending on privacy settings and the evolving functionality of Twitter, other users who follow this user may view the mention. The @mention is also amplified in the sense that the @ character is searchable. Mentions can be aggregated and other users can search for particular instances. It is possible to retrieve all instances of @mentions to a given user (within a particular time window) with the Twitter search interface or using metadata and the Twitter API. Twitter is, however, continually modifying how it deals with @mentions in terms of who will see a conversational exchange in their feed (e.g. only direct followers of one of the participants), presumably in an attempt to predict the interests/attention span of its users. Honeycutt and Herring (2009: 4) provide an overview of the various uses of the @ character throughout digital communication (examples added): Addressivity @User3 I wish I could bring you bagels and coffee. Thinking of you. Reference Coffee and pseudo-dinner with @User4 lol. Work talk, makes you think. Change can go both ways. Emoticons Will have a cup of coffee and cookies for breakfast then I’ll be fixing myself. Lazy bum. @_@ Email [email protected] Locational ‘at’ Bought pear balsamic @ the Oilerie. Eating @ door county coffee co. Eyeing up hubby’s Reuben. Non-locational ‘at’ i kno my co-wrkr jst bodied a red bull, a mountain dew, aaand a coffee all @ once … he goes hard Other Forgot all about instant coffee, JEBUS how do they make that cr@! ?

Taking into account current Twitter usage, the @ character seems to be transformed into an increasingly interpersonal resource. This follows a general trend in the evolution of punctuation identified by Knox (2009), namely an evolution from textual functions toward more interpersonal functions, and toward the service of social affiliation (Zappavigna 2015).

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4.2. Retweeting Another way of bringing external voices into a tweet is to republish another user’s tweet within your own tweet. This is known as ‘retweeting’ and is usually marked by the initialism, RT, to indicate that the body of the tweet is quoted text. In other words, RT marks grammatical projection, economically standing for ‘User X has posted the following’. In most instances RT will be followed by the @ character to attribute the retweeted text to its original author, @User1 in the below: RT @User1: Packed up and heading to Lake Tahoe. Need. Coffee.

Sometimes retweets are used in a similar way to the reply function: Of course NOT I’m not expecting miracles LOL! RT @UserA: @UserB what you kicked the coffee habit ? lol Ha ha yes come to San Diego and I’ll pay for it :] RT @ddlovato: Power through, power through, power though.. coffee anybody?! haha

The way that Twitter handles retweeting has evolved with the functionality of the service, from manual retweets (RT @User, as in the above tweet), to native retweeting by clicking an icon present at the bottom of each tweet (when accessed via the web interface) (see Figure 4). Retweeting “allows members to relay or forward a tweet through their network” (Nagarajan, Purohit and Sheth 2010: 295), marking the quoted text as notable and effectively recommending it to their followers. It can significantly amplify the reach of a tweet, particularly when a user with a large body of followers, such as a celebrity, chooses to retweet something. Beyond rebroadcasting, retweeting “contributes to a conversational ecology in which conversations are composed of a public interplay of voices that give rise to an emotional sense of shared conversational context” (boyd, Golder and Lotan 2010: 1). The convention marks a tweet as worth of the attention within this conversational context and allows the retweeter to display a stance toward the retweeted text and project it as valuable to the community, whether in terms of merit or notoriety. For example, the underlined text in the following has been appended to the original tweet by the retweeter: Love this! RT @User: Just paid for the couple behind us coffee at starbucks. I encourage you all to pay it forward too.

This kind of evaluative appendage has also been noted by Page (2012b) who, approaching media from the perspective of narrative, has suggested the role of retweeting in new ‘co-tellership practices’ and noted the tendency of celebrities to append evaluative assessment to their retweets as a means of aligning with their audience. Some studies have explored how often posts are retweeted, for instance as a measure of success in activism (Potts et al. 2014: 66). While retweeting is an

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important way to expand the reach of a tweet to new audiences, it also can be part of establishing and maintaining social relationships (Boyd, Golder and Lotan 2010). Puschmann (2015) claims that community structure can, to varying extents, be predicted by the social use of quotation. His study identifies four functions of retweeting: passing on information, commenting or responding, presenting one’s own interests, and building social capital (Puschmann 2015). 4.3.

Hashtagging and ‘searchable talk’

The drive to make our opinions and emotions readily findable has become an important social preoccupation, realized in social media as what Zappavigna (2012; 2015) refers to as ‘searchable talk’, discourse that relies on forms of social tagging to create alignments with potential audiences. Social tagging is the practice of appending user-generated metadata (often referred to as social metadata) to social media texts. An early example is Flickr tags for annotating photos (Barton 2015). Social tagging has been described as “conversational tagging” (Huang, Thornton and Efthimiadis 2010) since, in microblogging environments at least, tags often have a function beyond classification through taxonomies or folksonomies5 and facilitate forms of mass ‘conversation’ since “the ‘globally public by default’ nature of tweets lends itself to the development of means for automatically organising discussions of specific topics through shared conversation markers” (Bruns 2012: 1324). Tags can be conversational in the sense that they help users to engage with topics receiving broad interest, and also, more locally, to produce interpersonal meanings through forms of metacommentary and linguistic play, as we will see later in this section. A dominant form of social metadata is the hashtag, which has received extensive attention in social media research, both due to the interesting new communicative affordances it has offered users, and because it provides researchers with

5



The kind of collaborative tagging evolving with community use in social media is often referred to as a practice of ‘folksonomy’ (Vander Wal 2007) or social tagging very different to the top-down hierarchical approaches of traditional document classification. Whereas document classification involves experts, social tagging engages communities of general users. For example, it is used heavily on photo sharing sites such as Flickr where it functions as a cooperative form of verbal indexing involving a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the kind of classification previously achieved by reference librarians. Indeed, hashtags have been likened to the concept “better known to librarians as a subject heading” (Ovadia 2009: 203). The tags assigned provide “access to the reader’s view of aboutness in a way which was previously possible only on a small scale through elicitation experiments” (Kehoe and Gee 2011).

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an efficient means6 of collecting discourse about a particular topic, person or event.7 This also includes studies of the veracity and reliability of information annotated with hashtags in relation to the problems that can be caused by various kinds of inconsistencies in formats and conventions, the tendency of tags to proliferate, become redundant, or be misused and hijacked. Linguistic studies of hashtags have been studied in relation to a wide range of contexts including translation (Carter, Tsagkias and Weerkamp 2011), inferential processes in reading (Scott 2015), self-branding and microcelebrity (Page 2012b), bullying discourse (Calvin et al. 2015), digital libraries (Schlesselman-Tarango 2013), and political memes (Zhu 2015). Zappavigna (2015) explores the different linguistic functions that can be employed using a hashtag, noting their linguistic flexibility and tendency to be employed interpersonally in the service of social affiliation through forms of metacommentary. Similarly, adopting a pragmatic perspective, Scott (2015) and Wikström (2014) have noted that hashtags perform significant functions beyond facilitating search, and “have been appropriated by users to perform other roles in the communicative process” (Scott 2015: 19). As the name implies, a hashtag is prefixed with a hash symbol marking the label appended to the tweet. This symbol may be followed by a keyword or concatenated phrase or clause, as in the following examples: I have a feeling about today, it is either going to take lots of #coffee or #beer ?



French Press coffee is the jam. #ilovecoffee

The hashtag emerged through community-use on Twitter and the concept may derive from Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conventions for naming channels (#channelname), where a channel is the essential mechanism that people use to communicate with each other during an IRC session. Hashtagging is not restricted to Twitter and occurs across a range of social media platforms, including image-focused services such as Instagram (Highfield and Leaver 2014), notorious for the tendency for users to employ excessive numbers of tags, for instance a picture of a cup of coffee accompanied by the following tags:

6



7



A limitation of such hashtag-based research is that it does not necessarily capture all the communication surrounding the primary media, since there will be posts that do not use the hashtag, and, in particular, reply-posts may omit the tag. However, hashtags do, at the very least, make obtaining a snapshot of particular discourse at a particular time achievable. For example, see work on election hashtags such as studies of the Australian #auspol and #ausvotes hashtags (Bruns, Burgess and Highfield 2014; Sauter and Bruns 2015; Zappavigna 2014).

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#coffee #mocha #soymocha #skittlelane #skittlelanecoffee #coffeetime #morningcoffee #coffeelovers #coffeelove #cafe #sydneycafe #sydneycafes #sydneyfoodie #sgfoodies #coffeeadventure #cafehopping #mytaveldiary #mytravelgram #visualdiary

While metadata has a long history in the domain of information management, this is the first historical period where we see it so closely tied to enacting social relations, having extended its semiotic reach as an information-organising tool to a social resource for building relationships and communities (Zappavigna 2015). As Barton (2015: 64) has noted, “[t]here are many things going on in tagging spaces and it is not just about taxonomies, nor just about folksonomies”. Annotating posts with hashtags is a form of linguistic innovation (Cunha et al. 2011) and is unfolding as a means of expressing more than just the ‘aboutness’ of a social media text (Kehoe and Gee 2011). In a study comparing celebrity and ordinary users, Page (2012b: 187) classifies hashtags into two functional types: topic hashtags categorising a tweet “in the manner of folksonomic tagging” and evaluative hashtags “expressing an evaluative sentiment”. Evaluative hashtags are associated with the broader practice of using social tags for metacommentary, often for humorous effect as the contemporary equivalent of postmodern quotation marks for signalling ironic or self-conscious distance (Scheible 2015). An important function which hashtags have evolved to perform, beyond classification, is construing forms of metacommentary, particularly evaluative metacommentary. Some studies have drawn on the pragmatic insights offered by speech act theory, initially developed to understand face to face communication: […] meta-comment tags may be understood in terms of hedging, disclaiming and managing face, through the exploitation or flouting of maxims. The parenthetical explanations are analyzed as providing background information which is sometimes crucial to clarifying utterance force, but other times supplemental. The emotive and emphatic tags are analyzed mostly in terms of how they strengthen or change the illocutionary force of utterances, often in a manner reminiscent of the work done by non-verbal cues in faceto-face conversation. The humorous and playful uses of hashtags can be understood in terms of maxim-flouting and the exploitation of background knowledge. (Wikström 2014: 149–50)

Adopting this type of perspective, Wikström (2014: 130) argues that hashtags can be grouped into a range of types (examples added): – topic tags, where the topic is designated by the hashtag:

I hate being ‘twired’ where I am awake because of stimulants, but actually tired. #coffee #sleep

– hashtag games, similar to topic hashtags in terms of categorising function, but with the aim of participating in a social game:

When I say I’m great at customer service, I mean I can fake a great smile and only scream on the inside. #BaristaProblems

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I hate every last one of you. Every. last. One. #baristaproblems



Stop ordering fraps. #baristaproblems

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– meta-comments, where the hashtag makes a comment on the content of the tweet itself rather than creating an association with other tweets:

yeah i order a small coffee at the daily drip but grab a large cup, so what? #idontgiveafuck

– parenthetical explanations/additions, where the hashtag adds information explaining the tweet:

I’m in a pub at 10:20 on a Friday am. Today will be a good day haha #drinkingcoffee

– emotive usage, where the hashtag supports emotional expression that might otherwise be realised through some form or paralinguistic cue:

@4james When I worked in offices, I felt like I was the ONLY ONE who ever made coffee. #sigh #ifeelyourpainbrother

– emphatic usage, where the hashtag realises some form of intensification:

WTF! The coffee machine is broken! I can’t work under these circumstances. #wtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtf

– humorous and playful usage, including hashtags that support some form of joke structure, hyperbole, or self-conscious humourous self-reference, for example through excessive hashtagging:

Guys my coffee cup is empty WHAT SHOULD I DO #ifiwasonaforum #thiswouldbeanentirewebcomic #iamnotkidding #thishappens #ohno #theinternet

– memes and popular culture references, where knowledge of a particular cultural trend is needed to interpret the tag. An example explored by Zappavigna (2012) is employing the fail meme as a kind of humourous self-deprecation

no water nor coffee, me thirsty and sleepy #fail

Some studies have noted that hashtags have the additional function of forming communities (Yang et al. 2012) or ‘publics’ (Bruns and Burgess 2011), often through supporting visibility and participation (Page 2012b). Lin et al. (2013: 1–2) propose that hashtags “are more than labels for contextualizing statements, objects for bookmarking, or channels for sharing information, but they are active virtual sites for constructing communities”, where they are able to be used to monitor “on-going conversations” and “communicate non-verbal cues such as irony”. Just how to explore the linguistic realization of ambient communities is a key and emerging area of current research.

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Conclusion: towards understanding ambient affiliation

This chapter has provided an overview of linguistic research into microblogging and Twitter. The studies surveyed have explored how experience is construed in microblogging texts, drawing on a range of linguistic perspectives. However, this is only part of the picture. While most studies make some reference to the central function that forging community plays in microblogging, systematic linguistic models of affiliation are still in development. There has been a long-standing interest both within and outside linguists in the shared communicative strategies that might characterize communities of language users, variously theorized as ‘discourse communities’ (Bizzell 1992) and ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998).8 Language is resplendent with resources for negotiating community, such as naming practices, slang, and all kinds of variation across phonology, grammar, and semantics that characterise different personae and groups (Martin 2010). In Chapter 16 (this volume) on evaluation, I expand some of the perspectives introduced here to account for the important role that evaluative language has in sharing feeling and forging social alignments in social media discourse. The challenge for social media researchers is to model how microbloggers discursively negotiate their communal identites through sharing ‘bonds’ that consitute the value sets of communities and cultures (Knight 2010). In other words this is a challenge of understanding what Zappavigna (2011, 2012, 2014a, 2014b) terms ‘ambient affiliation’: social bonding where microbloggers as individuals do not necessarily have to interact directly, but may engage in mass practices such as hashtagging in order to participate in particular kinds of ‘belonging’. As an object of study, microblogging offers a rare opportunity to the linguist to track the particular configurations of shared social bonds as they emerge and unfold. In part, this is because the brevity enforced by the medium goes some very small way to reducing complexity of the endeavour, and because the affordances of the channel mean that we can collect large volumes of textual interactions that give us insight into both individual and communal linguistic disposition.9 This gives us some ability to gain a window on what Firth has referred to as the “general language of the community” that governs each person’s “command of a constellation of restricted languages” (Firth 1968: 207) (see also Zappavigna, Ch. 16, this volume).

8 9



For an overview of these concepts see Prior (2003). This disposition is informed by a persona’s particular semiotic ‘repertoire’ that arises out of the potential semiotic ‘reservoir’ available via their membership in a given community (Bernstein 2000).

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Zhu, Hongqiang 2015 Searchable talk as discourse practice on the Internet : The case of “#bindersfullofwomen”. Discourse, Context and Media 12: 87–98

9.

Social Network Sites/Facebook Volker Eisenlauer

Abstract: The omnipresence of computers and mobile devices in people’s daily lives together with the persistent access to Social Network Sites provide ample opportunities for users to communicate and interact in new ways. This chapter provides a critical review of the most important pragmatic perspectives on Social Network Sites/Facebook. Drawing on the concept of form of communication as well as on established approaches in Social Media research, I will propose a categorisation scheme for assessing different types of Social Network Sites. The application of fundamental concepts in pragmatics and discourse analysis to Facebook settings (such as context and speech act theory) provides access to the complex interlacing between text creation and text automation practices that constitute and constrain member profiles. 1.

Introducing Social Network Sites

Social Network Sites (SNS) are increasingly integrated into the daily practices of users around the world. Supporting people in all sorts of off- and online activities (such as planning everyday lives, job hunting, traveling, content sharing) these services facilitate various communicative practices while supporting the formation and maintenance of social ties of all kinds. The emergence of SNS as a novel online service dates back to the late 1990s and originates in the combination of two preceding services, i.e. dating websites and instant messaging. Just like dating websites, SNS afford the setup of a personal profile, and, comparable to instant messaging services, SNS support users in building up interpersonal connections to those they already know. According to boyd and Elison (2007), SixDegrees.com was one of the first services that combined these affordances. Founded in 1997 and shut down in 2001, SixDegrees.com offered many operational features that have by now become essential properties of cutting-edge SNS. It was followed by numerous other services which linked community building to a large variety of social and discursive practices, for example data sharing (YouTube), professional networking (LinkedIn), and cultivating friendships (Facebook). The emergence of the Internet was, from the very beginning, connected to the exploitation of new social and communicative spaces. Long before the rise of social media and SNS, users have been exchanging information with the help of computer technologies while forming, maintaining, and displaying social connections. As early as 1985, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL) offered early DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-009 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 225–242. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Internet adopters a virtual space for exchanging ideas emerging in one of the first online communities (Ebersbach, Glaser and Heigl 2008: 22). Henceforward, people have been utilizing the Internet and its various services, i.e. bulletin board systems, mailing lists, and news groups, to form all kinds of online communities around a variety of subjects and interests. From the mid-1990s onwards, new technologies and services, such as multiuser online games, chat rooms, or message boards, provided new means for online self-presentation and networking with other users. Recognizing the user’s desire for identity construction in online worlds, the web-hosting service GeoCities introduced the idea of free server space, as well as website construction kits to the online community. From 1995 onwards, their platform was one of the first Internet services that enabled technologically inexperienced users to create and publish private homepages on the Internet. Although GeoCities never enforced specific content, its preset modules and layouts facilitated the presentation of topics in a consistent and compatible style and structure. Similar to today’s SNS, the free web-hosting services of the mid1990s proved to be an easy-to-use, practical tool for self-presentation and social connectivity. Their creation of a new technological and communicative niche on the Internet soon turned free web-hosting services into a veritable economic success story, with an estimated value of millions of dollars (Knoke 2009). Their considerable initial market value notwithstanding, the services would not generate large revenues, unlike other major SNS such as Facebook, Myspace or Google+. SNS frequently reflect and display social links of previously existing offline communities (such as family, friends, neighbors and colleagues) in a much greater variety than message boards, chat rooms, discussion fora and other early online community tools. This is largely because in SNS, participants “are primarily communicating with people who are already part of their extended social network” (boyd and Ellison 2007). While there are also specific services that are particularly designed for meeting new people (cf. Meetup), the majority of SNS are primarily used to manage and maintain contacts with people who already know each other. Accordingly, Yus (2011: 115–116) argues that one of the key functions of SNS is “the maintenance of interpersonal relationships that already exist in physical settings, that is, a role of extension of physical relationships in to the virtual realm”. With online identities being increasingly anchored in offline contexts, the ways in which online communities are negotiated and perceived have changed dramatically in recent years. Users increasingly interact with offline acquaintances, while anonymous online activities seem to be on the decline. Thus, online communities usually reproduce existing offline communities and are firstly built around previously existing offline connections and only secondly around interests. In addition, users increasingly understand the Internet “as a tool for presenting and promoting their ‘real selves’ rather than for taking anonymous action” (Jones and Hafner 2012: 145).

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Although SNS constitute a rather specific object of study, online services have gained considerable research interest across various disciplines. Several studies are interested in different aspects of (discursive) online practices and explore the formation of social ties via and within SNS from various research perspectives and backgrounds, such as communication studies (Baym 2007), anthropology (boyd 2008), sociology (Androutsopoulos et al. 2013), economics (Heidemann et al. 2011), political science (Robertson, Vatrapu and Medina 2010), and computer science (Zhang, Liu and Xu 2015). Depending on the specific research questions and the kind of data used, these studies emphasize different criteria that constitute SNS, among them expert search and context awareness (Richter and Koch 2007), personalizable spaces (Selwyn 2009) or product reviews, and professional profiling (Adedoyin-Olowe, Gaber and Stahl 2013). Two of the most central practices afforded by most SNS are setting up personal profiles and forming network contacts. Additionally, different types of SNS provide readymade solutions for a range of different communicative problems, such as managing friendship ties (e.g. Facebook), building and maintaining career-related networks (e.g. LinkedIn), or marketing and sharing research (e.g. ResearchGate). Being a form of social media, SNS make use of software-supported text-generation tools that introduce non-expert users to online publishing and have brought forward a variety of new action patterns and online genres. Drawing on the concept of form of communication as well as on established approaches in social media research (Section 2), this article first proposes a categorization scheme for assessing different types of SNS (Section 3). It then investigates language use on Facebook from a pragmatic perspective. Reviewing the application of fundamental concepts in pragmatics and discourse analysis to Facebook settings (such as context and speech act theory) will provide access to the complex interlacing between text creation and text automation practices that constitute and constrain member profiles (Section 4). 2.

No longer media, not yet genres

Emerging generic and linguistic features particular to new online genres evolve partly from the particular design of the sites but are likewise affected by the dominant communities who colonize these new online spaces. Platform owners and software developers commonly plan and implement a variety of features to target a specific group of users. As we have seen in Section 1, SNS communities frequently mirror offline relationships and engage in some type of common behavior that may or may not correspond with the targeted practices of the developers. For instance, launched in 2003, MySpace initially aimed to compete with existing friendship networks at that time, such as Friendster or MiGente.com. Within a short time, unsigned rock bands used MySpace to connect and communicate

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with their fans and turned the platform into one of the largest global music networks. Some years later, MySpace continued to grow as a popular “social network among young teenagers until being overtaken by Facebook in 2008 in terms of volume and popularity” (Thuraisingham et al. 2016: 18). It follows that SNS can only be really understood by taking account of the space between the medium and the participants. In the broadest sense, a medium can be understood “as a system that makes a certain type of communication possible” (Posner 1986 in Threadgold 1997: 393). Unlike media serving as a technological means for sign production/ reception, SNS aim at and reinforce particular patterns of social actions. However, SNS cannot be considered as genres in the sense of recurrent configurations of meanings (Martin 2009; Hiippala 2014). Though SNS aim at specific discourse communities and facilitate the emergence of particular rhetorical patterns, they only provide the settings for individual networking practices. As shown for MySpace, recurrent rhetorical actions have only partly evolved based on the particular design of the SNS setting; they are likewise affected by whoever colonizes the preset templates. In SNS settings, typified ways of interacting and their conventional semiotic forms emerge in large parts from the discourse community of which the users claim membership. To this effect, Lomborg (2011) contends that [the] interposition of software between media platform and genre […] arguably adds a new dimension to the adjustment and development of genres. Changes and adjustments at the software level […] contribute to (re)shaping the communicative functions and social purposes of a given genre […]. (Lomborg 2011: 60)

While SNS contribute to the production and processing of conventional and repeatable patterns of language use, they cannot be equated with genres but emerge in so-called “forms of communication”. Coined by Ermert (1979), the term form of communication (“Kommunikationsform”) highlights the situational and medial conditions that precede any generic characteristics.1 Following Holly (2011), different forms of communication give rise to significant clusters of communicative conditions and can be distinguished along three different contextual parameters: (1) Modes and codes, which relate to the physical/ontological basis of the sign and the sensory channels addressed (e.g. visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, haptic); (2) communicative space, which is characterized by different degrees of communicative copresence, reciprocity, and directionality/directedness; (3) temporality, which accounts for the durability of signs and can be subdivided in transmitting and storing forms of communication. According to Holly, “[we] can speak of forms of communication whenever we can communicate particular signs in a particular direction (one-way or two-way), with a particular range (public or private) and 1



“Forms of communication […] are not necessarily associated within one single medium. A monological, written text may, for instance, be realized as a book, an inscription on a stone, or as an electronic text” (Gruber 2008: 364).

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a particular durability (transmitting or storing) in their specific patterns/arrangements (Holly 2004: 2)”.2 In a similar manner, Dürscheid (2005) identifies forms of communication as media constellations that configure the communicative setting and surface exclusively in conditions external to the text itself. Dürscheid’s (2005) criteria for classifying forms of communication include the number of participants, the type of signs, the direction of communication, and its spatio-temporal embedding. The application of the aforementioned parameters to SNS helps to approximate and conceptualize the ambivalent status of SNS, standing halfway between media and user/text actions. In terms of modes and codes, SNS support the creation and display of multimodal content. Most SNS request members to upload profile photos. Depending on their scope and focus, some SNS offer enhanced options for users to incorporate and share different semiotic resources by, for example, promoting and recording sounds on SoundCloud, sharing video clips on Vine, or embedding multimodal content stored on external servers on Facebook. Moreover, SNS encourage the use of semiotic resources that are at least partially generated by text-automation tools. When distributing content via and within SNS, most posts are automatically extended by user names, profile photos, and time stamps. As opposed to offline contexts in which production roles are exclusively adopted by human agents (Goffmann 1981: 144), in SNS environments, text production can be significantly supported, altered, outsourced, or even supplanted by software-based tools (Eisenlauer 2014: 76). Consequently, any pragmatic theory of SNS must examine not only the semiotic basis of user discourse but will ultimately have to account for the human and/or nonhuman actants (Latour 2007: 123) that are involved in selecting and aligning propositions. The communicative space of SNS is being constituted by a vast array of network-specific operations that promote bidirectional exchanges among network members. As opposed to single-tool platforms, such as chat, discussion fora, or blogs, SNS can be considered “multiple-tool platforms” (Jucker and Dürscheid 2012: 43) that offer a vast array of different services with specific medium-dependent practices. For example, Facebook’s messenger service supports (quasi-) synchronous and asynchronous user interactions among any number of friends at one time, while the status update service promotes asynchronous network exchanges and the notification service listed on Facebook results in a one-way form of communication.

2



Translated from: „Bestimmte Kommunikationsformen liegen vor, wenn wir bestimmte dieser Zeichen in bestimmter Direktionalität (einseitig ausstrahlend oder wechselseitig), mit bestimmter Reichweite (privat oder öffentlich), mit bestimmter Haltbarkeit (übertragend oder speichernd) in den jeweiligen Arrangements kommunizieren können” (Holly 2004: 2).

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With respect to temporality, SNS possess both transmitting and storing capacities. They make possible communicative interaction and archiving by default posts, comments, photos, and other user data. Holly’s (2004) binary classification into forms of communication with private and public reach falls short of the audience size that can be reached by SNS. The latter are forms of communication that support the formation of network sizes, ranging from a few members to several thousand. They thus blur the distinction between private and mass media (see “meso medium” in Zerdick et al. 2004). This intermediate position makes it difficult for users to keep track of who and how many contacts are pursuing their networking activities. Even though the services are technically equipped to form and maintain large networks, users face cognitive limits in maintaining and processing stable social relationships. As findings in psychology show, humans are capable of sustaining no more than 150 meaningful social relationships (Dunbar 1993). Users may commonly maintain connections to larger networks via and within SNS, such as Facebook, but they often count far fewer members as actual friends (Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe 2011). The software services make it easier for members to leverage weak ties; the individuals whom members have met or with whom they share a connection can be easily traced and recorded on SNS. Moreover, the various communicative tools on SNS lower users’ inhibition threshold when they contact loose acquaintances (Losh 2008: 347). To conclude, SNS are forms of communication that are both transmitting and storing at the same time. They enable spatially separated participants to connect in synchronous and asynchronous ways in semipublic contexts, and they promote the performance of social actions in written form while triggering the software-supported creation, integration, and display of multimodal data. 3.

A categorization scheme for social network sites

As we have seen, the concept of ‘form of communication’ unravels the subtle ways in which SNS platforms emerge in the contextual embedding of user text actions. Still, the notion is too broad to capture the distinctive characteristics that distinguish one SNS service from another. At present, the web offers the appropriate SNS for every conceivable purpose, supporting all kinds of social relations and practices. The omnipresence of smartphones has made SNS even more ubiquitous and paramount in our daily lives and has favored the rise of novel mobile social networking apps that are, in turn, based on specific mobile interaction patterns. These apps provide users with constant and instant access to their SNS profiles from their mobile devices. The large number of ever-growing SNS resources together with the fluidity of their underlying software environments makes any classification an open-ended venture.

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Previous researchers have recognized the importance of categorizing the diverse types of SNS and proposed different categorization schemes highlighting different features that are specific to SNS. According to Fraser and Dutta (2008), SNS can be framed along the nature and kind of networks that are created and maintained via and within the different platform environments; they distinguish five broad categories: 1) Egocentric networks, such as Facebook or Myspace, which serve as platforms for identity construction and support the creation and administration of friendship ties. 2) Community networks, such as Classmates or MyCatholicVillage, which replicate existing offline communities online. Its members display “strong identity linkages based on nation, race, religion, class, sexual orientation and so on” (Fraser and Dutta 2008: 5). 3) Opportunistic networks, such as Xing or LinkedIn, which support members in establishing online connections that serve rational interests as, for example, in business connections. 4) Passion-centric networks, such as Dogster or CarDomain, which provide online spaces for people who share interests, hobbies, and leisure time activities. 5) Media-sharing sites, such as YouTube or Vimeo, that are used primarily to consume or distribute music, films, and other media content. These online spaces are not defined “by their membership, but rather by their content” (Fraser and Dutta 2008: 6). A different classification scheme is proposed by Heidemann (2009), who distinguishes open SNS, which deploy only minor access restrictions, from closed SNS, which are limited to particular user communities. According to Gross and Acquisti (2005), different services can be distinguished by the ways and extents to which they support users in revealing personal information. Some SNS types encourage the use of real names, while others seek to protect members’ personal identity by supporting the use of nicknames. Different services vary dramatically in regard to the type and extent of information elicited. While major SNS, among them Facebook, ask for more general user information, such as hobbies and personal interests, niche SNS aim at specialized information on, for example, addiction-related behavior on sites supporting people in drug addiction recovery (cf. myRecovery.com). Depending on individual access restrictions, the visibility of information can differ drastically across different services. Certain SNS offer more or less unrestricted access to member profiles, while others offer refined access-tuning controls that limit profile information access to a restricted community. With reference to the classification criteria just discussed, Table 1 below proposes a categorization scheme for distinguishing different types of SNS and applies it to the 15 most popular SNS, as identified by Alexa Global Traffic Rank.3

3

Cf. The top 500 sites on the web, http://www.alexa.com/topsites, here accessed 1 September 2015.

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The function assigned to the particular SNS rests on the interplay of the platform’s communicative exigencies and the ways in which individual users adapt to these affordances in different ways. As shown, the functions that users associate with a particular service may or may not correspond with the initial functions of the developers. However, at the heart of any SNS is the display of user-generated content in relation to a community. Depending on the individual platform tools, the community or the content aspect of the service can be more pronounced. Services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Meetup excel through a range of options from which users can draw to create, display, and manage their connections with others. In contrast, the principal aim of media-sharing and (micro-)blogging networks is directed toward content creation and distribution. These services may well support the creation of social ties, but network communities emerge only as a side effect of the primary function of content sharing. The type of information members disclose about themselves stretches from general information on their demographics, hobbies, interests, likes, and dislikes to more specific private, interest-, or business-related details. While egocentric networks, such as Facebook or VK, facilitate members’ portrayal and sharing of the different facets of their personalities, community, opportunistic, and media-sharing networks restrict self-presentation to particular aspect(s) of user identities. Offline anchorage relates to the degree to which provided data can be connected to offline identities and members can be located in their physical and social surroundings. Services with low offline anchorage seek to protect the members’ personal identities, while high offline anchorage services elicit and display user data that are locatable in offline contexts, such as name, residence, occupation, institutions, partners, and friends (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin 2008). Mobile networking accounts for the increasing availability of mobile technologies for SNS purposes. Most SNS offer mobile applications of their services that provide users with instant access to their profiles and integrate mobile-specific affordances (such as swiping, taking photos, and location tagging) with SNS activities. It is interesting to note that out of the 15 most popular SNS, only six services are primarily concerned with the formation and administration of an online community, while nine services are directed toward the creation and dispersion of content. Although previous researchers agree that “[s]elf-disclosure is, perhaps, one of the most important reasons for uploading information on SNS” (Yus 2011: 124), various services restrict self-presentation to the discursive representation of a few particular identity facets of their users. As multidimensional platforms, SNS combine commonly existing forms of communication, such as chat, microblogging and e-mail, and enable the integration of different modes, such as voice, images, and music. Due to the various ways of interactions afforded by the services, self-presentation on SNS is never secluded and finished but can only be described as a highly dynamic concept that is in constant flux.

Social Network Sites/Facebook  Table 1.

233

A classification scheme for social network sites Function

Type of information

com-

general specific high

munity

content

Offline Anchorage low

Mobile networking native

Afforded network

auxiliary

Facebook

egocentric

YouTube

media-sharing

Twitter

egocentric

LinkedIn

opportunistic

Pinterest

media-sharing

Google +

egocentric

Tumblr

egocentric

Instagram

media-sharing

Reddit

media-sharing

VK

egocentric

Flickr

media-sharing

Vine

media-sharing

Meetup

passion-centric

Ask.fm

media-sharing

Classmates

community

In relation to the concept of offline anchorage, out of 15 services, nine exhibit only weak linkages to offline contexts. However, member profiles without any explicit linkage to a user’s personal details, such as residence, employer, or friends, can still be anchored in more subtle ways to identifiable and locatable offline individuals, e.g. in cases in which a user provides subtle information on individual likes or dislikes or on events he or she is going to visit. With mobile technologies becoming more and more popular, the line between web-based and mobile social networking is becoming more and more blurred. In regard to this, it is striking that the media-sharing network Instagram had originally been developed as a mobile app before the web version was introduced (Sengupta, Perlroth and Wortham 2012).

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Language use in Facebook from a pragmatic perspective

On average, Facebook currently hosts more than 1.7 billion active users and has turned into the world’s largest SNS (cf. statista 2016). Just like other services supporting the realization and administration of egocentric and community networks,4 two fundamental practices are at the heart of Facebook-enabled practices: “the presentation of self […] and the building and maintenance of networked relationships” (Seargant and Tagg 2014:5). However, self-presentation and community building via and within Facebook is inevitably bound to standardized templates and text automation tools that gradually define and standardize user actions. As Yus (2011) shows, “the repetition of a unique interface for profiles generates a conventionalization of the SNS genre that reduces, at least initially, the reader’s effort (to locate information)” (2011: 21). Likewise, when producing texts via and within Facebook, members gradually outsource text creation and distribution processes to preset templates and software-based actants (Latour 2008; Eisenlauer 2013). In order to disclose the gradual impact of the software on the discursive acts of self and other presentation, it is, therefore, necessary to specify the service’s key affordances, i.e. the “fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used” (Norman 1988: 9). Boyd highlights four key qualities of SNS. Profiles enable members to “write themselves into being” (boyd 2008: 121) by describing different facets of their personality. Friends lists give an indication of the intended audience, as they provide information on a member’s individual network connections. Public commenting tools support members in posting texts on their own and befriended members’ profiles and effect in the performance of social connections in front of broader audiences. Within Facebook, posting texts can be gradually outsourced to text automatisms, as, for example, when clicking the Like button in response to a post of a befriended user. Stream-based updates re-display user-generated content, such as status updates, photos, and comments, in the newsfeed and give members an impression of those around them. Such automatic updates are at the communicative heart of everyday Facebook interactions: Any post, comment, or other user action is automatically displayed in befriended members’ newsfeed streams and can be instantly commented on, liked, or shared. From a pragmatic point of view, the medial framing of user actions performed via and within the social network site Facebook calls for a revision of long-held beliefs and fundamental concepts in pragmatics and discourse analysis, in particular the notions of context and speech acts.

4



This is, for instance, the case in Russia’s largest service VK, Google’s Facebook rival Google+, or the Alumni network Classmates.com.

Social Network Sites/Facebook 

4.1.

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Facebook and context

One of the basic tenets in pragmatic theory is the notion that meaning is always context-dependent. Any production and interpretation of an utterance constitutes the context of the relevant components of the environments. Accordingly, context realizes only a subset of meanings offered by the environment and is created collaboratively and continually by the participants. When constituting the context, participants do not only cope with the environmentally situated utterance, but also rely on declarative, procedural, and episodic knowledge, as well as on knowledge that relates to earlier, similar contexts (Schegloff 1992; Bublitz and Hoffmann 2012; Meibauer 2012). This interactive and dynamic concept of context applies equally to language use via and within Facebook. However, the service facilitates the ongoing integration of on- and offline worlds. Both worlds contribute to meaning formation, and thus, the interpretation of the relevant environments can become more and more complex. A vivid example for how a member’s physical location expands directly into Facebook discourse is the location service. Supported by location data provided by their mobile devices, members may share information on their current whereabouts by choosing from a list of places near them. Such cues on the physical environment in which a status update, comment or other text was being produced are integrated with various contextual cues arising from constantly changing online landscapes in which the text is presented. Meaning environments that surround communicative interaction in Facebook are, to a large degree, affected by elaborate software algorithms: A prototypical example for this is Facebook’s newsfeed service that detects recently updated content by design and aggregates texts from many different profiles into a member’s individual stream. The merging of on- and offline environments, the automatic dispersion of user updates around the network together with the service’s status as a meso medium5 may lead to a communicative setting that has been labeled “context collapse” (Marwick and boyd 2011; Gohl and Schilling 2013): A member’s network of friends commonly encompasses parents, colleagues, ex-lovers and best friends, and other discourse communities. By default, all of them are updated about the participant’s individual network actions, though these might be directed at a particular audience. It follows that SNS “collapse diverse social contexts into one, making it difficult for people to engage in the complex negotiations needed to vary identity presentation, manage impressions, and save face” (Marwick and boyd 2011: 123). Figure 1 illustrates a case where a member had great difficulties assessing the heterogenic nature of the potential audience. In the example, the profile owner’s

5



Meso media support the formation of network sizes of up to several thousand members (see Section 2).

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Figure 1. Context collapse in a status update

post closely interrelates with the particular social frames of the intended audience, to which the commenter obviously did not belong. 4.2.

Facebook and Speech Act Theory

Within Facebook, the individual platform options, such as writing status updates, sharing events, or commenting on or liking befriended user posts, enable and restrict particular user actions while imposing on the semiotic shape of the individual actions. In other words, performing text actions via and within Facebook is inevitably bound to the platform’s functional affordances. As Yus (2011) shows, user actions may be customized to varying degrees ranging from ‘zero’ to ‘full personalization’. The former applies to settings in which “users have to follow strictly the rules and the default interfaces for profile creation by entering personal data on successive forms” (Yus 2011: 121); the latter relates to environments that offer possibilities for individually adapting the profile interface according to the user’s needs. Facebook and its various communicative features represent a system of paradigmatic options that give members great freedom in that they enable all kinds of identity performances. When presenting themselves and others in status updates, posts, and comments, members are free in the individual socio-stylistic choices of their text actions. At the same time, Facebook’s (semi-)automated texts6 result in a strong standardization and homogenization of user actions. Previous research has studied both self-presentation practices evolving from automated texts and identity actions performed in and through user-generated texts. In this light, Bolander and Locher (2010, 2015) investigated Facebook-enabled identity acts, using positioning theory (Davies and Harré 1990). More specifically, the authors are interested in two types of identity performances: first, the identity claims supported by preset categories of the profile interface and, second, the discursive identity

6



This is initiated, among others, by the Like, the Add Friend or the Going to an Event button.

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construction via status updates. As they show, standardized profile categories support users in explicit self-labelling practices, i.e., selecting from options in the relationship status category. Moreover, members employ profile categories for indirect self-presentation through enumeratives when listing information on their activities, hobbies, and interests. In relation to an identity construction via status updates, Bolander and Locher highlight assertives as the most common illocutionary type, followed by expressives and commissives. In Bolander and Locher’s (2010) sample of text actions performed by ten Swiss Facebook members, status updates are most frequently employed in order to provide information on members’ current states of mind and/or in order to tell other members what they are currently doing. Put briefly, the authors provide evidence that the self-presentation in Facebook stands out through the use of implicit rather than explicit identity claims. In a similar vein, Eisenlauer (2013, 2014) highlights implicit identity claims as a characteristic feature of Facebook discourse. In his study of Facebook afforded literacy practices, he reflects on the role of electronic agents for Facebook discourse, disclosing the role of automated text actions for mitigating users’ identity claims. According to Eisenlauer (2014), Facebook-bound text actions principally fall into the two categories of creative text actions and automated text actions. In cases in which members use keyboards to write status updates, posts, comments, etc., they perform creative text actions. This means that they have a free choice in expressing specific utterances and their respective illocutions. In other words, they remain in charge of animating their propositional choices with the help of blank text templates. In contrast, in automated text actions, the performance of the propositional and the utterance act is gradually delegated to various software-based text-generation processes. When clicking on the Like button, adding a friend function, or responding to an event invitation, a member’s semiotic choice is reduced to making predetermined binary decisions, i.e. to generating the text or not. Automatic text-generation processes will have trade-offs and both positive and negative consequences for user text actions. The employment of software-generated texts is less time-consuming than self-authored texts and enables users to be present and in contact with each other in new ways. In relation to identity performances, automated text actions let members disclose information about themselves and/ or other members in a more indirect fashion. As Eisenlauer points out: “Whereas self-authored texts on individual attributes and likes would always run the risk of being interpreted as rather straightforward and blunt identity performances, the employment of software generated texts enables a member to claim various identity aspects on her-/himself and others in a more indirect way” (Eisenlauer 2014: 314). On the other, hand-automated text generation in Facebook may lead to cases where members cannot foresee and/or intend the communicative outcome of their performances. Figure 2 illustrates a case of a member seeking advice on a discussion forum after having accidently hit Facebook’s Add Friend button.

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Figure 2. Seeking advice on Friend request sent by mistake

5.

Limitations and outlook

The reliability and efficiency of the pragmatic frameworks developed for studying SNS/Facebook discourses is obviously affected by updates and newer versions of the software environments. In fact, since its introduction in 2004, Facebook has undergone nine extensive relaunches (cf. Wikipedia.org), each introducing various new functions and capabilities that shape and are being shaped by emerging online literacy practices. While previous relaunches of the Facebook platform introduced, for example, mobile social networking and hashtagging, the current trend goes towards moving profile pictures, the use of animated gifs and the integration of 360 degree videos (cf. Süddeutsche Zeitung). Thus, pragmatic research on SNS communication needs to come up with theoretic frameworks that are broad enough to be applied to newer versions and at the same time specific enough to capture the individual characteristics of SNS-afforded literacy practices. Moreover, it is essential for pragmatic studies of social media to identify the data collection periods and software versions under focus. A further challenge for researchers studying SNS discourse is to strike a balance between empirical and theoretical research. Previous research has inter alia studied what members actually do via and within SNS (Gohl and Schilling 2013; Selwyn 2009), how they enact politeness (Losh 2008; Theodoropoulou 2015), or in what ways member actions are affected by text automation properties of the platforms (Eisenlauer 2014). While some of the findings strikingly demonstrated the need for revisiting pragmatic key theorems and adapting them to the media constellations that configure the communicative setting in SNS, the evidence is often based on small samples or particular case studies. Findings in pragmatic research on SNS communication need to be backed up by more empirical data on a diverse range of discourse communities and discursive practices. A goal for future researchers may be therefore to combine pragmatic studies of social media with data collection and research methods in sociolinguistics. An empirical exploration of large sets of language data could, for example, investigate the ways how

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members of specific discourse communities employ Facebook’s text automation properties to claim and impute community membership. References Adedoyin-Olowe, Mariam, Mohamed Gaber and Frederic Stahl 2013 A survey of data mining techniques for social network analysis. Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities 18. http://jdmdh.episciences.org/18. Androutsopoulos, Jannis, Yin Feng Hsieh, Joanna Kouzina and Reyhan Şahin 2013 Vernetzte Mehrsprachigkeit auf Facebook: Drei Hamburger Fallstudien. In: Angelika Redder, Julia Pauli, Roland Kießling, Kristin Bührig, Bernhard Brehmer, Ingrid Breckner and Jannis Androutsopoulos (eds.), Mehrsprachige Kommunikation in der Stadt: Das Beispiel Hamburg, 161–197. Münster, Waxmann. Arendholz, Jenny 2013 (In)Appropriate Online Behavior. A Pragmatic Analysis of Message Board Relations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Baym, Nancy 2007 The new shape of online community: The example of Swedish independent music fandom. First Monday 12 (8). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/1978. Bolander, Brook and Miriam Locher 2010 Constructing identity on Facebook: Report on a pilot study. In: Junod, Karen and Didier Maillat (eds.), Performing the Self, 165–185. (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature Vol. 24). Tübingen: Narr. boyd, danah 2008. Taken out of context. American teen sociality in networked publics. Ph.D. dissertation, Berkeley: University of California. boyd, danah and Nicole Ellison 2007 Social Network Sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x/full. Bublitz, Wolfram and Christian Hoffmann 2012 Text and context. In: Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald and Hubert Zapf (eds), English and American Studies. Theory and Practice, 435– 455. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. Davies, Bronwyn and Rom Harré 1990 Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20(1): 43–63. Dürscheid, Christa 2005 Medien, Kommunikationsformen, kommunikative Gattungen. Linguistik online, 22 (1/05). http://www.schreibkompetenz.uzh.ch/Publikationen.html. Dunbar, Robin 1993 Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 681–694.

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Ebersbach, Anja, Markus Glaser and Richard Heigl 2008 Social Web. Konstanz: UVK. Eisenlauer, Volker 2013 A Critical Hypertext Analysis of Social Media. The True Colours of Facebook. London/New York: Continuum. Eisenlauer, Volker 2014 Facebook as a third author (Semi)automated participation frameworks in Social Network Sites. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 73–85. Ellison, Nicole, Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe 2011 Connection Strategies: Social capital implications of Facebook-enabled communication practices. New Media & Society 13: 873–892. Ermert, Karl 1979 Briefsorten. Untersuchungen zu Theorie und Empirie der Textklassifikation. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Facebook n. d. Timeline of Facebook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Facebook. Accessed 28 September 2016. Fraser, Matthew and Soumitra Dutta 2008 Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World. London: Wiley. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Gohl, Fabian and Caroline Schilling 2013 What’s on Your Mind? and Who Do You Want to Tell? Negotiating collapsed contexts and multiple audiences in Facebook status updates. In: Anne Ammermann, Alexander Brock, Jana Pflaeging and Peter Schildhauer (eds), Facets of Linguistics. Proceedings of the 14th Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium in Halle Saale, 75–87. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Gross, Ralph and Alessandro Acquisti 2005 Information revelation and privacy in online Social Networks. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, 71–80. Alexandria, VA: Association of Computing Machinery. Gruber, Helmut 2008 Specific genre features of new mass media. In: Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller (eds), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, 363–381. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Heidemann, Julia 2009 Online Social Networks. Ein sozialer und technischer Überblick. Informatik-Spektrum 33(3): 262–271. Heidemann, Julia, Mathias Klier, Andrea Landherr and Florian Probst 2011 Soziale Netzwerke im Web. Chancen und Risiken im Customer Relationship Management von Unternehmen. Wirtschaftsinformatik & Management 3 (3): 40–45. Hiippala, Tuomo 2014 Multimodal genre analysis. In: Sigrid Norris and Carmen Maier (eds.), Interactions, Images and Texts: A Reader in Multimodality, 111–123. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

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Holly, Werner 2004 Fernsehen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Holly, Werner 2011 Medien, Kommunikationsformen, Textsortenfamilien. In: Stephan Habscheid (ed.), Textsorten, Handlungsmuster, Oberflächen. Linguistische Typologien der Kommunikation, 144–163. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Jones, Rodney and Christoph Hafner 2012 Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction. London/New York: Routledge. Jucker, Andreas and Dürscheid, Christa 2012 The linguistics of keyboard-to-screen communication. A new terminological framework. Linguistik online 56 (6): 39–64. Knoke, Felix 2009 Abschied von der Internet-Mumie. Spiegel Online. April 24, 2009. http:// www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,620913,00.html. Latour, Bruno 2007 Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die AkteurNetz­werk-Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lomborg, Stine 2011 Social Media as communicative genres. MedieKultur 27 (51): 48–64. Losh, Elizabeth 2008 In polite company: Rules of play in five Facebook games. ACE ’08 Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 345–351. New York, NY: ACM. Martin, James 2009 Genre and language learning: a social semiotic perspective. Linguistics and Education 20(1): 10–21. Marwick, Alice and danah boyd 2011 I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13(1): 114–133. Meibauer, Jörg 2012 What is context? Theoretical and empirical evidence. In: Rita Finkbeiner, Jörg Meibauer and Petra Schumacher (eds.), What is context? Linguistic Approaches and Challenges, 11–32. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Norman, Donald 1988 The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday. Posner, Roland 1986 Zur Systematik der Beschreibung verbaler und nonverbaler Kommunikation. Semiotik als Propädeutik der Medienanalyse. In: Hans-Georg Bosshardt (ed.), Perspektiven auf Sprache. (Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zum Gedenken an Hans Hörmann.), 293–297. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rheingold, Howard 1993 The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Richter, Alexander and Michael Koch 2007 Social Software. Status quo und Zukunft. Technischer Bericht 2007/01. 243. München: Fakultät für Informatik, Universität der Bundeswehr München. https://dokumente.unibw.de/pub/bscw.cgi/d1696185/2007-01.pdf.

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Robertson, Scott, Ravi Vatrapu and Richard Medina 2010 Off the wall political discourse: Facebook use in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. Information Polity 15 (1–2): 11–31. Schegloff, Emanuel 1992 In another context. In: Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 193–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seargeant, Philip and Tagg, Caroline (eds.) 2014 The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Selwyn, Neil 2009 Faceworking: exploring student’s education-related use of Facebook. Learning Media And Technology 34 (2): 157–174. Sengupta, Somini, Nicole Perlroth and Jenna Wortham April 13, 2012 “Behind Instagram’s Success, Networking the Old Way”. The New York Times. Accessed 27 September 2016. Statista 2016 Facebook users worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/. Accessed 27 September 2016. Süddeutsche Zeitung 2015 Facebook unterstützt 360-Grad-Videos. Süddeutsche Zeitung. http://www. sueddeutsche.de/news/service/internet-facebook-unterstuetzt-360-grad-videos-dpa.urn-newsml-dpa-com-20090101-150924-99-03605. Accessed 24 September 2015. Theodoropoulou, Irene 2015 Politeness on Facebook: the case of Greek birthday wishes. International Pragmatics Association 25(1): 23–45. Threadgold, Terry 1997 Social media of semiosis. In: Roland Posner, Klaus Robering and Thomas Sebeok (eds.), Semiotik. Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, 384–404. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Thuraisingham, Bhavani, Satyen Abrol, Raymond Heatherly, Murat Kantarcioglu, Vaibhav Khadilkar and Latifur Khan 2016 Analyzing and Securing Social Networks. New York: Taylor & Francis. Yus, Francisco 2011 Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated Communication in Context. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Zerdick, Axel, Valerie Feldman, Dominik K. Heger and Carolin Wolff (eds.) 2004 E-merging Media. Communication and the Media Economy of the Future. Berlin: Springer. Zhang, Xing-Zhou, Jing-Jie Liu and Zhi-Wei Xu 2015 Tencent and Facebook data validate Metcalfe’s law. Journal of Computer Science and Technology 30(2): 246–251. Zhao, Shanyang, Sherri Grasmuck and Jason Martin 2008 Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behavior 24(5): 1816–1836.

Part III Social media and discourse

10. Discourse and organization Maximiliane Frobenius and Cornelia Gerhardt Abstract: Interaction on social media follows certain organizing principles and patterns, as does face-to-face oral conversation. Research has begun to apply and adapt methods developed from and for offline interaction, such as Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis, to the sites of interaction that have emerged with the advent of the Internet and mobile phone technology. Our chapter traces the results of this research, encompassing Internet Relay Chats, text-messaging forum interactions, emails, Facebook posts and comments, Twitter, Skype calls and video blogs. This varied range of both spoken and written data has received attention regarding the sequential organization of the users’ contributions in terms of both time and space, and it has drawn interest to its implementation of classic motifs in Conversation Analysis, that is, repair, openings and closings. The chapter presents an overview and synthesis of the results of these strands of research. 1. Introduction This chapter gives an overview of the scholarly efforts made to illuminate the “central organizing principles of interaction” (Garcia and Jacobs 1999: 339) in computer-mediated communication (CMC), and, more specifically, social media. It reviews and critically evaluates work that applies notions first developed in the Conversation Analytic (CA) tradition to interaction, be it spoken or written, that is mediated through a digital device. Further, it reviews work situated in the Discourse Analytic tradition with a specific focus on topics that touch on the organizational features of CMC. CA as a discipline is rooted in ethnomethodological sociology (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1995), and as such it is interested in the organization of human behavior with a focus on spoken conversation. The basic premise is that human interaction follows a social order whereby interactants co-construct meaningful exchanges and successfully make sense of one another’s contributions. In other words, conversation is a site of orderly, that is, recognizably organized, human behavior. Its organizing principles are manifestly oriented to by the participants in a conversation and can be observed and described (e.g. by a researcher). Thus, conversation is not a random or chaotic conglomerate of utterances, but a well-formed composition of contributions that are relevant to and dependent on one another. The observations of orderly interactional behavior are made on the basis of what is referred to as “members’ method” (Schegloff 1995: xxx). This approach DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-010 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 245–273. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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requires the researcher to adopt a participant’s understanding of the situation rather than an outside observer’s. Each turn-at-talk is understood both as a meaningful and appropriate reaction to the previous turn, as well as an indication of what the next turn could be like to be understood as an appropriate contribution. This method allows a researcher to show the interactants’ preferences in the co-ordination and sequential organization of their contributions. Turn-taking, the metaphor used to represent the instantiation of sequential organization, is a central concept in the CA paradigm. It encompasses and makes relevant the notion of accountability that underlies the design and interpretation of social actions. Seedhouse (2004: 10) exemplifies accountability through the template of the greeting exchange, a greeting-greeting adjacency pair: “when one social actor greets another, a greeting response is the norm or has seen but unnoticed status. Failure to respond in this case, however, may be noticeable, accountable, and sanctionable”. In other words, because interactants hold each other morally accountable on the basis of established norms, the design of any contribution in the sequence of turns is constrained by virtue of its relation to the previous turn. In the case of adjacency pairs, the normative expectation that the first element necessitates the second is referred to as conditional relevance. The sequential organization of certain accomplishments in human interaction, such as conversational openings and closings, repair sequences, interruptions and so forth, have traditionally been researched in the domain of spoken conversation. More recently, they have come to attract academic attention with regard to how they are co-constructed in various online settings, where the contextual affordances of the website or service in question may differ significantly from those of face-to-face conversation. In this chapter, we revisit and contextualize these efforts alongside a number of topics that recur in them: Salient issues are the blurring of boundaries between seeming dichotomies, such as written language and spoken language and synchronous and asynchronous communication. These issues give rise to a reconsideration of time as a dimension along which communication is organized. The research reviewed here recognizes space as a dimension that, in predominantly visually mediated interaction, also bears significance for the joint human accomplishment of accountable actions. Accordingly, the notion of turn must necessarily undergo a revision in light of the contexts under consideration. A contextual factor of CMC that researchers increasingly attend to is its inherent multimodality, which offers various affordances that interactants can make use of. After exploring the written/spoken cline and synchronicity as necessary notions in this context, we first focus on predominantly written genres, on repairs, on openings and closings and conclude with spoken CMC.

Discourse and organization 

2.

247

Written communication and spoken communication in social media

In the investigation of language, researchers in the past have found it intuitive to attend to spoken language first and foremost rather than to written language. Linell (2005: 27) cites Bloomfield (1933), Saussure (1964), Lyons (1981) and Hockett (1958) as expressing the primacy of speech as the object of modern linguistic attention over written language. Following Vachek (1949), Linell nevertheless rejects the primacy of speech and gives both speech and writing the status as situated meaning-making activities (see also Watson 2009). Language use online has predominantly been written language use. As Schandorf (2012: 319) argues, “despite early techno-utopian visions of virtually embodied interactions in virtual worlds, the wide accessibility of mobile phones and VoIP technologies, the popularization of video conferencing (e.g. Skype) and the more recent availability of mobile video communications (e.g. Apple’s Facetime), most digital media communication remains firmly text-based”. However, this finding may soon be outdated given the dynamics of mediated communication and the development of mobile applications. Similarly, Herring states that “text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) enjoys historical precedence, and it remains more popular than VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol]” (Herring 2010a). In other words, while early CMC was mainly performed as written communication due to reduced access to data transfer technology, the successive spread of high-speed internet and the development of audio- and video-based channels had not overturned the dominance of written language on the web, at least when Herring wrote her statement in 2010. One might argue that in the first decade of the 21st century, the internet still provided a pervasive domain for written rather than spoken interaction, possibly unlike much of our offline communication. Hence, for chronological reasons, the demanding nature of spoken multimodal data, and because of the dominance of writing, there appears to be more research on written online communication than on spoken.1 This predominance also holds for research on the organization of interaction in CMC. One aim of research related to the writing/speaking dichotomy is to determine the speech-like character of online language (Baron 2008, 2010; Crystal 2011; Markman 2013) or the extent to which written exchanges can be considered conversational (see the Special Issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ed. by Herring 2010b). Jucker and Dürscheid (2012: 44) observe a terminological inaccuracy that leads to the confusion of what they term ‘codes’ (speech

1

Cf. discussions on the various terms in addition to ‘CMC’ introduced to denote the object of study and the field of study, which often cover the written code rather than the spoken (Jucker and Dürscheid 2012).

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or writing),2 which are discrete entities, and the degree of distance and immediacy, which is a function of the message style. Going beyond the written/spoken binary, one can understand any situated interaction as a convergence of multiple modes, that is, different materialities in which meaningful elements can be represented (Bublitz 2017). Spoken language is therefore represented in the phonic mode and written utterances in the graphic mode. Also, the notion of ‘text-only’ is in need of revision in an online context. Any text is situated in a system of affordances (Hutchby 2001: 447–449): the black on white appearance of printed text on paper is superseded by a pixelated representation on a screen that is movable, clickable and changeable. This has considerable implications for the semiotic system that writing is a part of, and both designers of social media and their users adopt the new functions that are available. CA, as the approach most known for its interest in uncovering the workings of the sequential organization of turns in spoken language, seems to be predestined to be applied to analyses in a largely two-sided, dialogic or polylogic context. However, Have (1999) explains that central concepts of CA such as gap and overlap are not readily applicable to written language. With regard to the fundamental analytic strategy that uses a subsequent contribution to identify the participants’ jointly negotiated understanding of the meaning or function of a turn (next-turn proof procedure), he states: “In some forms of CMC, one could use a similar strategy, in that, for instance, later contributions to a ‘thread’ in a ‘news group’ or ‘discussion list’ can be used to inspect at least some members’ analysis of previous postings” (Have 1999: 276). Thereby, he provides a justification for the extension of an approach developed for the analysis of spoken language to written interaction (also see Gibson 2009 for a comparison of written interaction to spoken conversation in online forum discussions). 3. Synchronicity In addition to the spoken-written dichotomy, which has been challenged in a CMC context, in technologically-mediated environments synchronicity needs to be taken into consideration when analyzing the interactional organization of these discourses. As previously mentioned, types of CMC are often classified as synchronous or asynchronous (Baron 2010; Crystal 2006), where synchronous communication refers to interaction in “real-time” (Crystal 2006: 135) and asynchronous communication to “postponed time” (Crystal 2006: 134). Herring (2007) explains:

2



Note that we will use the term ‘mode’ in the following when referring to the materiality of messages (cf. Bublitz 2017).

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Asynchronous systems do not require that users be logged on at the same time in order to send and receive messages; rather, messages are stored at the addressee’s site until they can be read. Email is an example of this type. In synchronous systems, in contrast, sender and addressee(s) must be logged on simultaneously; various modes of “real-time” chat are the most common forms of synchronous CMC.

Baron (2010: 1) lists chat, Instant Messaging (IM) and computer conferencing as synchronous, and email, text-messaging, bulletin boards, blogs and social networking sites (SNS) as asynchronous, but not without remarking that depending on the interactants’ practices, the boundaries can blur. Email, for example, can be used synchronously if interactants respond immediately, and IM can be used asynchronously if the response is delayed (Baron 2010: 1, 2004; Darics 2014; Herring 2007). Garcia and Jacobs (1999: 339) use the term ‘quasi-synchronous’ (QS-CMC) to differentiate further: “[A]lthough posted messages are available synchronously to participants, the message production process is available only to the person composing the message. Thus the process of message transmission (posting) in QS-CMC is not synchronous with message production.” This distinction between posting and production of a message is significant for the understanding of the organization of the unfolding interaction, as “information about real-time turn development is not revealed” (Jones 2013: 490). Thus, the concept of the transition-relevance place as found in face-to-face conversation (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) is “more nebulous in chat”, as Markman (2013: 543) points out. Overlap and interruption in the traditional sense are not possible (Herring 1999; Markman 2005; Jones 2013). Likewise, the interpretation of pauses in the interaction is complicated by the lack of access to an interlocutor’s actions (Rintel, Pittam and Mulholland 2003). As a logical consequence of this more refined notion of synchronicity, that is, the inclusion of the ‘quasi-synchronous concept’, some studies used as data for their analysis not just the chat-log or record of messages exchanged, which would mean analyzing the finished product alone, but they also included information on the production process, for example through screen-capture technology or video-recordings (see Garcia and Jacobs 1999; Markman 2005, 2009, 2013; Jacobs and Garcia 2013; Jones 2013; Meredith and Stokoe 2014; Reeves and Brown 2016). In these cases, researchers make use of information that is not available to both (or all) parties of the interaction, but only to the respective producer of a contribution. Thus, they access information on a core difference between mediated and unmediated (face-to-face) interaction, the separate production process. This represents an asymmetry of information when comparing the status of the producer of the message and the researcher to that of the recipient of the message. It is worth considering a brief theoretical aside: A CA approach to the organization of talk-in-interaction focusses on only the bare transcript of the interaction, leaving aside contextual information that the participants do not accountably

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orient to. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974: 729) explain that “the display of [interlocutors’] understandings in the talk in subsequent turns affords a resource for the analysis of prior turns and a proof procedure for professional analyses of prior turns, resources intrinsic to the data themselves”. Any editorial work on a chat interactant’s part that comes before the transmission, such as typing, erasing, re-typing and so forth, is unavailable to the receiver(s) of the message, making it inaccessible as an interpretative resource for them. Therefore, using it as an interpretative resource for research would then represent a deviation from the members’ method as established in Ethnomethodology and CA (Garfinkel 1967; Schegloff 1995; for similar reasoning, cf. Tudini 2014). However, as Meredith and Stokoe (2014: 186) argue by drawing on Drew, Walker and Ogden (2013), in the case of self-corrections, editorial work in chat contributions is indicative of an interlocutor’s sense of what is appropriate in the sequential position to be filled. The analytical advantage gained from this demonstrates that such an expansion of data is a useful approach to quasi-synchronous, mediated interaction.3 Reeves and Brown (2016) argue that investigating data beyond the interaction unfolding on the screen, that is, the embeddedness of CMC in off-line communication, allows insights into the integration of SNS into day-to-day life. Multi-channel online services, such as Google Wave,4 which encompassed collaborative work on documents, email, instant messaging et cetera, enable participants to see when their interlocutor is typing, an affordance called “typing indicator” (Auerbach 2014). One implementation involves a “keystroke-by-keystroke” (Trapani 2010) transmission, where any keyboard action is instantly visible to the parties involved.5 In other formats, the prospective receiver of the message sees an automated system message indicating that the interlocutor is currently involved in some keyboard action.6 A typing indicator grants all participants in the interaction access to the same information, thereby eliminating the asymmetry of information. An analysis of such data compared to data collected through screen capture or video-recording would demonstrate how users treat this affordance when both author and receiver of a message perceive its construction simultaneously. This would enable the observation whether such devices enhance the projectability of utterances in written CMC, in other words, whether the contributions were temporally more fine-tuned with smaller pauses between contributions. 3



4



5



6



See also Beißwenger (2008a, 2008b) and Jones (2004, 2013) for discussions of what contextual dimensions to consider in CMC research. Note that Google Wave was introduced in May 2009 and terminated on April 30, 2012, thus it is no longer in service (cf. Google Help 2015). E.g. in Google Wave, VAX system Phone Utility (Anderson, Beard and Walther 2010) and Unix talk (Auerbach 2014). E.g. in WhatsApp (Dürscheid and Frick 2014: 167), Gchat, Google Talk, iChat (Crair 2014), Skype chat, NatWest web chat.

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With the development and spread of new affordances in written CMC, the concept of synchronicity must be viewed carefully, especially with regard to attempts to understand the sequential unfolding of an interaction. After all, ‘no gap, no overlap’ as a basic preference in oral conversation refers to a temporal domain, in that the sounds through which this communication is transmitted are predominantly situated on a temporal plane. However, writing also contains a visual, that is, spatial, component. In fact, our conceptual understanding of the coherence achieved in chat and IM interactions would benefit from building on the arguments made for a more comprehensive collection of data, thereby acknowledging the significance of spatial constraints and affordances for the sequential organization of written data. 4.

Turn-taking in predominantly written CMC: Chats, Instant Messaging, blogs/vlogs and comments, Twitter, Facebook

With regard to both quasi-synchronous and asynchronous written multi-participant CMC, Herring (2010a) writes that “normal face-to-face (F2F) patterns of turn-taking are disrupted […], resulting in disrupted turn adjacency and overlapping exchanges” (also cf. Garcia and Jacobs 1998; Herring 1999; Panyametheekul and Herring 2003; Anderson, Beard and Walther 2010). (1) 1 hi jatt 2 *** Signoff: puja (EOF From client) 3 kally i was only joking around 4 ashna: hello? dave-g it was funny 5 (Herring 1999: 3)

In this interlaced exchange the greeting from line 1 is only returned in line 4, while line 3 is responded to in line 5. In other words, interactional contributions that are situated next to each other on the screen may not be designed by the interlocutors to be interactionally coherent, and vice-versa, contributions designed to reference one another may not be spatially adjacent. Delays (lag) caused by technical parameters may result in the display of contributions in a different order than they were produced in. Greenfield and Subrahmanyam (2003: 718) explain that “chat requires strategies for identifying relevant utterances that is, responses that follow earlier utterances in a coherent conversational thread”. Interactants use terms of address to make a directed contribution and thereby nominate the “intended next ‘speaker’” (Panyametheekul and Herring 2003) as a way of compensating for the lack of audio-visual cues, in comparison to face-toface communication (Werry 1996; see also Greenfield and Subrahmanyam 2003: 729 for their observations on “vocative cues”). This strategy of addressing an

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interlocutor directly and thereby selecting next ‘speaker’ proved to be the most frequent turn-allocation strategy in Panyametheekul and Herring’s (2003) data set from a Thai chat room. Hence, the authors posit a similarity in the turn-allocation behaviors of interactants in oral conversation and in chat room interaction. In newsgroups, however, where messages are also generally public, “the newsgroup system’s infrastructure requires that users specify their addressees and the positions of their messages in the sequential organization of the discussion” (Marcoccia 2004: 116). In other words, the affordances in Marcoccia’s dataset leave the user no choice but to specify the cohesive ties of their contributions in a certain format, whereas in chat rooms the users have more freedom in this respect. For synchronous (“keystroke-by-keystroke”) written multi-participant CMC, Anderson, Beard and Walther (2010: 15) observe that the participants in their study tend to self-select. Their interaction contains both phases of overlap, where several participants typed simultaneously, and long pauses where the previously posted messages were strategically decoded. (2) 23 C: a  stop: ::::(4)we need to store some of this info.....(23.7)                        do we                               know how? 24 (Anderson, Beard and Walther 2010: 8)

In Example 2, C self-selects after a pause of 23.7 seconds. Interruption, in the sense of preventing an interlocutor from finishing their contribution, proves impossible in this environment. This represents a clear deviation from the ‘no gap, no overlap’ ideal in spoken conversation. Baron’s (2010: 12) research on IM conversations between college students reveals that they can be “fairly lengthy” on average, and that they can contain extended pauses of up to several minutes, displaying a significant difference from face-to-face communication regarding temporality (2010: 24). Baron explains that while oral conversation is typically a foregrounded activity, IM interactions are not, that is, they may be just one of several activities requiring an interactant’s attention. Regarding the comparability of research on IM (and other quasi-synchronous CMC), the interactant’s focus in a ‘real-world’ setting might differ from that in more experimental settings (Baron 2010: 24), which relates back to the discussion of the contextual information that researchers should take into account. Closings in Baron’s data appear similar to those of oral conversation. Darics (2014) presents research on IM as a communicative tool in the workplace, where team-members who are based in different locations interact. She, too, characterizes IM interaction as intermittent, but in her data, openings and closings seem less prolonged than in Baron’s. Darics points out that norms may not yet have been established for these practices, or they simply are of a variable nature depending on a range of factors (2014: 17). Berglund (2009) highlights the significance of sequencing in IM as a tool for the creation and maintenance of coherence. On the one hand, she identifies adja-

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cency pairs whose first and second pair parts are not spatially adjacent but nevertheless recognizable as two parts of the same unit, and on the other hand, first pair part structures can be repeated (e.g., several questions) before the second pair parts are provided (i.e., several answers) (2009: 23). (3) Line Mode Time 1

From

MSN 17:40:18 BEAY

To

Message

FeliciaSmith hey baby, are u goining home with simon today

2

MSN 17:40:28 BEAY

FeliciaSmith i ′mean.. if u wll be in school

3

MSN 17:40:34 BEAY

FeliciaSmith can i cook for u guys?

4

MSN 17:40:37 FeliciaSmith BEAY

5

MSN 17:40:38 BEAY

like home to austria you mean?

FeliciaSmith u and him

6

MSN 17:40:50 BEAY

BEAY

7

MSN 17:40:53 BEAY

FeliciaSmith Ookie

mm. i think we were going out to eat

(Berglund 2009: 13)

In Example 3, a first pair part (line 1) is visibly oriented to by the repetition of ‘home’ in the response line 4. For data from a gay chat room, Jones (2013: 500) identifies a particular rhythm in the interactions, namely “bursts and breaks”. He argues that interactants move through a pattern of topics, thereby negotiating a potential meeting, where longer pauses between the topics occur because interactants may be involved in several interactions at the same time, and because pauses can have different implications, such as lack of interest or display of a “high market value” (2013: 506) (cf. also Fritz, Ch. 11, this volume). Again, as in other data discussed so far, we find a deviation from the ‘no gap, no overlap’ ideal. Rintel, Pittam and Mulholland (2003), on the other hand, approach pauses or “non-responses” in internet relay chat (IRC) as morally and interactionally implicative, regardless as to whether they are caused by the transmission system (e.g. lag) or by the interactants themselves. The following example from their study illustrates the conditional relevance of, for example, greetings and hence moral implicativeness, in that a user is held accountable for not responding. (4) 427. [sammi] ran you there 448. [sammi] RAN you there 503. [sammi] Ran: HELLO! 505. [Ran] Sammi: ya, I’m here, I was just backtracking to see what I missed, I can’t keep up with this

(Rintel, Pittam and Mulholland 2003)

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Markman (2005), whose data includes information on the production process of individual messages in quasi-synchronous chat, shows that the reversal of the floor claiming and message production order leads to phantom adjacency pairs, where question and answer pairs that are seemingly coherent only appear so by chance, as the production of the second pair part precedes the production of the first pair part. Skovholt and Svennevig (2013) have conducted research on email communication in the work place. They focus on the conditional relevance of messages containing speech acts that in face-to-face conversation regularly require more than a minimal response, for example a question or a greeting. Their study concludes that emails that contain a request for information or for action make a response conditionally relevant, that is, if the addressee(s) do(es) not respond, a ‘second pair part’ is noticeably absent. However, there is a tolerance for delay in the response (Skovholt and Svennevig 2013: 598). In the case where the request is for comments or corrections to a proposal, a missing answer is read as acceptance of the proposal. Hence, a response is not conditionally relevant in this case, as is also the case for emails that do not contain requests or questions (Skovholt and Svennevig 2013: 598). Text messaging, as a form of CMC that is not genuinely web-based but dependent on a mobile device such as a mobile phone or a smart-phone, has been shown to follow interactional norms regarding its sequential organization and especially the conditional relevance of replies to certain types of messages (Laursen 2005, 2012). Laursen, investigating interactional practices of 14-year-old Danish adolescents, identifies initiating messages as inducing conditional relevance, making a reply necessary: “among adolescent mobile users, there is a dominating norm that dictates that an SMS receives a response” (2005: 53). Only if the initiating message is a “night-time message” or a forwarded chain message, the interactants do not orient to the initiating message as requiring a reaction (2005: 71). The time delay between initiating message and reply that the interactants orient to as acceptable depends on the relationship of the interactants, ranging from merely a few minutes for best friends and couples, to a few hours for more distant relationships (2005: 71). Failure to respond within the acceptable time frame can result in reminders being sent; these are usually framed to reflect a candidate interactional problem along four dimensions: transmission problems, recipient problems, content problems, and relationship problems (2005: 71). For instance, by resending the message, the interactants imply that there might have been a transmission problem. A candidate relationship problem is exemplified in the following exchange: (5) Michael 13:03 pm What’s up beautiful are you coming over to my place by my mother. morten and I can’t be bothered to go to training. Michael Susanne –

–

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Michael 16:28 pm Heydi/hey there. are you doing something on friday. now we haten’t seen each other in a long time.. I thourght you had plenty time when we started going out but –> (349) Bebbi: Winke mal zum Kaetzchen wave once to the ((name=little cat)) wave to Kaetzchen (Schönfeldt and Golato 2003: 257–258)

Here Bebbi self-initiates a self-repair by correcting a misspelled name. However, Schönfeldt and Golato point out that they as researchers, as well as the other chat participants, have no access to the message production process, which means they cannot comment on self-repair that occurs before the completion and sending of the contribution. Thus, the first repair initiation position they can identify in the data “is the next possible turn (message) after the turn containing the trouble source” (2003: 273). Garcia and Jacobs (1999) and Meredith and Stokoe (2014), whose data also encompasses the production process, found self-initiated, self-completed same turn repairs (for instance, the editing of messages while typing). Finally, chatters use repair to gain access to an ongoing interaction between other chat participants, as do conversationalists in spoken interaction (Schönfeldt and Golato 2003: 272). (8)

(323)

cousine1: calv: moment …sicher bin net sauer aber total enttäuscht hab gedacht ich wärs *heul* calv: moment …certainly am not sour but totally ­disappointed have thought i was+it *cry* calv: wait … i am certainly not mad but totally ­disappointed i thought i was the one *sob*      => (354) sonnenblume72: cousine: was bist du? *neugierigfrag* cousine: what are you? *curiously ask* cousine: what are you? *curiously asking* (Schönfeldt and Golato 2003: 270)

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Here Sonnenblume72 enters the conversation by performing an other-initiated repair. Meredith and Stokoe (2014) investigate self-repair in quasi-synchronous Facebook chat. Within the category of self-initiated self-repair they identify two types: visible repair and message construction repair. In their data, the former is performed in a contribution immediately following the trouble source or in third turn position. The latter occurs during the typing of a message and before sending it, making it unavailable to the recipient(s). Thus, the authors reveal that message construction repair constitutes a type of repair unavailable to interlocutors in spoken interaction. The functions that message construction repair has in Facebook chat resemble those that it has in spoken interaction, namely repairs on stance, prosody, and action formation (2014: 202). Visible repair, on the other hand, mainly functions as error correction of spelling or typing (2014: 202). Jacobs and Garcia (2013), whose data consists of video tapes of multi-party intranet chat, also find self-repair in the construction of messages. In their data, the placement of a contribution in relation to the one it responds to is a much more salient issue, as several interactants potentially type at the same time and thus compete for the same slot on the screen. In other words, failure to place a message adjacent to the one it relates to can be seen as a trouble source. Lazaraton (2014) reports on repair in weblogs as a resource for humor and language play. In her data, commenters playfully orient to the passive voice as standard language use, and failure to meet this standard regularly results in self- or other-initiated repair, where other-initiation/repair is significantly more frequent than in spoken interaction. Unlike Meredith and Stokoe (2014), Lazaraton (2014) analyzes the finished contributions to the interaction, data that is available to all participants in the interaction, rather than its production process. The comparably small number of instances of self-repair in relation to other-repair might be explained by the blog (comment) authors’ option to check contributions before posting to eliminate potential trouble sources in this asynchronous type of interaction (Lazaraton 2014: 114). Using block-quotes to cite passages from another poster’s contributions containing trouble sources is a repair strategy which initiators use to create coherence. It is a consequence of the blog software’s affordances because they allow texts to be positioned sequentially adjacent despite temporal gaps (2014: 114). Collister (2011) presents evidence for the existence of a morpheme which is specific to written online language which initiates repair, namely, the asterisk (*). Chatters in the online game World of Warcraft use it both for selfand for other-initiation in the repair of typos and production errors (2011: 919), and the author further identifies the ^-symbol as an apparent alternative, which has the same functions. Harrison (2003) justifies the use of CA as an approach to analyze written data: drawing on Have (2000), she argues that online communication is increasing and that this interaction which takes place in a virtual environment can be seen as an

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extension of the original object of study for CA, spoken conversation. She then applies the CA-model of repair to data from email discussion lists, revealing that all combinations of self- and other-repair and completion occur, with email specific trouble sources such as missing attachments or blank emails, but also misspellings and personal attacks (flaming) that are disguised as repair. Tanskanen and Karhukorpi (2008) report on a specific type of repair in asynchronous email use, that is, concessive repair. This practice entails an “overstatement and a successive repair sequence” (2008: 1591). In emails, concessive repair only occurs in one position, the actual location of the trouble source itself, that is, same turn (2008: 1598). Therefore, the authors argue, this type of repair has implications for the interactive nature of these exchanges in that it demonstrates the author’s adopting the readers’ perspective and pre-empting their potential criticism. (9) For the central Europeans it is perfectly normal that their mother stayed at home until they went to school, when we in Finland are used to the fact that both of the parents work, basically from the day we are born (well, not exactly but you know what I mean). (Tanskanen and Karhukorpi 2008: 1592)

In Example 9, the early return to work of Finnish parents is first exaggerated and then directly repaired to anticipate potential criticism from other users. Again it can be seen that strategies used in spoken face-to-face talk-in-interaction are being reproduced in CMC and also how the specific affordances of the technologies cause an adaptation of such practices. A preference for self-repair (even though not always visible to the other interlocutors) remains, implying similar ideas about politeness in these data as in face-to-face interaction. CMC specific practices exploiting technological opportunities emerge, such as the use of blockquotes to draw attention to a trouble source, or asterisks or other symbols as repair markers. New trouble sources also appear such as one’s typing speed, which may have direct consequences for the placing of messages in the ongoing conversation and hence for the coherence of the unfolding text. 6.

Openings and closings

As with any other communicative exchange, people have to enter and leave situations unless they assume an “open state of talk” where “participants have the right, but not the obligation to initiate a little flurry of talk, then relapse back into silence, all this with no apparent ritual marking” (Goffman 1979: 10). Rintel and Pittam (1997) investigate IRC openings and closings, comparing them to casual group face-to-face interaction. They find similar patterns such as greetings on the one hand, but also quite different ones such as choice of nicks (nicknames with which to be identified on the platform) on the other. Practices

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identified in either setting serve similar functions (1997: 527), for example, the use of exclamation marks or capitalization is compared to gestures, facial expressions or tone of voice (1997: 514–515). Some features of embodied interaction may even be transferred into written action descriptions, as in the example below. (10) 6. 344 [DISP-#penpals][ACTION] metal shakes Jacstra’s hand 7. 349 [DISP-#penpals][ACTIONl Bobby *hugaz* his big sis!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8. 481 [DISP-#penpals][ACTION] melba hugs her lil broother Bobby 9. 553 [DISP-#penpals][ACTION] Megasta *huggggggggaz* his big sister 10. 86 [DISP-#australia][ACTION] JaKe waves to all the new folks … (Rintel and Pittham 1997: 515)

For both openings and closings, Rintel and Pittam’s data reveals that there are no fixed sequences, but that the order of elements is fluid. In fact, some elements may not occur at all, which, apparently, is not oriented to as a flaw in the sequence by the interactants. Rintel and Pittam (1997: 527–528) identify a number of stages that IRC interactants pass through when entering an exchange: (1) a server announcement, (2) a greeting to someone or no-one in particular or a question or statement in lieu of a greeting, (3) an optional exchange of verbal representations of non-verbal gestures of recognition and greeting as commonly used in face-to-face interaction (see example above), (4) transition to the next phase in the interaction. Greenfield and Subrahmanyam (2003: 734) find a strategy in teen chat rooms they call “slot-filler”, which has the “functional properties of adjacency pairs from oral conversation (Schegloff and Sacks: 1973), but without the formal property of adjacency”. Slot-fillers are information requests about a potential interactant’s identity that follow the fixed format a/s/l (age/sex/location). While the authors demonstrate that this strategy is oriented to as an opening device in chat interactions, they do not discuss whether or not the property of conditional relevance holds for slot-fillers as much as for what is traditionally considered a first pair part of an adjacency pair. Thus, the analysis suggests that slot-fillers are a fail-safe option for interactants to secure a chat partner’s response, which seems to contradict the findings discussed in Rintel and Pittam (1997) and in the research below. Rintel, Pittam and Mulholland (2003) investigate IRC openings more closely. Their investigation highlights the central role that server messages play in an “automated joining event (AJE)” (2003). Drawing a comparison to telephone call openings, the authors state that the automated joining announcement (JA) is significantly different from the ringing of the phone in that it does not entail conditional relevance. Therefore, the JA is not oriented to as a summons that requires an answer from another party. The authors explain that if a JA possessed the same conditional relevance the ringing of the phone has, “every JA would have to have been followed by a greeting from every channel member, leaving little room for any further interaction! Such a rigid summons-answer situation is clearly an untenable option in a group medium” (2003).

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(11) 1987. [SERVER] [email protected] has joined this channel 1988. [ACTION] NASA – hi to everyone 2040. [SERVER] [email protected] has joined this channel 2044. [ACTION] NASA – is here anyone who would like to talk with me? 2089. [Clown] hello there everyone 2099. [Clown] Hello? 2107. [Clown] Be sociable! 2111. [ACTION] NASA – talk to me too? 2120. [Clown] NASA: hello. 2131. [NASA] Clown-at least one who … umm, hi …:) 2145. [SERVER] NASA has left this channel 2148. [Clown] NASA: hi what’s going down? (Rintel, Pittam and Mulholland 2003)

As in the example above, the data under consideration reveal that a considerable number of initiating attempts and greeting exchanges did not lead to further exchanges, demonstrating a demand for a multitude of interaction attempts to secure one (or several parallel) strands of interaction (see Have 2000 for an exploration of the use of membership categorization devices (MCD) in the chat partner selection phase). Closings, similar to openings, are enacted through a number of stages. (1) The closing phase is initiated; (2) as a medium-specific option, the IRC “/action” command is employed for a textual rendering of actions; (3) phatic communion tokens are exchanged; (4) parting gestures are expressed in text form; (5) automated (and optionally adapted) server message appears (Rintel and Pittam 1997: 529). Markman, in her research on chat data of virtual team meetings, describes a two stage process involving an “opening move” and an “agenda setting turn” that interactants go through in the openings of their team chats (2009: 155). She found interactional practices in these openings that resemble those of faceto-face encounters.8 Closings were, again, enacted through a two-stage process, where the first consisted of an “explicit closing remark/summary statement” and a “turn projecting future action” (2009: 161). Both opening and closing sequences as described in these chat data were subject to delays caused by intrusive turns, owing to the “disjointed temporality” (2009: 161), which is one of the parameters of this type of interaction. For two-party IM interactions, Raclaw (2008) identifies two main patterns which closings regularly follow, the expanded archetype closing and the partially

8



Note that these observations were not made on the basis of the actual first interactional contributions, but the process of moving from non-task related talk to meeting talk, i.e. transitional moments. Hence the term ‘opening’ is not entirely congruent with its usual use in CA research here.

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automated sequence. Whereas the former resembles conversational closings in that there are pre-closing and terminal exchange adjacency pairs, it can also include a medium specific element, the post-closing. This is a message posted by the software as a consequence of a user’s signing out of the program or setting their status to unavailable, and it may appear below a previously finished interaction. The partially automated sequence, on the other hand, necessarily includes a message that is automatically posted by the software to complete the closing sequence. Interactants negotiate a pre-closing either through extensive pauses between contributions or by giving reasons for leaving the computer/the interaction, which is then followed by an interlocutors’ automated away-message. (12) 1 metonym: so i should like, probably start writing my paper (11.0) 2 pudding: yeah i should probably go to bed (8.0) 3 metonym: so i will talk to you tomorrow, jah [yes]? (7.0) 4 pudding: jah [yes] (6.0) 5 pudding: good luck writing!!! (2.0) 6 metonym: thanks! (2.0) 7 pudding: latahz [i’ll talk to you later] (3.0) 8 pudding: haha, bye (9.0) 9 metonym is away (Raclaw 2008: 9)

In this example, a pre-closing in the form of an exchange of accounts (lines 1 and 2) is followed by an arrangement for a future meeting (lines 3 and 4), a reference back to the accounts (lines 5 and 6), the terminal exchange (lines 7 and 8) and finally the post-closing in the form of an automated message by the system (Raclaw 2008: 10). With regard to text messaging, Spilioti (2011), for her Greek data, describes closings as part of politeness. She analyses when participants consider the use of closings appropriate and which formulae they use. Closings taken over from face-to-face interaction or from written or other mediated genres were used to signal degrees of immediacy and proximity. This is in line with earlier research on closings in text messaging where the social presence of the interlocutors was also signaled in this way (Laursen 2005; Ito and Okabe 2005; Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007). Generally it appears that ritual opening and closing sequences are less expected in technological environments than outside of CMC, which may be a reflection of a more ‘open state of talk’ or of a lesser commitment to the social encounter. However, it also transpires that there are local rules in different formats depending not only on the technology used, but also on sociocultural factors such as age or gender. Comparing the wealth of studies on embodied spoken language and paperbased written genres to the number of studies on current CMC based interactions, in the main, one has to conclude that much more research is necessary to capture

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the exact factors that may or may not make a closing or opening section expected elements in a given environment. One feature of closing and opening phases in CMC stands out, namely automated system messages that cannot be sidestepped. In multiparty face-to-face interaction, there may be degrees of participation (Goffman 1979) and people use an array of bodily, vocal and verbal means to signal their participation status. There is no one obligatory single signal for the co-interlocutors which convey that he or she is there/he or she has gone. 7.

Spoken CMC

With regard to spoken CMC, one may expect a smaller impact from the technologies used. For instance, comparing Skype calls to classic telephone calls, one can assume that because of the added visual information, skyping might be even closer to face-to-face talk-in-interaction. Barron and Black (2015) contribute research on Skype call openings between native speakers and non-native speakers using English. For example, their analysis of listener behavior in the form of back-channels is less indicative of particular practices pertaining to the Skype context, but linked to individual learners’ proficiency in their L2. Considering that Skype offers simultaneous audio-visual and text-based interaction between users, further investigation of these interactional events would be particularly desirable with respect to the use of multi-modal features for the organization of such interaction. This would include switching between audio-visual and spoken modes when, for example, there are interactional troubles caused by a poor internet connection; but possibly more importantly, the sequential (and not only in a temporal sense) unfolding of the simultaneous use of these channels should be explored in terms of the norms that are then oriented to by the interactants. In this vein, Licoppe and Morel have identified a norm that interactants regularly orient to in Skype calls: the current speaker should be seen on screen. The “talking-heads” (2012: 399) arrangement or “‘simplest systematics’ to the organization of video calls” (Licoppe and Morel 2014: 137–138) is the default on Skype. This means that anything else that comes to be shown in these calls – and an increasing mobility through the use of mobile devices allows for objects, or even buildings or sites to be shown – is under scrutiny for its relevance to the ongoing interaction. In other words, a camera movement towards an object or the surroundings is an accountable action (2012: 405). Licoppe and Morel (2014) identify these showing sequences as elements that require joint interactional work in that they have to be prefaced by the shower or requested by the viewer and then ratified by the other participant. This preparatory collaboration functions as a suspension of talking-heads norm and allows for potentially irrelevant images to be shown until a first relevant view can be produced and identified as such. The co-ordination of the audio-visual stream in

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Skype calls is therefore a “collaborative and joint interactional process” (2014: 158). In addition to research into one-on-one Skype conversations, there is also research on interaction involving audio-visual communication between more than two parties. Sindoni explores data from Camfrog, a software that allows “multiparty web-based video chat” (2014: 327) where several users meet in a virtual room and can use both spoken language and typed messages to communicate with one another. However, unlike face-to-face interaction, Camfrog allows only one person to speak at a time. In other words, speakers have no option to create overlap and are thus tied to this part of the ‘no gap, no overlap’ ideal. Sindoni remarks that the software allows for another type of overlap conditioned by the use of written chat message to open ‘parallel floors’, where the speakers turn into authors and engage in another interaction while, possibly but not necessarily, listening to the one who is speaking (2014: 327). This study gives ample space to considerations of multimodal issues in the sequential organization of contributions in multi-party video chat, a focus that is well worth pursuing in CMC research in an effort to better understand what impact the contextual setting offered by a web space has on human interaction in general (for studies of floor management issues in multi-party video interaction using experimental data, see Sellen 1992 and Heath and Luff 2000). Frobenius (2011) investigates openings in video blogs, which represent interesting data with regard to the co-construction of interaction in that the spoken part is clearly asynchronous and monologic. Her data set shows two clear tendencies, the first being a unilateral mirroring of sequential conversational openings with greetings and terms of address, and the second being the lack of both greeting and term of address. Other more established monologic media such as TV news, radio shows, or answering machine messages also influence language use on vlogs, with vloggers using the available editing options to provide written opening credits, for example. For closings, Frobenius (2014) finds that many vloggers replicate the conversational pattern of pre-closing and terminal exchange adjacency pairs, by providing only the first pair parts of each. Clearly, vloggers draw on conversational patterns in the organization of their monologues, despite the fact that a synchronous collaborative unfolding is impossible in this contextual setting. Of particular interest in video blogs posted on video-hosting platforms such as YouTube that are characterized by an inherent multimodality, is how interactants manage to switch from one mode to another without a loss of coherence. On the one hand, YouTube offers what they call a ‘deep link’. This affordance lets commenters insert hyperlinks in their written texts which, when clicked on, takes the reader to a specific point in the video and thereby allows a commenter to link their comment to a specific point in the audio-visual material. On the other hand, vloggers have adopted practices to incorporate written material from their viewers’ comments into their audio-visual recording: they can read out loud comments

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and reply to them in speaking, and they show screenshots of comments while producing a reaction to them in a voice-over (Frobenius 2014). YouTube clearly represents a complex contextual setting where interactants’ creativity in the joint production of meaning and sense is instantiated in novel ways. With the increase of spoken interaction in CMC, the studies discussed here, in the main, make manifest a desire for more, empirically based, thorough analyses of the practices or norms that evolve as new technologies are used as resources for communication, identity construction, or community building by their users. The cases previously discussed indicate that a full picture of the organization of spoken discourse in mediated settings needs to have a broader database as a foundation. At this point, it mainly transpires that people are well aware of the affordances of different technologies as enabling or constraining factors for the social actions they wish to engage in. 8. Outlook There is a progression in our understanding of the dimension along which types of CMC are organized. We leave behind binary distinctions like spoken-written and especially synchronous/asynchronous to enrich our view through a more finegrained model that distinguishes production, transmission and reception. This progression is taken further to include space as a dimension that interactants orient to, where, for example, screen space produced and seen by the interactants feeds into a spatio-temporal organizational feature. Additionally, the multimodal contextual configuration of interaction sites is beginning to be understood as yet another component of this organizational conglomerate. While research into the interactional organization of social media indicates a move away from the time-centric ‘no gap, no overlap’ ideal postulated for face-to-face conversation, there is still a great deal to explore with regard to what interactants actually orient to when faced with multitudes of ways to communicate – be it different modes, different platforms, and so forth – to create a coherent exchange between users. This process of streamlining multimodal online interaction is necessarily heavily influenced by website features and design, making the contextual factors or affordances a starting point for any pragmatic analysis. With another fundamental shift in online contextualization options in the near future, namely augmented reality in the form of, for example, three-dimensional projections (see devices such as Google Glasses or Oculus Rift), we will be faced with a range of novel interactional sites and practices. With the constant development of said affordances, it is to be expected that interactants will either incorporate these into their orderly, organized communication processes, or not use them at all. An obvious candidate for pragmatists’ research agenda is to continue to create an inventory of such practices in any setting that is accessible; beyond this ongoing task lies a more holistic (and perhaps

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elusive) complex of questions: what regularities do we find across all settings? How can we successfully adapt the Conversational Analytic approach with its powerful but restricted reach to the online setting(s) we want to research? With CA as sociological endeavor, it would possibly be fruitful to focus less on individual technologies and their organisation, and more on the social fabric that is created with the help of technologically-mediated communication. Some of the questions that are raised by current research such as the status of openings may well be furthered by taking groups or networks of people and their use of technology across platforms as a starting point. CMC as well as social media are very much a feature of the globalised world and a necessity for many of its inhabitants. The question therefore arises in how far the organisation of communication might be more universal than in more traditional genres. It would be interesting for future research to compare the use of social media between cultures and languages to answer the question as to whether, or to what degree, there are local social media practices which have developed against the backdrop of the specific behaviour patterns from other genres (cf. for instance Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). This could make the necessary and minute descriptions of the use of different devices or tools in social media and in different languages and cultures more relevant for the over-riding questions in linguistics in general. References Anderson, Jeffrey F., Fred K. Beard and Joseph B. Walther 2010 Turn-taking and the local management of conversation in a highly simultaneous computer-mediated communication system. Language@Internet 7: article 7. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2804 (last access 15 Oct. 2016). Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2015 Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications. International Journal of Bilingualism 19(2): 185–205. doi: 10.1177/ 1367006913489198. Auerbach, David 2014 I built that “so-and-so is typing” feature in chat. And I’m not sorry. http://www. slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/02/typing_indicator_in_chat_i_ built_it_and_i_m_not_sorry.html (last access 15 Oct. 2016). Baron, Naomi S. 2008 Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press. Baron, Naomi S. 2010 Discourse structures in instant messaging: The case of utterance breaks. Language @Internet 7: article 4. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2651 (last access 15 Oct. 2016).

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Dürscheid, Christa and Karina Frick 2014 Keyboard-to-Screen-Kommunikation gestern und heute: SMS und WhatsApp im Vergleich. In: Alexa Mathias, Jens Runkehl and Torsten Siever (eds.), Sprachen? Vielfalt! Sprache und Kommunikation in der Gesellschaft und den Medien. Eine Online-Festschrift zum Jubiläum von Peter Schlobinski, 149– 181. (Networx 64.). http://www.mediensprache.net/networx/networx-64.pdf (last access 15 Oct. 2016). Frobenius, Maximiliane 2011 Beginning a monologue: The opening sequence of video blogs. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 814–827. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.018. Frobenius, Maximiliane 2014 The pragmatics of monologue: Interaction in video blogs (Doctoral dissertation). http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2014/5895/pdf/dissertation_ frobenius_scidok.pdf (last access 15 Oct. 2016). Frobenius, Maximiliane and Richard Harper 2015 Tying in comment sections: The production of meaning and sense on Facebook. Semiotica 204: 121–143. doi: 10.1515/sem-2014-0081. Garcia, Angela C. and Jennifer B. Jacobs 1998 The interactional organization of computer mediated communication in the college classroom. Qualitative Sociology 21(3): 299–317. doi: 10.1023/A: 1022146620473. Garcia, Angela C. and Jennifer B. Jacobs 1999 The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 32: 337–367. doi: 10.1207/S15327973rls3204_2. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Gibson, Will 2009 Intercultural communication online: Conversation analysis and the investigation of asynchronous written discourse. Forum: Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research 10(1): article 49. http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1253/2731 (last access 15 Oct. 2016). Goffman, Erving 1979 Footing. Semiotica 25 (1/2): 1–30. doi: 10.1515/semi.1979.25.1-2.1. Google Help 2015 https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en (last access 31 Dec. 2015). Greenfield, Patricia and Kaveri Subrahmanyam 2003 Online discourse in a teen chatroom: New codes and new modes of coherence in a visual medium. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 24(6): 713–738. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2003.09.005. Harrison, Sandra 2003 Repair in email discussions. Discourse Analysis Online http://extra.shu.ac.uk/ daol/articles/closed/2003/004/harrison2003004-01.html (last access: 15 Oct. 2016). Have, Paul ten 1999 Structuring writing for reading: Hypertext and the reading body. Human Studies 22: 273–298. doi: 10.1023/A:1005496619385.

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11. Discourse and topic Elisabeth Fritz Abstract: This chapter focuses on the question of how the characteristics of social media interactions influence topic management. These influences will be described on two levels: First, local strategies of topic development are appropriated by the users of social media from face-to-face practices to the particular online environment. Second, with a view to whole exchanges, participants develop larger patterns of divergence and convergence of sub-threads on topics which exhibit various degrees of relevance to the superordinate topics of the particular exchanges. The chapter starts with providing a preliminary survey of linguististic approaches to discourse topics and topic development. This is followed up by a discussion of the most prominent characteristics of social media interactions (viz., (a)synchronicity, polyloguicity and monotopicality), which challenge frameworks of interactional topic development drawn up for traditional (i.e., mostly dyadic and spontaneously evolving) face-to-face conversations. The discussion closes with an overview of existing research concerning strategies of topic initiations and local topic development as well as more global patterns across different forms of synchronous and asynchronous discourse. 1. Introduction Topicality or topical coherence plays a fundamental role in the construction and perception of coherence in discourse (Brown and Yule 1983: 68; for coherence and cohesion in social media cf. Schubert, Ch. 12, this volume). It is rooted in our everyday understanding that any stretch of discourse is generally ‘about something’, and interactants are usually able to give topic summaries such as We were talking about our plans for the weekend. Discourse topics pertain to the ideational level of discourse. Nonetheless, they are essentially understood to be a product of interpretation and collaborative negotiation among participants – “an achievement of conversationalists” (Maynard 1980: 263). As a rule, topics need not be stated explicitly and are not mechanically derivable from linguistic surface structures, which obviously constitutes a major difficulty for linguistic analysis and has led to a variety of frameworks and topic definitions (see Section 2). Still, speakers (and writers) do guide topical understanding by linguistic means, such as prominent referents, means of lexical and grammatical cohesion, discourse markers and other kinds of metadiscursive items to indicate topical organization, e.g. to come back to what I was saying earlier (cf., DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-011 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 275–316. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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e.g., Lenk 1998; Keller 1979; Tiittula 1993). Interactants develop topics dynamically and often spontaneously. As recipients, they display their topical orientation by continuously checking new contributions against their understanding of the topical framework at hand. In the roles of speakers, they construct their own contributions so that they are tied and made relevant to previously established topics. Discourse topics can be identified and described for different stretches of discourse, which brings forth complex interplays of local and global topics of various scopes, levels of specificity and interrelations. At a local level, topics rarely stay the same over a stretch of discourse but are continuously expanded, shifted and changed. Focusing on content relations between individual topics and the communicative strategies of topical organization, linguistic research on face-to-face interactions has described general patterns of local topic development, such as topic introductions, closings, shifts and changes. From a more global perspective, however, patterns of topic development can differ widely and depend very much on the type of discourse at hand, and it may or may not be possible to subsume different local topics under a global topic. Studying topic management in interaction is thus both an important as well as challenging task. However, probably due to the inherent difficulty in identifying topics and topical boundaries, topic-focused linguistic studies are relatively scarce. Most of the existing studies concentrate on particular types of interactions taking place in a face-to-face setting. While they are thus able to identify and describe strategies of topic constitution, shifts, changes etc., these strategies are necessarily shaped by their respective communicative setting, and there is little research concentrating on differences across different types of face-to-face discourse. Social media interactions pose a further challenge both to the negotiation of topical orientation for the participants as well as to the linguistic frameworks aiming to describe them. The impact of the computer-mediated setting on the organization of discourse has been researched extensively and approached from a large number of angles. Yet very few studies concentrate specifically on describing the patterns and strategies of interactive topic management in online interactions and how they have been adapted from face-to-face practices to fit the respective technological environments of the various platforms. Those that do (cf. Section 4) are (necessarily) limited in focus, both in terms of their operationalization of discourse topics as well as their application to one specific platform and its characteristic communicative setting. This chapter will provide an overview of specific patterns in local and global topic management across the various forms of text-based multiparticipant online interactions. To this end, it will both draw on the findings from existing topic-centred frameworks as well as demonstrate how some of the technological functions specific to particular types of platforms are regularly appropriated by users in the service of topic management. Before doing so, however, I will first give a sur-

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vey of general directions and foci of topic research, which saw its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, i.e., before the rise of computer-mediated communication. The subsequent discussion of prominent characteristics of social media interactions – subsumed as synchronicity, polyloguicity and monotopicality – will point out how each of these factors has considerable impact on their topical organization. Although multiparticipant settings and monotopical orientation are not in themselves specific to online communication, it is the clustering of the three factors that characterizes and shapes the predominant part of public social media interactions and thus poses fundamental challenges to the study of topic management. Nonetheless, some of the concepts and approaches that have been developed to tackle such complexities in multiparticipant and/or monotopical face-to-face interactions may also prove useful for the description of topical organization online. 2.

Perspectives on discourse topics and topic management in traditional forms of communication

Linguistic research on discourse topics can be roughly divided into two groups of approaches, which adopt distinct perspectives and methodologies: Structural approaches, on the one hand, take on a product-oriented perspective and understand topics as a structuring unit of discourse, which can be described for stretches of discourse and put into identifiable relations with each other. On the other hand, dynamic approaches adopt a procedural view on discourse. Rather than characterizing individual topics, they concentrate on describing the procedures and activities interactants engage in when they manage topics in conversation (cf. Brinker and Hagemann 2001: 1252). Structural topic approaches are typically found in structuralist text and discourse analysis, and most prominently in research with a focus on text and discourse grammars, cognitive planning or artificial intelligence1 (e.g., van Dijk 1977; 1980; Brinker, Cölfen and Pappert 2014; Gardner 1987; Schank 1977; Reichman 1978, 1990; Hobbs 1990). While they do concur that discourse topics are not static, independent entities that can be directly derived from the linguistic surface structure, structural topic analysis feeds on semantic and/or referential links between topical units, so that the description of cohesive ties between discourse segments constitutes a basic part in their approach to topical organization. Discourse topics themselves tend to be explicitly defined as a representation of semantic content. Some models adopt very distinct standpoints on whether discourse topics should

1

Cf. Sirois and Dorval (1988) for an extensive overview of different theories of discourse and their respective resulting views on discourse topics.

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be conceptualized as a proposition (e.g., van Dijk 1977, 1980; Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin 1976; Hobbs 1990) or a prominent referent (e.g., Fritz 1982; Schank 1977). Propositional theories (particularly van Dijk 1977, 1980) are often supplemented with an intricate framework of more or less rigid inference mechanisms. Example (1) shows van Dijk’s formal representation of his deletion rule: (1) Ken Holland saw a blonde. She was wearing a white summer frock … DELETION => (entails) Ken Holland saw a blonde (adapted from van Dijk 1980: 78)



DELETION Given a sequence E of propositions (Pi, Pi+1, …, Pk) or a text T, satisfying the normal linear coherence constraints, substitute E by a sequence E’ such that each Pi+je E that is not an interpretation condition (presupposition) for at least one proposition of T does not occur in E’, whereas E and E’ are further identical. (van Dijk 1980: 82)

However, such strict topic rules and formulations have been repeatedly criticized for neglecting the inherently interpretive nature of topics (cf. Brown and Yule 1983: 114–116). Fritz (1982, 1994) and Bublitz (1988), among others, plead for a freer formulation of discourse topics, arguing that it should be adaptable to the communicative purpose of a topic summary and the intended degree of specificity and granularity (cf. Bublitz 1988: 20–22). In this vein, in example (2), both (a) and (b) can count as adequate topic summaries, with the latter being the most general formulation and as such applicable to any sort of discourse (cf. Fritz 1994: 192): (2) (a) We have been considering which films to go and see and in that connection d has told us an amusing story about a visit to the Biograph and then A and I have been complaining about our local cinema. (b) We have been talking about films. (adapted from Bublitz 1988: 21–22)

Topic frameworks are (necessarily) closely tied to the kind of data they aim to describe. (Prototypical) written discourse is planned and monological; spoken discourse evolves spontaneously and in interaction. The central implication for topic analysis is that clear topic trajectories are unlikely to be found in discourse with a certain degree of spontaneity and interactive involvement. Consequently, it is those models which are developed with a view to analyzing written monological texts that tend to suggest mechanisms and rules for extracting topics from the text and combine them into hierarchical structures (most prominently van Dijk 1977, 1980; Brinker, Cölfen and Pappert 2014). In contrast, frameworks describing topical structures in dia- and polylogal discourse must allow for unplanned, and in fact unpredictable, topic development. In the course of the interaction, topics may be brought up which are anchored

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in the participants’ common ground,2 including their shared physical surroundings (cf. Adato 1980), or utterances may be spontaneously re-interpreted to create connections to new topics. Nevertheless, local (chains of) topic transitions can be described in terms of semantic or referential links, and structural approaches focused on topic development in spoken interactions draw on these connections to identify topical units and describe transition patterns between them (e.g. Hobbs’ (1990) coherence relations). It is particularly in this context that dynamic approaches complement a structural perspective. Dynamic approaches to topic management heavily feed on ethnomethodological principles advocated by conversation analysis, which is concerned with describing formally identifiable techniques and procedures by which interactants “exhibit […] attention to topic” (Sacks 1995: 755) rather than defining topics in semantic terms. A central distinction is that between topically bounded and unbounded stretches of talk,3 with stretches of bounded talk exhibiting more or less discernible disturbances in the smooth flow of speaker change as well as in the continuity of referents (Maynard 1980: 263–264). Specifically with regard to topical organization, conversation analysts have employed a multitude of terms to refer to various patterns of disjunctive topical transitions across clearly disparate (i.e., bounded) episodes and more subtle topic transitions that do not display clear disruptions or disfluencies, e.g.: stepwise moves or stepwise topic transition vs. topical shift (Jefferson 1984, 1983), topic shading vs. topic bounding (Schegloff and Sacks 1973), pivotal topic transitions (Holt and Drew 2005, cf. also Drew and Holt 1998), topic change (Maynard 1980), or topic generation (Button and Casey 1984, 1985). The two perspectives with their different foci and methods are not incompatible and have been fruitfully combined in a number of frameworks (e.g., Bublitz 1988; Korolija and Linell 1996; Linell and Korolija 1997; Linell 1998 for conversational data).4 These frameworks account for topic development both in terms of Common ground is here understood in very broad terms as “a mental representation of knowledge and attitudes assumed to be shared” (Bublitz 2006: 370) among interactants (cf. also Lee 2001: 27). 3 The distinction refers to the presence or absence of signals with which participants separate more or less distinct stretches of talk. Such signals usually include disruptions to the referential chains (Sack’s tying structures, cf. Sacks 1995: 540) and/or to the interactants’ negotiation of turns. The typical bounding techniques introducing a possible boundary are pre-closings (Weeell, so, ok, etc.), i.e., turns, which “occupy the floor for a speaker’s turn without using it to produce either a topically coherent utterance or the initiation of a new topic” (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 304), aphoristic formulations, or final assessments (Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Holt and Drew 2005; Drew and Holt 1998; Jefferson 1983; West and Garcia 1988). 4 Note, however, that while the concept of topic bounding overlaps with the more semantic distinction between topic shifts and changes (cf. below), they feed on different criteria and are not fully congruent. 2



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identifying units of talk on a topic and describing their local and global relations semantically as well as in terms of interactional topic management manifest in formal procedures of collective topical organization. Taxonomies tend to differentiate between patterns of topic development at local and global levels and of various degrees of complexity, such as topic (re-)introductions, closings, shifts, changes, digressions and drifts, with most research focusing on a section of these patterns. In broad terms, Bublitz’ (1988) classification offers an overarching framework of the (increasingly complex) topical action patterns introduction, closure, shift, change and digression, focusing on the strategies with which interactants collaboratively negotiate attention to topics. Based on propositional links as well as strategies of sequential organization of spontaneous conversation among intimate couples, Crow (1983) identifies similar patterns (maintaining, coherent and noncoherent shifts, renewals and inserts), which are, however, categorized differently.5 Focusing more strongly on the logical/semantic relationships between the individual topics, Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin’s (1976) basic distinction between continuous (with collaborating and incorporating discourse topics) and discontinuous discourse (encompassing re-introducing and introducing discourse topics) is well-known and taken up repeatedly (see Section 4). Much more finegrained frameworks such as Korolija and Linell (1996; also Linell and Korolija 1997) and Reichman (1978, 1990) distinguish according to the nature of the links holding between consecutive topical units. While the former’s classification is based on where the new topic referents are anchored (i.e., in the local co-text, the participants’ shared physical situation or ongoing activity, etc.), Reichman’s approach is distinctly hierarchical, and many of her categories (e.g., generalization, illustrative and restatement, subissue and joining or total shift relations) are reminiscent of van Dijk’s (1977, 1980) macro-rules. With a more restricted focus 5



Maintaining refers to topical continuity as well as Bublitz’ topic closures; Crow’s coherent shifts are “[t]he structurally preferred mechanism for topic change within a conversation” (Crow 1983: 141) in the sense that they “will not occasion a request for topical coherence clarification” (Crow 1983: 143). They are subdivided into initiations and topic shading, which correspond to Bublitz’ “regular” topic changes and shifts respectively as well as the classic topic bounding and topic shading transitions described by conversation analysts. Renewals are reintroductions of previously discussed topics. They involve linguistic tokens such as anyway, getting back to the subject etc., and are consistent with the last move in Bublitz’ larger digression pattern. A noncoherent shift is an “abrupt [and propositionally completely unconnected] shift that succeeds in getting the topical floor” (Crow 1983: 146). This matches Bublitz’ description of topic changes involving the break-off of the prior topic, which, however, seems to be so marked in spontaneous conversations amongs friends and acquaintances that this case remains purely hypothetical in his study (cf. Bublitz 1988: 134). Last, the insert describes abrupt shifts which do not succeed in getting collaboratively established as topics.

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on semantically related transitions, local topic shift rules or coherence relations (see Section 4) are described by Schank (1977) and Hobbs (1990) respectively. In Hobbs’ framework, such locally-shifted segments combine to larger segments with coordinated or subordinated topical constituents (labelled parallel and chained association respectively). The re-establishment of a previous topic in the wake of such associations is then called a topic return or a topic pop; however, if such a topic is not re-established after a series of shifts, this is labelled a topic drift. Dascal and Katriel (1979) and Pons Bordería and Estellés Arguedas (2009) particularly focus on the complex pattern of digressions, describing the nature of the intervening topics and approaching the question of whether or not digressive patterns differ from a “simple” return to a prior topic after intervening topical talk. Digressions are often also implicitly or explicitly touched upon in discussions that declare to target the discontinuous topic changes, and particularly those to a prior topic. In this way, Sirois and Dorval (1988) differentiate returns according to the “distance” of this topic, while Planalp and Tracy (1980) classify changes according to where the newly-established topics are drawn from (conversation vs. nonconversation). Adato (1979) describes linguistic signals accompanying anticipated and unanticipated topic returns. Strict conversation analytic approaches generally focus on the description of the more local patterns. Terminologically, they do not always distinguish between topic shifts and changes, but identify and describe topic transitions in talk by means of the sort of bounding signals involved in achieving that transition. In this way, Maynard (1980) distinctly speaks of topic changes in the case of topic initiations after failed speaker change, while West and Garcia (1988) classify a broader range of transitions, with their topic transitions after prior topic extinction corresponding to Maynard’s topic changes. Their collaborative topic transitions, on the other hand, describe what Jefferson (1984) calls stepwise topic transitions, i.e., transitions via aphoristic conclusions, arrangements and other topic-bounding activities, which would be labelled shifts rather than changes based on the similarity of successive topics. Employing an even narrower focus on the individual strategies of introducing new topics, Button and Casey (1984, 1985) have brought forth a detailed classification of topic generating sequences, which occur at places where the topical floor is open (either because the previous topic has been exhausted or because the first topic of the interaction has not yet been established). Speakers can then either nominate or elicit a new topic. Topic closing procedures are most frequently described in the context of disjunctive, or bounded, topic transitions rather than as patterns in their own right. Understood as initiating steps of these transitions, they are indicative of the participants’ endeavour to get ready to move on from the present topic towards the next. Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and Button (1987) explicitly describe closing patterns that (at least potentially, i.e., if participants do not choose to move out of the closings, cf. Button 1987) open up the slot for producing final interaction-terminating sequences.

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Acknowledging that interactants orient not only to what they talk about but also to what they do by talking about it, most approaches to topic development more or less explicitly supplement their semantic/referential topic analysis with a pragmatic perspective on participants’ activities and associated speech actions.6 This helps to account for the fact that a progression of local topics may often be controlled or guided by the ongoing communicative activity and its action trajectory rather than by any evident relation between individual topics (e.g., topically disparate question-answer pairs in a quiz show, distinct points on a topical agenda in a business meeting, etc.). Interactive topic development is to a considerable degree shaped by situative factors such as the communicative activity or purpose of the exchange, existence of a pre-determined topic, number of participants and participation structure, and the setting in which the exchange takes place. Within “traditional” spoken interaction in a face-to-face setting or over the telephone, there is room for considerable variation: Discourse topics and their development tend to play a different role in topically-oriented institutional talk than in spontaneously evolving informal conversations. In the former case, a larger topical agenda restricts the topical range of the interaction and acts as a reference point for both participants and observers to assess the relevance of locally-evolving topics; in the latter, the lack of such an overarching topical framework may facilitate moments of faltering topic transitions and generally direct the interactants’ attention more towards local topic progression and management. Institutionalized discourse tends to feature a clearer distinction of participant roles as, e.g. teachers, students or moderators, who assume different responsibilities in negotiating topic progression. Additionally, the degree of explicitness with which interactants themselves state or announce topics and signal transitioning moves, e.g., by means of discourse markers, explicit metacommunicative comments, can differ considerably along these lines. Most studies on topic management in spoken discourse concentrate on one particular type of interaction and often restrict themselves to the analysis of individual aspects and patterns of topic development, which are, in turn, often adapted to fit the material at hand. 3.

Major factors governing topic management in social media

Thus far, studies concentrating specifically on strategies and patterns of topic management in computer-mediated communication are relatively scarce, which may be due to their inherently interpretive nature and the accompanying difficulties

6



This is probably most noticeable in Bublitz’ (1988) approach, who even incorporates this aspect in his definition of topical actions.

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concerning their operationalization for analysis. While this in itself is a source of considerable debate in linguistic research on traditional forms of communication (see Section 2), the various forms of interaction on social media platforms exhibit various new combinations of technological and situational factors (Herring 2007: 13–23). These present unprecedented challenges both for participants to negotiate topical coherence in interaction as well as for the analyst to identify and describe reconfigured (cf. Herring 2013b) discursive strategies of topical organization post festum. There is little debate nowadays that computer-mediated discourse in general is stylistically heterogeneous and exhibits characteristics from both conceptual orality and literacy.7 As discourse on social media is interactively constructed by a number of different participants, research on its inner workings usually take face-to-face conversations as a frame of reference rather than (conceptually and modally) written discourse.8 The most distinctive factors shaping the organization of topical discourse across social media platforms are 1) the (quasi-)synchronicity or asynchronicity of the exchange, 2) the potentially high number of participants interacting with each other, facilitating complex patterns in terms of participatory structures, and 3) the 7



8



The distinction of conceptual orality and literacy originates from Koch and Oester­rei­ cher (1985). Disentangling the various readings and implications of the commonplace opposition of spoken vs. written language, they propose a model of communicative immediacy and distance. At the heart of this lies the conceptual as well as terminological differentiation between the realization of language and its conceptualization. In terms of the former, they differentiate between the graphic and the phonic mode, i.e. the written vs. spoken format of representation (cf. Bublitz 2017 for this definition of mode). Conceptually, they propose a continuum running from the poles of conceptually spoken language (or the language of immediacy) to that of conceptually written language (or the language of distance). This conceptual dimension encompasses both situative communicative features of the communicative act (such as, e.g., dialogue/monologue, familiarity of the interactants, temporal and spatial co-presence/separation, presence/ absence of ad hoc speaker change, degree of involvement, free/pre-determined choice of topic) as well as the various strategies of linguistic expression related to these parameters (e.g., provisional/definitive character, degree of information density, compactness, planning). Especially in the context of newly-evolved forms of communication, this model has been repeatedly criticized and extended (e.g., Dürscheid 2003; Landert and Jucker 2011; Landert 2014). In order to sharpen the terminological distinction, Bublitz (2017) proposes to differentiate between conceptual orality vs. literacy on the conceptual dimension, and orality vs. scripturality at the level of realization. A notable exception to this is Largier (2002), who explicitly regards her German and French asynchronous forum postings as realizations of conceptually written discourse. She also observes that the frequent occurrence of a message-initial and final greeting section is clearly reminiscent of norms of conceptual literacy (Largier 2002: 292; cf. also Herring’s (1996) electronic message schema).

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fact that acceptable topic development is frequently delimited by pre-determined global topics. This section will give an overview of each of these factors’ impact on global discourse organization, showing how their interplay creates new sets of technological and situational conditions that render traditional approaches of interaction management partially unsuitable and in need of modification (cf. Dürscheid and Brommer 2009: 17; Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012; Marcoccia 2004). 3.1. Synchronicity A key aspect in differentiating computer-mediated communication from face-toface interactions is that interactants do not need to be physically co-present. This spatial separation, combined with the early predominance of text-only (or at least text-based) messages, has been in the focus of linguistic research since its beginning and led to detailed investigations into emerging phenomena and strategies such as, e.g., emoticons, non-standard spellings, or use of capitalization to compensate for the lack of paralinguistic and non-verbal cues (e.g., Thurlow, Lengel and Tomic 2007: 125; Baym 2015: 68–69). One of the most prominent distinctions across the various forms of computer-mediated communication is concerned with synchronicity, i.e. the temporal dimension of online interactions. In synchronous exchanges, participants are only spatially separated; they are logged on into the system (e.g., a chat client) simultaneously and are thus temporally co-present, which facilitates quick exchanges in real-time (or at least with minimal delays). In contrast, in asynchronous computer-mediated communication participants do not need to be online at the same time and can retrieve and react to messages at a later point. In its simplest form, this distinction is understood as a technological property and used to differentiate between synchronous and asynchronous systems, such as chat or email, discussion forums, etc. respectively (e.g., Herring 2007: 13; Beißwenger 2007: 17–31). This, however, has been criticized and further differentiated with regard to matters of temporal organization in the actual ensuing discourse. On the one hand, chat platforms require participants to be logged on at the same time. In this light, Beißwenger (2007: 37) and Jucker and Dürscheid (2012: 39; cf. also Cherny 1999: 154) have argued that true simultaneity of production and reception is only facilitated in a 2-way transmission format, when users’ contributions are transmitted keystroke by keystroke instead of being sent as a whole. In such an understanding, most chat systems commonly called synchronous only facilitate quasi-synchronous exchanges. On the other hand, so-called asynchronous platforms such as discussion forums, mailing lists etc., may well be designed to afford asynchronous communication but can also accommodate quasi-synchronous exchanges of rapidly sent consecutive messages between users

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who are simultaneously oriented to the ongoing interaction (Dürscheid and Brommer 2009: 6; Beißwenger 2007: 22; Baym 2006: 523; Jucker and Dürscheid 2012: 39). The convergence of technical devices (Jucker and Dürscheid 2012: 37) seen in recent years acts as a further complicating factor: As mobile phones turn into hand-held computers continuously connected to the internet and medium-size portable devices become commonplace, people can access the various platforms whenever they want, receive notifications and respond immediately without having to wait until they can access a stationary computer. Software providers react by developing smartphone and tablet applications to make their web-based communication platforms easier to navigate from mobile devices. These technical advances and accompanying shifts in practice can even lead to a conflation of traditionally separate forms of communication (cf. Herring 2013b). This can be observed in texting and instant messaging, for instance, whose main differentiating factor was the kind of device used to engage in it (mobile phones with 12-key keypads vs. stationary computers with a full keyboard) – in combination with resulting restrictions such as character limits etc. Both are now continued in the form of newer internet-based messenger services that work on both stationary and mobile devices, the latter of which have seen major changes to their text input hard- and software. In a similar vein, the once predominant deeply hierarchical structure of asynchronous forums has gradually been reduced to a facultative display option or even completely given up in favour of a purely chronological arrangement of postings, which appears to be more mobile-friendly. For all these reasons, synchronicity is best understood as a continuum (Baron 2008: 15) of synchronous, quasi-synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication. By and large, however, bearing in mind that true synchronicity in the sense of simultaneity is not facilitated by most text-based platforms, a rough categorization into synchronous and asynchronous forms of computer-mediated communication still seems justifiable. Also, the functional range the software affords is essentially geared towards its intended (quasi-)synchronous or asynchronous use, and those platforms meant to facilitate asynchronous interaction can also host quasi-synchronous exchanges. Synchronicity has been shown to play a decisive role in how interactants design and organize their contributions linguistically. As speed is particularly important in multiparticipant synchronous environments, these contributions tend to be shorter and (lexically and syntactically) less complex (e.g., Herring 2001: 617; Beißwenger 2003: 225) – as compared to asynchronous exchanges, where individual contributions can be more complex and can accommodate various functional and topical moves (Condon and Čech 2010; Black et al. 1983; Herring 1999). In terms of conceptual differences manifest in the linguistic organization of individual contributions, the difference between (quasi-)synchronous and asynchronous exchanges can be traced along the lines of the continuum of communicative imme-

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diacy according to Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) (Dürscheid and Brommer 2009: 7; Androutsopoulos 2007: 87; Jucker and Dürscheid 2012: 39).9 Concerning the interactional organization across messages, both synchronous and asynchronous interactions are prone to exhibiting what Herring (1999) calls “disrupted turn adjacency”, i.e. the tendency for interactionally and topically unrelated turns to “interrupt” sequences of related messages. Tracking individual co-occurring exchanges, then, is a “cognitively challenging” task (Herring 1999), which becomes even more demanding as interactions fragment into various parallel threads on different topics, leading to persistent claims that “topics decay quickly” (Herring 1999; also Lambiase 2010; Herring and Nix 1997).10 In both synchronous and asynchronous communication, participants cannot fully rely on the linear order of messages determined by the time of transmission in order to trace topically and interactionally coherent sequences. In asynchronous computer-mediated communication, the relative lack of time constraints in combination with the persistence of messages additionally opens up the possibility for users to contribute responses to temporally distant messages, thus creating webs of multilinear exchanges (Gruber 1998: 36, 2013: 65). It thus becomes a particularly important strategy for creating coherence to overtly signal links to previous contributions. Common verbal strategies, such as addressing particular participants, paraphrasing or repeating (parts of) previous contributions, are typically directed at people and/or the subject matter at hand and are clearly adopted from established communicative practices of topic and turn management in face-to-face interactions (cf. Schubert, Ch. 12, this volume). Others are particular to computer-mediated communication and involve “semi-automatized” (Bublitz and Hoffmann 2011: 438) practices, most prominently the quoting templates in asynchronous forms such as discussion forums and email and the software-based positioning of messages in hierarchical tree structures in some discussion forums or comment sections on social media platforms. Research into the communicative use of such linking devices thus can constitute a first step

Dürscheid (2003: 47) rightly points out that, contrary to some conceptualizations, the differentiation of conceptual orality and literacy cannot be attributed to the particular forms of communication (such as email, chat, etc.) as such, but can only be applied to particular genres emerging within the various platforms (cf. also Kilian 2001). In this vein, a love email (or text message, etc.) will be more conceptually immediate, or oral, than one sent in a business context (Dürscheid 2003: 47). 10 In contrast to this, Crystal (2006: 151) suggests that “the vast majority of messages […] stay surprisingly on-topic”, whereas Stomer-Galley and Martinson (2009) arrive at a more nuanced conclusion and claim that the pre-determined global topic, together with the “seriousness” of the interaction determines whether or not participants tend to drift from the original topic, and that technologically-conditioned factors are not “inherently problematic” (Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 195; see Section 4.4). 9



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to approaching patterns of collaborative topic management in and across various platforms (see Section 4.3). 3.2.

Polylogal organization

Interaction on social media typically involves a large number of individuals. It has been noted repeatedly that, with the “convergence between the public and the private sphere” (Chovanec and Dynel 2015: 10) resulting from the technologically-conditioned permanence and reproducibility of content, it is impossible to know even the size of one’s audience. The blurring along the lines of audience and participants necessitates modifications (Marcoccia 2004: 131–143; Arendholz 2013a: 44; Chovanec and Dynel 2015) of traditional frameworks of participation formats established for face-to-face encounters in order to account, inter alia, for lurkers, who inadvertently or intentionally read exchanges without actively participating. Once they start to contribute, however, they can easily turn into ratified and addressed participants (Arendholz 2013a: 44). Conversational groups are dynamic and “continuously under construction” (Marcoccia 2004: 140). The sheer amount of people actively engaging in an interaction opens the door for intricate and multifarious patterns of interleaving and more or less separable exchanges. In doing so, it poses considerable challenges both for the ongoing interactional organization as well as an adequate linguistic description of these structures. Fragmentation in itself is not unknown from the study of face-to-face communication. Polylogues are characterized by their increasing “flexibility, instability, and unpredictability […] on all levels of their functioning” compared to dyadic configurations (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004: 7). Placing fewer constraints on individual participants in terms of the mechanics of turn taking and speaker selection, they exhibit more frequent and varied instances of interruptions and simultaneous talk (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004: 5–6). In interactions involving four or more participants, these instances are prone to function as bifurcation points triggering what Parker (1984) calls conversational grouping, i.e., the fragmentation into parallel exchanges between smaller groups. A conversation can thus split up into two or more simultaneously proceeding threads, which, in turn, can compete with each other, quiet down and/or converge into new configurations, giving rise to a vast variety of different dynamically evolving interactional patterns. In example (3), Sara’s prompt in line 5 leads to a fragmentation into two parallel exchanges. The competition is short-lived and ends with Elsa’s turn (lines 12–14), in which she closes down the ongoing topic and refocuses on Sara’s original attempt at a topic introduction. She thereby initiates a topic change towards a topic to which all participants then contribute in a single shared conversational exchange:

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(3) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Elsa Max Sara Max

Elsa Max Elsa

so we saw in any case that although topics could recur if you like we saw differences     [    uh in:::   [hm hm (silence 3s) but uh I return to [the example of this morning\= Léa [yes that is (inaud.) of the first Sara frame Léa it will be a (inaud.) [topical [simply but all the [yes                  [yes rest has changed [                                                                            [yes all the rest has changed yes (2s) what did you say↑ this morning/

=yes yes because it’s a good example/ yes (taking notes) emerging frame (silence) inside/

yes↑ this morning/ I arrived at half past 9\ and also uh::: uh came/ [                         and at half past [yes 16 Inès 9 I came for a polylogue meeting/ [ and I came into the office 17 Sara                                                                                                                                                         [yes↑ 18 Elsa here there was already an ongoing dialogue (.) between uh: 19 Sara and: – and Anne/ (Xs) then uh: well after a while – I stayed/ (.) after a 20 Léa while I went out because for me/ it was – we were – I was no longer in 21 the participation framework poly – uh polylogue meeting [ 22 [yes↑ 23 Elsa [that’s it 24 Inès (Traverso 2004: 71) 15

Sara

Such structures form more or less discrete organizational units at an intermediate, or “macro-local” (Traverso 2004: 56), level of discourse organization. This level is located below the global level of the interactive encounter as a whole and above that of local turn management. Structures at this macro-local level emerge as “islands of organization and regularity” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004: 7) and constitute a fruitful middle way to identify and describe structures of coherence in polylogal interaction. They have been described under the term of conversational floors (Edelsky 1981; Shultz, Florio, and Erickson 1982; Hayashi 1991; Coates 1997; Traverso 2004; Jones and Thornborrow 2004; Simpson 2005, 2013), and there are overlaps with other concepts from interactional discourse analysis such as phases (and subphases), episodes, etc. (Korolija and Linell 1996; Linell and Korolija 1997; Linell 1998: 203; Pavlidou 2014). The concept of floor is “notoriously slippery” (Simpson 2013: 518), and definitions vary. At their core, however, floors are taken to be an interactional achievement of the participants, reflect-

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ing their understanding of “what’s-going-on within a psychological time/space” (Edelsky 1981: 405). As such, individual floors are characterized by their relatively unified participation framework,11 as well as a shared communicative purpose or activity and topic. Thus, they constitute a valuable springboard for the analysis of collaboratively negotiated topics and topic management in polylogal, interactionally complex, discourse. As with topic-focused approaches, conversational floors can be studied from structural and dynamic perspectives: The structural, or “cross-sectional” (Traverso 2004: 54), perspective yields descriptions of various, more or less abstract and ‘typical’ floor types: Edelsky (1981) identifies two such types, viz. one-at-a-time, singly-developed type F1 and collaboratively-developed type F2. The former is characterized by orderly turn-by-turn talk with little overlap, a smaller number of speakers taking (comparatively) longer turns, a single topical focus and an overall more formal and hierarchical organization. Conversely, F2 types evolve in a more egalitarian fashion, with a larger number of central participants, diverse topics, shorter turns (and shorter overall duration) and a larger extent of overlapping speech (cf. also Herring 2010: 3–4). Accounting for the possibility of simultaneously developing floors in polylogal interactions, Shultz, Florio and Erickson (1982) incorporate the distinction of multiple and single floors into their framework, which has been taken up in various taxonomic modification and extensions (e.g., Hayashi 1991; Traverso 2004; Cherny 1999; cf. Simpson 2013 for a concise overview). In the dynamic, or “longitudinal” (Traverso 2004: 55), approach, the focus lies on describing the dynamics in which floors evolve, split off and converge. It is closely connected to patterns identified for topic management such as topic shifts, changes, digressions etc. Floors are, essentially, topically bounded units; transition points between floors typically exhibit the discontinuity markers identified by conversation analysis to indicate topic boundaries (Traverso 2004: 61; see example (3)) – so that shifts in participation statuses and/or ongoing communicative activity are likely to indicate transitions in topic. Here again, structural and dynamic perspectives complement each other. Social media constitute ideal platforms to foster “massive polylogues” (BouFranch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014: 19). Their tendency to fragment into various threads or sub-threads has been widely noticed (e.g., Marcoccia 2004; Bou11

Participation framework, in this context, does not only refer to different participation statuses in terms of Goffman’s (1981) framework (such as primary/secondary speaker, addressed/unaddressed recipients etc.) but also extends to participant statuses based on institutional and social roles vis-a-vis the overall interaction (such as moderator, teacher vs. student etc.), and the ongoing communicative activity (e.g. asking for advice vs. proffering advice), as well as those discursive roles related to local turn management (e.g., giving the floor) (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004: 16).

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Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012). As messages are persistent and constantly retrievable on most – and especially asynchronous – CMC platforms, fragmentation and multiple floors “are in fact easier to achieve than in face-to-face conversations” (Cherny 1999: 180; cf. also Herring 1999), and it can even be rather effortless for one participant to contribute extensively to two or more simultaneously developed floors. Contrastively, in face-to-face settings, the ability of interactants to monitor and actively engage in multiple parallel floors at the same time is severely constrained by the ephemeral (spoken) nature of the participants’ contributions and the simultaneity of the exchange (Traverso 2004: 72). Conversational floors have been used to conceptualize such mid-level units in the organization of polylogal CMC interactions (Cherny 1999; Simpson 2005, 2013; Herring 2010), particulary with a view to the relative conversational dominance of one or more individual participants. Other studies have brought forth taxonomies of similar types of patterns under different analytic foci. These include, e.g., instances of disrupted vs. linear messages sequences, exchanges between dyads or (smaller) sub-groups and larger groups, orientation toward different communicative activities or patterns of linking back to specific prior contributions or participants vs. addressing and orienting towards a larger audience, which may be accomplished with the help of software-afforded functions (e.g., Largier 2002; Schütte 2004; Holmer 2008; Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012; Bou-Franch and Garcés Conejos-Blitvich 2014; Haugh and Chang 2015). Discourse topics and their dynamics in interaction are rarely focused on in any explicit manner, but seem to play an important role in the development of such mid-level organizational structures.12 These structures can serve as a starting point for more detailed investigations into local and global patterns of topic management in social media polylogues. 3.3.

Monotopicality and off-topic behaviour

Perhaps most directly connected to matters of dynamic topic management is the question of whether or not a communicative encounter is set out to cover a particular topic and/or serve a particular purpose. Depending on the presence or absence of such an agenda, ensuing interactions can be classified as monotopical or polyto12

Regarding the formation of subgroups in synchronous MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, i.e., a text-based multiparticipant virtual world incorporating, inter alia, chat interfaces), Cherny (199: 176) claims that they “cannot be formed with physical proximity or volume control, so if they do form, they must be purely topic driven”. In Herring’s (2010) adaptation of floor analysis to academic mailing lists, aspects of topical organization feature in her category of thematic focus (i.e., measured as messages on main or sub-themes) as well as, within her participation category, as “distribution of new topic initiations across participants” (Herring 2010: 10).

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pical respectively, with the terms referring to a projection of the acceptable topical range rather than the actual outcome: With the term ‘monotopical’ we intend not an ex post facto finding that a single topic was talked about, especially in view of the complexity with which topic talk is done, wherein each successive utterance can revise what the topic has been ‘all along’. We have in mind, rather, conversations produced from their beginnings with an orientation to their expectable monotopicality. (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 307)

Lacking such an orientation, spontaneously evolving everyday conversations have typically been attested a “relative lack of [topical] order, which cannot be foreseen (or easily directed)” (Bublitz 1988: 40); topic changes, shifts and digressions are common and do not in and of themselves constitute sanctionable behaviour. Topics may develop by means of creative and unpredictable associations, and this can be an obstacle to the analytical identification of topic boundaries. In contrast, in monotopical interactions the shared focus on a global topic places severe constraints on norm-conforming topical management. Although tangential topics may de facto ensue, which temporarily shift the attention away from the main topic, they are, in face-to-face environments, usually short-lived and marked as digressions or as subordinate side floors (cf. Bublitz 1988: 94–129; Traverso 2004). Although the distinction may certainly leave some leeway, most (asynchronous) polylogal communication on social media, at the level of whole exchanges, is intended to be monotopical. Synchronous chat in topically undefined chatrooms – as far as the notion of a bounded ‘single exchange’ is applicable – seems to be the most perspicuous exception. Irrespective of their mediated or unmediated nature, the distinction of global vs. local topics gains additional momentum in monotopical interactions. Generally, global and local topics may be defined by means of conversational scope alone (e.g., Bublitz 1988: 35; Linell 1998: 183). In a monotopical setting, however, the global topic is pre-determined to span the entirety of the interaction; it acts as a point of orientation for participants both in the construction of their own contributions as well as for interpreting and judging the topical nature of those made by other interactants. It is open for the duration of the interaction, and in spoken conversations, its closure typically triggers “the initation of the closing section” (Schegloff and Sacks 1973: 308) terminating the whole interaction. Locally-instantiated topics are as a rule expected to contribute in some way to the global topic at hand. In this sense, the differentiation of local and global topics can be extended by a notion of hierarchy in addition to their scope. The differentiation of on-topic and off-topic behaviour is particularly prominent in monotopically-oriented social media interactions. Platforms usually provide an explicit code of conduct, which normally includes the request for members to stay on topic – a direct reminder of monotopicality. This clearly affects the overall organization of topical management, as locally-instantiated topics are not

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only developed and interpreted with reference to their connection to sequentially preceding topics, but are also continually assessed with respect to their relevance for the global topic at hand. However, from an analytic point of view, clear criteria and boundaries for onand off-topic exchanges are nearly impossible to establish. What falls within the range of a particular global topic remains just as flexible and dependent on interpretation and reinterpretation as the notion of discourse topic itself. Detailed models are rare and strongly dependent on how they operationalize discourse topics. Simple semantic relations, as suggested, e.g., in Stromer-Galley and Martinson (2009), however, may not do justice to the complexity of perceptions of relevance. As seen before, topics and communicative actions are closely related in orienting participants in an ongoing exchange (Linell 1998: 182). Monotopical interactions are tied to a more or less clearly laid out purpose, which entails a particular trajectory of relevant communicative actions and preferred responses (cf. Haugh and Chang 2015). Most global topics such as politics, auto racing or cancer support (Stromer-Galley and Martinson’s (2009) examples for global topics), already imply a purpose or range of relevant action patterns (e.g., discussion/argumentation, exchanging opinions or information, connecting to likeminded people, giving and receiving support etc.). Especially in asynchronous exchanges, where messages can be longer, the initiating postings have been shown to regularly include more or less explicit calls for particular actions (Arendholz 2013a: 148–156; see Section 4.2). In this way, topics and communicative actions complement each other, and messages may still be perceived as relevant to the overall exchange when they are recognizable as being relevant to either the global topic or the communicative activity determined for the interaction. It follows that the distinction between on-topic and off-topic behaviour should best be conceived of as gradual. From the analyst’s point of view, the safest judgements can be made in cases where participants display their perception that an ongoing exchange has gone off-topic in their communicative behaviour. While “silence”, or more accurately the absence of responses to particular contributions, may not be intentional in this respect (Markman 2009: 157–158), explicit verbal strategies can be less ambiguous. They include, most prominently, metacommunicative utterances commenting on the lack of relevance to the global topic (Lambiase 2010: 13). But participants may also display their discontent with the relevance of the ongoing local topic less explicitly by engaging in recognizable topic closing procedures adapted from face-to-face settings. Whether or not an interaction is set out as monotopical places considerable constraints on its development both in terms of discourse topics as well as communicative actions. Thereby, projected monotopicality impacts on the collaborative organization of the exchanges as a whole. From a dynamic point of view, off-topic exchanges are mostly the result of patterns of topic drift rather than abrupt changes, which tend to occur more frequently at a point in time when the interaction has

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been going on for a while, so that the global topic is exhausted and participants are losing interest in continuing it (Lambiase 2010; see Section 4.4). 4.

Topic management in multiparticipant social media interactions

This section will review linguistic research into topic management in multiparticipant social media interaction, taking into account both approaches and findings from synchronous (IRC and public web-based chatrooms, MUD systems, instant messaging services) and asynchronous forms (mailing lists, web-based discussion forums and their predecessors such as usenet newsgroups, and comment sections on YouTube, news websites, etc.). Setting off with an overview of predominant operationalizations of the notion of discourse topic and topic progression, the focus will be narrowed onto recurrent strategies of topic initiations across various platforms. With respect to stepwise local topic transitions across individual contributions, the technological resources afforded by the software to provide cross-message links play a prominent role in shaping how users manage sequential and topical coherence. After exploring their potential, the section will conclude with an overview of linguistic research on local and global patterns of topic development in public multiparticipant computer-mediated discourse. 4.1.

Tendencies in researching discourse topics in social media

Only few studies focus specifically on matters of topic management in social media. Of those, most concentrate on the phenomenon of topic drift. The clear majority studies synchronous interaction (Herring and Nix 1997; Herring 2003; Hoffmann 2004; Herring and Kurtz 2006; Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009). Topic investigations into asynchronous interactions are under-represented (e.g., Gruber 1997, 1998; Lambiase 2010). These topic-focused approaches (with the exception of Hoffmann 2004) draw on two topical frameworks in particular, viz. Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin (1976) and Hobbs (1990). Both of them encompass relatively specific definitions of discourse topics as propositions as well as taxonomies for local topic transitions: Hobbs’ model of topic drift describes various strategies of stepwise topic transitions between utterances (termed parallelism, explanation and metatalk) on the basis of how they relate to each other.13 Performed over a series of utterances,

13

Parallelism is based on similarity of argument or proposition, explanation refers to a causal relation, and metatalk transitions have to do with a shift towards the goals of the conversation (Hobbs 1990: 8–9).

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such transitions can steer the conversation far away from the original topic. Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin (1976: 341–342) cover a broader spectrum and make a four-fold distinction between the general categories of continuous and discontinuous discourse, which each cover two transition types based on the topical similarity between utterances.14 These frameworks seem to lend themselves more easily to adaptation for computer-mediated environments than conversation-analytic approaches. This is because they define discourse topics and their boundaries by means of propositional content, whereas conversation analysis has always been more cautions with content analysis and instead focuses on organizational procedures that strongly hinge on simultaneity. Viewing topics as a collaborative achievement (Lambiase 2010: 5), the transferability at this local level also relies on short message length. As a general tendency, this makes chat more accessible than asynchronous interaction. A major issue for topic analysis in computer-mediated environments is that adjacent turns tend to get disrupted by (topically and/or interactionally) unrelated turns (cf. Herring 1999). Topical and sequential coherence typically go hand in hand; indeed, Schegloff (1990: 64) observes that “the sequential structure [can] provide […] the basis for finding some topical linkages across what are, at the surface, topically unrelated and noncoherent utterances.” As such, an analysis of dynamic topic development crucially depends on tracing sequences of contributions, which are often non-adjacent in the chronological order of the interactions. Synchronous and asynchronous platforms typically differ in both the complexity of such sequences and the range of linking strategies that participants can draw upon. While some of them are practices adopted from turn management strategies in face-to-face conversations, others (especially on asynchronous platforms) rely on functions afforded by the software. Once such sequences are established, the models usually take referential ties as the basis for describing patterns of topic development. Sequences of topically related contributions are commonly referred to as threads (Herring 1999; Crystal 2006: 142; Lambiase 2010: 5; Markman 2013: 545). Synchronous platforms usually do not provide any formal means to indicate such sequences; they have to be signalled and interpreted by means of the verbal content of the contributions alone, and the complex interplay of multiple threads can become “confusing” (Cherny 1999: 182).15 Asychronous platforms, Continuous discourse subsumes collaborating and incorporating discourse topics, with collaborating topic matching that of the preceding utterance and an incorporating topic sharing an element from the preceding topic. Discontinuous discourse, in contrast, is characterized by introducing or re-introducing discourse topics, depending on whether or not the topic has been active in more distant utterances of the ongoing discourse (Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin 1976: 341–342). 15 There are a number of software projects concerned with visualizing interactional pat14

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on the other hand, differ widely in terms of their specific functions, but they usually provide some technological resources to structure exchanges by arranging messages into hierarchical sequences, which are intended to visualize local topic development. They have the potential to make coherent exchanges more effortless, in the sense that users can outsource a large part of their linking work. However, they are also susceptible to human error (Gruber 1997: 109; Marcoccia 2004: 123– 126) and/or strategic misuse (Lambiase 2010: 10). As asynchronous interactions are typically monotopically oriented towards a global topic, they are usually as a whole referred to as threads (and can, in turn, develop into several local (sub-) threads). In contrast to chatrooms, these threads are usually explicitly started by a thread-initiating message, which lays out the global topic and the action trajectory that all responding messages are supposed to relate to. 4.2.

Topic initiations

Establishing a discourse topic is a collaborate achievement and thus necessarily involves at least two messages by two different participants (e.g., Lambiase 2010: 5). In the potentially noisy environments of social media, users do not compete so much for the right to speak as to make themselves heard (Cherny 1999: 174), i.e., to receive responses to their postings. Consequently, the first message in topic initiations is particularly important. Users regularly self-select to start new topics (Markman 2013: 549), and unilateral topic nominations (and profferings; cf. Schegloff 2007: 169–180) generally seem to be much more promising a strategy than topic elicitations, whereby recipients are invited to propose a topic (Schegloff 2007: 170; cf. Button and Casey 1984, 1985). Linguistic patterns are adapted from face-to-face conversations and are similar across synchronous and asynchronous platforms, but the placement of the postings and their complexity is heavily influenced by the synchronicity and intended monotopicality of the exchange. 4.2.1. Topic initiations in synchronous chat Local topic initiations can occur throughout the chat, even more so if it is not intended as monotopical (cf. Herring and Nix 1997). Pre-arranged chat sessions typically exhibit opening (and closing) phases similar to those of face-to-face or telephone conversations. Markman (2009), in her investigation of informal virtual terns, based on message links, participation and/or temporal structure etc., both as a tool for analysis in retrospect (e.g., Herring and Nix 1997; Herring 2003; Herring and Kutz 2006; Donath, Karahalios and Viégas 1999; Donath 2002; Holmer 2008; Severinson Eklundh and Rodriguez 2004 for an asynchronous platform) as well as bringing structure to synchronous exchanges while they are taking place (e.g., Donath, Karahalios and Viégas 1999; Donath 2002).

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meetings, observes a “two-stage process” (Markman 2009: 155) by which participants habitually move into the topical stage of the meetings of a fixed group, consisting of “(a) an opening move referencing prior communication from the team and (b) an agenda-setting turn focusing the talk on a specific topic” (Markman 2009: 155). While the first stage is frequently introduced by the discourse marker so (e.g., So, guess you found some neat people according to Dr Kimble’s notes …; Markman 2009: 156; also 2013: 550), the second stage is typically “phrased as a first-pair part (questions, assessments) that offer[s] a specific candidate for the current meeting’s discussion” (Markman 2009: 156), e.g., what areas are we all interested in researching? (Markman 2009: 160). It is thus this second stage that functions as a move to initiate the first (and often global) topic. This strategy of opening the main (topical) phase is characteristic of meetings in general and not in itself specific to the chat setting. What seems to be a direct consequence of the quasi-synchronous setting, however, is the ease with which openings can be interrupted, so that it can take several attempts to complete the two stages and open the meeting (Markman 2009: 161). Such clearly delineated opening phases are naturally absent from open chatrooms, in which users continually log on and off (Schönfeldt 2001: 48). For those who have recently logged in, topic initiations constitute an easily accessible entry point for them to join in (cf. Hoffmann 2004: 107). In terms of linguistic strategies, directives in the form of interrogative clauses (i.e., Leech’s (2014) rogatives) are the primary means by which new topics are initiated in chats, and they are typically (implicitly or explicitly) directed at everyone (Hoffmann 2004: 109; Markman 2013: 547). As they establish conditional relevance, they are a particularly effective means to trigger responses. Assertives are clearly less effective in this respect, but may be successful, particularly when participants use them to offer assessments which clearly invite contrastive assessments (Hoffmann 2004: 111). 4.2.2. Thread initiations on asynchronous platforms In contrast to chats, asynchronous multiparticipant interactions are as a rule oriented towards a particular global topic and formally separated from other threads. Consequently, individual thread-initiatiating messages can be clearly identified. The asynchronous setting encourages longer messages,16 which means that post16

Nonetheless, messages tend to stay relatively short: In her corpus of 50 discussion forum threads, e.g., Arendholz (2013b: 360) measures a mean of 171.82 words in the thread-initiating messages, with longer specimens containing around 550 words. As there is no obligation whatsoever for users to pick up on potential thread initiations, overly long messages may be felt to overburden prospective respondents and are thus avoided.

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ings can be more complex and elaborate on the envisioned topical scope to make it interesting and relevant for users to respond. How this is achieved is influenced by a multitude of social factors, most prominently the communicative purpose of the thread and the projected actions as well as the characteristics of the group as such, e.g., user demographics, interests and expertise on particular subjects. Similarly to chats, directive speech acts realized by interrogative or imperative clauses are common strategies to elicit responses from the recipients (Gruber 1997: 114, 1998: 30; Arendholz 2013a: 150) and are at the core of topic initiations. Arendholz’ (2103a) study of interaction in a web-based discussion forum indicates that this is also reflected in the thread headings, where interrogative structures make up more than half (29 of 50) of the threads under investigation (Arendholz 2013a: 139). Headings are particularly powerful means of attracting attention on these platforms, as threads are listed by their headings and are only displayed in full once they are clicked on. They serve as “condensed abstracts” (Arendholz 2013a: 128) of the thread-initiating postings, often indicating both intended topical range and communicative purpose. The way in which the global topic is introduced and elaborated on is primarily influenced by the communicative purpose the authors have in mind: Most prominently, the global topic is built around a central (personal or otherwise) problem, about which authors seek advice or opinions, or simply wish to vent their anger. Personal problem expositions are performed by means of narratives, which are typically concluded by an evaluation if users mean to “blow […] off steam” (Arendholz 2013a: 156). Advice, on the other hand, is elicited implicitly or explicitly through interrogative or imperative clauses, which can explicitly address the community (Arendholz 2013a: 154). Thread initiations that aim for other people’s opinions rather than advice equally employ interrogatives to elicit them. In contrast to the other categories, the topic need not be linked to the author’s personal life. If it is not based on personal experience, authors frequently draw on thread- or forum-external sources to establish its relevance and build up common ground for discussion (Arendholz 2013a: 149–155; Gruber 1997: 116). While a distinction between different communicative purposes is important, it should be noted that this is often not as clear-cut as one might suppose. Example (4) demonstrates that the trajectory of the directives includes both opinions and narratives of personal experiences. In fact, it has been frequently observed that communicative activities such as troubles telling, seeking advice and complaining frequently conflate in online interactions (Smithson et al. 2011; cf. Haugh and Chang 2015: 104–108 for a succinct overview). However, they can be differentiated and exhibit different trajectories of preferred responses. (4) Is the UK sleepwalking into a surveillance state? Do we need more adequate safeguards? Have you been snooped on? (adapted from Arendholz 2013a: 155)

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Which topics exactly users find interesting to talk about is highly dependent on interests and purposes shared by the community. Gruber (1997, 1998) observes that the central points of interest in academic mailing list communities seem to centre on theoretical and empirical issues. Either are usually common and accepted foci for responding messages to pursue. For this reason, he argues that the global topic laid out in thread-initiating postings can best be regarded as a set of related (more specific) topics (Gruber 1997: 115). Arendholz’ finding that authors often ask multiple questions (e.g., example (4)) is consistent with this interpretation. Global topics are relatively broad and can be interpreted as a range of more specific topics for respondents to choose from. Thread-initiating messages compete with each other, and not all messages turn out to be successful. Marcoccia (2004: 121), e.g., notes that 50 % of thread-initiating messages to a French newsgroup within a two-month period fail to trigger responses; in contrast to this, Gruber (1998: 32) finds “only a few” such postings on two academic mailing lists within four month. Both hypothesize that the lack of responses may be (at least partly) attributed to the linguistic presentation of the topic. Just as in chat interaction, responses may be inhibited by the failure to produce first pair parts (Marcoccia 2004: 122). Also, presenting the topic in a way that does not make the problematic issue evident, e.g. by phrasing their exposition in “unmodalized positive polarity” (Gruber 1998: 33), seems to have a similar effect, as readers are not offered particular “possible points [or topics] of discussion” (Gruber 1998: 33) and may feel reluctant to disagree with an account that has not been marked as problematic. Other factors that may negatively influence users’ propensity to respond include extensive message length (Gruber 1998: 33) and the possibility to get back to the author on other channels (i.e., through private email etc.; Marcoccia 2004: 122). 4.3.

Quoting and threading in the service of topic development

Asynchronous systems usually provide specific technological options for participants to indicate sequential patterns of the ongoing exchange, viz., most prominently quoting templates and a threading mechanism of some sort. They complement the array of ‘manual’ linking strategies, such as paraphrasing, direct references to authors etc., which users have at their disposal throughout synchronous and asynchronous platforms (cf. Severinson Eklundh and Rodriguez 2004 for an overview of such linking strategies; see also Section 4.4). Threading and quoting can be considered semi-automatized strategies in the sense that a considerable part of the linking work is taken over by the software.17

17

The distinction between non-, semi- and fully-automatized is originally introduced by Bublitz and Hoffmann (2011) with reference to quoting in CMC. However, it can be

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But they differ in their degree of optionality and granularity, as threading (if featured by the software) is usually obligatory, while the use of quoting is optional. With threading, the software generates hierarchical thread structures based on the participants’ choices in marking their messages as replies to specific prior contributions to the thread. With quoting, the system will automatically generate a quote of the selected message, i.e., adding a verbatim repetition of the message body, formally separated from the new contribution (e.g. displayed as a box or bubble) and complemented by a pointer to the original message. Participants can usually manipulate this quote, e.g. by selecting parts of the quote and deleting others, segmenting the original message into multiple quotes or selecting content from other messages to include as additional quotes (by means of copy-and-pasting) (cf. Bublitz and Hoffmann 2011: 439; Bös and Kleinke 2015: 74). This high degree of adaptability makes quoting a particularly versatile strategy,18 which can be employed to serve an array of functions going beyond simple indication of sequential message order. On a broad scale, semi-automatized quoting practices can induce coherence as well as carry out relational functions (Bös and Kleinke 2015; Arendholz 2015; Bublitz 2015). These main functions are, however, not always clearly separable in practice; Bös and Kleinke (2015: 78) suggest viewing this distinction as a continuum, with quoting patterns “typically […] display[ing] a complex functional profile”. The coherence-inducing function of quoting is probably most prominent and has been most widely discussed in linguistic literature (e.g. Severinson Eklundh and Rodriguez 1994; Herring 1999; Severinson Eklundh and Macdonald 2004; Severinson Eklundh 2010; Bublitz and Hoffmann 2011). Aiming to disentangle conceptual ambiguities, Bös and Kleinke (2015) list three coherence-related functions, viz. the text-deictic, the adjacency-creating and the trigger/mental access function. The text-deictic function (Bös and Kleinke 2015: 79) relates to basic linking, tying a message to a particular preceding one, which is thus taken as the departure point for the new contribution. This function can equally be performed by means of threading. However, quoting is a particularly economic strategy, as by providing a verbatim repetition of a prior message’s textual material, it invites the extended to strategies of (thread-internal) linking in a more general sense with little difficulty. 18 Note that pragmatically-oriented research on quoting in social media emphasizes the fact that the communicative act of quoting invariably encompasses both the representation of a source text as well as its (evaluative) re-contextualization on the part of the quoter (Bublitz and Hoffmann 2011; Arendholz 2015; Bublitz 2015; Bös and Kleinke 2015). This understanding is mirrored conceptually and terminologically in a differentiation between quote (i.e. the inclusion of textual material from another source in a particular message) and quotation or the act of quoting, i.e. “the combination of quote and comment” (Bös and Kleinke 2015: 72; also Arendholz 2015: 55).

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use of cohesive ties in the new contribution much more effectively than a simple link of messages in the thread structure would (cf. Severinson Eklundh 2010: 20). From the perpective of interactional organization, quoting can contribute to eliciting adjacency and lending the interaction a flavour of dia- or polyloguicity. Within a single message, a quote not only creates a link to a prior message, but it “creates the illusion of adjacency in that it incorporates and juxtaposes (portions of) two turns, an initiation and a response, within a single message. When portions of previous text are repeatedly quoted and responded to, the resulting message can have the appearance of an extended conversational exchange” (Herring 1999). Severinson Eklundh (2010: 10) reports that (newsgroup) users prefer to crop the original message and select only a part of it to appear as a quote, i.e. to quote selectively. Her observation that “there seems to be a tendency to quote elicitative parts of a message [i.e., most typically a question] as the primary source” (Severinson Eklundh 2010: 10) clearly highlights the adjacency-creating function. Polyloguicity (as opposed to dialoguicity) is particularly promoted by the inclusion of multiple quotes from various messages, interspersed with new comments (Bös and Kleinke 2015: 80) – a strategy facilitated by the asynchronous setting (cf. Black et al. 1983). In terms of topic management, this can be a strategy to contribute to multiple (local) topics (developed by different people) in one message in a transparent and economic way. The trigger/mental access function builds on this and focuses on the way in which the quote is constructed by the quoter as an anchor for a reinterpretation and shift in focus carried out in their comment. In this sense, quotes “initiate […] and trigger […] processes of metonymic elaboration by providing a conceptual (and contextual) anchorage point from which the quoter accesses the situation referred to in the comment” (Bös and Kleinke 2015: 82). This is exemplified in example (5), where the pope is taken as an anchor point to trigger the target domain the church , for which G od and sinner are sub-domains: (5) Bush is a man who killed thousands of people in iraq in the name of terrorism, what the hell is the pope doing with a murderer. Regards I thought God loves everyone, including sinners. (adapted from Bös and Kleinke 2015: 83; the quote is marked in italics)

This last function is clearly an effective strategy in the service of topical work: Explicitly repeating particular textual material from a preceding message not only re-establishes this material in the participants’ common ground (cf. Arendholz 2015: 53). It also, particularly in the case of selective quoting, explicitly brings to the foreground a specific part of the preceding talk and presents this as the departure point for the following comment: “By selecting a part of the message to which a response is provided, the sender simultaneously excludes a number of other possible interpretations of the message and focuses explicitly on the quoted parts as salient or noticeable” (Severinson Eklundh 2010: 19–20).

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Narrowing the focus down in this way, quoters prepare recipients for an impending shift. This shift can consist in Bös and Kleinke’s metonymic elaboration patterns, in which the focus is transferred to referents inferable from, but not explicitly mentioned in the quote. But similary, a shift in focus can be accomplished by means of what Bös and Kleinke (2015) and Arendholz (2015) describe as primarily interpersonally-oriented quoting practices – i.e. in comments with evaluative elements directed either at the proposition(s) and the stance conveyed in the quote or directly at the author of the quoted material (ad res and ad hominem in Arendholz’ (2015) terminology).19 The latter is exemplified in (6): (6) sorry, but i dont see how your coming up with these theories when youve admitted that youve never spoke to someone whos been home educated?? its called using your imagination fool (adapted from Arendholz 2015: 63)

While quoting mostly exhibits both relational and coherence-related functional components to varying degrees, it is the refocusing on an element drawn from the quote that carries potential for more or less evident shifts in topic. Bearing in mind that topics are negotiated interactionally, the shift in focus would need to get picked up on (and thus ratified) by other participants in order to be identifiable as an interactively-achieved topic shift. With a view to the enacted participation structure, the adjacency-creating function is particularly highlighted when the quoter comments by means of a first pair part directed at the originator of the quoted material, thus shifting from a polylogal to a dyadic alignment: (7) I wasn’t home-schooled, but provided I have the time when I’m older I’d like to homeschool my future children (of course allowing them to attend school if they want); not because I expect them to be bullied or to be agoraphobic, but beause I’m strongly against the current UK education system and don’t see it changing drastically any time soon. Why are you against the UK education system? (adapted from Arendholz 2015: 65)

As a technology-facilitated practice, quoting stands out from non-automatized ways of linking messages. It can be regarded as a particularly prominent device that posters can use in order to signal a shift in focus and, potentially, topic. Selective quoting further accentuates this by enabling posters to deliberately and efficiently select the material they consider immediately relevant for their contribution (cf. Severinson Eklundh 2010: 20). Incorporating multiple quotes into a single message can be a valuable tool for handling multiple local topics in a single message. Despite their potential, however, there is hardly any specific research 19

By extension, evaluative comments can also be concerned with intergroup relations of various scopes rather than being directly targeted at individuals (Bös and Kleinke 2015).

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on the impact of these software-facilitated linking functions on interactive topic management throughout a whole thread.20 In an endeavour to compare threading and quoting functions and find out which of them provides a more accurate representation of a thread’s topical structure, Barcellini et al. (2005) look at an email-based discussion centred on software design. Contrary to the assumed purpose of threading, they find that a representation of the thread structure based on (pervasively employed) quoting links provides a better resource “for the reconstruction of thematic coherence” (Barcellini et al. 2005: 302) than links provided by the threading mechanism. The main reason for this seems to lie in the greater versatility and specificity of quoting as a linking strategy (Barcellini et al. 2005: 312). Consequently, the role of threading for indicating coherence and topic development in asynchronous exchanges seems to be smaller than it is often assumed. This is also supported by observations that, even in cases where threading errors are made, this does not necessarily affect coherence (Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012: 512; cf. also Berglund 2009; Marcoccia 2004). Frequently occurring misplacement of messages seems to indicate that users tend not to be particularly attentive to the threading structure and resort to quoting if they feel that explicit linking is important. Social media platforms seem to have reacted to this tendency by introducing changes in their linking resources in recent years and now offer a condensed range of semi-automatized linking strategies. Traditionally fully threaded platforms (i.e., most prominently discussion forums) increasingly switch off the threading function and offer quoting as the only technologically-aided linking strategy. On the other hand, ‘newer’ social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, which have never featured explicit linking functionality, now provide a reduced threading structure, which distinguishes between comments to the main post and comments to a first-level comment by means of simple indentation (cf. also Bou-Franch, Lorenz-Dus and Garcés Conejos-Blitvich 2012: 509). This may be understood as a move adapting the technological environment to user practices striving towards a middle ground between communicative effort and benefit.

20

However, quantitative results on the frequency, position and form of quotes in various forms of asynchronous interactions are provided in, e.g., Bös and Kleinke 2015; Arendholz 2015; Severinson Eklundh 2010 and Barcellini et al. 2005. Quoting tends to be a widely adopted strategy, with the percentage of messages containing a quote often exceeding 50 %. Particularly Severinson Eklundh (2010: 13) points out that frequency and position of quotes are likely to be influenced by the software default option (cf. also Bös and Kleinke 2015: 75).

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303

Local and global topic development

As seen before, dynamic topic management in interaction crucially depends on signalling and reconstructing (sub-)threads of related messages. Software for synchronous interaction, as a rule, does not offer resources to visualize topical threads and requires users to manually type in their entire contributions. In the absence of quoting and threading templates, links to preceding messages are established by means of addressivity (Werry 1996), metacommunicative elements, lexical (and grammatical) cohesion as well as along the lines of adjacency pairs (e.g., Markman 2013: 545; Holmer 2008: 2; Herring 1999). Much of topic-related research on computer-mediated discourse has focused on local topic development in chat, often with the purpose of describing larger patterns and their interdependence with other factors. Based on the initial observation that “topics decay quickly” (Herring 1999), Herring and Nix (1997; also Herring 2003; Herring and Kurtz 2006; Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009) adapt Hobbs’ (1990) categorization of local topic shift patterns and develop a framework for analyzing and classifying moves of topic development on a local basis. As suggested in Hobb’s model, the main idea is that sequences of consecutive local transitions result in topic drift, i.e., by means of “successive small modifications in the topic” (1990: 3), interactants can eventually end up talking about a topic that bears no resemblance to the one they started out on. As this kind of semantic analysis of local topic dynamics relies on linear sequences of related utterances, the first analytic step is to identify the threads of related utterances in the chat interaction. For this, recognizable linking devices (see above) provide a valuable reference point. Since messages in synchronous exchanges are typically short and “[e]ach utterance [= message] is primarily on one topic and directed to one person” (Cherny 1999: 160), local topics are typically operationalized at the “level of chat message” (Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 201). With reference to Hobbs’ (1990) proposition-based framework, each proposition (which is typically co-extensive with a message) is coded according to its relation to the “previous proposition or message in the conversation to which it appears to have been most directly intended to relate” (Herring 2003: 4). Herring’s Dynamic Topic Analysis directly imports Hobbs’ coherence relations of parallelism, explanation and metatalk, and adds break and on-topic as additional coding categories. On-topic relations are created by messages that continue on the topic without adding new material, predominantly “simple agreements, reactions, rephrasings and clarifications” (Herring 2003: 5). Breaks exhibit no identifiable relation to preceding propositions and are – provided the messages receive responses – a strategy to initiate new topical threads and develop stretches of discontinuous discourse in Ochs Keenan and Schieffelin’s (1976) terms.

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In order to quantify the extent of topic drift, semantic distance is measured and operationalized along a scale of 0–4, depending on the inferences that have to be drawn in order to interpret the new message as topically coherent. This, however, is highly interpretive (Herring 2003: 5–7; Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 202), and a reworking of this coding scheme by Stromer-Galley and Martinson (2009) replaces both sets by a two-fold coding scheme for old/new topic and old/ new referent(s).21 This then results in four different types of transitions on a scale from on-topic/no drift-transitions, along small and greater drift, to full breaks with a new topic and referent being established (Stromer-Galley 2009: 203). Topics, in this framework, are loosely understood as “umbrellas for linked knowledge structures” (Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 211). Greater shifts involving new topics with a continuity of referents can be found in metacommunicative shifts or (as in Bill’s message in example (8)) “when an utterance shifts from talking about a topic that is something in the world to discussing a person in the interaction” (Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 212): (8) Sue George Bush is Great! Teri I agree Bill Sue, how can you say that? (or: Sue, are you a Republican?) (adapted from Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 212)

In contrast, example (9) is an instance of smaller topic drift, in which Groovy continues on the old topic (“the war in Afghanistan”; Stromer-Galley and Martionson 2009: 203) but introduces new referents: (9) Christa Hey I just saw on CNN talking about finding “low load” nukes in the cave Groovy Chris; … you sure you heard that right? This is just another example that Bush was right to go into Afghanistan. (Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 203)

Both frameworks include an additional classification of individual local topics as on- or off-topic. Herring and Nix (1997), closely adhering to Hobbs’ local perspective, define any message as off-topic that does not fit into the on-topic category; the reference topic is always that of the directly preceding message in the sequence (Herring and Nix 1997: 8). Stromer-Galley and Martinson (2009), on the other hand, specifically focus on chatroom interactions with a pre-determined global topic. In a separate analytic step, they classify each local topic as on-topic or offtopic, depending on whether or not they consider it a relevant aspect of the global

21

Topical coding necessarily has to remain fundamentally interpretive (Herring 2003: 5; Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 204). Nonetheless, Stromer-Galley and Martinson (2009: 210) speak of an “acceptable” intercoder agreement for the assessment of local transitions (80 %) and a high degree (of 98 %) for the classification of local topics as on-topic or off-topic.

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topic. This allows them to not only determine degrees of topic drift over longer stretches of interaction, but also the number of threads and/or individual messages that focus on topics deviating from the global monotopical orientation. Both Herring and Nix’s as well as Stromer-Galley and Martinson’s findings indicate a tendency for serious and/or educational chat to exhibit a higher percentage of on-topic messages than purely recreational chats.22 With regard to the distribution of local topic development patterns, Stromer-Galley and Martinson’s study shows that entertainment and politics chats exhibit a relatively high frequency of “messages that introduced a new interactional [local] topic while retaining a referential connection with prior messages” (2009: 206), whereas old topic, old referent relations make up the largest part of transitions in all of the chats. In the chat on politics, these shifts tended to result in a personal attack on another chatter; on the entertainment chat, they usually introduced plays on words. Full breaks, on the other hand, were particularly prominent in chats on auto racing and cancer support (32 % and 24 %, respectively), while still accounting for 12 % of the messages in the entertainment chat. However, Stromer-Galley and Martinson (2009: 206) mainly attribute them to technical difficulties, which participants intermittently focused on. This shows again that the purpose of the interaction is a predominant factor in global topical management. It is not the technical environment of computer-mediated discourse itself that impedes topic-centred coherent interactions (Stromer-Galley and Martinson 2009: 209; Herring 2003: 3, 11). Instead, participants tend to accommodate their topic management behaviour to whether the interaction is framed as serious or non-serious, instructional/problem-solving or recreational. The former will, as a tendency, lead to longer and fewer threads with a common topical focus, while in the latter case, participants will feel less obliged to pursue a narrow topical focus, so that multiple shorter (and overlapping) threads can develop (Herring 2003: 3), which may often deal with relational rather than strictly topic-focused matters. The relative frequency of messages loosely connected by means of superficial lexical connections and word associations (i.e. greater shifts in Stromer-Galley and Martinson’s terms) tends to be so prevalent that Herring (2013a) speaks of loosened relevance as a communicative norm in recreational synchronous computer-mediated discourse. As for global patterns of topic management in asynchronous exchanges, Lambiase’s (2010) study of a discussion group centred on the exchange of news after a bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995 shows that attention to the original global topic decreases “within a few days” (Lambiase 2010: 1): The focus on news

22

However, the results are not directly comparable as the two studies employ different reference points (the preceding message vs. the global topic). Still, the figures point in the same direction.

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exchange is gradually broadenened towards more argumentative discourse on marginal topics, which were developed from the global topic by means of stepwise local shifts as well as full breaks (Lambiase 2010: 6). Most original topics and purposes become exhausted and/or obsolete after some time, and whether or not a thread is kept alive depends on whether or not the participants have succeeded in deriving new (and potentially off-topic) topical strands that can hold their interest. Global topic management also seems to be majorly influenced by how the interaction is set off. In contrast to many older forms of computer-mediated discourse (especially chat), most Web 2.0 interactions are initiated by a particular prompt, such as a video, news story etc. As Herring (2013b) points out, the presence of such a prompt leads to a reconfiguration of topical interaction patterns, as participants tend to continuously orient their talk towards this prompt. The consequence of this is “limited topical development” (Herring 2013b: 13), with most contributions being oriented to the initial prompt rather than (exclusively) at preceding comments (cf. also Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012). However, interactions on older platforms, such as discussion forums, are equally clearly triggered by an identifiable prompt (viz. the initiating post), which is persistently displayed on topic of the ensuing interaction. But while these prompts are directly directed at users and typically feature direct requests for interaction, prompts on Web 2.0 platforms can vary a lot in this respect (e.g., YouTube vlogs vs. articles on news websites). In the light of the scarcity of research into topic development on asynchronous platforms in general, it would be interesting for future research to investigate which role the nature of this prompt plays for topic development in the ensuing discussion, and whether the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 interaction patterns, in turn, can be shown to leave traces in topic management on older discussion platforms. 5. Conclusion Discourse topics, while being a major factor for construing coherent talk, have always been an inherently fuzzy concept, touching upon conceptually distinct but empirically interwoven matters of sequential discourse organization and communicative purpose or activity. Online interactions constitute a further challenge for participants as well as analysts. As varied as computer-mediated communication is, social media tend to be geared towards facilitating instances of multiparticipant monotopical discourse. There is, as of yet, little research specifically on topic management in computer-mediated discourse, but those studies that do exist tend to pursue a narrow topic definition and track patterns of topic development back to a measurement of semantic similarity between individual messages. Their findings suggest that, while patterns of topic drift as well as discontinuous breaks can be found regularly,

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it is not the technological setting itself that necessarily impedes monotopical talk. Instead, users accommodate the way in which they manage topics to other key factors characterizing the interaction, most prominently perhaps its communicative purpose. From this perspective, users’ perception of acceptable (i.e., “on-topic”) talk may have as much to do with maintaining a relevant topical focus as with orienting to communicative actions conforming to the projected purpose of the interaction. Asynchronous platforms facilitate especially complex interaction structures, with threads potentially stretching over extended periods of time and developing multiple more or less distinct sub-threads, which can develop and interleave in various ways. Individual messages have the potential to be linguistically complex and extend on more than one locally-instantiated topic at the same time, thus being able to give rise to complex multilinear structures. The practice of using semi-automatized linking devices provided by the system is adopted by users not only to indicate sequential structures alone; it is also regularly exploited as a device aiding local shifts of topic, which are often accompanied by modifications in the participation structure. For a detailed description of the dynamics of topic management, it thus seems to be helpful to look at mid-level patterns of organization, which should be characterized by relatively homogeneous constellations regarding participation structure, (range of local) topics and communicative actions, but also, e.g., temporal pace, message complexity, use of linking templates etc. These structures can then provide the backbone from which strategies of interactional development and management of distinct local topics at various degrees of specificity and with different degrees of attention to the global topic can be described. References Adato, Albert 1979 Unanticipated topic continuations. Human Studies 2(1): 171–186. Adato, Albert 1980 “Occasionality” as a constituent feature of the known-in-common character of topics. Human Studies 3(1): 47–64. Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2007 Neue Medien – neue Schriftlichkeit? Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanisten­ verbandes 54(1): 72–97. Arendholz, Jenny 2013a (In)Appropriate Online Behavior. A Pragmatic Analysis of Message Board Relations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Arendholz, Jenny 2013b “How to stop strange people speaking to me” – A syntactic and interpersonal perspective on offering advice online. In: Katrin Röder and Isle Wischer (eds.), Anglistentag 2012 Potsdam. Proceedings, 357–370. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

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Arendholz, Jenny 2015 Quoting on online message boards: An interpersonal perspective. In: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, 53–69. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Baron, Naomi S. 2008 Always On. Language in an Online and Mobile World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barcellini, Flore, Françoise Détienne, Jean-Marie Burkhardt and Warren Sack 2005 A study of online discussions in an open-source community: Reconstructing thematic coherence and argumentation from quoting practices. In: Peter van den Besselar, Giorgio De Michelis, Jenny Preece and Carla Simone (eds.), Communities and Technologies 2005, 301–320. Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005. Dordrecht: Springer. Baym, Nancy K. 2006 Language in computer-mediated communication. In: Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition. Vol. 6, 523–529. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Baym, Nancy K. 2015 Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Second edition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beißwenger, Michael 2007 Sprachhandlungskoordination in der Chat-Kommunikation. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Berglund, Therese Örnberg 2009 Disrupted turn adjacency and coherence maintenance in instant messaging conversations. Language@Internet 6, article 2: 1–25. http://www.languageat internet.org/articles/2009/2106/Berglund.pdf. Black, Steven D., James A. Levin, Hugh Mehan and Clark N. Quinn 1983 Real and non-real time interaction: Unravelling multiple threads of discourse. Discourse Processes 6(1): 59–75. Bös, Birte and Sonja Kleinke 2015 The complexities of thread-internal quoting in English and German online discussion fora. In: Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz and Monika Kirner-Ludwig (eds.), The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then, 71–96. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Bou-Franch, Patricia and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014 Conflict management in polylogues: A case study from YouTube. Journal of Pragmatics 73: 19–36. Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012 Social interaction in YouTube-based polylogues: A study of coherence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17(4): 501–521. Brinker, Klaus, Hermann Cölfen and Steffen Pappert 2014 Linguistische Textanalyse. Eine Einführung in Grundbegriffe und Methoden. 8th edition. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Brinker, Klaus and Jörg Hagemann 2001 Themenstruktur und Themenentfaltung in Gesprächen. In: Klaus Brinker, Gerd Antos, Wolfgang Heinemann and Sven F. Sager (eds.), Text- und Gesprächs-

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Crow, Bryan K. 1983 Topic shifts in couples’ conversations. In: Robert T. Craig and Karen Tracy (eds.), Conversational Coherence. Form, Structure, and Strategy, 136–156. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Crystal, David 2006 Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dascal, Marcelo and Tamar Katriel 1979 Digressions: A study in conversational coherence. PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 4: 202–232. Donath, Judith 2002 A semantic approach to visualizing online conversations. Communications of the ACM 45(4): 45–49. Donath, Judith, Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda Viégas 1999 Visualizing conversation. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.1999.tb00107.x. Drew, Paul and Elizabeth Holt 1998 Figures of speech: Figurative expressions and the management of topic transitions in conversation. Language in Society 27(4): 495–522. Dürscheid, Christa 2003 Medienkommunikation im Kontinuum von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. Theoretische und empirische Probleme. Zeitschrift für angewandte Linguistik 38: 37–56. Dürscheid, Christa 2005 Medien, Kommunikationsformen, kommunikative Gattungen. Linguistik Online 22. https://bop.unibe.ch/linguistik-online/article/view/752/1283. Dürscheid, Christa and Sarah Brommer 2009 Getippte Dialoge in neuen Medien. Sprachkritische Aspekte und linguistische Analysen. Linguistik online 37(1): 3–20. Edelsky, Carole 1981 Who’s got the floor? Language in Society 10(3): 383–421. Fritz, Gerd 1982 Kohärenz. Grundfragen der linguistischen Kommunikationsanalyse. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Fritz, Gerd 1994 Grundlagen der Dialogorganisation. In: Gerd Fritz and Franz Hundsnurscher (eds.), Handbuch der Dialoganalyse, 177–201. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Gardner, Roderick 1987 The identification and role of topic in spoken interaction. Semiotica 65(1/2): 129–141. Goffman, Erving 1981 Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Gruber, Helmut 1997 Themenentwicklung in wissenschaftlichen E-mail-Diskussionslisten. Ein Ver­gleich zwischen einer moderierten und einer nicht-moderierten Liste. In: Rüdiger Weingarten (ed.), Sprachwandel durch Computer, 105–128. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Gruber, Helmut 1998 Computer-mediated communication and scholarly discourse: Forms of topicinitiation and thematic development. Pragmatics 8(1): 21–45. Gruber, Helmut 2013 Mailing list communication. In: Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 55–82. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Haugh, Michael and Wei-Lin Melody Chang 2015 Troubles talk, (dis)affiliation and the participation order in Taiwanese-Chinese online discussion boards. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 99–133. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Hayashi, Reiko 1991 Floor structure of English and Japanese conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 16(1): 1–30. Herring, Susan C. 1996 Two variants of an electronic message schema. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer Mediated Communication. Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 81–106. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.1999.tb00106.x. Herring, Susan C. 2003 Dynamic topic analysis of synchronous chat. New Research for New Media. Innovative Research Methodologies Symposium Working Papers and Readings, 1–18. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesoty School of Journalism and Mass Communication. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/dta.2003.pdf. Herring, Susan C. 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@ Internet 4, article 1: 1–37. Herring, Susan C. 2010 Who’s got the floor in computer-mediated conversation? Edelsky’s gender patterns revisited. Language@Internet 7, article 8, 1–29. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2801/herring.intro.pdf. Herring, Susan C. 2013a Relevance in computer-mediated conversation. In: Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 245–268. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Herring, Susan C. 2013b Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, reconfigured, and emergent. In: Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0. Language and New Media, 1–25. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Herring, Susan C. and Andrew J. Kurtz 2006 Visualizing dynamic topic analysis. Proceedings of CHI’06, 1–6. ACM Press. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/chi06.pdf.

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Herring, Susan C. and Carole G. Nix 1997 Is “serious chat” an oxymoron? Pedagogical vs. social uses of Internet Relay Chat. Paper presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics annual conference, 1–19. Orlando, FL. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/ aaal.1997.pdf. Hobbs, Jerry R. 1990 Topic drift. In: Bruce Dorval (ed.), Conversational Organization and Development. 3–22. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Hoffmann, Ludger 2004 Chat und Thema. In: Michael Beißwenger, Ludger Hoffmann and Angelika Storrer (eds.), Internetbasierte Kommunikation, 103–122. (Osnarbrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 68.) Oldenburg: Redaktion OBST. Holmer, Torsten 2008 Discourse structure analysis of chat communication. Language@Internet 5, article 10: 1–17. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1633/holmer.pdf. Holt, Elizabeth and Paul Drew 2005 Figurative pivots: The use of figurative expressions in pivotal topic transitions. Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(1): 25–61. Jefferson, Gail 1983 Caveat speaker: Preliminary notes on recipient topic-shift implicature. Tilburg Papers in Language and Literature 30: 1–25. Jefferson, Gail 1984 On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next-positioned matters. In: Maxwell J. Atkinson and John Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis, 191–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Rod and Joanna Thornborrow 2004 Floors, talk and the organization of classroom activities. Language in Society 33(3): 399–423. Jucker, Andreas H. and Christa Dürscheid 2012 The linguistics of keyboard-to-screen communication. A new terminological framework. Linguistik Online 56(6): 35–60. Keller, Eric 1979 Gambits: Conversational strategy signals. Journal of Pragmatics 3(3–4): 219– 238. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine 2004 Introducing polylogue. Journal of Pragmatics 36(1): 1–24. Kilian, Jörg 2001 T@astentöne. Geschriebene Umgangssprache in computervermittelter Kommunikation. Historisch-kritische Ergänzung zu einem neuen Feld der linguistischen Forschung. In: Michael Beißwenger (ed.), Chat-Kommunikation. Sprache, Interaktion, Sozialität & Identität in synchroner computervermittelten Kommunikation. Perspektiven auf ein neues Forschungsfeld, 55–78. Stuttgart: ibidem. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher 1985 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36: 15–43.

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Korolija, Natascha and Per Linell 1996 Episodes: Coding and analyzing coherence in multiparty conversation. Linguistics 34(4): 799–831. Lambiase, Jacqueline 2010 Hanging by a thread: Topic development and death in an online discussion of breaking news. Language@Internet 7, article 9: 1–22. http://www.languageat internet.org/articles/2010/2814/Lambiase.pdf. Landert, Daniela 2014 Personalisation in Mass Media Communication. British Online News Between Public and Private. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Landert, Daniela and Andreas H. Jucker 2011 Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries. Journal of Pragmatics 43(5): 1422–1434. Largier, Céline 2002 Aspekte der Debatte in argumentationsorientierten Internet-Foren: die Abtreibungsdebatte in Frankreich und Deutschland. Deutsche Sprache 30(4): 287– 306. Lee, Benny P.H. 2001 Mutual knowledge, background knowledge and shared beliefs: Their roles in establishing common ground. Journal of Pragmatics 33(1): 21–44. Leech, Geoffrey 2014 The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lenk, Uta 1998 Marking Discourse Coherence. Functions of Discourse Markers in Spoken English. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Linell, Per 1998 Approaching Dialogue. Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogic Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Linell, Per and Natascha Korolija 1997 Coherence in multi-party conversation. Episodes and contexts in interaction. In: Talmy Givón (ed.), Conversation. Cognitive, Communicative and Social Perspectives, 167–205. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Marcoccia, Michel 2004 On-line polylogues: conversation structure and participation framework in internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36(1): 115–145. Markman, Kris M. 2013 Conversational coherence in small group chat. In: Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 539–564. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Markman, Kris M. 2009 “So what shall we talk about”. Openings and closings in chat-based virtual meetings. Journal of Business Communication 46(1): 150–170. Maynard, Douglas W. 1980 Placement of topic changes in conversation. Semiotica 30(3/4): 263–290. Ochs Keenan, Elinor and Bambi B. Schieffelin 1976 Topic as a discourse notion: A study of topic in the conversations of children and adults. In: Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, 335–384. New York: Academic Press.

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Parker, Richard 1984 Conversational grouping and fragmentation: a preliminary investigation. Semiotica 50(1–2): 43–68. Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula 2014 Phases in discourse. In: Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron (eds.), Pragmatics of Discourse, 353–383. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Planalp, Sally and Karen Tracy 1980 Not to change the topic but …: A cognitive approach to the management of conversation. In: Dan Nimmo (ed.), Communication Yearbook 4, 237–258. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Pons Bordería, Salvador and Maria Estellés Arguedas 2009 Expressing digression linguistically: Do digressive markers exist? Journal of Pragmatics 41(5): 921–936. Reichman, Rachel 1990 Communication and mutual engagement. In: Bruce Dorval (ed.), Conversational Organization and its Development, 23–48. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Reichman, Rachel 1978 Conversational coherency. Cognitive Science 2(4): 283–327. Sacks, Harvey 1995 Lectures on Conversation. Volume 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Schank, Roger C. 1977 Rules and topics in conversation. Cognitive Science 1(4): 421–441. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1990 On the organization of sequences as a source of ‘coherence’ in talk-in-interaction. In: Bruce Dorval (ed.), Conversational Organization and its Development, 51–77. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schegloff, Emanuel A. and Harvey Sacks 1973 Opening up closings. Semiotica 8(4): 289–327. Schönfeldt, Juliane 2001 Die Gesprächsorganisation in der Chat-Kommunikation. In: Michael Beiß­ wen­ger (ed.), Chat Kommunikation. Sprache, Interaktion, Sozialität & Identität in synchroner computervermittelter Kommunikation. Perspektiven auf ein interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld, 25–53. Stuttgart: ibidem. Schütte, Wilfried 2004 Diskursstrukturen in fachlichen Mailinglisten: Zwischen Einwegkommunikation und Interaktion. In: Michael Beißwenger, Ludger Hoffmann and Angelika Storrer (eds.), Internetbasierte Kommunikation, 55–75. (Osnarbrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 68.) Oldenburg: Redaktion OBST. Severinson Eklundh, Kerstin 2010 To quote or not to quote: Setting the context for computer-mediated dialogues. Language@Internet 7, article 5: 1–30. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2665/Severinson_Eklundh.pdf. Severinson Eklundh, Kerstin and Clare Macdonald 1994 The use of quoting to preserve context in electronic mail dialogues. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 37(4): 197–202.

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Severinson Eklundh, Kerstin and Henry Rodriguez 2004 Coherence and interactivity in text-based group discussions around web documents. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: 1–10. Shultz, Jeffrey J., Susan Florio and Frederick Erickson 1982 Where’s the floor? Aspects of the cultural organization of social relationships in communication at home and in school. In: Perry Gilmore and Allan A. Glatt­horn (eds.), Children In and Out of School. Ethnography and Education, 88–123. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Simpson, James 2005 Conversational floors in synchronous text-based CMC discourse. Discourse Studies 7(3): 337–361. Simpson, James 2013 Conversational floor in computer-mediated discourse. In: Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 515–538. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Sirois, Patricia and Bruce Dorval 1988 The role of returns to a prior topic in the negotiation of topic change: A developmental investigation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 17(3): 185–210. Smithson, Janet, Siobhan Sharkey, Elaine Hewis, Ray Jones, Tobit Emmens, Tamsin Ford and Christabel Owens 2011 Problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm. Discourse Studies 13(4): 487–501. Stromer-Galley, Jennifer and Anna M. Martinson 2009 Coherence in political computer-mediated communication: Analyzing topic relevance and drift in chat. Discourse & Communication 3(2): 195–216. Thurlow, Crispin, Laura Lengel and Alice Tomic 2007 Computer Mediated Communication. Social Interaction and the Internet. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage. Tiittula, Liisa 1993 Metadiskurs. Explizite Strukturierungsmittel im mündlichen Diskurs. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. Traverso, Véronique 2004 Interlocutive ‘crowding’ and ‘splitting’ in polylogues: The case of a researchers’ meeting. Journal of Pragmatics 36(1): 53–74. van Dijk, Teun A. 1977 Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London/New York: Longman. van Dijk, Teun A. 1980 Macrostructures. An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Werry, Christopher C. 1996 Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, Social and CrossCultural Perspectives, 47–63. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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12. Discourse and cohesion Christoph Schubert Abstract: This paper investigates the occurrence of cohesion in the non-linear genre of social media platforms, taking into account both grammatical and lexical ties at the intra-, inter-, and extranodal levels. In addition to verbal cohesion, the focus is on the functions of software-dependent nonverbal signs such as response buttons and navigation tools, which often provide global orientation and contextualization cues. The platforms under scrutiny are the media-sharing service YouTube, the social network site Facebook, the microblogging service Twitter as well as personal weblogs. The cohesive ties on these websites are examined with regard to types of cross-modal relations, degrees of author control, and structural composition. By contextualizing such ties in their social circumstances of interpersonal networking, it is shown that hypercohesion in social media is the result of textual collaboration between users in the form of mutually relevant posts, entries, and comments. 1. Introduction When the notion of cohesion was originally established in the 1970s (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976; Gutwinski 1976), electronic discourse did not play a decisive role in everyday social interaction. Since the genres discussed in these seminal studies belong to linear spoken and written discourse, the application of cohesion to non-linear social media platforms poses new challenges. In their ground-breaking monograph, Halliday and Hasan define cohesion as a “semantic relation” (1976: 6) that manifests itself in grammatical and lexical ties across the sentences of a text.1

1



Only a few years later, the complementary term coherence was programmatically established (cf. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 84–112; Brown and Yule 1983: 223–271). Originally conceptualized as a continuity of sense that is not explicitly realized in texts but cognitively constructed by recipients, the term has proved controversial over the past decades. According to Bublitz, coherence is both “an interpretive process” and a “mental concept” (2006: 363), resulting from strategies of discourse comprehension. In addition, coherence is intuitively expected by recipients as a “default assumption” (Bublitz 2006: 364, emphasis original) and varies according to individual interpreters. As regards the relationship between cohesion and coherence, it has been demonstrated that cohesion is neither sufficient nor necessary for the construction of coherence, yet cohesion strongly supports the process of establishing unexpressed meaning across sentences and paragraphs (cf. Tanskanen 2006: 23–29).

DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-012 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 317–343. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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While sentences are internally marked by “structure”, the patterns of cohesive ties throughout a text are said to constitute its “texture” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 2). Since the often idiosyncratic punctuation in social media is no valid parameter for the determination of written sentence boundaries, cohesive ties will here be examined not at the intersentential but at the interclausal level, which depends on syntactic functions (cf. Hoffmann 2012: 73). Cohesive ties can be subdivided into grammatical and lexical devices that weave textual patterns mainly at the discursive micro-level (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 532–538; Schubert 2012: 31–64). Grammatical cohesion comprises pro-forms, coordinators, syntactic constructions such as ellipsis and parallelism as well as the grammatical categories of tense and aspect. Lexical cohesion is realized chiefly by means of partial and total repetition, semantic relations, paraphrases as well as lexical fields. On social media platforms, cohesive ties are additionally established by technical devices such as response buttons, navigation tools, embedded hyperlinks and menus. From the perspective of computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA), texture in social media is constituted primarily at the level of “interaction management”, as realized by “turns, sequences, exchanges, threads etc.” (Herring 2013: 5). Recent research on cohesion has concentrated on various areas, such as lexical cohesion from a statistical, corpus-based vantage point (e.g. Flowerdew and Mahlberg 2009), the spoken-written divide in cohesion (e.g. Dontcheva-Navratilova and Povolná 2009), cross-modal cohesion in film discourse (Tseng 2013) as well as contrastive and variational issues of cohesion (e.g. Neumann 2014; Klein 2012; Neumann and Fest 2016). However, cohesion has been neglected by most major studies dealing with digital discourse, Netspeak and computer-mediated communication (CMC) (e.g. Crystal 2006; Frehner 2008; Yus 2011; Zappavigna 2012; Tannen and Trester 2013). A few notable exceptions to this practice are specific articles by Fritz (1999), Storrer (1999), Bublitz (2005), Markman (2012) and Adami (2015) as well as a monograph by Hoffmann (2012), which provides an examination of cohesive profiling in the electronic genre of weblogs. The present contribution intends to treat cohesion not as a purely text-linguistic phenomenon in its own right but aims to recontextualize cohesive ties in their social circumstances, as proposed already by Martin’s systemic-functional account of cohesion and texture (cf. 2001: 47). Since the main function of social network sites (SNS) is the creation of social “connections” (boyd and Ellison 2008: 211), it is to be expected that these are reflected by linguistic linkage as well. On these grounds, this article will investigate the internal texture of individual messages, posts and comments in social media and the ways in which they are cohesively interwoven. In doing so, the paper will first provide a taxonomy of cohesive devices in order to lay the conceptual foundation and will then successively apply the single categories to local discourse units of the media-sharing service YouTube, the social network site Facebook, the microblogging service Twitter and (we)blogs, so as to

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cover the most prominent social media platforms. These services are all associated with the concept of Web 2.0, which is generally marked by “participatory information sharing; user-generated content; an ethic of collaboration; and use of the web as a social platform” (Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2012: 12). On this basis, it will be possible to discuss the pragmatic issue of participatory interaction with regard to the intentions and expectations of users. Owing to the hypermedial and multimodal character of these electronic genres, the focus will be not only on verbal cohesion but also on software-dependent nonverbal signs such as navigation tools, buttons and embedded hyperlinks. 2.

Cohesive ties on social media platforms

As for verbal cohesive devices, a terminological synopsis of Halliday and Hasan (1976), de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) as well as Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) yields a taxonomy of grammatical and lexical items, as outlined in Table 1. Table 1.

A survey of verbal cohesive devices (adapted from Schubert 2012: 61–62)

grammatical cohesion

lexical cohesion

(1) pro-forms

reference substitution

(1) repetition

total partial (morphemic)

(2) syntactic constructions

ellipsis parallelism

(2) semantic ­relations

(3) conjunction

coordinators/ subordinators [adverbs] [prepositional phrases]

synonymy antonymy hyponymy meronymy

(3) paraphrase

expansion condensation

(4) collocation

lexical fields lexical sets

(4) grammatical categories

tense aspect

Since pro-forms in texts function as search instructions, they create cohesive ties with a presupposed phrase or passage that constitutes the lexical antecedent. While items of “reference”, such as personal and demonstrative pronouns, show coreferential relations, the members of “substitution” (e.g. one, do or so) replace their antecedents only at the grammatical surface level (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976: 89). Ellipsis creates cohesion due to the fact that grammatically incomplete structures presuppose a source in the surrounding context which provides the missing lexical items. Syntactic parallelism has a cohesive effect because of its formal

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similarity, which is often reflected by analogies in content as well. For instance, in the weblog “1000 Awesome Things” (see Section 6), two comments discussing the entry “#977 The smell of gasoline” show SPO structures, both of them expressing forms of (dis-)agreement: the post “I like your blog..” (15 September 2011) is answered by the comment “u guys are crazy i hate the smell of gasoline” (22 September 2011). Conjunctive items may be purely grammatical in the case of coordinators and subordinators or can contain a lexical component if they are realized as linking adverbs (e.g. moreover) or conjunctive prepositional phrases (e.g. in addition, as a result). The interclausal logical connection expressed by them can be additive, adversative, causal or temporal (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976: 242–243). The category of conjunction also comprises so-called “continuatives”, such as yes, no, oh, of course, anyway, after all and well, which “signal a move in the discourse: a response, in dialogue, or a new move to the next point if the same speaker is continuing” (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 81). In their function of organizing and structuring discursive interaction, they are similar to discourse markers such as you know, you see and right, which can indicate “an interactive relationship between speaker, hearer, and message” or “a transition in the evolving progress” of communication (Biber et al. 1999: 1086). Since there are structural analogies between social media discourse and spoken conversation, it may be expected that such items occur online between users as well. For instance, related Twitter posts constitute a written polylogue that is likewise frequently organized by “connecting adverbs” such as well (cf. Crystal 2011: 48). Tense and aspect are two grammatical categories that trigger cohesion mainly by means of temporal continuity or sequence. In the area of lexical cohesion, the repeated occurrence of complete words is labelled “total” repetition, while the recurrence of morphemes in different combinations constitutes “partial” repetition (cf. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 49). Lexical cohesion is also realized by various kinds of semantic relations, which may form cohesive chains both within and across web pages, since here no unidirectional pointing procedure is necessary. The category of “paraphrase” shows “expansion” if the content of a shorter expression such as a noun phrase is specified by longer expressions in the ensuing text, while “condensation” refers to the opposite sequence (cf. Schubert 2012: 51–52). In a text-linguistic framework, the phenomenon of collocation is defined as “the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 284). While lexical fields contain items that belong to the same word class and have common semantic features, the members of lexical sets are more loosely associated and do not necessarily belong to the same part of speech (cf. Schubert 2012: 53–54). Since sections of social media sites are commonly grouped around thematic foci, it is to be expected that on these pages collocation looms large among the various types of cohesive ties.

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When the traditional systemic-functional concept of cohesion is applied to social media, it needs to be adapted and modified with respect to both the hypertextual and the multimodal character of these websites. A hypertext may be defined as “a non-linear text that consists of nodes, that is to say textual units, and links between these nodes” (Jucker 2002: 29). Storrer (cf. 2000: 240) additionally distinguishes between medial (non-)linearity, based on the respective medium (e.g. a film reel vs. YouTube), and conceptual (non-)linearity, depending on the arrangement of textual sections by the authors of hypertexts (cf. Eisenlauer 2013: 62). Although there may be occasional “pre-defined paths”, as in online shopping platforms, users commonly need to proceed along a “self-selected path” through the hypertext, establishing individual cohesion through browsing (cf. Fritz 1999: 222). Instead of paragraphs and chapters prearranged in a fixed sequence, users find nodes or clusters of nodes that they can process according to their own choosing (cf. Bublitz 2005: 322). This type of cohesion that occurs in non-linear and multimodal hypertexts such as social media platforms will here be labelled hypercohesion. Herring (1999) already shows that discursive interaction in many genres of computer-mediated communication is challenged by asynchronous feedback and interrupted adjacency. For instance, this is characteristic of YouTube comments whenever the “top comments” button is clicked, since in this case the chronology of comments is neglected. As a result, sequence-based types of grammatical cohesion are hardly existent across individual posts. While in linear texts anaphoric and cataphoric relations can be clearly distinguished, these backward- and forward-pointing processes may become ambiguous in non-linear hypertext. Since ellipsis relies on empty spaces in the discursive information flow, its use is highly problematic across hypertextual nodes as well (cf. Eisenlauer 2013: 70; Fritz 1999: 230). However, lexical cohesive devices frequently appear in the form of “semantically filled links” (Jucker 2002: 41), which are often realized as repeated content words such as hashtags on Twitter. By contrast, “semantically empty links” can occur as general directives in the form of view all and more options on Twitter or show more on YouTube, triggering transfer to a different or extended node. As regards cohesion across nodes, a tripartite distinction may be drawn, for textual ties may operate “within one node (intranodal cohesion), within one hypertextual database (internodal cohesion) or across different hypertextual databases (extranodal cohesion)” (Eisenlauer 2013: 71). For example, personal weblogs basically consist of the bloggers’ entries and corresponding user comments, which together form individual nodes. In turn, single entries may be internodally linked to other entries within the same blog or they can be extranodally connected to other websites which are not under the present blogger’s control. As a consequence, intranodal texture typically displays a higher degree of cohesive density than interand extranodal texture, since there is a stronger thematic continuity within a node

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such as a specific blog entry than between different hypertexts. Thus, the concept of intertextuality is highly pertinent to the make-up and use of social media sites. The presence of cohesive devices also corresponds with different functional types of hyperlink triggers (cf. Jucker 2005: 289–291). First, what-triggers represent the question “what can you tell me about x?”, so that they initiate a discursive structure resembling a question-answer adjacency pair. For instance, if users click on a specific hashtag presented by Twitter, they will be provided with topically related tweets. Second, where-triggers express the enquiry “where am I?”, offering users textual orientation, for example by guiding them to the beginning or end of the respective node. Along these lines, the trigger “top” on Twitter refers users back to the most recently posted entry within the present hashtag. Third, do-triggers represent a hypertextual order or command, such as printing a document, showing a video clip or downloading a file. In YouTube, for example, this typically happens by clicking on the title of a video or by using the “upload” button, which enables users to post a video. In general, by clicking a trigger, users initially anticipate specific hypertextual connections and are afterwards enabled to decode the cohesive ties between the root and target nodes. Taking into account the layout and structure of hypertexts on the screen, Storrer (cf. 1999: 49–61) develops three types of navigation devices operating on the discursive macrolevel (cf. also Jucker 2002: 44). These techniques closely cooperate with website-internal cohesion and can be adapted to various subgenres of social media discourse. First, “global orientation devices” help users to gain an overview of the thematic and functional macrostructure of a hypertext. A typical device belonging in this category is the hypertextual frame, forming a subsection on the screen which remains constant while the hypertext is browsed and which contains essential links that may be clicked at any time. On Facebook, for instance, users may switch between their profile and their home page, while at the top of the screen the verbal links “home”, “find friends” and the user’s name stay unchanged. Hence, through easily remembered logos, such frames also fulfil the commercial functions of brand recognition and corporate identity construction. Second, “contextualisation devices” (Jucker 2002: 44) support users by indicating the hypertextual node in which they are currently situated. This can be achieved by specific colours, by typographic means or by a sequential list of steps users have taken from the website’s cover page. For instance, when users choose one of the five sections “top”, “live”, “accounts”, “photos” and “videos” under a Twitter hashtag, the respective section heading is underlined while browsing this part. Third, “retrospective orientation devices” (Jucker 2002: 44) provide information on previously visited nodes and websites, so that users know which links they have already clicked. This is most commonly done by means of the back button, the history option and the use of bookmarks. In addition, so-called “bread crumbs” (Storrer 1999: 60; emphasis original) introduce colour to highlight all triggers that have already been clicked within a given space of time before the present moment

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of browsing. Moreover, on highly personalized social media sites such as Facebook profiles, retrospective orientation dominantly manifests itself in links such as “friends” or “favorites”, which provide a survey of preferred sites. Like many pages on the internet, social media services are marked by a multimodal architecture, so that it is indispensable for the study of hypercohesion to include nonverbal signs as well. Along these lines, Adami argues that cohesive devices may operate “trans-modally, i.e., what is spoken in a video can be shown as an image in its response, thus establishing a multi- or intermodal cohesive tie of repetition” (2015: 234). Van Leeuwen (2005: 179–267) discusses “multimodal cohesion” from a social semiotic perspective, providing a typology of information linking with regard to images and words. In principle, he argues that visual linking as well as visual-verbal linking rely on either “elaboration” or “extension” from image to text or vice versa (2005: 229–230). Along these lines, for instance, YouTube videos typically provide specifying and illustrating “elaborations” of the clips’ verbal titles given below the video screen (cf. Section 3). By contrast, “extension” implies complementary information, as it may be provided by knowledgeable user comments referring to YouTube clips. In semiotic research, the typology of signs is a controversially disputed issue, which is chiefly due to deviant terminologies and diverging classificatory criteria (cf. Nöth 1995: 107). A well-known starting point which can be utilised for the discussion of social media is the Peircean “index-icon-symbol trichotomy” (Nöth 1995: 108). Along these lines, verbal signs are “symbols” on grounds of their arbitrary and conventional relationship between signifier and signified, whereas hypermedial images are often “icons”, since in these cases the form imitates, or at least resembles, the content (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 8). For instance, with the help of iconic pictograms, users are able to express opinions (e.g. the “thumbs up” button) or to carry out requests. By virtue of their imitative character, chains of iconic signs are particularly immediate in their representation of semantic continuity. The third category, the so-called “indexical” signs, are characterized by a causal or physical relationship between signifier and signified. According to Chandler (2007: 37), this type not only comprises natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning but also includes “recordings (a photograph, a film, video or television shot, an audio-recorded voice)”. Consequently, this category is pertinent to hypermedial communication as well, for social media sites often contain documentations of extralinguistic events and situations. In view of these distinctions, the semantic connections that constitute multimodal cohesion are realized at the discursive surface by intertwined patterns of symbolic, iconic and indexical signs. At the same time, it needs to be considered that one hypertextual node as a whole typically constitutes a multilayered sign that may comprise embedded signs of various types. For instance, a Facebook home page is a complex assemblage of clickable keywords such as “edit profile”, usually in combination with indexical

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video clips and icons such as a stylized pen. Cohesion may further be supported by visual means of page design as well as layout features based on colours and font types (cf. Boardman 2005: 18; Hoffmann 2012: 20–21). Occasionally, hypercohesion may fail or be disrupted as a result of the transitory and dynamic character of the web. If single pages are deleted or shut down without notification, this process is called “link rot” and thus entails “dead links” (Crystal 2006: 211). Consequently, instead of the expected target page with relevant cohesive ties, the message “error 404 – page NOT found” will be displayed. If there is a temporary problem with the internet connection, the message usually reads “the page cannot be displayed” (Boardman 2005: 77), which implies a short-term or merely momentary failure of hypercohesion. Another phenomenon that interrupts cohesion is pop-up windows, which obstruct the users’ direct path to the desired target page and are often motivated by commercial objectives (cf. Boardman 2005: 63). After the reading process has been discontinued in this way, users will decide whether they intend to engage in this discursive side sequence or whether they discard the pop-up window and proceed with the cohesive chain originally intended. 3.

Cohesion on YouTube

As indicated by the personal pronoun you and the noun tube, a colloquial American English expression for ‘television’, YouTube is a media-sharing site that allows users to post and watch video clips (cf. Sindoni 2013: 172). Since users may also comment on the clips, YouTube represents a mixture of media that is labelled “convergent media computer-mediated communication” (CMCMC) by Herring (2013: 4). In this type of “hyper-intertextuality” (Sindoni 2013: 177, emphasis original), cohesion operates inter- and hypermedially between the different discursive units on this platform. Since YouTube has a collaborative character, Androutsopoulos counts it among the so-called “participatory spectacles”, which are “multiauthored, multimodal, multimedia, inherently dialogic, dynamically expanding, and open ended” (2013: 50; see also Johansson, Ch. 7, this volume). As far as structure is concerned, YouTube consists of three main segments, which will be investigated with regard to their respective cohesive potentials and interconnected patterns: (1) the video clips, (2) a section of user comments, which can be viewed according to the two parameters “top comments” or “newest first”, and (3) “a hosting environment that includes a list of related videos and other peripheral elements” (Androutsopoulos 2013: 47–48). These other elements comprise a navigational frame with interactive buttons entitled “review”, “sign in” and “upload”, all of which trigger various online activities. Moreover, YouTube allows users to look for topics by typing search expressions in an input field and provides icons that enable the audience to “like” and “dislike” as well as to “subscribe”,

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“add to”, “share” and carry out “more” actions by means of do- and what-triggers. While segment (1) constitutes the main part and prime level, segments (2) and (3) are paratextual planes that form a frame below and to the right of the video screen. In terms of multimodal cohesion based on spatial composition, the video clip in the top left area of the screen represents the “given” element (van Leeuwen 2005: 201), the starting point of the page design, if the sequentiality of Western writing from left to right and from top to bottom is transferred to the reading of images (cf. Schubert 2009: 35–36). Accordingly, the recommended videos on the right-hand side constitute the “new” section with a sequential structure in both spatial and temporal terms, while the comments below the video form the concluding section on the page. As regards segment (1), uploaded video clips are multimodal texts with a linear organization, similar to unalterable verbal e-texts such as pdf documents. As these clips are integrated into a hypertextual website, users are often confronted with pop-up video clip suggestions or advertisements, which cover a certain section of the screen and can be accepted or discarded. Characteristically, advertisements show a thematic connection to the subject of the current video clip, so that lexical cohesion links the video text proper with the quasi-parasitical paratext. For instance, while watching the clip “the best of David Cameron” (8:20 minutes), which is a compilation of humorous and sarcastic utterances by the former prime minister in the House of Commons, a pop-up window notes “suggested: the best of Nigel Farage”, establishing cohesion through lexical repetition and collocation in the form of British politicians’ personal names. Moreover, the website recommends users to subscribe to the YouTube channel “UK political humour”, whose very title contains superordinate terms of the respective lexical set. Furthermore, the title of the channel is cross-medially connected to a visual logo consisting of a photo of the Houses of Parliament combined with the Union Jack. Beneath the video frame, the content of the clip is briefly paraphrased by the caption “David Cameron’s funniest moments inside the Chamber!”. Hence, in this additional piece of information, the adjective “best” is not only grammatically continued by the superlative “funniest” but also semantically expanded. When the mouse cursor is moved over the icons representing thumbs up or thumbs down, a small window displays the brief texts “I like this” and “I dislike this”, respectively. In this way, the demonstrative pronoun “this” establishes “extended” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 66) demonstrative reference with regard to the complete multimodal video clip. As for segment (2), the comments usually show cohesive connections with the prompting video clip and are also internally linked by means of grammatical and lexical cohesive ties. If the presentation mode “top comments” is chosen, the comments are not in chronological order, since the comments with most “thumbs up” clicks are displayed first. As a result, the cohesion between adjacent comments is restricted, since the antecedent utterance of conjunctive items or pronominal reference is difficult to determine. If, however, the mode “newest first” is selected,

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comments appear in chronological order, so that cohesion is more tightly knit. This is demonstrated by example (1), which contains the five most recent comments on the video clip “the best of David Cameron”. (1) Alberto Barbosa 1 day ago He may be a cuckservative, but at least he’s got some banter. Kaustubh Misra 2 days ago That ‘Bill Somebody’ roast though … Poor Ed. Dr Penguin 3 days ago Ed Balls just sitting there getting roasted xD Rusty Shackleford 4 days ago That is some top shelf banter right there erik lindström 4 days ago This is the first time I’m seeing this. I don’t know much about this guy, since I’m from Sweden, but he acts like the Wolf of Wall Street. (YouTube, “The Best of David Cameron”, retrieved 1 February 2016,  )

Hypercohesion here manifests itself in lexical repetition (“banter”, “day[s] ago”, “Ed”) as well as in morphological repetition (“roast” and “roasted”) across individual comments, so that the multi-authored discourse forms a cohesive unity to some extent. In addition, pro-forms also contribute to cross-medial cohesion, as the demonstrative pronoun in “seeing this” refers to the complete video clip and the determiner in “this guy” relates both to Cameron in the clip and to his name in the caption. In addition, the three occurrences of the personal pronoun “he” form a cohesive chain across different comments. While “right there” refers to the events in the video clip, the pro-adverb in “sitting there” creates a cohesive link to the clip and at the same time deictically points to Ed Milliband’s seat on the opposition bench, as visible in the clip. Concerning the participatory framework, YouTubers commonly regard themselves as members of one of many “digital communities of practice” (Sindoni 2013: 174, emphasis original), interactively negotiating and interpreting shared media content. As example (2) demonstrates, this practice can lead to a dialogue of adjacent utterances. (2) iM3GTR 1 week ago And this load of jeering school children are running the country. Why can’t nice people ever be in charge for once. Scott Mairs 4 days ago I find Cameron very strong … especially against that pathetic excuse of a man who is Corbyn. And +iM3GTR I’d rather someone with backbone and authority than someone who’d throw British patriotism and principles down the drain. iM3GTR 4 days ago +Scott Mairs Fair enough. (YouTube, “The Best of David Cameron”, retrieved 1 February 2016 )

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In extract (2), the critical comment posted “1 week ago” by a tuber named iM3GTR is the prompt for a response by tuber Scott Mairs, who speaks in defence of Cameron. This adjacency pair structure is made visible by the plus sign “+” in collocation with the original tuber’s name. On the same day (“4 days ago”), iM3GTR again replied to this post, tentatively agreeing with the phrase “fair enough”. Hence, this leads to a three-turn conversational exchange, in which the final response can be analysed as an instance of clausal ellipsis, since it presupposes a previous statement. In terms of cohesion, such posts and counter-posts show structures of spoken conversation transferred to digital discourse. Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2012: 506–511) exclusively consider the comment section on YouTube as a written polylogue, analysing types of “cross-turn cohesion” between the individual posts. Drawing from a corpus of 300 consecutive Spanish comments on two YouTube clips, they demonstrate that lexical cohesion is quantitatively dominant (1,018 items), while the number of pronominal references is significantly lower (645 items). The other three types of cohesion according to Halliday and Hasan (1976) hardly play a role, as corroborated by the numbers for substitution (49 items), ellipsis (56 items) and conjunction (51 items) (Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012: 510). Since this type of interaction is similar across languages, comparable quantities may be expected for English comment sections. Extending the scope, the authors also point out “YouTubers’ preference for managing turns through turn-entry/exit devices and cross-turn addressivity signals instead of employing such strategies as cross-turn quoting and backchannelling” (2012: 515). Finally, segment (3) of YouTube pages offers thematically related videos under the heading “up next”, in which the adverb “next” invariantly represents temporal conjunction. The videos suggested at the top of the list bear the titles “David Cameron vs Gordon Brown – very entertaining!!” and “David Cameron – thug life compilation”, so that they display lexical repetition of the personal name in collocation with new thematic foci. Under the eye-catching still frames which represent the individual clips, users find the current number of “views”, which means that lexical repetition of this word collocating with the lexical field of ordinal numbers leads to additional cohesion. In case the autoplay option is activated, the single clips will be played back to back in a linear succession suggested by the YouTube software, so that cohesion is then constructed not only by users but also by automatized electronic processes. Scrolling down to the end of the list of videos, users reach a do-trigger entitled “show more”, in which the pronominal quantifier “more” creates comparative reference between the clips currently on display and the clips to come. With regard to audience participation, Adami (2015) points out that besides comments, users may also react asynchronously in the form of home-made video responses, which are thus linked to previously posted video clips. In her analysis of various videos responding to a popular prompting video, she postulates a “related-

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ness continuum” (Adami 2015: 254, emphasis original). At the one end of the scale, responses show very strong cohesion with the initiating video, while at the other end, the videos may show no explicit hints of relatedness at all. In between the two extreme poles, there are different degrees of (non-)cohesion, realized by various verbal and nonverbal devices. In particular, responding video clips may show the immediate emotional reactions of users watching the prompting video (e.g. through facial expressions), so that they function as direct second pair parts of multimodal adjacency pairs. Alternatively, video bloggers may verbally comment on the original clip, using some degree of topic deviation. Finally, transformations can occur in the form of “[r]emixes, parodies and recontextualizations” (Adami 2015: 246). As for the general theoretical framework for such open and multimodal types of cohesion, Adami refers to Gunther Kress’s social semiotic idea “that communication is always a response by one participant to a prompt by other participants in social events” (Kress 2010: 35, emphasis original). Accordingly, video clips that trigger attention and interest may well provide the starting point for corresponding interpretive activities, which in turn give the original post the status of a prompt. 4.

Cohesion on Facebook

Over the past ten years, Facebook has become one of the primary social networking services (SNS) across the world, since it is not only widespread among private individuals but also used for business and commercial purposes (cf. Dąbrowska 2013: 127–128; Eisenlauer 2013: 32; see also Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this volume). As the “Social Network Theory” (Yus 2011: 116, emphasis original) propounds, there is a close relationship between social bonding and the use of SNS communication, which will in turn have an effect on cohesion at the linguistic level. As regards their central functional components, SNSs comprise a “profile”, “a list of other users” that serve as contacts and the technical possibilities to browse other profiles (boyd and Ellison 2008: 211). More precisely, typical SNS profiles contain photographs, names, personal information, friends, actions on the profile, feeds of latest events and public messages as well as other applications (cf. Yus 2011: 113). Furthermore, SNSs are characterized by the four significant features of persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences (cf. Yus 2011: 112). In comparison to YouTube, Facebook offers more options of initiating, continuing and intensifying social contacts. As regards audience design on Facebook, a user who posts a comment or status update does not only communicate with a specific addressee but also needs to take into account “[a]ctive Friends”, “[w]ider Friends” as well as all internet users who may metaphorically eavesdrop on postings (cf. Tagg 2015: 156). As Lee (cf. 2011: 115–117) points out, status updates can fulfil a wide range of discursive and potentially cohesive functions, such as responding to the Facebook prompt, starting a discussion or quoting from other online sources.

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                         Facebook account    home page   personal profile                                                                      navigational devices   profile data         advertisements                info layer                   wall layer              photo layer Figure 1. Structural constituents of a Facebook account

In terms of macrostructural constituents, a typical Facebook account of an individual user consists of a home page and a personal profile (cf. Figure 1). While users switch between these two nodes, the frame, which includes the semantically filled hyperlinks “home” and “friends” as well as icons for friend requests , messages and notifications , remains unchanged and thus functions as a global orientation device. The personal home page serves as an interface for various social contact-establishing and -maintaining activities, such as selecting favourites, using applications or creating groups (cf. Locher 2014: 564). Centrally, the default news feed initiates a dialogue by means of the prompt “what’s on your mind”, which can be answered by typing in a text box or by clicking an icon that allows members to add photos, tag people or inform others about current activities. The personal profile page of individual users comprises three structural constituents that can be labelled “navigational devices”, “advertising texts” and “profile data” (Eisenlauer 2013: 33). The profile data comprise a variety of details that other members can possibly relate to, so that the web of social contacts resembles the woven texture of cohesive ties. Within the next level of “profile layers” (Eisenlauer 2013: 34), the “info” section contains an additive sequence of social features and individual interests, so that interpersonal connections can be based on common hobbies or shared pop culture predilections. The “wall” layer gives an account of the member’s recent Facebook activities, while the “photo” layer contains personal pictures. The advertisements are semantically connected to items in the user profile, since the advertisers are provided with information on consumer preferences of their respective target groups. Finally, the navigational devices consist of semantically filled links mainly based on what- and partially on do-triggers, which allow users to find self-selected paths across other profiles. As can be expected from a networking service, online activities by individual users have significant repercussions on other nodes, for the corresponding text actions are heavily interwoven: Changes to member details on the Personal Profile are dispersed throughout a user’s network of friends via the News Feed stream. Likewise, commenting on other member’s [sic] posts within the Home Page environment is recorded on one’s own profile Wall and thus contributes to a member’s self-presentation (Eisenlauer 2013: 36).

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Consequently, cohesion is to some extent initiated and created by the Facebook software itself, which automatically links nodes in a cross-medial manner. As discursive items are generated and distributed by the software, Facebook has been labelled a “third author” (Eisenlauer 2013: 42) that structurally intervenes in the communication between network members. Cohesion on Facebook strongly relies on lexical sets and fields, since most of the triggers on the site ultimately represent content-related slots. This will be illustrated by means of semantic areas realized as drop-down lists or vertical columns on the home page. For instance, if the semantically filled hyperlink “About” on the profile page is clicked, the subordinate hypertextual node provides a vertical column with additional links which subcategorize biographical details (cf. example 3). (3)

About

Overview Work and Education Work + add a workplace Professional skills + add a professional skill College + add a college High school + add a high school Places You’ve Lived Contact and Basic Info Family and Relationships Details About You Life Events (Facebook, retrieved 12 February 2016, )

The anthropomorphic pictogram of a close shot, located next to the preposition “About”, indicates the focus on personal matters. The result is an onomasiological and hierarchically structured display of this semantic field. The nouns which are listed here serve as clickable what-triggers offering more specific data. For instance, when “work and education” is selected, additional options are given at the centre of the screen, as displayed in example (3). These are do-triggers which lead to text boxes provided for the user to enter written information. Hence, internodal cohesion here results from the lexical set curriculum vitae, subsuming facts about the user’s professional and private life. This is complemented by the second-person pronoun you, which in example (3) occurs twice, pointing in exophoric and endophoric directions, since it refers both to the extralinguistic user and to his or her “cyberego” (Bublitz 2005), as represented on the screen by a proper name in combination with a photograph. Under the Facebook prompt “what’s on your mind?” on the personal homepage, a laughing emoticon serves as a trigger for posts responding to the more specific stimulus “add what you’re doing or how you’re feeling”. By clicking on this pictogram, an extensive drop-down list offers a variety of choices in the form of present participles or verbal nouns in -ing. If any of them is selected, such as “feeling” or “celebrating”, verbal complements appear, as demonstrated in example (4).

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(4) Feeling Celebrating happy your birthday loved her birthday excited his birthday blessed your special day sad this special day thankful success crazy life fantastic love (Facebook, retrieved 12 February 2016, )

Regarding the first domain, “feeling” can be considered as the superordinate noun or verb, while the adjectives offered represent subordinate terms. Similarly, the default smiley which represents “feeling” forms an iconic sign with fewer semantic features than the more specific emoticons, so that a semantic hierarchy exists also on the pictorial level. In the case of the verb form “celebrating”, the dropdown list provides typical syntactic collocates, which may likewise be subsumed under the text-linguistic notion of collocation, since their co-occurrence in textual segments is highly probable. Although grammatical cohesion is rare at the internodal level, the present drop-down list contains the personal pro-forms “your”, “his” and “her” as well as the demonstrative determiner “this”. The third-person pronouns here presuppose social contacts, or, more precisely, Facebook Friends, whose names have to be retrieved from other nodes of the hypertext, so that cohesion manifests itself in the form of internodal reference. The demonstrative pronoun in “this special day” constitutes exophoric reference but also presupposes a specifying item that needs to be endophorically recovered from a different node. The ubiquitous “like” button, which expresses positive reactions to a specific content, fulfils the structural function of a “clickable response device” (West and Trester 2013: 138). Thus, it forms the second part of a potentially multimodal adjacency pair and presupposes a cohesively linked antecedent. The introduction of further “emoji reactions” in addition to the “like” button was officially announced by Facebook on 24 February 2016 (“love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry”) (Facebook Newsroom). With these pictograms, users can express their emotional responses to posts in more detailed ways than with a general “dislike” button, whose introduction has been avoided by Facebook. These updates impressively underline the statement that electronic discourse is a “moving target” (Locher 2014: 557) for any linguistic analysis. As Lee cogently points out, such alterations “pose real challenges” to discourse analysis but at the same time are “a perfect opportunity for tracing creative adaptations in people’s new media textual practices” (2011: 111), for commercial software applications are bound to react to the communicative needs and preferences of their users.

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Cohesion on Twitter

Although microblogging is a possibility also offered by Facebook, Twitter has been the default platform for this digital communicative practice since 2006 (cf. Crystal 2011: 36–56; Yus 2011: 135–149; Zappavigna 2012, 2013, and also Zappavigna, Ch. 8, this volume). Twitter is based on microposts (i.e. microblog posts) or “tweets”, which are “time-stamped, chronologically ordered entries” (Zappavigna 2012: 195), continuously published in microblogging feeds. From a structural viewpoint, tweets contain three vertically arranged components: (a) the user name, marked by “@” and accompanied by a photo and the date of the tweet, (b) the message in the form of text and possibly images, followed by the topic, which is indicated by the hash character “#”, and (c) options of reacting to the tweet by means of clickable pictograms. In this way, users can reply to the author, retweet the post or express approval for the tweet by clicking on an iconic heart symbol. In particular, retweeting is the practice of forwarding a message to your “followers”, as it enables users “to republish another user’s tweet within your own tweet” (Zappavigna 2012: 35). As opposed to Facebook, Twitter users can have asymmetrical or “non-reciprocal relationships” (Draucker 2015: 52), since their followers do not need to confirm mutual friendship. This has consequences on the direction of endophoric reference, as the tweets by followers typically refer back to the prompting tweets. Moreover, “[i]n contrast to Facebook and YouTube, the user-generated content in Twitter lends itself well to re-transmission” (Chovanec and Dynel 2015: 9). Accordingly, this activity of forwarding and spreading messages strongly supports the intricate web of cohesive ties. Hashtags indicate “the topic of tweets in a process of ‘ambient affiliation’, whereby people sharing associated values bond around these user-defined topics” (Zappavigna 2012: 14). This system involves linguistic cohesion as well, since hashtags connect posts with similar lexical content and facilitate cross-referencing as well as mutual commenting. Thus, as Zappavigna points out, Twitter is strongly based on the development of “searchable talk”, in which “we mark our discourse so that it can be found by others, in effect so that we can bond around particular values” (2012: 1). As a consequence, social grouping is likely to correspond with linguistic linkage on Twitter in the form of lexical cohesion. Terms like friends and followers imply the presence of a social relation, which is reflected by the language use in the posts. Since the prompt for the Twitter text box was changed from “what are you doing” to “what’s happening” in 2009, “Twitter now has far fewer isolated postings and far more semantic threads” (Crystal 2011: 11). These cohesive chains are linked mainly by lexical cohesion, especially by repetition and collocation. Thus, for an investigation of cohesion on Twitter, it is important to check cohesive ties both (a) between tweets and their corresponding replies by other users and (b) between tweets of the same semantic thread posted by one individual user.

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Accordingly, cohesion will rely either on a quasi-conversational exchange or on an additive sequence of contributions. Despite the predominance of lexical linkage, Crystal (2011: 48) found various items of grammatical cohesion in tweets as well, such as coordinators, conjunctive adverbs, anaphoric reference and repair strategies (e.g. “I meant …, really?”). Example (5) is an excerpt from a conversational polylogue among Twitter users from 12 February 2016. It was retrieved by clicking on a trigger labelled “view conversation” under the topic “Griffith Observatory”, a famous sight in Los Angeles, California. (5) Jonah Green @Jonah Green ∙ Feb 12 Low light grain destroyed pic at the observatory last night actually turned out pretty sick Margarita @singingasian ∙ Feb 12 @JonahGreen where where where where ?! also take me!!! Jonah Green @Jonah Green ∙ Feb 12 @melizabeth143 GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY!! We all should go next week :) Margarita @singingasian ∙ Feb 12 @JonahGreen ah! Yes, so down. Jessica Danielle @ohnoitsjessicaa ∙ Feb 12 @melizabeth143 @JonahGreen take me too Marg or else Emma:) @emmalemonhillis ∙ Feb 12 @JonahGreen @melizabeth143 and me (Twitter, “Griffith Observatory”, retrieved 16 February 2016, )

This polylogue is initiated by tweeter Jonah Green, who posts a photo of himself sitting on the wall of the observatory during nighttime. Margarita responds to his post with a highly elliptical tweet consisting of the repeated interrogative adverb “where” and an emphatic imperative. Jonah again answers by means of clausal ellipsis and introduces the inclusive pronoun we in collocation with the quantifier all. This triggers responses not only by Margarita but also by two other women, whose tweets are likewise connected mainly by verbal and clausal ellipsis. Margarita’s interjection “ah!” in her second tweet signals recognition, while the response form “[y]es” realizes anaphoric clausal ellipsis. In Jessica Danielle’s tweet the vocative “Marg” indicates that now the addressee has changed, while the ellipted destination “GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY!!” remains unchanged. Finally, the member Emma:) adds the highly elliptical “and me”, presupposing information from various antecedent tweets. Thus, as Yus argues, such “sub-sentential utterances” (2001: 146) are typical of the structurally reduced discourse of Twitter, which calls for endophoric reference. Hence, example (5) corroborates the fact that Twitter contains grammatical cohesion in polylogic units at the intranodal level. In addition, the pervasive repetition of users’ names and the calendar dates constitute dominant chains of lexical cohesion. In a series of tweets by one

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individual user over a period of time, the occurrence of cohesive ties is different, as example (6) demonstrates, taken from the feed by American actor Kevin Spacey. (6) Kevin Spacey @KevinSpacey ∙ 2 Dec 2015 Here it is … Tardiness will not be tolerated! Learn more about my new project here: masterclass.com/ks Kevin Spacey @KevinSpacey ∙ 8h I’m a man of the people. Even I like to take a selfie outside my house from time to time … instagram.com/p/BCEjTHpClIX/ Kevin Spacey @KevinSpacey ∙ Feb 20 Two weeks left to apply for the @KS_Foundation #KSFArtistsofChoice £10K/$10K + mentoring for your creative project http//bit.ly/KSFArtistsofChoiceapplication (Twitter, “#Kevin Spacey”, retrieved 22 February 2016, )

In contrast to the polylogue in example (5), these tweets are not addressed to specific Twitter members but appeal to the wide online public. The list starts with a “pinned” tweet from 2 December 2015, which invariantly remains at the top of the stream, since it fulfils an advertising function that is valid over a longer period of time. By clicking the link in the tweet, the user reaches Spacey’s acting school website, which is extranodally tied to the present trigger by the repetition of the noun “masterclass” and by Spacey’s name. In addition, a teaser video serves as a commercial for his acting lessons, providing multimodal cohesion as well, for the URL and the video are cataphorically referred to in the topmost tweet by demonstrative (“here”) as well as personal reference (“it”). The next tweet in example (6) contains an extranodal link to Instagram, where a selfie of Spacey in front of the White House can be viewed. The extranodal cohesive item consists of an exact repetition of the tweeted text, followed by the greeting “[w]elcome to my instagram” and accompanied by a reappearance of the actor’s well-known countenance. The third tweet again contains a link to an external site, here the Kevin Spacey Foundation, which is likewise extranodally connected through lexical cohesion. This is achieved through morphological repetition in the form of the verb “apply” in the root node and the compound noun “application form” in the target node. Apart from first-person pronominal reference (“my”, “I”), the three posts are intranodally linked chiefly by the lexical repetition of Spacey’s name, his Twitter address and calendrical details. Still, there is no lack of overall cohesion, for the contextual frame provided by Twitter guarantees uninterrupted orientation and thus allows tweets to be perceived as coherent even in situations of low cohesive density. When Spacey’s tweets are answered in the form of numerous retweets, this Twitter thread becomes polylogic, so that discourse markers or continuatives occur as well. Investigating discourse markers such as right, well, great, okay

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or anyway in text messages, Tagg argues that “their functions include opening or closing interactions, sequencing interaction and marking topic boundaries and shifts, focusing attention and monitoring shared knowledge” (2012: 105). Since Twitter may principally be labelled “the SMS of the Internet” (Crystal 2011: 36), similar uses of discourse markers appear in the retweets responding to Spacey’s prompting tweet, such as “right then … time to enroll myself on Masterclass!!!” (@Deborah J Ball ∙ 2 Dec 2015) or “Hi! Well, THIS is a touch of terrific!” (@dianeborbes129 ∙ 2 Dec 2015). Here the discourse marker “right then” signals attention and approval of Spacey’s post, while “well” indicates confirmation and interest. Both of them clearly underline the similarity between Twitter discourse and the register of informal conversation. 6.

Cohesion in Weblogs

In comparison to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, weblogs are somewhat less polylogic and interactive, since usually a single author is in control of the site. Nevertheless, blogs typically contain extranodal hyperlinks and include comment sections, in which other users may post additional remarks (cf. Yus 2011: 95; Pusch­mann 2009: 58–59, and also Heyd, Ch. 6, this volume). Like on other social media sites, entries appear in reverse chronological order, so that this sequential structure lays the foundation for possible cohesive patterns. As far as functional subgenres are concerned, blogs may be related to the users’ private (diaries, friendship weblogs) or professional lives (career, commercial/corporate blogs) (cf. Hoffmann 2012: 39). Regarding the fundamental constituents of blogs, it is necessary to differentiate between two compositional layers (cf. Hoffmann 2012: 19). The first level contains the primary sections of entries and comments, while the second refers to peripheral segments that have a paratextual character. In particular, this fringe on the screen can be divided into the upper, lower and side panels, which commonly contain the blog title, navigational tools as well as a blog archive and a blog roll (cf. Hoffmann 2012: 19–26). The presence of extranodal hyperlinks, which is an essential feature of weblogs, may result in a complex “network of inter-connected blogs” (Yus 2011: 105). In terms of cohesion, personal blogs are generally closer to written monological texts than to spoken dialogical ones, as demonstrated by Hoffmann (cf. 2012: 206–213). Accordingly, the frequencies of substitution and repetition are quite low, while collocation and conjunction show relatively high quantities. Ellipsis is scarce in blog entries but occurs more regularly in comments, whereas there is only little cohesion between entries and comments. Moreover, blogs hardly contain any cohesion between different comments, so that “[m]ost entries and comments are individual, autonomous monologues which showed only a few intertextual bonds” (Hoffmann 2012: 209). As for personal pronouns, first-person reference is particu-

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larly salient, placing the bloggers and their opinions at the centre of interest (cf. Puschmann 2009: 74). Myers (cf. 2010: 28–47) discusses “creative linking” in blogs and emphasizes their strong hyper-intertextual character, which is caused by high numbers of links. He reaches the conclusion that “[t]here have been many studies of what bloggers link to, but rather few of what they link with, the information contained in the text about the link” (Myers 2010: 34). For instance, if longer quotations or textual segments are used in the highlighted trigger of the root node, extranodal lexical cohesion is often particularly strong, since it may be based on several literal repetitions. Alternatively, if the trigger is formed by single words, names, titles or URLs, there are usually fewer cohesive ties at work. Multimodal cohesion is established by images as triggers, while deictic expressions functioning as semantically empty links may give rise to grammatical cohesion. As blogs typically contain individual opinions about the respective topics under discussion, stance markers are quite frequent, especially in the comment sections. As Myers shows (cf. 2013: 269–270), this practice of stance-taking includes items that can also contribute to cohesion, such as adversative conjunction with but or conversational features in the form of discourse markers or response forms. For the purpose of illustration, extracts from the popular blog entitled “1000 Awesome Things” () will be employed. This site is operated and regularly updated by Canadian-born author and blogger Neil Pasricha, who intended to post notes about the simple pleasures of everyday life on a daily basis. The single entries range in length from only a few words to longer stretches of text in combination with images. Since these posts internally behave like linear texts in terms of cohesion, the focus will here be on the interplay of entries, comments and hyperlinks. Example (7) contains entry #43 from 21 February 2012, followed by four brief comments by bloggers. (7) #43 Finding out from a doctor or mechanic that nothing’s wrong February 21, 2012                    Neil Pasricha Weird thump, strange lump, funny bump? It’s nothing. AWESOME! 48 thoughts on “#43 Finding out from a doctor or mechanic that nothing’s wrong” ATUL10ER February 21, 2012 at 12:11 am Very True.. WENDY February 21, 2012 at 12:12 am Oh, I should probably see *that* doctor, or mechanic perhaps …hahaha:) ATUL JAIN February 21, 2012 at 12:13 am lol CASEY February 21, 2012 at 12:23 am Finding awesome in everyday things.. I love it.

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(“1000 Awesome Things”, retrieved 23 February 2016, )

In contrast to personal weblogs, this site addresses a wide online audience and has a commercial background, since it advertises topically related books by the blogger. Although the comments quoted here are very short, they show cohesive ties both with the original entry and among themselves. The prompting entry is accompanied by a photograph of a doctor giving the viewer literally the thumbs up, so that the image cohesively reinforces the verbal meaning of the post. The comments are separated from and connected to the entry by the lexically cohesive link “48 thoughts on […]”. The first comment shows clausal ellipsis with regard to the entry, for the attribution of the adjective phrase “[v]ery [t]rue” presupposes the complete antecedent post. The second entry starts with the interjection “[o]h”, which functions as a discourse marker of mild surprise, while the demonstrative determiner “that” cross-modally refers to the physician in the photo of the entry. Since this comment ends with the humorous interjection “hahaha:)”, the ensuing comment “lol” is directly tied to the immediately previous one. The interconnection of these comments is strongly supported by the exact posting time, since this detail indicates the rapid succession of the messages within minutes. The final comment quoted here is linked to the entry by the repetition of “awesome” and by personal reference (“it”), which in this case establishes extended reference not only to the present entry but to the blog in its entirety. As for global orientation devices, the blog’s upper panel contains the navigational links “HOME”, “ABOUT”, “BOOK”, “BOOK 2”, “THE TOP 1000” and “SUBMIT”. At the left-hand side, bloggers find an optional panel containing the icons of the current social media sites Pinterest, Google+, Facebook and Twitter. The right-hand panel comprises advertisements of the author’s bestselling and upcoming publications, a search box, contact information, the top posts and a list of newspapers and TV channels under the title “FEATURED IN”. Thus, the intranodal cohesion present in example (7) is complemented by internodal ties between the 1,000 entries of the blog and by extranodal hyperlinks. However, a blogroll in the narrow sense of the word is not offered here, which may be due to the self-contained commercial framework of this blog. 7.

Summary and conclusions

To sum up, both the theoretical considerations and the illustrative examples have demonstrated that the conceptual outline of social media platforms, whose main purpose is interpersonal networking, encompasses linguistic and multimodal cohesion. Along these lines, the metaphors of follower or friend already presuppose an interest in the semantic content of other users’ posts, which often results in cohe-

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sive ties as well. Thus, Tanskanen’s (cf. 2006: 23–27) notion of textual collaboration is particularly salient in the case of social media, in which chains of meaning are collectively negotiated by users. For instance, whenever a topic is initiated by a brief post and sequentially elaborated on by a number of users, this process can be labelled collaborative expansion in the area of lexical cohesion. Moreover, this concerted effort is to some extent supported and intensified by automatized connections that are established by the social media software. From the perspective of hypertextual nodes, intranodal texture comprises a variety of both grammatical and lexical cohesive ties, while inter- and extranodal texture is realized mainly by lexical cohesion. The most common ties are literal repetition and collocation in the form of lexical sets, since these types of cohesion do not imply a search instruction and thus do not demand a particular referential direction. Between chronological posts, cohesive ties are only possible anaphorically, for although users per se need to rely on forward-looking strategies (cf. Fritz 1999: 230), cataphoric cohesion dependent on other users’ future posts is not feasible. Whenever the cohesive tie of reference is present across individual posts, the search instruction evoked by pronouns is more demanding than in linear texts. The presupposed item may be more difficult to find, for it can be realized in multimodal form and in order to retrieve it users might have to scroll up. With regard to hypermedial design, the frequent use of images in social media results in pervasive cross-modal cohesion, particularly at the personal level, when, for instance, interpersonal pronouns or proper names refer to photographs of users. Furthermore, iconic pictograms typically function as do-triggers, allowing users to express their emotions or opening other nodes and platforms. In general, the informationally dense and emotionally appealing character of most iconic images may attract users’ attention and trigger semantic threads more easily than purely symbolic signs. Although the four social media platforms discussed in this contribution share many cohesive features due to their similar communicative functions, a few significant differences can be determined as well. First, regarding cross-modal cohesion, YouTube is predestined for word-image connections, since short video clips are at the very centre of this platform, while on the other three sites, images are not the starting point but rather fulfil supportive functions. Second, as for author control, the original creators of weblogs can exert influence over their entries and Facebook users can supervise their own profiles. By contrast, since the discourses of YouTube and Twitter represent mosaics of individual contributions, lower degrees of cohesive uniformity are present on these platforms. Thus, owing to the practice of microblogging, Twitter shows the highest degree of textual fragmentation, whereas weblogs often contain more extended textual chunks that are internally marked by greater cohesive density. Accordingly, the conversational register and concomitant cohesive devices such as ellipsis are most salient on YouTube and Twitter, for these sites are based almost exclusively on dialogical interaction.

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Third, concerning structural composition, the predetermined autobiographical slots on Facebook constitute a relatively fixed template that results in a given set of collocations, whereas the other platforms do not offer such prearranged lexical fields. Hence, in the conceptual layout of Facebook, individual self-presentation through personal profiles serves as the point of departure for cohesion, while in blog comments, YouTube posts or retweets, cohesive threads are typically initiated by prompting posts or video clips. Provided by the social media software, explicit markers of semantic threads, such as the hashtag, help users to trace cohesive chains. Conclusively, the hypercohesive “harmony” (Halliday and Hasan 1985: 94) between interlinked chains is strongly supported by these digital devices. Whenever cohesive ties between individual posts are scarce, global orientation and contextualization cues play a significant role. Despite these hypertextual tools, hypercohesion is not as text-centered as linear cohesion, since the recipient not only has more freedom in establishing hypertrail texture but also needs to expend more effort in tracking cohesive ties. Having acquired the necessary New Media literacy, however, average users are acquainted with the challenges of social media cohesion, so that the (re-)construction of hypertexture is usually unproblematic. References Adami, Elisabetta 2015 What I can (re)make out of it: Incoherence, non-cohesion, and re-interpretation in YouTube video responses. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 233–257. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2013 Participatory culture and metalinguistic discourse: Performing and negotiating German dialects on YouTube. In: Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, 47–71. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Boardman, Mark 2005 The Language of Websites. London: Routledge. Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2012 Social interaction in YouTube text-based polylogues: A study of coherence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17: 501–521. boyd, danah m. and Nicole B. Ellison 2008 Social Network Sites: definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication 13: 210–230. Brown, Gillian and George Yule 1983 Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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13. Discourse and cognition Andreas Langlotz Abstract: This chapter focusses on the relationship between discourse and cognition by concentrating on one social medium, Twitter, and by analysing concrete tweets as discursive examples. Starting from a working definition of the central notions ‘discourse’ and ‘cognition’, it provides a brief historical overview of the recent convergence between discourse analysis and cognitive science. In line with this trend, the chapter adopts a socio-cognitive perspective of discourse management. With reference to Herbert Clark’s theory of language use (Clark 1996), it outlines the socio-cognitive parameters that play a decisive role in the human management of discourse in general and the management of tweets in particular. Finally, the socio-cognitive affordances and limitations of Twitter will be briefly surveyed with regard to the following questions: How can users perform joint actions online? What signalling strategies can they use for doing so? How do they manage and creatively play with common-ground construction online? 1. Introduction More than 20 years ago, in the early phases of research on computer-mediated communication (CMC), Nancy Baym predicted the great social potential of new media: If anything, the ways in which people have appropriated the commercial and noncommercial networks demonstrate that CMC not only lends itself to social uses but is, in fact, a site for an unusual amount of social creativity. […] participants in CMC develop forms of expression which enable them to communicate social information and to create and codify group-specific meanings, socially negotiate group-specific identities, form relationships […], and create norms which serve to organize interaction and to maintain desirable social climates. (Baym 1995: 160)

Indeed, the massive spread and proliferation of social media platforms and social networking sites (SNS) such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, flickr, Pinterest, Linkedin, and many more prove that human beings enjoy communicating with each other online. As psychologists and neuroscientists are showing, the great amount of communication on and through social media also has an impact on human psychology and cognition (Meshi, Tamir and Heekeren 2015). For instance, SNS such as Facebook or Twitter are reported to increase working memory and spelling abilities and to enhance the feeling of social connectedness (Alloway and Alloway 2012; Alloway et al. 2013). On the other hand, various studies have supported DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-013 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 345–380. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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arguments that point to more negative cognitive and psychological consequences for “homo zappiens” (Veen and Vrakking 2006), especially on the youth (Ahn 2011): multitasking and information overload on SNS reduces academic performance (Kirschner and Karpinski 2010; Junco and Cotton 2012); social media reduce the feeling of socioemotional well-being in young girls (Pea et al. 2012); and they may increase feelings of social anxiety and depression (Becker, Alzahabi and Hopwood 2013). While the reported insights into the striking adaptive effects of new media on the neuropsychological, psychological, and cognitive setup of their users are very interesting and intriguing, even more fundamental questions have to be asked from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics. Social media present human beings with particular interactional settings or socio-communicative environments (Langlotz 2015a: 52). Apart from written verbal communication, these platforms also include a number of additional communicative tools (icons, images, emoticons, videos, etc.) that allow their users to organise their interactions with other online communicators. On the other hand, the media – excluding Skype or other audiovisual platforms such as Snapchat, Youtube, videochats, and videoblogs – do not support the immediate use of embodied communicative modes such as facial expressions and body language that are naturally employed in face-to-face interaction (Bublitz 2013: 29). To become able to navigate through the complex and dynamic semiotic worlds established by and through social media, communicators need to exploit their cognitive, social, and emotional capacities in order to find orientation for themselves and to create orientation for their communicative partners. Therefore, from a pragmatic point of view the impact of social media can only be explained if we better understand the cognitive tasks and challenges – closely linked to the corresponding social-interactional and emotional challenges (Langlotz and Locher 2012) – that these new communicative environments present to their users in the first place. Put differently, what socio-cognitive skills do online users have to bring to the task that allow them to find social and communicative orientation in them? Harré (2001: 695–696) proposes a threefold distinction between tool, task, and skill to discuss the complex interrelationship between discourse, socio-communicative tasks, and the cognitive capacities that support them. By analogy with this threefold distinction we can illustrate the interdependent relationship between cognition, discourse and social media by Figure 1. I have used the term tripartite reciprocal adaptation to denote the interdependent relationship between the cognitive skills, the communicative tools, and the discursive tasks (Langlotz 2015a: 111–115) that communicators are dealing with in communicative activities. We can employ this general idea in order to scrutinise the complex relationships between discourse, cognition, and social media in the present chapter. With regard to the model we can ask three general questions with each question addressing one fundamental relationship in Figure 1:

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1. What cognitive skills are necessary for the management of discourse? 2. By means of which socio-cognitive processes is discourse managed in general and when communicating through social media? 3. How are these cognitive skills and socio-cognitive processes affected when cognisers adapt to the technological affordances and constraints provided by these platforms?

Figure 1. Tripartite reciprocal adaptation between cognition, discourse, and social media (adapted from Langlotz 2015a: 112)

To engage with the complex interrelations between cognition, discourse, and social media along these interrogative lines, the chapter concentrates on one social medium, namely Twitter (see Zappavigna, Ch. 8, this volume), only. This limitation of scope to the micro-blog is taken due to reasons of space and coherence. However, it is assumed that the general points addressed in this chapter can also be applied to other social media. Engaging with concrete tweets as discursive examples throughout, the chapter is divided into three main sections. After this introduction, Section 2 discusses the relationship between cognition and discourse and gives a brief historical overview of the more recent convergence between discourse analysis and cognitive science as a growing area of linguistic interest. In the third Section, the socio-cognitive parameters that play a decisive role in the human management of discourse will be specified with reference to Herbert Clark’s theory of language use (Clark 1996). In Section 4, we will then zoom in on the particular discursive environment offered by Twitter to deal with question 2 and 3, i.e. how its particular features involve special socio-cognitive challenges and opportunities for its users. In doing so, some concrete applications, for which investigating the

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relationship between cognition and discourse on Twitter is particularly interesting, will be presented: How can users perform joint actions online? (Section 4.1) What signalling strategies can they use for doing so? (4.2) How do they manage and creatively play with common-ground construction online? (4.3). The chapter then ends with a short conclusion that reinterprets the insights from the above-mentioned psychological studies from the perspective of socio-cognitive linguistics. 2.

Discourse and cognition – What cognitive skills are necessary to manage discursive tasks both online and offline?

2.1.

What is discourse? What can be achieved through it?

Following Schiffrin (2006: 169), I define discourse as “the use of language above and beyond the sentence: how people use language in texts and contexts”. While the preposition ‘above’ points to the fact that discourse analysts are interested in communicative phenomena that are more complex than single sentences or utterances, the word ‘beyond’ highlights that discourse involves much more than merely conveying and sharing information (see also Jaworski and Coupland 1999). One can refer to Halliday’s famous distinction between three “communicative meta-functions” (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29–31) to scrutinise what tasks communicators can manage through discursive engagement. (1) Ideational function: a. represent the world of experience (including inner-psychic and fictional worlds of experience) b. convey ideas to communicative partners (2) Textual function: a. structure discursive activities into distinct communicative actions b. make information accessible and mutually comprehensible (3) Interpersonal function: a. engage in interactions b. establish relationships c. show stances d. convey identities e. negotiate power

The following tweet by Barack Obama can be used to illustrate these dimensions.

Tweet 1.

President Barack Obama’s first official tweet

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(1) Ideational function: a. With his tweet, the President represents the new state-of-affairs about him having finally got his own presidential Twitter account b. He also communicates his view that he got it rather late, after six years of being in office. (2) Textual function: a. The President clearly structures his message into two parts: a greeting to the Twitter community Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! and a critical statement about how long it took for him to get his presidential Twitter account. The short message features the brevity that can be expected from a tweet. b. To render his message more emphatically and to hammer it in, the President employs four speech acts: an address formula (Hello, Twitter!), a personal introduction (It’s Barack.), an intensifier (Really!), and an explanatory statement (Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account). He also uses exclamation marks for emphasis. (3) Interpersonal function: a. The President connects to other people using Twitter. b. The way in which he addresses the community indicates that he probably wishes to establish a relationship to a group of young and modern people who are not commonly in contact with the most powerful man on the planet. This is best shown by his use of his first name, Barack. In doing so, he symbolically puts himself on the same hierarchical level as other Twitter users. c. Obama jocularly expresses his critical stance against the circumstances of his late joining of the community. It was they who gave him the account late. They probably refers to the US governmental administration. But this does not become fully clear from the message. d. Various elements in the message are relevant to convey Obama’s personal and professional identity. The image depicts Obama. Next to the image his official title and last name are given: President Obama. This information is accompanied by the username/handle @POTUS – an acronym for President Of The United States. Moreover, Obama reveals his personal identity by using his first name. e. The President clearly avoids a demonstration of his authority and political power. On the contrary, he establishes the personalised image of a friendly, funny, selfironic and jovial Twitter-friend.

It seems uncontroversial that both producers and interpreters of such messages need considerable cognitive skills to competently manage the highly complex array of communicative tasks that are achieved through such a message. In the next section, these cognitive skills are sketched. 2.2.

What is cognition? What skills does it comprise?

The Merriam Webster Dictionary simply defines cognition as: “conscious mental activities: the activities of thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cognition). While such a basic definition is certainly not sufficient from a scientific perspective, it points to the central capacities that a cogniser must be able to achieve when engaging with his

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Figure 2. The dynamics of sense-making

or her world of experience. More technically speaking, cognition comprises the intelligent ability to produce meaningful and creative behavioural responses by applying mental representations and processes to the input of environmental stimuli (Bless, Fiedler and Strack 2004: 8). This view of the mind encapsulates two central metaphors. On the one hand, the mind is conceived as a container which stores mental representations, including ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. On the other hand, the mind works like a machine that can manipulate this mental content in working memory to produce a behavioural response, which allows the cogniser to solve a problem or manage a task appropriately (see also Langlotz 2015a: 88–89). The psychologist Gibson (1979) introduced the term affordance to point to the fact that a cogniser can only engage with the world of experience – in our case a social medium – to the extent that this is made possible by his or her cognitive capacities and the range and variety of stimuli that emanate from the environment. Along these lines, Figure 2 depicts the interaction between a cogniser (on the left) and the social medium as his or her world of experience (on the right). The platform contains tweets as stimuli to which a cogniser can potentially orient. This pool of stimuli both affords and constrains the cogniser’s potential contact with the world of experience. Contact is further afforded and constrained by the cogniser’s sensorimotor system as well as his or her interaction with the emitted stimuli. Only those stimuli that come into the cogniser’s limited scope of attention can be perceived by him or her. These factors conjointly determine the set of potential

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conceptualisations that result from the interplay of the cognitive and environmental constraints and affordances (see also A. Clark 1997: 44). The activated conceptual patterns can then be mapped back onto the stimuli to make sense of them. While the messages in the social medium influence the activation of sense-making processes bottom-up, the cognitive capacities determine sense-making top-down. This turns sense-making into a highly dynamic and adaptive process. When applying this general model to the task of understanding social media discourse, one can sketchily describe the necessary cognitive skills as follows: (A) Perception: i. orient to and detect the message, i.e. bring it to one’s scope of attention; ii. actively attend to the presented signals by which the tweet is made up. (B) Categorisation and conceptualisation: i. categorise the input relative to previous knowledge that is stored in long-term memory; ii. activate frames as knowledge schemas (see Ziem 2014: 218–242) relative to which the input can be understood in a broader cognitive context. (C) Making inferences and judgements: i. infer the speaker’s meaning by computing, integrating or blending the activated conceptualisations into complex and meaningful situated conceptualisations (Barsalou 2005); ii. scrutinise the message for its potential informational, social, and emotional implications; iii. take an affective stance towards the underlying conceptualisations.

When applying these dimensions to the President’s tweet, we can describe the underlying cognitive dimensions as follows: (A) Perception: i. Readers must detect the tweet on their computational device (computer, mobile phone) and orient to it. ii. They must attend to the multimodal semiotic environment presented by the tweet, including its imagery, verbal components and layout. Paying attention to the message corresponds to representing it in working memory. When posting the message, Obama had to exploit the semiotic affordances (Kress 2011: 55) offered by the technological environment of Twitter in a way that fosters attention to and engagement with his personal message. (B) Categorisation and conceptualisation: i. Readers must categorise the multimodal input in working memory. This involves: – communicative categorisation (recognising the message as a tweet with its medium-specific elements, e.g. the handle); – linguistic categorisation (recognising the verbal signals); – social categorisation (recognising Obama in the image and rightly classifying this person as the President of the United States). When composing the message, the President had to try and make sure that the signs used support and appropriately enable such processes of categorisation.

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ii. To support these categorisation processes the readers have to activate conceptual structures or frames from long-term memory that provide the necessary knowledge about: – the communicative activity (What is Twitter? How does it work?) = discourse frames; – the types of speech-activities (Why does the President present the message in this particular form?) = speech-activity frames about greeting, introducing oneself, giving an explanation; – linguistic knowledge (e.g. What does @POTUS stand for?) = semantic frames; – social knowledge (Who is Barack Obama?) = social frames; – world knowledge (How is American presidency organised?) = encyclopedic frames As a sender of his message, Obama must have assumed that readers can (partially) retrieve these chunks of knowledge when engaging with his tweet. (C) Making inferences and judgements: i. The readers must integrate the activated chunks of knowledge about Obama’s current presidency, about Twitter, about Obama, and about the form and meaning of the message into a complex conceptual network in order to; ii. appreciate the informational, social, and emotional value of the message, including the relationship that it creates to the audience, the identity it creates for Obama, and the affective stance that it expresses. When producing the message, Obama must have intended to change the mental representations of his readers via the conceptual knowledge activated in (B) in order to achieve several aims along the three communicative metafunctions outlined above. iii. The message may also trigger emotional reactions in the audience. This affective stance may cause them to appreciate or reject Obama’s communicative move ­(Langlotz and Locher 2012).

Although this overview of cognitive representations and processes that have to be recruited for understanding even a very short message like Obama’s tweet is only cursory and superficial, it can give us an inkling of the wide-ranging cognitive skills that are involved in finding and structuring communicative orientation in social media. Several cognitive-linguistic, pragmatic, and socio-cognitive frameworks exist that model different dimensions of these cognitive skills and could potentially offer alternative descriptive, explanatory, and methodological frameworks to engage with them. As it is impossible to present these approaches in any sufficient detail here, Table 1 is meant to provide readers with a rough map of how they can be connected to the dimensions sketched above. Interested readers can then explore these frameworks further via the references:

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Table 1. Overview of cognitively-oriented frameworks modelling sense-making in and through discourse Theory

Short description of ­cognitive dimensions ­covered

Typical questions that could be asked about the tweet

Relevance theory

Post-Gricean theory that focuses on the cognitive processes of meaning generation in context and that models language-based meaning inference

How can cognisers compute Sperber the utterance meaning of and Wilson Obama’s tweet on the basis (1995) of the linguistic input in combination with contextual knowledge?

Frame ­theory

Analyses frames as complex knowledge schemas that are recruited for (linguistic) sense-making. Promotes an encyclopedic view of meaning.

What semantic frames are activated by Obama’s words? What broader knowledge do they entail for making sense of the tweet?

Cognitive semantics

Semantic theory that focuses on how linguistic units are related to conceptual structures (including metaphor and metonymy) to categorise the world of experience.

What conceptual categories Cruse and Croft (2004) are activated by Obama? How is conceptual metonymy relevant for understanding the phase six years in?

Cognitive grammar

Usage-based theory of language that scrutinises the relationship between language (use) and conceptualisation.

How does the grammatical form of Obama’s statement conceptualise the world of experience?

Langacker (2008)

Mental space and blending theory

Cognitive theory of online processes involved in situated sense-making. Focusses the conceptual creativity involved in sense-making.

How are mental spaces activated and blended for the situated construction of meaning?

Fauconnier and Turner (2002)

Sociocognitive linguistics

Diverse approaches that combine insights from discourse analysis with cognitive heuristics in order to model the interaction of social and cognitive components involved in sense-making (see Section 3).

How are cognitive processes of conceptualisation coupled with social processes with interaction? (see Section 3)

Clark (1996); Van Dijk (2010); Langlotz (2015); Zima (2013)

References

Fillmore (1982); Cienki (2010)

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Theory

Short description of ­cognitive dimensions ­covered

Typical questions that could be asked about the tweet

References

Discursive psychology

Theory of social psychology that employs conversation-analytical methods to deal with cognitive concepts such as emotion, memory, social categorisation or evaluation

How does Obama discursively construct his social identity as the President on Twitter?

Edwards (2005)

Discourse processing

Psycholinguistic models of how discourse is processed.

What are the incremental Graesser et steps involved in processing al. (2003) the tweet?

Dialogic syntax

Model of how syntactic reso- How does formal repetition Du Bois nance in interaction supports of Obama’s phrasing reflect (2014) cognitive processes of infer- intersubjectivity? encing and stance-taking.

To the best of my knowledge, only very few of these frameworks have been systematically applied for the explicit purpose of analysing discourse in social media from a cognitive angle. Wherever possible I will refer to such studies in the following parts of this chapter. The striking absence of cognitively inspired linguistic research of social media discourse is probably due to historical, theoretical, and methodological reasons. Indeed, a fruitful combination of discourse analysis with cognitive science has only emerged recently. This convergence is shortly addressed in the next section. 2.3.

Bringing discourse and cognition together

From a historical perspective cognitive approaches to discourse had been sleeping for a long time because cognitive science – due to the primacy of cognitivism (Bechtel, Abrahamsen and Graham 1998: 38–77; Waskan 2006: 15–35) – adopted a highly individualist and universalist perspective on language and cognitive processing up to the 1990s. By comparison, discourse analysis had always cherished a fundamentally social and functionalist view of language as a form of social and cultural practice.1 These orientations had also prevented an inspired dialogue between these two fields on the level of theory. While – following the metaphor

1

A systematic comparison of the two conceptions is presented in Langlotz (2015a: 83–107).

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of the mind as a computer – a fairly mechanistic and internalised view of information-processing used to be prominent in cognitivism, meaning-creation in discourse analysis was seen as an externalised social process that always transcends the capacities of an individual. In grossly simplified terms, meaning is fully controlled by the individual cogniser in traditional cognitive science, whereas meaning in discourse analysis is conceived as a form of social convention and the result of social-interaction that necessarily transcends individual achievement. Finally, the marriage of discourse and cognition was also hindered by methodological differences. While cognitive science had primarily favoured the measurability offered by experimental methods, discourse analysis had long been more closely allied with qualitative sociolinguistic and ethnographic methods that place the analytical control in the hands of the participant-observer or culturally-informed interactional analyst (Harré 2001: 693–695). In recent years several developments in cognitive science and discourse analysis have encouraged people from both camps to explore the fascinating interfaces between discourse and cognition more closely. Most importantly, cognitive science has changed its basic view of the cognitive processor away from the computer-metaphor to the idea of the embodied cogniser (see, e.g., Pfeifer and Bongard 2007). In accordance with the new role-model in artificial intelligence – the robot – an embodied cogniser is seen to solve everyday problems in very close physical and social interaction with the environment. For human cognisers, environments constitute culturally-constructed, historically-determined, and socially-mediated environments (Langlotz 2015a: ch. 4.1). As a consequence, the embodied view of cognition brings human cognitive activity much closer to analytical phenomena that have been traditionally scrutinised by discourse analysts. The paradigm shift towards the idea of embodiment (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; A. Clark 1997, 2008; Noë 2009) is also compatible with ideas from social constructivism, which claims that the construction of mental representations and cognitive processing are socially-distributed activities (Vygotsky and Cole 1978). Following this idea, human cognisers depend on processes of social “scaffolding” to fully exploit their cognitive capacities when creating meaning (A. Clark 1997: 45). The socially interdependent nature of human cognition has also been stressed by representatives of mediated cognition (Hutchins 1995, 2006) and situated cognition (Suchman 1987). These researchers have analysed the highly complex interactional and technological environments that pattern and mediate mindful human practices. Instead of experimental methods, these situated, mediated, and socially-distributed approaches to cognition have embraced discourse-analytical methods, most importantly conversation analysis and ethnography (see Streeck and Mehus 2005). With regard to the pragmatic analysis of social media discourse, these approaches are very interesting because social media also constitute situated, mediated, and socially-distributed communicative environments. They provide very complex arrangements of communicative tools and

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multimodal semiotic resources (pin walls, chatrooms, postings, imagery, emoticons, etc.), which structure socio-communicative processes beyond merely providing additions to verbal interaction (Eisenlauer 2013). However, it is not only within the field of cognitive science that researchers have moved more closely to discourse. In recent years, various linguists – primarily having their academic roots in cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and interpersonal pragmatics – have also become more interested in combining the cognitive underpinnings of language and discourse management with their social-interactional foundations. Based on pioneering work in cognitive and socio-cognitive linguistics (e.g., Clark 1996; Du Bois 2003; Enfield and Levinson 2006; Langacker 2001, 2008; Tomasello 1999, 2003; Van Dijk 1990, 2006a; Verhagen 2006; Zlatev 2007; Zlatev and Sinha 2008), several researchers have ventured to develop integrative models that combine concepts from cognitive science and discourse analysis (e.g., Fischer 2010; Langlotz 2010, 2015a, 2015b; Van Dijk 2014; Zima 2013; Zima and Brône 2015). Trying to overcome the research-historical divide between social practices and individual cognition, this socio-cognitive research strand has stressed the inseparability of the social and the cognitive dimensions of discourse by highlighting the joint and intersubjective nature of discursive achievements as well as the dynamic, socially-distributed nature of conceptualisation processes. In the following section, I will specify how these socio-cognitive parameters can play a decisive role in the management of social media discourse with reference to Herbert Clark’s theory of language use. The theory is taken as a baseline to carve out how the discourse-analytical tasks listed in Section 2.1 interact with the cognitive skills sketched in Section 2.2 in social media communication. 3.

The socio-cognitive dimensions of managing social media discourse

The central mystery of communication – both online and offline – resides in the fact that whenever we communicate with other people, we cannot convey or transport any meaning. Although this “conduit metaphor”, as Reddy (1979: 186) terms it, captures a common folk conception about how communication works, meaning simply cannot be encoded into words for it to be unpacked by its recipients (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 3–9). Instead, the task of managing meaning through discourse amounts to the communicators’ complex interactional task of coordinating their mental states or mutual cognitive environments (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 42) in order to create an intersubjective orientation to social, transactional, or evaluative states-of-affairs. In his seminal work Using Language (1996) Herbert Clark has proposed a socio-cognitive theory of communication. His central argument is that the creation of meaning is achieved by joint actions in which the speaker and the listener simultaneously play active roles. Therefore, acts of communication

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cannot be analysed in simplified terms as mere acts encoding and decoding predefined meanings. 3.1.

Managing common ground

For Clark language use amounts to the complex management of joint communicative actions. These actions have the purpose of establishing and advancing common ground between the communicative partners (Clark 1996: 92–121). Common ground is “the sum of [the interactors’] mutual, common, or joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions” (Clark 1996: 93), i.e. the knowledge that both communicative partners are supposed to share. Some of this knowledge – communal common ground – is presupposed by both communicative partners when they enter their interaction. Other knowledge is built up through the interlocutors’ shared history of joint engagement. This is termed personal common ground. Communal common ground describes knowledge that is shared by the members of a cultural group or community of practice (Wenger 1998). It is this mutually shared basis of expertise that defines the set of people as a community. Apart from such insider knowledge, people may also have public access to outside information about other cultural groups (Clark 1996: 101). When posting his message, Obama obviously assumed a great deal of communal ground between his audience and himself. For instance, he assumed that the recipients knew that he is the current President of the United States (POTUS) in office and that they therefore refers to the US government as an institution. Moreover, he took for granted that people could immediately link his first name Barack to his last name Obama. By contrast, personal common ground comprises interpersonal knowledge that is derived from the history of shared experiences between individuals. When tweeting the message, Obama obviously also wished to advance personal common ground between himself and the readership, namely that he has just got a presidential Twitter account. This newly established common ground between himself and his audience must be inferred from the multimodal input that is provided by his tweet. Thus, cognitively speaking, the construction of common ground is bound to cognition in the form of internal representations of knowledge. These representations are retrieved as cognitive frames from long-term memory, which comprise stable knowledge about language, cultural facts and norms (encyclopedic knowledge), typical procedures (how-to knowledge), or more personal experiences (see Section 2.2). In highly simplified terms, communication thus amounts to advancing shared states of personal common ground by exploiting the presupposed knowledge that is retrieved via communal common ground. By activating and constructing pieces of common ground, users can create internal representations of what is going on in discourse. But how can these processes of activating the frames be managed communicatively?

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3.2.

Coordination devices

Since meaning cannot be grasped physically, cognitive knowledge states can only be coordinated if communicators can rely on solid, perceptually-accessible evidence that both (or more) interactors conceptualise the world of mutual experience in a similar way. Such communicative evidence establishes an external representation of what is going on in the given interaction. Clark calls these externalised pieces of evidence coordination devices: “What coordination devices do is give the participants a rationale, a basis, for believing they and their partners will converge on the same joint action” (Clark 1996: 65, italics in the original). Coordination devices are semiotic tools to channel the participants’ mutual conceptualisation of their immediate ‘reality’ for establishing common ground (see Langlotz 2015a: 160–166). To infer and construct common ground by means of such coordination devices, cognisers must proceed incrementally (Clark 1996: 116–120). They must: 1. detect cues that can serve as evidence for common ground; 2. derive common ground by exploiting these semiotic resources; 3. establish conceptual connections by integrating old pieces of common ground with new ones, i.e. elaborate and fine-tune the joint knowledge bases. Let us use another Twitter message, Bill Clinton’s reaction to Obama’s tweet, to illustrate these concepts.

Tweet 2.

Bill Clinton’s reaction to Barack Obama’s first Twitter message

With reference to this tweet, one can point to the following coordination devices with the corresponding pieces of common ground that they can potentially trigger (Table 2):

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Table 2. Coordination devices involved in Clinton’s reaction to Obama’s first tweet coordination device

(presumed) shared basis

inference of common ground

type

message design

knowledge of this social medium

this is a tweet

communal

@billclinton @Twitter @POTUS

knowledge of discursive conventions on Twitter

these are usernames or handles

communal

#askingforafriend knowledge of discursive conventions on Twitter

this is a hashtag

communal

photo

encyclopedic knowledge about Clinton’s physical appearance

this is Bill Clinton

communal

Bill Clinton

name denotes this ­particular person

Clinton is the sender of this message

communal

Welcome to (@Twitter …)

conventional welcoming formula

sender wishes to establish contact to receiver

communal personal

one question:

linguistic knowledge, performative formula

Clinton wishes to ask Obama a question

communal personal

lexical knowledge Does that username [@POTUS] about username

Clinton signals that he has understood the meaning of the username

communal

stay with the office

encyclopedic knowledge about the maximum 8-year period in presidential office

Clinton alludes to the limited duration of Obama’s presidency

communal

Does that username stay with the office

integration of pieces of common ground

cheeky allusion that Obama might lose the account again soon

personal

#askingforafriend linguistic knowledge

personal jocular allusion to the fact that this is a question for a particular “friend” that both Clinton and Obama only know too well – Hillary Clinton, of course.

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Note that the conceptualisations associated with these pieces of common ground implement all the dimensions of the ideational, interpersonal (including their affective dimensions), and textual metafunctions of discourse (1) – (3). Clinton reacts to Obama’s attempt at sharing his new experience with the world of Twitter and does so in a strikingly jocular and informal manner in order to establish a strong interpersonal sense of proximity to Obama. His affective stance can thus presuppose to align him with the President on a hierarchical level of social equality and friendship. 3.3.

Signalling methods employed in meaning coordination

As becomes obvious in Table 2, an array of multimodal coordination devices can be employed by users of social media even within the scope of a very short tweet. Clark’s notion of coordination device is compatible with this semiotic characteristic of social media communication, because it replaces the classical model of the linguistic sign with the more dynamic notion of signalling (Clark 1996: 155– 189). He proposes that instead of just employing linguistic symbols as vehicles for encoding and decoding conventional semantic content, a “signal is really the presentation of a sign by one person to mean something for another” (Clark 1996: 160, italics in the original). Signalling in communication consists of a mixture of three methods of constructing and using coordination devices for joint communicative action: “describing-as, indicating and demonstrating” (Clark 1996: 188). The three methods of signalling are related to Peirce’s (1977) tripartite model of the sign in terms of icons, indexes, and symbols. Icons, such as pictograms, resemble their referents perceptually. Indexes are physically connected with their referents. For instance, smoke points to fire. Finally, symbols, such as linguistic symbols or traffic signs, constitute purely artificial signs which are associated with their referents by convention. Clark (1996: 160) proposes that communicators use the three methods of signalling to create such signs for their recipients. This can be nicely illustrated on the basis of the two tweets. When demonstrating a thing to the communicative partner, the speaker relies on or creates an icon. Thus, Obama and Clinton used a picture of themselves to demonstrate their identity. Obama also relied on the strategy of indicating; when using the explanation marks in his posting, he employed an index that directs the readers to his state of excitement. Finally, when formulating their messages, both interlocutors also relied on linguistic symbols to describe the new state-of-affairs as well as the question, respectively. In communicative activities, users combine the different signalling strategies to produce complex composite signals: “In language use, indicating is usually combined with describing or demonstrating” (Clark 1996: 168). Both tweets also feature such complex composite signals. For instance, in Obama’s tweet the image is combined with the name President Obama and the username or handle

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@POTUS. These elements describe, demonstrate, and indicate social information about their prominent user. The name verbally underlines the personal identity that is demonstrated by the image, whereas the handle indicates the role of the user in the form of an acronym for President Of The United States. In the text, Obama further describes his personal identity by using his first name Barack. By means of these different methods of signalling social information, he can channel the construction of his self-presentation by evoking both communal and personal common ground in his followers’ minds. This obviously worked for Bill Clinton as is evidenced by his answer. 3.4.

Grounding communicative behaviour through joint actions

As the different signalling methods indicate, the discursive management of common ground does not merely apply to the content of what is said but also to the complex semiotic actions involved in how the speaker says it. As Brennan states: “To communicate successfully, two people need to coordinate not only the content of what they say, but also the process of saying it” (Brennan 1998: 201). When producing communicative actions, speakers must therefore monitor whether their communicative partners have established common ground and whether the procedure of using the specific coordination devices has been successful in doing so. This socio-communicative process of managing common-ground construction is called grounding: “people try to ground what they do together. To ground a thing, […], is to establish it as part of common ground […]” (Clark 1996: 221, italics in the original). Grounding works through the interactors’ mutual engagement in joint actions: “A joint action is one that is carried out by an ensemble of people acting in coordination with each other. As simple examples think of two people waltzing, paddling a canoe, playing a piano duet, or making love” (Clark 1996: 3). Clark’s idea of joint action is fully compatible with the situated and praxeological view of cognition developed in conversation analysis (Mondada 2006). From this perspective, the sequential arrangement of interactions into turns as well as the construction of these turns for the management of the interactors’ joint orientation to the ongoing conversational activity is the basis for guaranteeing intersubjective understanding. According to Clark (1996: 148–153), joint communicative actions feature a very complex participatory structure organised along four interdependent levels as depicted in Table 3. Levels 1 and 2 involve the production of an utterance by producing composite signals with the three different methods of signalling sketched above. The speaker executes a behaviour to which the listener attends. The behaviour has the purpose of presenting coordination devices to the listener, which they must try to identify correctly. With reference to Obama’s tweet this involves the President’s writing and posting of the message and the followers’ reception of it. These levels of

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Table 3. Joint communicative actions Level

Speaker A’s actions

Addressee B’s actions

4

A is proposing joint project w to B

B is considering A’s proposal of w

3

A is signalling that p for B

B is recognizing that p from A

2

A is presenting signal s to B

B is identifying signal s from A

1

A is executing behaviour t for B

B is attending to behaviour t from A

communicative work thus correspond to the dimensions (Ai), (Aii) and (Bi) in our overview of cognitive skills and to the textual function (2) involved in discourse-management. Note, however, that Clark regards execution/attention and presentation/identification as socially-distributed joint actions: speaker’s must capture the listener’s attention when producing an utterance and listeners must orient to the semiotic activities of the speaker and take on the perspective of the speaker when interpreting an utterance (see also Langlotz 2015a: 168–169). Levels 3 and 4 also constitute complex joint actions. Level 3 involves the speaker’s informative intention and its recognition by the addressee. With his posting Obama primarily wished to communicate that he is now a member of the Twitter community. For communication this level is the most decisive one because it involves the listener’s adaptation of his or her mental state for the construction of common ground (Clark 1996: 139). With regard to the cognitive skills and discursive tasks, level 3 thus corresponds to the dimensions (Bii) and (Ci), and the realisation of the ideational (1) and interpersonal functions (3). Through this process of cognitive adaptation, the addressee is invited to consider a joint communicative project, which is proposed by the speaker (Level 4). The readers of Obama’s tweet are invited to engage with Obama’s representation of the new state of affairs and engage with Obama’s message by reacting to it. Cognitively speaking, they can further scrutinise the message (Cii) and take an affective stance towards it (Ciii). Ideally, these cognitive and affective changes may lead to taking up the proposed joint project and to the recipient’s writing a response. But how could Barack Obama assume that his communicative move actually succeeded in triggering the participatory actions and the corresponding cognitive activities that are necessary for sharing common ground with his potential audience? How do we know that his communicative project was sufficiently grounded? For grounding to become successful, joint actions must obey the principle of closure: Principle of closure. Agents performing an action require evidence, sufficient for current purposes, that they have succeeded in performing it. (Clark 1996: 222)

Two further complementary principles make it possible for the communicative partners to obtain explicit evidence on the success of their joint convergence on

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common ground: the principle of upward completion and the principle of downward evidence. Upward completion. In a ladder of actions, it is only possible to complete actions from the bottom level up through any level in the ladder. (Clark 1996: 147) Downward evidence. In a ladder of actions, evidence that one level is complete is also evidence that all levels below it are complete. (Clark 1996: 148)

We have already described how Obama’s tweet incrementally completes the four levels of speaker’s actions to communicate his informative intention: ‘I wish to share my excitement about being on Twitter with you!’ However, the President cannot be certain that his potential followers have actually understood this meaning before he receives any direct positive evidence of their recognition of his intention and their willingness to take up the joint communicative project (Clark 1996: 222). Such an evidence is reflected in Bill Clinton’s reaction to Obama’s tweet. With his own tweet, Clinton orients back to Obama’s message by welcoming him to Twitter. By replying to Barack, the former POTUS takes up the joint project proposed by the current president (Level 4). This provides Obama with positive evidence that his attempt at establishing personal common ground with this particular user of Twitter actually succeeded. An addressee’s uptake provides the most powerful direct evidence of joint closure because it also entails evidence that all the lower levels of the joint action-ladder have also been completed successfully. More concretely, Clinton reacts to two pieces of common ground a) Obama’s gesture of addressing the Twitter community as a new member, and b) Obama’s new official username or handle @POTUS. Thus, by reacting to these two pieces of information, Clinton indicates that he has understood Obama’s move in a way that was probably intended by him. Following the principle of downward evidence, Clinton also shows that he successfully attended to the corresponding signals (Level 1), positively identified them (Level 2), and recognised Barack’s purpose in producing them (Level 4). In line with the concept of grounding, Clinton’s reply thus signals to Obama explicitly that he has grounded what Obama wished to achieve. The recipients themselves have to actively signal their understanding of what is being said to them. Coordination devices thus play a double role. On the one hand, they must serve as appropriate tools for triggering the speaker’s message: I am using these signals to communicate something to you. On the other hand, the cues must also serve as appropriate vehicles for signalling that the speaker’s message has been successfully processed by the listener. This double function of communicative signals creates what Clark (1996: 241) terms “two parallel tracks of actions” as illustrated in Figure 3. On track 1 the actual content of what is communicated has to be derived and negotiated by the speaker and the hearer, whereas on track 2, the speaker and the hearer have to adopt a meta-communicative stance to control the functionality of

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the coordinated actions that are employed to guarantee the joint alignment of their shared conceptualisations. In this light, it is interesting to note that Clinton does not only react to Obama’s communicative move, but he also mockingly addresses the signals that Barack uses for establishing common ground with his audience on Twitter. His question: Does that username stay with the office? implies a very cheeky and teasing meta-commentary on Obama’s tweet. On track 2, he reacts to Obama’s central identificatory signal on Twitter: the handle @POTUS. Indirectly, this question also makes fun of the President’s own comment (on track 1) on his rather late joining of Twitter. Since the American presidency can only last a maximum period of eight years – a piece of communal common ground that can obviously be presupposed by Clinton –, it seems evident that Obama will only be able to use the handle @POTUS for the rather short period of another one-and-a-half years. Clinton’s seemingly innocent question about one of Obama’s most important coordination devices thus also provides good evidence that Clinton actively observed the signalling strategies that Obama employed for executing and presenting his message. Clinton’s question-as-meta-comment shifts the communicative activity from welcoming to jocular banter between friends. Clinton underlines his tease by using the hashtag #askingforafriend.

Figure 3. Two tracks for communicative actions (based on Clark 1996: 241)

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Socio-cognitive affordances and limitations of social media

From the socio-cognitive perspective articulated above, one can now ask how the specific communicative features of social media afford and constrain (see Section 2.2.) social and cognitive processes of sense-making online. In several approaches to discourse – most notably conversation analysis – spoken, face-toface talk-in-interaction is conceived as the most natural and primordial site for linguistic and social activity (Drew 2005: 74; Schegloff 1996; see also Bublitz 2013: 29). A similar stance is also adopted by Clark, who developed his socio-cognitive model of discourse primarily – but by no means exclusively – with a focus on conversational settings (Clark 1996: 8–9). With reference to an earlier study by Clark and Brennan (1991), he defines the discursive parameters of “natural settings” as follows and groups them into immediacy (features 1–4), medium (features 5–7), and control (features 8–10) features: Table 4.

Communicative features of face-to-face conversation

1 2 3 4

Copresence Visibility Audibility Instantaneity

The participants share the same physical environment. The participants can see each other. The participants can hear each other. The participants perceive each other’s actions at no perceptible delay.

5 6 7

Evanescence Recordlessness Simultaneity

The medium is evanescent – it fades quickly. The participant’s actions leave no record or artifact. The participants can produce and receive at once and simultaneously.

8

Extemporaneity

9

Self-determination

10

Self-expression

The participants formulate and execute their actions extemporaneously, in real time. The participants determine for themselves what actions to take when. The participants take actions themselves.

As Goodwin’s (2007: 56) interactional research in the field of situated and embodied cognition shows, interactors actively construct joint attention through “embodied participation frameworks.” In such frameworks, gestures and physical behaviours such as bodily stance-taking, postures or pointing are intertwined with joint sense-making processes. Moreover, these embodied actions are “environmentally coupled” with material resources that are jointly used for problem-solving (Goodwin 2007: 63). Through these embodied practices interactors can literally demonstrate their instrumental, epistemic, cooperative, moral, and affective stances (Goodwin 2007: 70). In other words, they can demonstrate which tools they actively use for solving a problem, how they use these tools, what their cog-

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nitive orientation to the problem at hand is, to what extent they actually cooperate, as well as what their attitudes and emotions towards the issue at hand is. All of these complex dimensions are accessible to the interlocutors’ direct observation. As a result, facets of meaning can directly be seen in the interlocutors’ behaviours. They do not have to be inferred through internalised and effortful mental processes (see also A. Clark 1997: 180). From this perspective of cognition-in-interaction, social media display various features, which differ strikingly from the embodied arrangements of face-to-face cooperation. It is well known that social media are often conceived as a “diminished form of face to face conversation” (Baym 2010: 51). While this negative evaluation is obviously not shared by the many users of online communication platforms, it is nevertheless the case that some of the parameters of situated and embodied cognitive processing through joint action are radically affected by social media. The parameters from Table 4 can be taken as a point of departure to highlight the main features of Twitter in comparison (see Table 5): Table 5.

Communicative features of Twitter

1

Virtual presence

2 3 4

Non-visibility Readability Non-instantaneity

5 6

Permanence Storage and replicability

7

Asynchronicity

8

Distribution and fragmentation

9

Planning

10

Partial self-determination

11

Guided self-expression

The participants share the same electronic communication platform as a communicative environment. The participants cannot see each other. The participants can read each other’s contributions. The participants perceive each other’s actions with a (sometimes considerable) temporal delay. The medium is permanent. The participant’s actions leave a record – a permanent trace – on the platform. These traces can be referred to or recycled by other users. Simultaneity is considerably reduced on Twitter. The reaction to and exchange of messages may occur with a considerable time lapse. The interlocutors’ actions become spatially distributed throughout the medium. However, actions by specific users and particular topics can be followed via handles and hashtags. The participants can formulate their contributions with deliberation and consideration. The participants determine for themselves what actions to take when, but they cannot control when and how their communicative moves are taken up. While the participants take actions themselves, their freedom is constrained by the features of the communication platform.

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Extended reach

13

Mobility

367

The users can address many more users than the people present in their physical context. But they can only partially control their readership. The users of Twitter can reach one another anytime and anywhere.

As can be seen from this sketch, Twitter has new communicative affordances, but it also limits communicative interactions in striking ways. What consequences may these differences have on the socio-cognitive dynamics of sense-making sketched in the Section 3? 4.1.

Affordances and constraints on joint actions in social media

The characteristics of Twitter have a direct effect on the management of joint actions. Due to its non-instantaneous and non-simultaneous nature, the joint character of the coordinated actions along the four levels of Clark’s action-laddermodel is considerably reduced. While the communicative partners can mutually control and monitor the performance of each other’s participatory actions at each singular level in face-to-face conversations (Richardson, Dale and Kirkham 2007), they can only orient to the products of their communicative actions online. For instance, readers of Obama’s Twitter message can only participate in his communicative move once they have actually detected and read the message. But they cannot immediately react to the ways the writer is executing or presenting it. Moreover, the producer of a message does not have access to any evidence of whether the recipient has understood his communicative intention and considered the proposed communicative project before he/she has received a reaction by the addressee in the form of a communicative response (a reply in the form of another tweet). Along these lines, the diverse uptake of Obama’s tweet is only evidenced by the many reactions that the tweet received on the Twitter platform (https:// twitter.com/potus). However, these reactions do not all appear right after Obama’s move. Rather they are spatially distributed as a long strand of reactions that also include reactions to these reactions. This fragmentation of the communicative take-up of a tweet disrupts the sequential arrangement of communicative moves that is typical of face-to-face interaction (Drew 2005: 89–94). To capture joint communicative actions on Twitter, Clark’s model must therefore be adapted by separating the producer’s and the addressee’s participatory actions (see Table 6). Moreover, due to the extended reach of social media, it is not always clear to whom a message is actually addressed. As a consequence the dyadic structure of a face-to-face conversation is broken up (Bublitz 2013: 30–34) and the participant roles are decomposed (Hoffmann 2012: 63). Obama’s message was addressed to the entire Twitter-community, which massively increased the range of its potential readership. (@POTUS currently has more than 6 million followers).

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Table 6.

Joint communicative actions in Twitter Producer A’s actions

Addressee X’s actions

4

A is proposing joint project w to X

X is considering A’s proposal of w

3

A is signalling that p for X

2

A is planning and writing a ­message m for X

1

A is planning a message m for X

Spatio-temporal ­separation of “joint” actions

Level

X is recognizing that p from A X is detecting and reading the message m from A X is detecting and reading the message m from A

In the action-ladder model the addressee must therefore be labelled as a potentially indefinite X (see Table 6). This different setup of joint communicative actions on Twitter has cognitive consequences for the producers and receivers of messages. In the absence of any direct feedback, the producer has to carefully design the tweet to create intersubjectivity with the desired audience through the carefully planned use of coordination devices. This demands considerable cognitive effort. Moreover, due to the record left on the platform, the producer cannot easily self-repair what he or she has said. This becomes apparent in Obama’s careful formulation of his tweet as discussed above. When anticipating the shared bases of presupposed knowledge in the absence of an interlocutor, the social-psychological principle of valuing ‘me and mine’ over ‘them and theirs’ works as a very strong driving force (Smith and Mackie 2000: 16–17). Following Clark (1996: 111), communicators derive a feeling of what others know (feeling of others’ knowing) from what they know themselves (feeling of knowing). This may lead to a false consensus effect, i.e. an overinterpretation of common ground shared by a ‘me’ and a given ‘other’. This effect is reflected in some reactions to Obama’s post:

Tweets 3 and 4. Unclear reactions to Obama’s post

While these replies indicate an uptake of the President’s tweet, they obviously do not attempt to provide any evidence to the President that his communicative intention has been recognised. This lack of control over the recipients’ communicative

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cooperation constitutes one of the central socio-cognitive limitations of managing joint communicative projects via this social medium. While the split-up of joint socio-cognitive coordination in the action-ladder liberates the recipient and gives him/her more personal control over his/her engagement with particular messages, the complementarity of participant-roles in natural conversation (Langlotz 2015a: 169) is potentially – but not necessarily – eroded. This is clearly reflected in the following post by DOPE Magazine, which deliberately reinterprets the handle @POTUS as a reference to marihuana:

Tweet 5.

Pot for us!

Van Dijk (2006b) stresses the cognitive dimension that underlies the construction of such shifts of communicative context: “[…] contexts are […] subjective participant interpretations, constructions or definitions of […] aspects of the social environment” (Van Dijk 2006b: 163; italics in the original). The cogniser works as the mediating link between situational and social norms and their actual effect on the production of discursive behaviour. The interpretative act of perceiving and mentally constructing a given situation as being of type X makes it possible for us to relate to contextual parameters in a purposeful way. Accordingly, context models are the interlocutors’ mental models of a communicative situation. The categorisation of what the situation is about provides a cognitive frame relative to which discursive choices can be planned: “context models ongoingly control discourse production and understanding. That is, they are not fixed, but flexible and dynamic and ongoingly adapt themselves to the situation, to what has been said before, to changes of plan, and so on” (Van Dijk 2006b: 171). Van Djik highlights cognitive conceptualisation processes as the actual medium for controlling “ways of speaking” (Van Dijk 2006b: 171). In DOPE Magazine’s uptake of Obama’s handle @POTUS we can see a radical shift in the contextual meaning of the coordination device. The meaning of @POTUS shifts from the concept of ‘presidency’ to the idea of ‘drug consumption’. This recontextualisation also channels a shift of speech activity from ‘presidential greeting’ to ‘Obama campaigning for marihuana’. Due to the highly distributed and fragmented nature of Twitter, producers of messages can hardly repair such adversive recontextualisations of their communicative intentions. This shows how the construction of social-psychological categories such as the ‘image of the President of the United States’ become socially-distributed achievements for which the producer’s discursive control over the entire sense-making process is strikingly reduced. From

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a socio-cognitive perspective, this may explain the feelings of social anxiety and the experiences socioemotional stress that are reported in psychological studies on social media (see Section 1). 4.2.

Constraints and affordances on signalling through Twitter

In his critical discussion of the limiting factors of the social networking site Facebook (Fb), Eisenlauer (2013: 99) shows how: “the specific functional properties of the Fb platform condition the semiotic choices of a Fb participant”. While affording the upload of images, videos, and other iconic tools to demonstrate – following Clark’s terminology – personal experiences and opinions, the technical environment further causes people to report a feeling of loss of control “over the textual self-presentation” (Eisenlauer 2013: 201). As Bublitz (2013: 40–41) argues with reference to Eisenlauer, the technological templates offered by social media premediate the creation of composite signals and therefore strongly intervene with the users’ freedom of self-expression as if the media acted as ‘third authors’. This critical stance towards constrained signalling is aligned with the impersonal view of online communication that was already developed in the early phases of CMC. Due to the absence of important social signalling methods like nonverbal gestures, facial expressions, voice and accent, the semiotic affordances for generating a sense of an authentic and personal social presence are rather poor in cyberspace. This cues-filtered-out-approach was introduced in the 1980s (Culnan and Markus 1987) with reference to the social psychological social presence theory (Short et al. 1976) and the social context cues theory (Sproull and Kiesler 1976). From a socio-cognitive perspective, the cues-filtered-out-approach implies that recipients cannot find enough bases for coordinating social information with their virtual interlocutors. Hence, the limited number of cues prevents them from activating frames for social and normative knowledge that would allow them to sufficiently conceptualise their social presence as well as the social context of the given communicative activity. As Wood and Smith (2005: 82) state “[…] the short supply of social context cues can create perceptions of impersonal replies and impersonal interpretations of messages”. The same ideas can also be applied to Twitter. A tweet consists of a limit of 140 characters and contains options for uploading photos or embedding videos. Features like handles and hashtags are also characteristic of this type of electronic message. With regard to signalling, tweeters can thus potentially exploit all the signalling strategies outlined in Section 3.3. However, their freedom of semiotic activity only operates within the systemic limits. This has caused some users to give expert advice on how tweets should be optimally constructed as small-text types (http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/structure-perfect-tweet). The active search for optimal signalling strategies on Twitter is compatible with the social identification/deindividuation (SIDE) model developed by Postmes,

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Spears and Lea (1998). This model suggests that people may overcome the restrictions of computer-mediated signalling. To compensate for the lack of social context cues users may create a new sense of community and norm by developing novel, socially-accepted behavioural patterns. Interestingly, Twitter is also termed Twitterverse by its users (see: https://twitter.com/hashtag/twitterverse). The very existence of this name points to the communal common ground shared by Twitter users. For them this platform constitutes a discursive environment with its very own semiotic characteristics and discursive norms. These patterns are based on conventionalised, but platform-specific interactional styles (Wood and Smith 2005: 82). From a socio-cognitive perspective, the SIDE-model therefore implies that Twitter users must develop specialised frames for semiotically managing the activity type (Levinson 1992: 69) called ‘tweeting’. Hence, interpersonal engagement is of great importance in the SIDE model because the communication of common ground is essential to sustain relational ties. For people not sharing these group-specific communicative norms this may have negative social and cognitive consequences. On the one hand, they may be excluded from the community, on the other hand, the community may actively prevent them from developing enough communal common ground to become an accepted member of the platform. Such norm-imposing, excluding moves can also be seen in some adversive reactions to Obama’s tweet:

Tweets 6 and 7. Rejection of Obama’s tweets due to group-internal norms

Here Obama’s act of signalling his presence on Twitter is explicitly contested. Obama’s suggested concept of ‘US president as Twitter friend’ may clearly run counter to the social identification of some users with the Twitter community. Thus, instead of incorporating the President through a platform-specific process of deindividuation, the commentators in tweets 6 and 7 clearly individuate the President’s posting to harshly demarcate it as running counter to the signalling norms of the community.

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4.3.

Social and cognitive consequences of grounding via Twitter

Due to the extended reach of social media, their non-instantaneous nature as well as the readability, permanence and replicability of the recorded communicative traces, the producer of an online message cannot fully control the construction of common ground. But the restrictions for grounding on Twitter and other social media may also lead to more positive socio-cognitive effects. Such effects are addressed by the concept of hyperpersonal communication as introduced by Walther (1996; see also Walther 2007). Running counter to the cues-filtered-out theory, this view claims that due to the better control and the arrangement of signals online, users may overcome the social pressures of co-presence and feel more liberated when it comes to presenting themselves. This effect also becomes visible in Obama’s tweet which is considerably less formal than other addresses issued by the President. It can be assumed that the discursive environment of Twitter with its flat social hierarchies gave Obama the liberty of formulating his message rather informally. This more controlled and deliberate self-presentation may further cause recipients to exaggerate the positive qualities of their communicative partners and thus trigger hyperpositive feedback. Again, the same effect can be seen in reactions to Obama whose informal welcome to the Twitter community led to equally informal responses that would seem rather unlikely in a face-to-face encounter with the President.

Tweet 8.

Love eyes

The love-eyed smiley in this tweet clearly goes beyond the level of intimacy that may have been desired by Obama in his self-presentation to the community. As this and the other examples discussed suggest, hyperpersonal attempts at establishing common ground online have direct consequences on interpersonal conceptualisation processes. The construction of common ground on Twitter has cognitive as well as social repercussions. Since producers have to presuppose communal common ground between themselves and their audience when writing a message, they naturally imply a certain degree of familiarity or distance to their addressees through how they formulate their message – “style is the relationship” as Sperber and Wilson (1995: 217) put it. Tweeters expect that the used coordination devices are sufficient for the recipient to activate the necessary knowledge chunks from long-term memory and to recognise the content and purpose of the message. According to Enfield (2006: 422): “the practices by which we manage and exploit common ground in interaction demonstrate a particular commitment to particular relationships and particular communities”. This is apparent in Obama’s tweet, which expects a con-

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siderable amount of knowledge about him as a person and thus suggests interpersonal familiarity. Thus, the more communal and personal common ground two interactors share, the more likely their practices are to converge around the construction of common ground. This has become most obvious in Bill Clinton’s reaction to Obama’s tweet. He advanced personal common ground between himself and Obama by means of his cheeky tease. In teasing Obama, he demonstrated a very high degree of personal common ground and intimacy. Barack Obama himself replied to Clinton in the following interesting manner, which can be regarded as a form of creative hyperpersonal identity construction (Langlotz 2015b):

Tweet 9.

Obama’s reply to Clinton

Obama creatively exploits the semiotic affordances and peculiarities of the medium to strike back against Clinton’s tease. He ambiguates the word handle to mean both ‘username’ and ‘door handle’. So when Obama leaves the White House, he will also have to abandon the Twitter handle. But there is another Twitter handle: @FLOTUS, which is used by the First Lady Of The United States. It is well known that Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary, had already been campaigning for the US presidency when Obama and Clinton posted their tweets. Obama’s question about @FLOTUS is thus directly, but implicitly, addressed at Bill Clinton, who could indeed become the future First ‘Lady’. Obama’s allusion is funny and mean at the same time. He makes fun of Clinton by engaging in a little transgender mockery. He symbolically emasculates the former president and thus trumps (Veale et al. 2006: 312) Clinton’s previous tease. Moreover, he may make fun of the fact that the US constituency does not have a name for the male partner of a female president because Hillary would indeed be the first female leader of America. Thus, Obama communicates both on Track 1 and on Track 2 of communicative signalling. His allusion to @FLOTUS is both a meta-commentary on the specific Twitter-handle and a cheeky remark to Clinton becoming the First Lady. Hence, this example demonstrates that close convergence and social creativity are possible even within the restricted semiotic space offered by a tweet. This construction,

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however, demands the activation of a great deal of presupposed common ground and the clever exploitation of coordination devices that are explicitly designed for the take-up by a specific addressee. Moreover, the sequentiality of the tweets must be mutually traced by the interactors and controlled by both of them. 5. Conclusion Social media, discourse and cognition co-determine one another through tripartite reciprocal adaptation (see Figure 1). Users must be able to adapt their socio-cognitive skills and processes to the affordances and limitations of the social medium. The medium is itself designed for managing specific discursive tasks and for different types of information. This design is then exploited to the extent that this is afforded by the users’ socio-cognitive skills and dispositions. Most importantly, they must recruit chunks of conceptual knowledge from their long-term memories for the construction of common ground with their communicative partners. This knowledge involves both the content of messages as well as the processes of jointly managing the sense-making process. The chapter has surveyed some of the socio-cognitive opportunities and challenges that emerge for Twitter-users. While Twitter certainly enables the joint construction of shared situated conceptualisations, the brevity of tweets and the absence of bodily signalling methods, the spatio-temporal separation as well as the fragmentation of the sequentiality of joint actions undermine the embodied nature of face-to-face interaction. This communicative disembodiment is also accompanied with a cognitive disembodiment. Instead of orienting to their interlocutors’ subtle actions of jointly coordinating common ground, Twitter-users must press out meaning from the semiotic space that is afforded by the medium. The reduction of socio-cognitive coordination puts more load on internalised and individual sense-making processes because a great deal of communal and personal common ground has to be activated and mentally constructed to make sense of tweets. Internalised processing is likely to be increased because the control over the joint-meaning construction is lowered both for the producers and the recipients of tweets. This higher degree of socio-cognitive disembodiment may explain the positive and the negative cognitive and socio-emotional effects reported in psychological studies: the increase of working memory and spelling abilities, information overload, and a reduced feeling of socio-emotional well-being that may be accompanied by social anxiety. This said, very little is actually known about the socio-cognitive dynamics of social-media-communication. This is primarily due to the fact that embodied, socio-cognitive studies of discourse processing have only emerged recently. In the future, the potential of socio-cognitive linguistics has yet to be fully developed both with regard to offline and online communication.

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14. Discourse and ideology Stephen Pihlaja and Andreas Musolff Abstract: This chapter focuses on the manifestation of ideology in social media interaction, both in explicit contestation and in implicit frameworks. Following a discussion of the key concepts of ideology and discourse, several exemplary studies are presented that show how ideology can be investigated in different ways and on different scales, from looking at blogs and forums, where ideologies are the explicit topics of research, to trolling on Twitter, where ideology is enacted in the way users respond to specific users and topics. Finally, we discuss key methodological issues and controversies in the study of ideology in social media. 1. Introduction Social media is diverse. What you present about yourself differs drastically depending on the site or platform. You’re unlikely to use YouTube in the same way that you use Facebook because the different sites serve different purposes for you, and both have specific elements which are suited for different kinds of interaction. When we speak of ideology in social media, we might think of political memes shared on Facebook walls or offensive, racist tweets. There are, of course, important examples of such ideologies being displayed online, but there are also more subtle instances of ideologies that impact on social media discourse. If you want only your friends to see a video of your child learning their first words, you might put that video on Facebook and protect the post so that only your friends can see it. Alternatively, if you think the video has the chance of going viral, thus providing you with minor Internet celebrity status, you might post the video on YouTube. In either of the choices you make, there are ideological issues to be examined. The choices you make will likely say something about the way you see the world and how you think it should be. Social media and online contexts also provide the chance for people to meet and engage with like-minded individuals that might be absent in their close physical proximity, such as atheists in America who might not know any other ‘out’ or self-described atheists in their day-to-day life (Cimino and Smith 2014). This ability to meet and connect with others can lead to movements that challenge dominant ideological positions, as users interact in spaces that allow for more diversity. At the same time, as spaces for dissent grow and become influential, voices from dominant ideologies (both in the positions of individual users and corporations) can begin to assert influence and create conflict. DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-014 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 381–403. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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This chapter focuses on how issues of ideology are present in social media interaction, both when they are explicitly contested and in the implicit ideological frameworks that the platforms are built on. The aim is to highlight several central issues in ideology and social media. We will look at the role of complex performance of ideologies, how ideologies are voiced online, how users come to consensus, the role of fluid identities in online places, and the effects of constant interaction on the development of ideologies. The chapter will offer some important framing questions and guidance for how to think about the role of ideology in the construction and use of social media platforms. The first section introduces the key concepts of ideology and discourse, followed by a sketch of the historical background to research on social media and language. We then describe several exemplary studies of ideology online, showing how ideology can be investigated in different ways and on different scales, from looking at blogs and forums, where ideologies are the explicit topics of research, to trolling on Twitter, where ideology is enacted in the way users respond to specific users and topics. Finally, we introduce some key methodological issues in the study of ideology in social media and discuss some key critical issues and controversies. 2.

Ideology and discourse

The concept of ideology remains contested, oscillating between pre- and post-Marxist definitions, which usually focus on unequal power-relationships, and reformulations such as the basis of any kind of social “representations shared among a group” (van Dijk 1998: 8; see also Eagleton 2007; Fairclough 1989; Laclau and Mouffe 1989) and the sub-concept of ideologies of language use, i.e., norms and presuppositions about how to communicate ‘properly’ (Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity 1998; Verschueren 2012). The latter may not even be recognised by their users as ‘ideological’ but reveal their socio-political force in conflict, when they are explicitly contested and invested by their users with normatively loaded interpretations. Ideology in this perspective can be defined as a set of evaluative beliefs and attitudes regarding socially relevant topics, including language itself, which is constructed in the process of discourse as the social production of meaning (Halliday 1978). The emphasis is then on the discursive production of ideology rather than on its cognitive (or “socio-cognitive”) aspect as highlighted by van Dijk (1998, 2016), which seems to presuppose pre-established shared concepts such as “capitalism” and proceeds to analyze and categorize their discursive manifestations, for example, “polarization” and “positive self-descriptions and negative other-descriptions” (van Dijk 2016: 67–77). The seeming objectivity of such an approach is undercut by the pre-conceived identification of “dominant” and “dominated groups”, which reinstates by the backdoor a vaguely “emancipatory” bias, in which polemical discourse strategies such as “othering” or de-legitimization of

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an out-group are criticized if practiced by “dominant” groups and legitimized as “resistant” when practiced by “dominated” ones (van Dijk 2016: 77–82). Instead we take the view that power-relationships implicit in ideologies are in fact established and renegotiated in and through discourse and that all discourse aspects that serve to convey interactional, socio-politically and ethically evaluative messages can be characterized as ideological. The ‘sharing’ of socially evaluative beliefs and attitudes is itself the product, not the pre-condition of ideology in discourse. In social media, ideologically loaded discourse can most easily be found in explicitly politicised text types, such as discussion forums and blogs, but also manifests itself in the meta-communicative commenting of each other’s contributions in the community of users. One oft-commented example is the correction of other participants’ spelling mistakes, which establishes interactional relationships of power and authority among each other (see Crystal 2011: 61–63; Harris and Hiltunen 2014; Markman 2010). Comments can also express stances on politeness rules (‘netiquette’), rules of addressing and quoting, dialect vs. standard varieties, multilingualism and many more issues. Insofar as such language-focused norms are highlighted and debated as conceptual-evaluative systems in their own right, they constitute ‘language ideologies’ that can also impact strongly on debates about other ideological contents (Verschueren 2012: 21–50). The public debate on immigration conducted on the BBC’s popular Have Your Say website, for instance, provides a forum not just for vigorous argumentation about the effect of mass immigration into Britain but also gives an insight into one of the rarely explicitly spelt-out negative assumptions about multilingualism, such as the contention that one’s home culture is threatened by any evidence of other languages being used ‘in our streets’ or by learning ‘more than one language’ or the public purse ‘wasting money’ on translation/interpreting services (BBC 2010a-c). The analysis of such computer-mediated communication (CMC) data helps to uncover folk-linguistic attitudes and trends that are hidden from or even officially denied in the ‘mainstream’ public discussion of contentious topics such as migration because they are deemed taboo or at least unfashionable. Computer-based social media has changed fundamentally the way the established print media and electronic media function. It has become inconceivable for any press organ or broadcaster not to have their own Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as forums for interactive user-participation, which can also be cross-posted on other forums or blogs (Berker et al. 2005). Some forms of highly topical and contentious news reporting, e.g. crisis news, have been directly affected by the need to include emerging and ongoing social media coverage as part of the news event itself and consumers’ reactions to it (Belair-Gagnon 2015). This ‘feedback loop’ between news reporting commenting and re-commenting has forced but also re-empowered powerful media institutions such as the BBC to reformulate their ideological stance as the ‘normal’ consensus of the public. In a sense, the so-called ‘traditional’ media and their ideologies have become partly ‘socialised’ themselves.

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Social Media

Among other things, social media is about producing and consuming content and therefore has consequences for the concept of ideology as continuous, dynamic, and variable emergence in discourse patterns. Whether on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, users engage videos, status updates, photos in a way that promotes ideologies they align with and those with which they disagree.1 The obvious examples come to mind quickly: the obnoxious politician spewing racist rhetoric in 140 characters on Twitter or an ‘inspirational’ message on Facebook that assumes a particular religious ideology. These examples are certainly interesting in terms of the ideologies they embody, but we should also think beyond the explicit displays of ideology, and consider how all interaction is influenced by and evidences users’ ideological positions. Before investigating ideology as it relates to interaction on social media, we need to discuss how the media platforms themselves are created from particular ideological positions and have, embedded in them, certain ideological assumptions. Marwick (2013) shows how radical ideologies present in early Web 2.0 culture became in many ways subsumed in the rise of social media. While originally driven by principles of community and sharing, social media has become more about the commodification of social interaction online, where ‘sharing’ becomes a means for apps and platforms to benefit from the expression of their users. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, describes this commodification of interaction in an interview with Wired magazine: Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now. (Vogelstein 2009)

Zuckerberg’s use of the language of commodity is instructive as we think about how social technology platforms are produced and the ideology that underpins these platforms. If users are seen as ‘building identities’ around self-promotion and image, how that interaction is curated by the site or platform will reflect that ideology. The statement suggests the company does not only see the site as a community of users, but rather as individuals looking to get ahead socially. The activities of ‘liking’, ‘commenting’ and ‘sharing’ of Facebook entries and to pick up supposedly ‘trending’ posts and videos are understood as self-advertising or even competitive moves in a virtual market. For the average user of social media, however, commodification is not explicitly present beyond ads appearing on the sites they visit. Instead, interaction with 1



For Facebook see also Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this volume, for Twitter Zappavigna, Ch. 8, this volume, and for YouTube Johannson, Ch. 7, this volume.

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others is dictated by a complex set of assumptions about what is and isn’t appropriate in certain online environments. These assumptions and practices lead to a diverse range of interactions on different sites. Within these different sites for engagement, there are then different ways in which ideology is present. Ideology is enacted in different ways on different sites, depending on the affordances the technology provides and how users interact with it. The study of ideology on social media is then not just a question of analysing the discourse of interactants on the site, but also of how the site facilitates interaction. Online interaction has long been known for aggressive, antagonistic interaction. It has been one of the main historical interests about online interaction, going back to the early eighties (Kiesler, Siegel and McGuire 1984). In online forums, for example, particularly those dedicated to controversial issues that are likely to draw opposing sides, contestation is the norm. The nature of a social media site and how users interact on it will impact on what norms emerge. Users are competing to be heard, and that competition can emerge as antagonism when given the right set of factors. There are, of course, places where consensus is the norm and users are not prone to attack one another. On Facebook, for example, when a young father posts a picture of his new-born daughter with the message ‘#blessed’, another set of complex factors will lead to an outpouring of positivity, both in the ‘likes’ the photo will receive from friends and family and in positive text comments on the photo. It is very unlikely that anyone will say something negative or criticise the father for posting the picture. To understand why there is such a difference in the responses, we must take into account the different factors affecting interaction: the topic, audience, text producers and site for interaction (see also Fritz, Ch. 11, this volume). Changing any one element of the scenarios we have given as examples means a possible change to how the audience might react and the extent to which the user will be met with praise, animosity or indifference. The ideologies of users and enacting of the ideology in interaction will affect how people respond to the actions of others. Uncovering what ideologies are at work, and how they impact on any given interaction leads to important methodological issues for researchers, such as what data to collect and when to collect it. 4.

Methodological issues

So far, this chapter has focused on ideology in the practices of users in their interaction on social media platforms. However, ideology is not only embedded in the production of social media data. It is also present in the ways in which data is managed and made publicly available. For researchers considering which data to analyse and whether permission is needed to access the date, ethical considerations are particularly important.

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While historically interaction online could roughly be considered either ‘public’ or ‘private’, social media blurs these distinctions, something Lange’s work (2007) identified early in the life of YouTube. For example, a Facebook user with 10 or 15 friends may post personal information about themselves that is publicly available, but doesn’t appear to be oriented towards a public audience. Users’ physical location may be shared on their page, and they may assume that no one would be looking at their page except their friends. A researcher might say that this material is publicly available and therefore requires no consent to analyse. Although this may be the case in legal terms, particularly if the posts are of a personal or controversial nature, the researcher must weigh carefully the effect of recontextualising social media texts in other environments (like research papers or conference presentations). Social media interaction, like Internet interaction more generally, also problematises the notion of multiple identities (boyd 2011: 40–41), and the extent to which one can have a ‘real’ identity online in contrast to an offline identity. The extent to which these opinions represent what a user really thinks about a particular topic is difficult to judge. Platforms like YouTube, for example, encourage users to behave in more antagonistic ways than they might otherwise, in attempts to generate interest around their videos (see Pihlaja 2014a for an analysis of drama videos on YouTube). Although careful discussion of important issues is certainly present on social media, more often than not, extreme and antagonistic positions rise to the top as users are attracted to the drama surrounding these positions and their responses. In these cases, it can be difficult to extract what a user’s ‘real’ position is, rather than what they are presenting to garner attention. This can be seen in atheists attacking Christians on YouTube (and vice-versa) claiming that their opponents are acting like Nazis. One user was repeatedly called ‘Hitler’ for suggesting that non-Christians would be burned in hell (Pihlaja 2014a: 74). The extent to which they genuinely hold that position, or are simply using the language of antagonism for rhetorical effect, is not always simple to deduce. How to analyse texts on social media is also fraught with difficulty, taking into account all the complexities of interaction. In terms of linguistic pragmatics, there are numerous ways to investigate the ways ideology is present in social media interaction. We’ve touched on identity construction, discussing how users might present more extremist views in online settings than they might otherwise. In terms of the actual texts and utterances produced, ideology can be considered by looking at a variety of different elements in communication. For example, the use of quotations in presenting one’s own position can be very important in presenting a particular ideology. This can include quoting authoritative texts, as when Christians quote the Bible to show that their position is the same as Jesus’ (Pihlaja 2013). The quotation of other users can vary in a chatting ‘thread’ and can serve a variety of purposes, ranging from consensus creation over dialogic uptake and critique to the polemical dismissal of (presumptive) common ground presupposi-

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tions (Arendholz 2013, 2015; Bös and Kleinke 2015). Metaphor is also a rich topic of analysis, particularly when investigating how ideology is implicit in talk about controversial issues. Metaphor allows users to state more controversial positions in a veiled way, like calling someone a ‘wolf’ rather than explicitly saying that they are lying. By using the metaphor of ‘wolf’, users can avoid making a direct accusation, while still implying that a person is dangerous or unreliable (Pihlaja 2016). Although linguistic expression is an important part of expressing ideology in social media, ideologies are also implicit in the non-linguistic, multimodal elements of interaction. In text-based computer-mediated interaction, these issues have been investigated in the use of emoticons in text and instant messaging online. As technology has developed, interaction around images, gifs, and videos has increased, and with these technologies, analysis of language is not sufficient to provide complete descriptions of how interaction develops. For example, ‘internet memes’ (in the sense of iconic images matched with formulaic language) are effective not simply because of their linguistic content, but of the interaction of the language with the image and the audiences’ shared knowledge of the formula of the meme. An example can be seen in the sharing of the “Pepe the Frog” meme during the 2016 Presidential election. The meme had become a symbol of White Nationalism in the USA and was assertively used in the campaign for presidential candidate Trump (BBC 2016; Clinton 2016), but recognising this required contextual, shared knowledge as the frog cartoon isn’t inherently a racist icon. Here again, there is both the potential for ideologies to be explicitly present in the semantic value of the meme, but also implicitly in its shared use over time and the meanings of particular images, formulaic language, and video styles garner in use, as with Internet memes (Gal, Shifman and Kampf 2015). Unpacking the meanings of the memes requires not only the analysis of the text and image, but also some input from the community of users producing and consuming the images, and their histories, which can be gained from observing the community over time and/ or asking them directly, as Androutsopoulos (2008) uses in Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography. With any research of social media, there is also an important issue of scale. Researchers can look very closely at a small number of interactions, or can look at huge datasets with hundreds of millions of words. How data is gathered, and the kind of data that is analyzed will always be subject to the research question one is interested in investigating. To exemplify how some of these methodical issues play out in research both in scale and in the analytic approach, we will now look briefly at examples of research, taken from our own work and that of colleagues. The examples show how these methods for the analysis of ideology can differ and elicit the ways in which researchers can approach questions of ideology both implicitly and explicitly.

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Examples of ideology on social media

Internet discussion forums and blogs can be ideology-laden and polemical. This is hardly surprising given that many of them are maintained and managed by political institutions, parties, the media and individual ‘public’ personalities. Forums, as publicly accessible discussion platforms, invite and foster debate and polemical dispute, with varying degrees of editorial ‘gatekeeping’ but usually open to all visitors who register or simply post under an assumed online identity (Suler 2004; Wiszniewski and Coyne 2002). The main gatekeeping sanction available to the forum website’s editor is the removal of a posting, which is resented by the ‘victims’ as a form of censorship but on the other hand helps to exclude hate-speech and openly insulting behaviour (Li 2013; Ihlebæk and Krumsvik 2015), so that the flow of communication can be maintained and a (precarious) community-specific ethos is established. The interventions of forum managers thus concern mainly the interactional dimension of user communication, rather than a monitoring of taboo areas for ideational content (with the exception of criminal activities). Of course, this does not mean that taboo topics such as sex, death, bodily functions etc. are plainly spoken about in forums; as in other forms of discourse they are elaborately treated by way of lexical and textual means of euphemistic (and dysphemistic) reference and representation (Crespo-Fernández 2015). Forum participants have a chance to interact with each other emphatically and in real time by quoting and commenting both on press and online articles (and reacting to those genres’ own characteristic quotation practices) and on each other’s postings, thus continually constructing and negotiating individual and communal ‘self’-, ‘other’- and mutual face-relationships (Angouri and Tseliga 2010; Bös and Kleinke 2015; Korenmann and Wyatt 1996; Landert 2015; Landert and Jucker 2011; Neurauter-Kessels 2011). In the comment sections of online media, the respective original articles and/or other ‘precedent’ texts serve as primary ‘reference points’ for follow-up quotations and comments but they are also instrumentalized to build up the commentators’ own communicative identities through evaluation, stance-taking, repositioning, selective or ironic meta-representation (Johansson 2015; Reich 2011). Thus, in an online debate on the popular history (or perhaps better: mythology) of German(ic) national identity, participants competed for authority status by arguing over the right to quote their most famous source, i.e. the writings of the ancient historian Tacitus, e.g. by correcting each other’s translations of key-passages, accusing each other of misquotation and some adopting the ‘online identity’ of Tacitus for themselves (Musolff 2015a: 131–140). Forum participants also quote each other cumulatively, as it were, to escalate an argument as in this debate on the BBC’s “Have Your Say” website about Pope Benedict’s public condemnation of paedophile priests: “‘So one elderly German in a badly fitting white frock says sorry in English and that makes everything OK does it?’ [participant 1] quoted by participant 2: ‘No the offenders will be judged, Judged that

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is, when time comes’; both quoted by participant 3: ‘It also helps that the church is compensating many of the victims with money’” (Bös and Kleinke 2015: 79). Whilst Internet forums are oriented towards providing a platform for wide possible audiences and open debates, blogs, on account of their being maintained by individually identifiable persons, groups or institutions, often cultivate an ‘insider’ ethos (Bolander 2012, 2013; Bruns and Jacobs 2006; Herring et al. 2005; Hoffmann 2012; Miller and Shepherd 2004; see also Heyd, Ch. 6, this volume). Political and communicative ideologies of blogs are strongly intertwined, although this does not completely exclude the possibility of disagreement and robust discussion; however, they take place within the blog’s in-group that defines itself through their shared interest in maintaining the blog. With the establishment of blogs as a “stabilized genre” (Yus 2011) they provide ample material for pragmatic research. This has focused so far, for example, on the authors’ “intentions when uploading information”, their adherence and/or deviation to the genre-specific standards, the readers’ interpretations and follow-up reactions, and their success in community-building and maintenance (Yus 2011: 95; see also Kopytowska 2013; Singer 2006). The difference between blogs and related but distinct CMC genres such as online press publishing and internet forums has become a special focus of research. Musolff (2015b) has investigated a mixed corpus of texts in all three genres that discussed UK immigration policies, with a focus on dehumanizing metaphors such as parasites for ‘immigrants’, as in this defamatory characterisation: “If they haven’t been detected for ten years then they are either living via the proceeds of crime or tax dodging. And that makes them parasites and criminals” (BBC 2010b). In terms of their overall ideological stance, all genres were characterised by a majority of cautious to hostile anti-immigration attitudes and judgements. However, only the Blogosphere exhibited a consistent xenophobic and polemic bias insofar as the parasite metaphor was regularly used together with further ‘disgusting/dangerous organism’ terminology to stigmatize immigrants. In online forums, such as the BBC’s Have Your Say website, and to an even greater extent in the press, the use of the immigrants-as-parasites metaphor was explicitly criticized as xenophobic and racist and attributed to the ‘extremist’ section of the political spectrum. Beyond this extremist fringe there is the grey zone of terrorist groups’ websites, whose success in disseminating ideologies and acquiring followers is still hotly debated (Benson 2014; Brunst 2010; Ducol 2012). YouTube, since its foundation in 2005, has also been a site for contentious arguments, and served, inter alia, the conflict-rich interaction of religious communities (Pihlaja 2011, 2014). It has, for instance, become an important catalyst for the emergence of so-called ‘New Atheism’, a position that gained prominence on the site (Pihlaja 2014). While the basic starting point of the New Atheist movement was simply a lack of belief in God or gods, it has become attached to other positions, such as a belief in the supremacy of science and the scientific method,

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a rejection of institutionalised religion, and a focus on a critical approach to any and all other beliefs. As atheist voices grew prominent on YouTube, Evangelical Christians appeared on YouTube as well, often championing voices which opposed the scientists and humanists that atheist users supported and cited. The authority of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris was met with Creationist Ken Hamm and Christian apologist William Lane Craig. In instances where users argued, prominent thinkers from both sides were often present either in the arguments, or in video clips or lectures posted on YouTube. In this way, ideological positions of particular individuals were revoiced and recontextualized in the social media space, where they could be debated and reworked to meet users’ own contextual arguments. The result was often a hardening of positions, with less focus on discovering the truth, and more on winning an argument and shaming an opponent. Within the disagreements among Christians and atheists on YouTube, a key topic of argument has been Creationism. For atheist users, Christians’ lack of belief in evolution is incoherent and illogical, evidence that Christian belief is, at its core, unreasonable. Christians in general and Creationists in particular should be the object of scorn and ridicule, with atheist users making parodies of prominent Christians and mocking their positions (Pihlaja forthcoming). For Christians (often Evangelical Christians, based in the USA) on YouTube, the belief in the Bible and a literal reading of the Christian creation myth is essential to their belief about the authority of the Bible and their particular reading of the text. The argument about Creationism was part of a larger argument about the authority of the Bible and how Christians interacted with it. In these arguments, metaphor and us-vs.-them categorisation have been particularly important for users attempting to construct their own group identities through attacking and defending other users. Metaphor analysis (Cameron and Maslen 2010) showed, for example, that the use of words and phrases from the Bible could be used to support a user’s particular position by embedding it in an authoritative discourse that sounded vaguely biblical. A user could mix language taken from the Bible and mix in their own interpretation to suggest that some people were ‘wolves’ while others were ‘sheep’, using the language of the Bible to categorise people in their own social context (Pihlaja 2016). User-categorisation is of key-importance in these discussions (Housley and Fitzgerald 2002). Users employ categories as a way of affiliating with friends and then attacking enemies, e.g. by using categories like ‘good Christians’ and ‘bad Christians’ to differentiate among other users, and alienate and judge others with whom they disagreed (Pihlaja 2014b). Finally, impoliteness and causing offense was an important way for users to draw attention to their own videos and the message they were attempting to spread. By employing language that others judged as offensive such as calling another person ‘human garbage’, users could draw attention to themselves and build their popularity both among those who agreed with them and those who,

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even if they were offended, engaged with the discourse to express their disagreement. This ongoing argument between atheists and Christians on YouTube serves as a good example of how ideology can be identified and analysed in social media context. While Creationism is simply one argument of many, by focusing discourse analysis on how users from both sides argue, what sources of authority they appeal to, and how they react to challenges, ideological positions become clear, beyond their own stated positions. Pihlaja (2014a: 151) showed that when given the chance to sit down together in a shared physical space, two of the most antagonistic users from both sides of the argument could find common ground and shared experience in conversation. The physical meeting of the users which they recorded and uploaded to YouTube suggested that the positions taken by both on their own channels, and particularly their antagonism towards one another, was likely heightened by the distance both in time and physical location that YouTube video facilitated, and that when sat together over lunch, their own ideological positions could at least accommodate the other’s position. Other scholars have sought to offer broader descriptions of online behaviour that have implications for the study of ideology on social media. Hardaker and McGlashan’s (2016) work on Twitter looks at rape threats made on feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. Their research investigates a corpus of tweets with the goal of understanding the language surrounding sexual aggression on the site and shows disturbing, if perhaps unsurprising, language directed at women on Twitter, and in particular, towards Caroline Criado-Perez. Hardaker and McGlashan (2016) use a mixture of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods, starting with a focus on frequency, collocation, and keywords. This method allowed them to identify places to investigate how sexual aggression is enacted and what the language might say about different communities of users. The use of corpus linguistic tools then allows the researchers to provide a quantitative assessment of how a particular pattern of action occurs. These patterns could then have important implications for the ideologies that different user communities hold. The findings also show how ideologies spread on social media. Hardaker and McGlashan note, that perhaps the most crucial issue here was how cleanly and neatly different “communities” or “groups” can be identified, especially when dealing with a highly fluid, fast-moving environment like Twitter populated by users who may coalesce around a topic or user and engage in transient interactions for a mere matter of seconds before moving on. Indeed, terms like “community” or “group” seem far too strong for a collection of people who may have no further connection to each other than to have tweeted the same target with either support or abuse. (Hardaker and McGlashan 2016: 91–92)

This quotation highlights an important factor in researching ideological statements online: Similar expressions of beliefs or positions are not necessarily co-ordinated, and, more interestingly, might not be the independent position of a user. Instead,

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users may be ‘joining in’ without considering what they’re saying or why they’re saying it. What the research shows is thus not necessarily a community of users with shared beliefs working together (either explicitly or implicitly) to spread a particular set of beliefs. Instead, in the moment of the social media face attack, latent ideologies (in this case, anti-feminist ideology) can become apparent. The users who threatened and attacked Caroline Criado-Perez were not clearly affiliated with one another, but behaved in similar ways, using similar language. The ‘coalescing’ around a particular event and the different reactions that come out in response are then sites for ideological expression (Hardaker and McGlashlan 2016). While ‘community’ remains a recurring theme in research on online interaction (Jones 1995; Herring 2004; Seargeant and Tagg 2014), the term is problematic given its variety of uses and its comparison to a traditional notion of community which simply can’t be applied to online spaces (Yuan 2013) where users may or may not share the same ideologies even within the same ‘community’. This is an important point to consider when researching ideology in interaction online. While our other examples showed people who were committed to specific positions and beliefs over time, the users making threats on Twitter may not be operating from a specific set of explicit beliefs, but react to something they have seen and then move on immediately to something else. This does not negate the importance of the ideology which is implicit in the action, but it does need to be considered in a different light than the sustained positions held by users in Pihlaja’s (2013, 2014a, 2016) studies of Christians and atheists, which represent a more coordinated, systematic presentation of ideology. These different case studies highlight the different ways that ideology can be investigated on social media, from the explicit object of study as in Musolff’s (2015a) work, to research which uncovers underlying ideologies in particular social media events. The different studies also highlight different approaches to social media data. Researchers have looked at particular pages or websites as a location of interaction, seeing, for example, how racist ideology is discussed and spread, often by way of explicitly disclaiming racism, in blogs and Youtube forums (Goodman and Row 2013; Kettrey and Laster 2014). Experiments have furthermore indicated that that frequency of Facebook use related positively to message acceptance, particularly messages with overt racist content (Rauch and Schanz 2013: 613). We will now move on to some key issues and controversies in the study of ideology on social media and suggest ways in which difficulties might be met. 6.

Critical issues and controversies

Historically, the issue of online anonymity has been a key issue for the analysis of CMC in general and has important implications for the study of ideology online. If users are able to communicate without the repercussions of immediate social feed-

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back as in face-to-face communication, they may be more willing to take extreme positions, such as posting racist memes. Most recently, this concern can be seen in fears about radicalisation online and fears that young people could be drawn to more extremist views. Anonymity has been seen as contributing to users taking more radical positions online and recruiting others to their positions (Neo et al. 2016). Whereas physical communities tend to discourage users from speaking in overtly radical ways whether it be espousing racist opinion or encouraging hate against specific individuals, in online contexts without these social restraints and feedback, users may take more radical positions. While these concerns persist in public discourses about social media and the Internet more generally, there is a role for researchers to play in understanding if such concerns can be substantiated and to investigate also the ideological positions of the corporations that own the means of production. Thus, it is not only important to analyse how users employ Twitter to spread extremist positions, but the response by Twitter and the effect of responses to extremism are of equal if not higher significance. In the case of Hardaker and McGlashan (2016) on trolling, for example, it is not only important to understand why users post the threats that they do, but why Twitter allows for the threats to be posted on the site. The answer appears to relate to the role and necessity of ‘free speech’ on social media, a critical issue for users of social media (Swigger 2013). Concerns about free speech are often contrasted with the need to curtail ‘hate speech’ online, which encourages violence or discrimination towards particular people or groups (Brown 2015). Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter operate in multi-national and -cultural contexts, so their decisions about what should and should not be allowed has an important impact not only on the content of their own sites, but how other sites are modelled after them. The concept of free speech and its limits also has important implications for influencing how users interact with their own governments, particularly when Twitter or Facebook are censored by national governments, which happened for example during an event called “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” in 2010. Users on social media sites encouraged others to draw pictures of Muhammad and post them on social media, leading to government agencies in Pakistan to censor the sites and limit access (Greene 2010). As the corporations play an important role in deciding what is acceptable, there is important work still to be done on critiquing the institutions and their processes, and how national governments interact with these decisions and support or oppose them, or attempt to influence them. In addition to fears about extremism, there is also difficulty with online discourse and identity in deciding to what extent ideological positions displayed online, particularly in anonymous settings, represent a user’s actual ideology. In research on Twitter like the work above (Hardaker and McGlashan 2016) and studies of trolling (Buckels, Trapnell and Paulhus 2014; Hardaker 2010; Herring et al. 2002), the extent to which individual users stand by their words and actions in

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online environments is a complicated issue. These issues have been evident even from early narrative research about YouTube, where users expressed complex feelings about flaming and trolling on the site and their own engagement in it (Moor, Heuvelman and Verleur 2010). Questions of multiple identities not only comparing offline and online interaction, but also different sites of interaction online, remain an important issue to investigate. The issue of multiple identities is not, of course, bound to online spaces, as people perform different identities in different settings. Social media, however, can highlight disparities among positions, particularly on social networking sites, where users perform multiple identities for a mixed audience that may include family, friends, colleagues, and the public. In work done by Marwick and boyd (2011), the complexity of these issues has come up regularly in the use of social media. Whereas in offline contexts, users can mitigate (in some ways) different audiences with different physical spaces, the pressure to ‘friend’ colleagues and family members on places like Facebook may mean that having multiple authentic selves in the context of that site is limited when audiences are ‘flattened’ into one (Marwick and boyd 2011: 122). Again, the response of corporations in the development of the platforms is a key to how users manage these issues, with different ‘circles’ in Google’s social media site, Google+, or in different “lists” on Facebook. These technologies are continually changing and the extent to which the platforms adapt and innovate their platforms will continue to dictate how users present themselves and their beliefs on the sites. The effect of ‘context collapse’ on ideology is also worth considering, particularly in how ideological positions are displayed in social media contexts. If users must perform different identities, it is also then plausible to consider the different ideologies they may perform, given a different audience. Muslim users of social media, for example, can focus on the compatibility of Christianity and Islam, when speaking to a predominantly Christian audience (Pihlaja forthcoming). In this case, ideology might not then be a static position that a user holds and promotes and defends online, but rather a malleable set of beliefs that comes out in different ways in different contexts, depending on the perceived audience and the affordances of the technology. Increasingly, however, there has been more pressure for users to produce ‘authentic’ versions of themselves on social media. With the rise of social networking sites and the integration of mobile technology and the Internet, research now also focuses on this so-called “context collapse” (Marwick and boyd 2011: 122) online, where users struggle to maintain authenticity in online spaces where they interact with family, friends, and co-workers, along with Internet users whom they may have never met in offline contexts. This is, in many ways, directly tied to the ideology of the Facebook platform, which values authenticity in a way that previous platforms have avoided. Users are encouraged, if not required, to use real names and connect with people they know and have met through offline interactions. This coupled with the proliferation of mobile

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technologies that allow users to check in at physical locations and integrate their interaction on social media with their physical movements, may mean a future where maintaining different personas and selves online could become increasingly difficult. The extent to which the integration of online mobile technologies with offline contexts will further this ‘collapse’ and require users to present more consistent positions across platforms is yet to be seen. With these shifting positions and contexts, researchers looking at language must be particularly in tune with why users are interacting in specific social media spaces at specific times, and take care to look carefully at the various factors surrounding expressions of beliefs and positionings, including the site of interaction, who is interacting, and the history of interaction in a particular context. Understanding that expressions of ideology are plastic and highly contextual in these environments is of key importance to understanding why certain expressions are occurring. 7. Conclusion In this chapter, we have focused on the ways in which ideologies are present both in the explicit practices of social media interaction and the implicit ways in which the platforms themselves promote particular ideologies. Depending on the focus of discussion and research, individuals will encounter different theoretical, practical, and ethical issues in their investigation and use of social media platforms. Social media presents a specific challenge in the study of ideology because the interaction is mediated by the different platforms, changing how users express themselves and what positions they take. Researchers must look carefully at the contexts of interaction over time to provide nuanced, careful descriptions of how ideology is shaped by the technology used. From there, researchers can then begin to analyse discourse and offer insight into how beliefs are spread and adapt in social media contexts. This analysis must take into account the different factors that influence the production of ideology on different sites. First, the platform itself must be analysed, and the ideological positions of the platform producers. The ideology of Facebook plays an important role in how users interact on the site, encouraging certain behaviours, while discouraging others. The analyst must be aware of the features specific to certain platforms and how these impact on the use of the technology. No platform is without an ideological position, and awareness of the position is necessary for understanding how users interact on a site. Second, researchers must be aware of the ways in which historical positions held in the so-call ‘real world’ are at work in new media. While social media may give an increased access to broad audiences in a way that hasn’t been possible historically, this does not mean that interaction on social media is necessarily new

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or novel. In many cases, the Internet and social media specifically have become simply new sites for old arguments. As in the example of Fundamentalists arguing for Creationism, the argument itself is not new, but rooted in a long standing disagreement and presentation of a specific ideological position that is quite old. The historical context is then essential for doing analysis of social media ideology. Third, there must be an awareness that arguments online are often not about clarifying positions or convincing others, but ways of presenting ideological positions to build communities and serve social purposes like insulting or demeaning others. Moreover, as Verschueren states, we must remember that “[t]he idea that an issue – any issue – could be settled once and for all is an illusion” (Verschueren 2012: xi). The analyst’s role is then to understand both the ideology that is being represented and the way in which language is being used as social action in online communities. Linguistic analysis provides the tools for describing how users accomplish this work. Analysis of, for example, linguistic impoliteness can provide insight into the positions that users hold based on what they do or do not find offensive and how other users respond to (and are offended by) the claims that they make and/or how they act online (Angouri and Tseliga 2010). Fourth, there is a need to understand that the access social media provides allows users to interact with individuals outside of their physical social connections who might share minority ideological positions. As in the case of atheism on YouTube, users can develop movements and communities around ideologies that have been historically seen as suspect and discouraged. When given the chance to interact with users on social media, users can come to build online communities around these ideas and impact offline social change, using the Internet as the main means of publicising their message. Alternatively, given the need to interact with broad audiences coming from different ideological positions, social media interaction can also be influenced by ‘context collapse’, where users have to maintain a kind of authenticity among a diverse group of users, including those that disagree with them and those whom they might wish to influence. While historically anonymity has been of central concern to researchers looking at online interaction, social media and pressure to maintain an ‘authentic’ position online change the dynamics of how users see interaction online. While anonymous interaction is still possible and does still lead to antagonism and hatred, the interaction on places like Facebook, with user names attached to real names and photos, rather than avatars and screennames, the interaction between offline and online lives will seemingly continue. Social media will remain an interesting and engaging site for research as long as users of diverse backgrounds interact with and challenge one another. As users are constantly challenging the notion of what counts in a particular community culture as common sense, ideologies must be constantly re-asserted, revised, and defended. With another user with a differing opinion only a click away, there is an almost constant back-and-forth among users over their ideological positions. This

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Part IV Social media and identity

15. Facework and identity Miriam A. Locher and Brook Bolander Abstract: This chapter reviews studies which focus on Internet users’ attempts to change (challenge, reinforce, negotiate) current or past, stereotypical, individual and/or group identities in interactions. It thereby acknowledges that the literature regularly draws on various theoretical conceptions of identity. Perspectives on identity range from sociolinguistic understandings of the impact of social variables on linguistic variation to constructivist and discursive negotiations of identity as employed in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and discursive psychology. These latter approaches share a particular view of identity as a complex, emergent, context-sensitive, social, ephemeral/changing and negotiable concept. Methodologies vary according to theoretical orientation so that we find a rich mixture of quantitative and qualitative studies. In addition to addressing these different conceptualisations of and approaches to identity, the chapter also reviews a number of key themes which emerge in the literature review: the importance of (im)politeness; the impact and negotiation of gender; the construction of expertise, authenticity and trust; the surfacing of emotions; the creation of in- and out-groups and community building; and the intertwining of offline and online acts of positioning. 1. Introduction It has been long established that language contains a relationship component and that any act of communication thus implicitly and often also explicitly says something about the relationship of the interactants involved (e.g. Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson 1967). The same pertains to computer-meditated communication (CMC), such that research on CMC also lends itself to studies on identity and relationship construction. A famed cartoon by Peter Steiner (1993) in The New Yorker depicts two dogs in front of a computer, one of which had been typing and then informs the other that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. Ever since this cartoon, it is not just scholars but also lay people who have been aware of the fact that the keyboard can be used to write oneself into being (Sundén 2003). While the quotation highlights the anonymity that online interaction can grant its users, more recent social media practices show that users also reveal their name, post pictures and videos of themselves, and write texts (for example status updates) to show their worldviews. They thus share a considerable amount of information about themselves. This is not to deny that anonymous and/or creative identity construction can still take place, but with the advent of web 2.0 platforms, DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-015 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 407–434. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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the spectrum of different acts of positioning is even wider than before. Complex acts of positioning which create affiliations and disaffiliations result in creative practices of online identity construction. This chapter first touches on a number of linguistic theories that discuss identity construction and its link to facework (Section 2). It then offers a succinct review of recurrent themes in identity construction research dealing with online data (Section 3). The chapter then moves to a presentation of a number of studies in recent social media practices, such as Facebook and Twitter (Section 4), before concluding in Section 5. 2.

Theories of identity construction

Within linguistics, the topic of identity construction has a long tradition and it is defined and approached in many different ways. The study of how interactants use language to shape their persona or image has been of concern within many subfields, among them pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, anthropological linguistics and literary pragmatics. Linguistics has bene­fitted much from insights from other disciplines, among them rhetorics, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, literary studies and discursive psychology, which focus on language as well as other forms of communication. Depending on how widely or how narrowly one defines identity, the above-mentioned disciplines and fields can be drawn on for our respective research questions and methodological decisions. Rhetorics, for example, has shown us that politicians who want to persuade others in order to be elected or to convince people of their ideas, try to appear knowledgeable but not scholarly, friendly and approachable but not chummy, etc., depending on their target audience and cultural context (see, e.g., Burke 1969 on the use of pathos, ethos and logos). The study of how persuasion is performed and power exercised is also of concern for linguists working on CMC, such as public health sites or political campaign sites (see Section 3.3 below). From sociolinguistics in the Labovian (1972) tradition, we learn that the ways in which speakers utter words and choose lexemes reveal something about their class, ethnicity, age and/or gender. Individuals may also aspire to sound like a member of a higher social class (see, e.g., the phenomena of hypercorrection and overt prestige) or adhere to their sociolect in order to distance themselves from other groups and create ingroup solidarity (covert prestige; see, e.g., Labov 1972; Meyerhoff 2006). Identity in these studies is functionalized through the inclusion of social variables into the research design. As a consequence, identity is depicted with a broad brush that considers the values of gender, class, age and ethnicity as methodologically given. Studies that use insights from linguistic anthropology, ethnology, and conversation analysis provide further important findings with respect to the indexical

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power of language. These lines of investigation target a more fine-grained picture of identity since the focus is on the construction of identity in interaction. For example, Irvine (2001) studies in minute detail how language indexes social belonging in a Wolof village in Senegal and reports on Gal’s (1992) work on the Hungarian village Bóly where cultural and ethnic belonging is indexed through linguistic style. And Ochs (1993: 288) demonstrates how “speakers attempt to establish the social identities of themselves and others through verbally performing certain social acts and verbally displaying certain stances” (emphasis in original). The concept of membership categorization developed in conversation analy­ sis (see, e.g., Sacks 1992; Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Hester and Eglin 1997; Fitzgerald 2015) helps to show the practices through which interactants themselves draw on lexemes for self-identification (such as mother, sister, daughter) and style in order to highlight those aspects of their identities that they wish to make salient in interaction. The constructivist stance is also key in Eckert (1989) and Mendoza-Denton (2008), who demonstrate how students use linguistic and other practices to index ingroup and outgroup belonging. The latter work creatively combines quantitative aspects from variationist sociolinguistics with qualitative observations about the indexicality of linguistic markers. Furthermore, the study of identity construction is expanded beyond a focus on language use to include other practices like afterschool activities, hairstyle, and clothing. Research on stylistics and the pragmatics of fiction highlights that language is a crucial means to create characters in fictional worlds. The authors’ and actors’ choices for register, accent and syntax tap into the readers’ and viewers’ world knowledge in that they evoke stereotypes, which act as recognizable cues for the readers/audience.1 From discursive psychology, we get the concept of positioning (Davies and Harré 1990; Bamberg 1997; Deppermann 2013), which contributes to a better understanding of how people create storylines for themselves in face-to-face interactions, therapy and storytelling. This tradition complements the sociologist Goffman’s (1955, 1959, 1967, 1974) metaphor of the stage2 and the idea that people take on and enact (dynamic) different roles in particular situations. Positioning theory has also influenced Bucholtz and Hall’s work (2005, 2008, 2010; Hall and Bucholtz 2013), which further demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of this research field. They explore “the social positioning of self and other” (Bucholtz and Hall 1



2



Here, the reader is referred to the handbook Pragmatics of Fiction (Locher and Jucker 2017), which reviews crucial linguistic strategies for characterization, among them regional, social and ethnic linguistic cues, stance markers and code-switching. In Goffman’s “dramaturgical approach” (Willems 2001: 6298) the metaphors of theatre and the stage are used to point to “the manipulative and the moral aspects of social life” (Léon 2006: 98).

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2005: 586), and posit that there are five principles which show the complexity of identity construction. These principles highlight that identity is a relational phenomenon (relationality principle), which emerges in interaction (emergence principle), and which is indexed (indexicality principle) through processes of positioning through which interactants attempt to position self and other (positionality principle). By studying such acts we only ever get a partial glimpse of identity construction (partialness principle), which can be complemented (contradicted, challenged, reconfirmed) in previous and following interactions and which is influenced by competing (cultural) discourses (e.g. on gender and roles). The concept of face is also important to (im)politeness research (and interpersonal pragmatics more generally; see Locher and Graham 2010). This field of research is concerned with relationship creation through interaction and it thus studies how face is negotiated and how facework patterns in different situations and cultural contexts. Here Goffman (1955, 1967) is again important, since his concept of face and facework are crucially interlaced with (im)politeness studies. To be judged a polite or well-mannered person might be a motivation for choosing between different possibilities of performing a speech act. The ways we use language thus say something about our understanding of the social situation we find ourselves in and how we judge our relationship towards others (see also Section 3.1). While research on facework overlaps with politeness research (and might be considered synonymous by some researchers), there are scholars who work with the concept of face without necessarily studying politeness norms. For example, the concepts of rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2007), relational work (Locher and Watts 2005) and face-constituting theory (Arundale 2015) all draw on the notion of face3 but do not necessarily or exclusively study (im)politeness concerns. These concepts are thus more encompassing than (im)politeness. Yet they can all be tied to identity management and relationship creation (see Locher 2008 for this link). The field of gender studies, itself interdisciplinary in nature, also illustrates the different approaches to the study of identity. There are numerous overview articles (e.g. Mullany 2012; Sunderland and Litosseliti 2002; Swann 2002) that trace the development from a more essentialist to a more constructivist approach and that highlight that a gender identity may be one of many identity traits that might be made salient by interactants in situ. Studying the impact of gender on CMC will be taken up in Section 3.2.

3

The metaphor of face itself has been discussed extensively and its definitions vary from assigning it the status of universal psychological wants (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1987) to more negotiable understandings (e.g. Goffman 1955). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a history of this concept (but cf. Section 3.1). For an overview, the reader is referred to Bargiela-Chiappini (2006).

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This chapter cannot do justice to all of these different traditions of studying identity construction, nor to all of the concepts that are associated with this process (see, e.g., style, stance, indexicality, stereotype, (im)politeness). For overviews on research on identity, see, among others, De Fina (2010), Joseph (2004, 2010), Kiesling (2006), Locher (2008) and Mendoza-Denton (2002). What is central here is recognising the diversity of approaches, since this same diversity is mirrored in studies that explore identity construction in computer-mediated contexts and social media in particular. For example, we find qualitative case studies conducted in an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic or discourse analytic tradition, as well as large-scale quantitative studies of linguistic expression where data is separated according to social variables. Much of the research we review in Sections 3 and 4 also alludes to (im)politeness theories as identity construction goes hand in hand with (im)politeness considerations (for observations on this interface, see Locher 2008; Hall and Bucholtz 2013). 3.

Themes in identity construction research on online data

Reviewing the literature on identity construction in online data, we first need to reiterate that any form of language use contains elements of recipient/audience design and thus represents a choice of a particular interactant as to available linguistic variants. This means that any type of CMC can be studied from what Locher and Graham (2010: 1) call an interpersonal pragmatics perspective, i.e. with respect to its relational component. Relational work, i.e. the communicative choices interactants make and how these are interpreted in light of relationship creation (e.g. address terms, register, levels of mitigation, Locher and Watts 2005), then leads to identity construction. Social network sites such as Facebook might be immediately associated with relationship maintenance and creation since this is also the declared aim of the platform. Yet we wish to stress that it is not only such social network sites that lend themselves to the study of identity construction. Nor does interactivity have to be built into the technical make-up of the practice as in discussion boards or newspaper comments sections. Also less obviously social or interactive online practices such as information websites can be explored with respect to identity construction via a focus on concepts such as stance, style or positioning. In the following we introduce a series of pertinent themes for the study of identity construction online: the importance of (im)politeness; the impact and negotiation of gender; the construction of expertise, authenticity and trust; the surfacing of emotions; the creation of in- and out-groups and community building; and the intertwining of offline and online acts of positioning. In light of our conviction that identity construction can be performed in various modes, these themes do not stem from studies on just one type of online interaction but from a mixture of sources.

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In turn, insights from the studies may feed into more than one theme, such that individual studies may be relevant with respect to a series of the identified themes. 3.1.

(Im)politeness: From face-enhancing to face-aggravating behavior

Studying concerns about politeness and impoliteness is an important theme in linguistic research on online communication (see also Graham, Ch. 17, this volume). The link to identity construction hinges around the concept of face and facework (see Goffman 1955, 1967; Bediijs, Held and Maaß 2014b). Face is defined by Goffman (1967: 5), as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself [sic] by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact”. Considering someone’s face in interaction means that speakers engage in facework and project identities that might challenge, confirm or negotiate roles that surface as relevant in a particular interaction. Since communication online is not faceless in its metaphorical sense, we can assume that facework is equally important as it is in face-to-face communication (see also the discussion in Bediijs, Held and Maaß 2014b and Held 2014). In many ways what happens in this research field mirrors general trends in (im)­politeness research. These include discussions on methodological and theoretical concerns such as the role of universality within a given framework or the distinction between emic and etic approaches; broadening the scope of data and interest, which now also includes impoliteness and aggression; the role of emotions; the emergence and negotiation of norms; processes of judging and historical developments of modes of conduct in given societies (for overviews on developments in this field, see Locher 2013a, 2014, 2015). Given this wide field of interest covered by (im)politeness research nowadays, it comes as no surprise that we find many studies on CMC and (im)politeness, but no unified theoretical or methodological approach. The literature review shows that there are several reasons why (im)politeness scholars have been particularly motivated to research computer-mediated language. These reasons are often intertwined and thus not mutually exclusive: – To further theory building: The last two decades have seen an upsurge in theoretical discussions about how to approach the study of (im)politeness phenomena. The new data available from computer-mediated contexts was readily utilised as testing grounds for established and new ideas. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) key concepts of face (adopted and developed from Goffman 1955) as well as face-threatening act (FTA), and their taxonomy of mitigating the force of FTAs (from bold on record, with mitigation, to off record) is also applied to online data, at times in adapted forms (e.g. Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014; Kleinke and Bös 2015; Herring 1994; Neurauter-Kessels 2011, 2013; Yus 2011). At the same time, scholars also employ more recent discur-

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sive understandings of politeness and particularly focus on local and situated emergent forms of (im)politeness (e.g. Angouri and Tseliga 2010; Graham 2008; Haugh 2010; Locher 2008; Planchenault 2010). – To study emic negotiations of norms of conduct in and about computer-mediated communication: As interactants adopt new forms of CMC, new norms of conduct are explicitly commented on and addressed. As a result, we find many practices where meta-discussions on appropriate or inadequate behavior are negotiated. This is the case with respect to forms of Netiquette that were published and discussed (e.g. for email conduct and behavior on message boards). In addition, there are many threads in discussion boards or online articles where interactants comment on offline codes of conduct. This data is thus rich for scholars who are interested in the negotiation of norms on personal, local or societal levels and who focus on meta-pragmatic comments. Representative examples of such studies are Arendholz (2013, 2014), Graham (2007, 2008), Haugh (2010), Haugh, Chang and Kádár (2015) and Locher (2008). – To explore face-aggravating behavior: Scholars interested in developing politeness theories which can also deal with impoliteness and aggressive face behavior found rich data of conflictual and face-aggravating behavior in computer-mediated contexts. While recording aggression and conflict in face-to-face contexts might often be a matter of chance, online data seems to give easy access to such data (for ethics and other research challenges, see Bolander and Locher 2014). Numerous studies focus especially on face-aggravating data and explore it with (im)politeness theories (e.g. Arendholz 2013, 2014; Kunkel 2014; Neurauter-Kessels 2011, 2013; Langlotz and Locher 2012). In early research on online communication, the possibility for anonymous posting was seen as an uninhibiting factor that resulted in less mitigation, directness and bluntness (Baym 1996; Reid 1999). In addition, practices such as trolling, flaming and shaming and the ensuing discussion about appropriate behavior received attention (e.g. Arendholz 2013; Hardaker 2010; Helfrich 2014; Kluge 2014; Perelmutter 2013, 2015; Rentel 2014; Turnage 2007). While not every study on face-aggravating behavior in a computer-mediated context necessarily draws on (im)­ politeness theories, the general link to identity construction and facework is usually a given. For a review of studies on consensual and conflictual disagreement in online contexts, see Bolander and Locher (Ch. 22, this volume). The overview of (im)politeness studies on computer-mediated data draws a rich picture of interpersonal strategies that can be used for face-maintenance, face-enhancing and face-aggravation. Screening the texts with respect to epistemology and methodology, it becomes apparent that we find studies adopting a constructivist understanding of politeness and identity; and a leaning toward qualitative

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explorations, although there are also quantitative and mixed-method approaches. Special journal issues and edited collections (Bedijs, Held and Maaß 2014a; Locher 2010; Locher, Bolander and Höhn 2015) particularly tackle the interface of identity construction, relational work and (im)politeness studies in CMC. A number of monographs highlight aspects of relational work in different computer-mediated contexts (e.g. Arendholz 2013; Dayter 2016; Locher 2006; Yus 2011) and recent papers and handbooks offer overviews of (im)politeness research and CMC (e.g. Dynel 2015; Hardaker and Graham 2017; Graham, Ch. 17, this volume). The contexts studied vary, and include: – blogs (e.g. Bolander 2012, 2013; Luzón 2013; Perelmutter 2013), – chats (e.g. Linnemann, Brummernhenrich and Jucks 2014; Vandergriff 2013; van Compernolle, Williams and McCourt 2011), – discussion boards and fora (e.g. Angouri and Tseliga 2010; Arendholz 2014; Ehrhardt 2014; Eisenchlas 2012; Fröhlich 2014; Haugh 2010; Haugh, Chang and Kádár 2015; Held 2014; Herring 1994; Kleinke and Bös 2015; Kreß 2014; Kunkel 2014; Maaß 2014; Nishimura 2010; Perelmutter 2015; Planchenault 2010; Placencia 2012; Schrader-Kniffki 2014; Shum and Lee 2013; Thaler 2014), – email interaction (e.g. Darics 2010; Hössjer 2013), – mailing lists (e.g. Graham 2007, 2008), – newspaper comments (e.g. Upadhyay 2010; Langlotz and Locher 2012; Neu­ rauter-Kessels 2011, 2013), – Youtube videos and comments and other polylogues (e.g. Bedijs 2014; BouFranch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014; Dayter and Rüdiger 2014; Lange 2014; Placencia 2012), – social network sites (see Section 4 in this chapter, and Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this volume), – and text messaging (Spilioti 2011; Georgakopoulou 2013). 3.2. Gender As mentioned in Section 2, studies on gender and identity construction have a long tradition, which has been continued with data from many different computer-mediated contexts (for overviews, see, e.g., Herring 2003; Herring and Stoerger 2014). In their recent review article, Herring and Stoerger (2014: 567) explore the impact of anonymity on CMC in light of gender and the popular claim that CMC is “inherently democratic, leveling traditional distinctions”. They report that online communication has erroneously been perceived as a context where gender can be neutralized or power differences made to disappear (Herring and Stoerger 2014: 578). The studies they review demonstrate that gender still becomes salient both with respect to access and use, and the distribution of textual or multimodal features. The picture, however, is diverse and context-sensitive. Thus, while men

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are typically seen as adopting a more aggressive communicative style compared with women, in the case of asynchronous discussion lists and forums, “Herring (1996 […]) observed a majority-gender effect: women tend to be more aggressive in male-dominated groups than among other women, and men tend to be more aligned in female-dominated groups than in groups dominated by men” (Herring and Stoerger 2014: 570). The results are also mixed with respect to language use, e.g., vocabulary, style and speech acts (Herring and Stoerger 2014: 572). From a discursive perspective this is not surprising, since gender ideologies are not expected to disappear in computer-mediated contexts, but are instead made salient in varying ways by interactants. As Page’s (2012: 91) study of storytelling in various online, polylogue contexts confirms, “gender persists as a meaningful category in computer-mediated contexts and […] offline values do not disappear in online interaction”. And in a review on studies of texting, Thurlow and Poff (2013: 166) report that the fact “[t]hat gender differences emerge in young people’s preferred communication styles is hardly surprising (Thurlow 2001); these findings do, however, reiterate the variability that exists between texters and the messages they send”. With respect to research methodologies employed in studies on gender in computer-mediated contexts, we find the same broad distinctions that also characterize the research on facework and identity construction in general. There are studies that are interested in exploring whether and how men and women use language differently by considering gender a social variable for exploring different computer-mediated contexts, often with a quantified study design (e.g. Chen and Abedin 2014; Herring and Paolillo 2006; Knupsky and Nagy-Nell 2011; Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). On the other end of the spectrum, we also find qualitative research on how individuals or groups of individuals negotiate gender. For example, Herring’s (1999) two case studies from an Internet Relay Chat channel and a listserv discussion group show how men and women are treated differently when disagreeing. This results in what Herring (1999: 151) calls a “rhetoric of harassment” against women, which surfaces differently in the two online contexts: “Whereas female participants on IRC are kicked off the channel, in the discussion group harassers must rely exclusively on language to intimidate and silence”. A further example is Lee’s (2011) study of one woman who used status updates while giving birth (see also Section 4), or Perelmutter’s (2015) work on how Russian women negotiate appropriate and inappropriate behavior on a forum dedicated to marital infidelity. By employing acts of shaming addressed to mistresses and wives, the interactants in Perelmutter’s (2015) research make gender roles salient: Since the overarching societal norms and expectations of family mores and gendered behavior in the post-Soviet society are often unclear, these shaming practices help Russian-speaking women construct and negotiate their identities within a group of peers. These negotiations integrate individual, group, and societal face concerns. (Perelmutter 2015: 149)

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There are also studies that combine quantitative with qualitative analysis and insights derived from different datasets (e.g. Eisenchlas 2012; Hampel 2015; Page 2012). Planchenault’s (2010, 2015) study on how transvestites construct gender roles to position themselves in their online communities is a case in point. She reports how roles and experiences with roles are discussed on a meta-level and how gender markers in French are used in an intricate combination of acts of positioning: grammatical female endings visible in orthography in adjectives or past participles but not always pronounced are combined with the male and female form of nouns. This allows the posters to create ambiguity and to play with their identities on a lexical, grammatical level (Planchenault 2010: 93). Another example is Zhang and Kramarae’s (2014: 66) work on online meta-discussions of gender norms in the context of Chinese online debates about “Shanghai Metro’s official ‘dress-code’ warning to women passengers”. The authors use a corpus of comments as reactions to the initial message posted by Shanghai Metro and complement this with further online sources and the response by Shanghai metro. They then explore the discursive strategies that the different players employ. This results in a very heterogeneous, often contradictory and at times ambiguous picture about how gender and feminism are negotiated online in present-day China. 3.3.

Expertise, authenticity and trust: Experts and laypeople in e-health interaction

The negotiation of facework and the construction of identity is particularly salient in the field of professional and lay interaction, where expertise, authenticity and trust are at stake. This can be a concern for information outlets such as newspaper articles, governmental information websites, websites of political parties, e-campaigns and e-presence of political candidates and e-health communication. In this review, we focus on e-health practices. In Locher and Schnurr’s (2017) literature review on health and (im)politeness research, studying e-health practices is considered one of the up-and-coming themes. Within both interpersonal pragmatics in general, as well as for e-health in particular, four key concerns emerge: –  The face-threatening potential of many interactions in health contexts; –  The negotiation of roles pertaining to health interaction in dynamic encounters; –  The creation and maintaining of trust and expertise; –  The importance of advice giving, information giving, counselling, etc. (Locher and Schnurr 2017: 698)

We thus find, for example, a number of studies which explore how interactants attempt to negotiate roles and identities in order to come across as credible experts (patients and health practitioners alike) in different online contexts. This includes research from both a linguistic and psychological perspective (among them, Harri-

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son and Barlow 2009; Harvey and Koteyko 2013; Hunt and Koteyko 2015; Koteyko and Hunt 2016; Locher 2006, 2013b; Locher and Hoffmann 2006; Rudolf von Rohr 2015; Sillence 2010, 2013; Thurnherr, Rudolf von Rohr and Locher 2016). One example of this research conducted from a linguistic perspective is Locher’s (2006; cf. also Locher and Hoffmann 2006) study of advice online in the American Internet advice column “Lucy Answers”. Here, the professional advisor persona Lucy, who is created by a team of health professionals and presented as an agony aunt, distinguishes herself by, for example, providing up-to-date researched factual information on health concerns (e.g. by quoting statistics or referring to books and other sources), embedding her advice within other discursive moves to lower its face-threatening character, displaying a sense of humour, not being afraid to criticize and appearing approachable through her choice of vocabulary (while not being informal, there is a clear avoidance of medical jargon) (see Locher and Hoffmann 2006). The importance of embedding advice and thus mitigating it to a certain extent has also been reported for other online advice practices (e.g. Morrow 2006, 2012 and Ch. 24, this volume; Placencia 2012 and references in the next paragraph). With respect to peer-to-peer interactions, we can refer to studies by Harrison and Barlow (2009), Harvey and Koteyko (2013), Hunt and Koteyko (2015), Kouper (2010), Koteyko and Hunt (2016), Rudolf von Rohr (2015), Sillence (2010, 2013) and Thurnherr, Rudolf von Rohr and Locher (2016), which all convincingly demonstrate that peers also engage in the creation of expertise and trust. For example, in a study of how peers help each other in their journey to quit smoking in an online forum, Rudolf von Rohr (2015: 264) observes that “[p]articipants who seek help have to convince other forum members of the authenticity of their claim, while helpers need to establish their expertise to give advice or emotional support”. In other words, it is not just the self-selected advice-givers who engage in warranting strategies to demonstrate their expertise and thus legitimize their role, but also the advice-seekers, who need to establish their authentic identity as experts of their personal quitting situation, so that they are “considered help-worthy” (Harvey and Koteyko 2013: 165). To give another example of the intricate negotiation of roles in e-health practices, both Harrison and Barlow’s (2009) research on a diabetes peer-to-peer forum and Thurnherr, Rudolf von Rohr and Locher’s (2016) analysis of various online e-health sources show how sharing narratives can function as a resource for giving advice and creating a credible identity as a resource for help. Research on e-health practices is still developing and to approach it with an interpersonal pragmatics lens, which is interested in identity construction and facework, proves promising in light of exploring the themes listed at the beginning of this section. The interest guiding this research can be both applied (e.g. health practitioners might benefit from insights on how expertise can be indexed linguistically) and theoretical (e.g. how do peers differ from experts in their use of strategies for imparting advice and sharing expertise, etc.).

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Further themes

A number of further themes will be mentioned in passing only. The first has to do with in-group and out-group creation and community building in general. This is connected to the negotiation of face and the construction of identity since acts of positioning employed to affiliate and disaffiliate oneself from others influence emerging identities. For example, many studies on conflict also discuss online community building and involve meta-discussions of group norms (e.g. Baker 2001; Baym 1996, 1998; Dayter 2016; DuVal Smith 1999; Reid 1999; references mentioned in Section 3.1 on face-aggravating behavior). A further strand of research zooms in on the expression of emotions and how emotional stance cues add to identity construction, the negotiation of interpersonal relations and community building (e.g. Maíz-Arévalo and García-Gómez 2013; Langlotz and Locher 2012; Skovholt, Gronning and Kankaanranta 2014). For example, for their data of Taiwanese parenting fora, Haugh and Chang (2015: 99) report that emotional support can be expressed via both “affiliative responses” (including “mutual encouraging, mutual bemoaning, and empathic suggesting”) and “dissafiliative responses” (including “accusing and advising”). These diverse possibilities of expression highlight the importance of “soliciting emotional support” as a relational practice in these discussion boards. To give another example, in their research on emoticons in workplace emails, Skovholt, Gronning and Kankaanranta (2014: 780) underscore several functions of emoticons in workplace e-mails, which are not primarily used to index the writers’ emotions, as one might at first glance expect. Instead, the emoticons function as “contextualization cues”, which “provide information about how an utterance is supposed to be interpreted” (Skovholt, Gronning and Kankaanranta 2014: 780). More specifically, these include marking “a positive attitude” when they occur after signatures; functioning as markers of jokes or irony when they follow utterances intended as humorous; and serving as “strengtheners” after expressive speech acts and “softeners” after directives (Skovholt, Gronning and Kankaanranta 2014: 780). From a perspective that takes facework and identity construction into account, exploring emotional stance clearly promises more insights for the study of relational work. As a final theme, we would like to mention studies that focus on the intricate interplay between online and offline activities of interactants with respect to identity construction (e.g. Georgakopoulou 2013; Lee 2011; Mak and Hin Leung Chui 2014). There are many studies on CMC where no background information is available on the participants or where studying interactants’ offline communicative behavior would not be possible (e.g. polylogue chatrooms, fora, online games, etc.). There are, however, studies that focus on the individual and that thus follow him/her in order to understand better how offline and online acts of communication intertwine. Georgakopoulou (2013), for example, accompanies young people

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during their school days and observes how acts of CMC and information shared in such acts (e.g. texting) also shape their face-to-face negotiation of identities and become part of the small stories that they share. And Lee (2011) shows how a Chinese women uses status updates to keep her friends informed about the progress of her birthing experience (see below). These studies are by nature qualitative. 4.

Examples from Facebook and Twitter

To illustrate some of the findings previously discussed, this section reviews a selection of studies on identity construction on the social networking site (SNS) Facebook and the microblogging platform Twitter. SNS are “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users [‘friends’] with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (boyd and Ellison 2007). boyd and Ellison (2007) established the following sequence of appearance of SNS: MySpace in 2003; Flickr and Facebook (the Harvard-only version) in 2004; YouTube and Facebook (for high-school networks) in 2005; and Twitter and Facebook (for everyone) in 2006. SNS combine previously separate online ways of communication within one platform (e.g., posting status updates, sharing photographs and videos, reposting/sharing other users’ material, chatting, commenting on each other’s activities, playing games and participating in surveys; see, e.g. Herring 2013; Jucker and Dürscheid 2012; Locher 2014; Thurlow and Mroczek 2011). Characteristically, the technological affordances of these providers are constantly developing (see, e.g., Bolander 2017; Eisenlauer 2013 and Ch. 9, this volume; Locher 2014: 558). As a consequence, the literature on social media interaction always needs to state clearly how a particular practice worked at the time during which the data was recorded. This ensures transparency on whether the data is comparable, and prompts for reflection on the ways it might be more or less comparable given the change/s in question. It also encourages increased research on the diachronic development of Facebook practices over time. While such work is scant, Lee (2011) and Page (2012), for example, include analysis of the shift in 2009 in the status update prompt from “What are you doing right now?” to “what is on your mind”; and Koteyko and Hunt (2016) explore health identities on Facebook via a longitudinal (four-month long) observation of 20 Facebook profiles. In our own research on identity construction in Facebook (inspired by Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin 2008), we focused on what people reveal in their profile pages and in status updates. Our choice to prioritise status updates over other activities performed by our interlocutors was based on them being the primary activity in our data collected from two groups of ten students (living in the UK and Switzerland) between December 2008 and January 2009 (Bolander and Locher 2010,

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2015; Locher and Bolander 2014, 2015; Locher 2014). Drawing on a previous study on away messages in Instant Messaging (Nastri, Peña and Hancock 2006), we analysed what the students write about on a speech act level and what acts of positioning are evoked within the status updates. We found that the two groups of students put different emphasis on identities related to personality, pastime endeavours, sense of humour, work and relationships, and that individuals draw on and position themselves with respect to these categories to differing degrees. In the reactions to status updates, we found a predominance of moves that confirm acts of positioning by the status updates writers and only a handful of challenges. However, many status updates received no comments at all. We also found that the ten individuals living in Switzerland draw on more language varieties when writing their status updates than the UK-based focus group, with multilingualism thus serving as a resource for identity construction. While our choice of data (status updates) emerged from the nature of the Facebook platform at the time of analysis, working with current data warrants a more multi-modal approach that includes photographs, videos and memes and which captures interaction (reactions to interactional moves within the platform and also interaction between offline and online practices) (e.g. Bolander and Locher 2015; Dayter and Rüdiger 2014; Lee 2011; Locher and Bolander 2014, 2015; MaízArévalo 2013; Maíz-Arévalo and García-Gómez 2013; Mak and Hin Leung Chui 2014; Page 2012, 2014a; Peña and Brody 2014; Theodoropoulou 2015). In this vein, Lee (2011) focuses on a female user and author of status updates, who documents the process of giving birth and thus her transition into motherhood. This example highlights that the distinction between offline and online life is not tenable. In documenting the act of giving birth via Facebook in front of witnesses (Facebook “friends”), it also highlights a blurring of private and public (see also Jucker and Landert 2011; Landert 2014). Our second example of a computer-mediated context is from the microblogging platform Twitter, which started in 2006 and provides its users the opportunity to post messages that are restricted to 140 characters. As Zappavinga (2012: 3) succinctly describes, these posts are addressed either to the “general internet” or a specific set of “followers” who have subscribed to an individual’s “message stream”; the posts are subsequently displayed in reverse chronological sequence “as an unfolding stream of content”. Research on identity construction on Twitter has been growing rapidly since the turn of the decade, with Zappavigna (2012, 2014a, 2014b), Page (2012, 2014a, 2014b), Dayter (2014, 2016) and Rentel (2014), for example, exploring tweets as instances of microblogging that – in their cumulative effect over time – add up to acts of identity construction. Zappavigna (2012: 14) maintains that “people use Twitter and other microblogging services to share their experiences and enact relationships rather than to simply narrate the mundane details of their activities, as has been claimed in the popular press”. This enacting of relationships through tweets makes “microblog-

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ging […] an ongoing performance of identity” (Zappavigna 2012: 38). For Zappavigna (2012: 38), these processes of identity construction are connected with the broader aim of connecting with others, or our “human desire for affiliation”. Since we “exist within communities of other voices with which we wish to connect” our tweeting practices become bound to, and relative to the community and its practices of “meaning-making” (Zappavigna 2012: 38). It is important to stress that Twitter is not a practice that functions in isolation. As mentioned in the quote above, tweets connect to different actions and activities and tap into other meaningful repertoires. In her work, Zappavigna (2012) utilises a corpus of over 7 million tweets (and sub-corpora thereof). Her methodology draws on systemic functional analysis and corpus linguistic expertise. Throughout her monograph she identifies and discusses practices that are part of identity performance. For example, she explores the rallying function of hashtags, how evaluative stance is embedded, or how the use of humor, memes and slang serve to foreground certain identities. In Zappavigna (2014a: 140) on tweets about coffee, she differentiates between “affiliation (personae aligning into communities of value) and identity (personae enacting particular evaluative dispositions)”. She further shows how the hashtag or affiliative stance markers in processes of coupling (from a systemic functional perspective “[ideation: coffee/evaluation: positive appreciation: positive reaction]”, 2014a: 148) are used to “align personae around shared values” (Zappavigna 2014a: 156). As a consequence, a community of coffee lovers who use coffee as treat and reward emerges (Zappavigna 2014a: 155). Her study thus shows how “linguistic strategies available to personae [are employed] in electronic discourse for construing community” (Zappavigna 2014a: 156). In her research monograph on microblogging, Dayter (2016: 215) follows a group of eleven non-professional, yet dedicated and passionate ballet students. Using a corpus of 1000 tweets, she explores their acts of self-disclosure, achieved through “self-praise, implicit positive disclosure, third party complaints and personal narratives”. In studying the pragmatic force of the tweets, Dayter (2016) reports that there are contradicting repertoires, an “ego repertoire” and a “member of community repertoire”. Whereas the former serves to confirm the speaker’s face and contribute to the formation of the “ballet hero image”, the latter serves to confirm the “others’ face”, such that it signals the desire to be accepted “into the community” and the willingness to “award social capital to others” (Dayter 2016: 217). Both repertoires are drawn on by individual tweeters. Next to the fact that the members of her focus group mix strategies individually, another finding is that self-praise was a frequent and accepted practice (i.e. there was no criticism of this practice by other tweeters; Dayter 2016: 215, 217), which contributed to the image of a ballet hero. For example, references to “bloody bunioned feet” demonstrate in-group knowledge and thus serve to distinguish between “proper” dancers as opposed to fans; mentioning physical ailments thus translates into proof of a dedication to ballet (Dayter 216: 134). (For further discussion of Facebook

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and Twitter, please consult Zappavigna, Ch. 8 and Eisenlauer, Ch. 9, this handbook). 5. Conclusions There is neither a unified theory nor singular methodological approach to the study of identity construction in computer-mediated contexts. As shown in the literature review, the field is vibrant and insights from studies cross-fertilize each other. As a consequence, we find a rich interface of different approaches, with scholars drawing on previous research conducted within linguistics, but also other neighbouring disciplines. In this review, we focused on a number of themes which emerge in research on identity construction in various modes of CMC. Much attention was paid to studies of (im)politeness that have adopted online data as their site for research with scholars approaching identity construction by drawing most explicitly on the notions of face and facework (or relational work/rapport management, etc.). Three particular orientations have been shown to be pursued: (a) to further theory building; (b) to study emic negotiations of norms of conduct in and about CMC; and (c) to explore face-aggravating behavior in addition to face-maintaining and face-enhancing behavior. These also mirror general trends within (im)politeness research. Studies inspired by research on gender have been shown to constitute an equally dominant trend, where scholars have underscored, for example, both the pertinence of gender ideologies about men and women, while also drawing attention to the ways factors beyond sex influence the ways these men and women interact online. To illustrate the importance of the construction of expertise, authenticity and trust, we chose the context of e-health communication, where we addressed some of the textual and multimodal ways interlocutors position self and other when engaging in e-health discourse. Finally, the chapter briefly explored the surfacing of emotions, the creation of in- and out-groups and community building, as well as the intertwining of offline and online acts of positioning. More research on the study of the construction of identity within different computer-mediated contexts is clearly called for. We also predict that there will be increased attention paid to the relationship between online and offline contexts, and the implications of the blurring of these contexts for online identity practices; as well as to multimodal acts of positioning. Acknowledgments Our heartfelt thanks goes to Aline Bieri, who was instrumental in compiling the literature reading list and chasing up the texts for our perusal. For feedback on this

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16. Evaluation Michele Zappavigna Abstract: This chapter explores linguistic research into evaluation in social media texts. After a survey of some of the dominant linguistic theories of stance and evaluation, introducing the Appraisal Framework as a model that has been used across a range of social media discourses, it explores work on evaluation in social tagging, focusing on the evaluation functions of hashtags. The chapter concludes by considering how values are negotiated in social media texts and how alignments are forged through ambient affiliation. 1. Introduction Social media texts rarely present bald facts or narrate activities and events without adopting some kind of evaluative stance, since sharing and contesting opinion and sentiment is central to social media discourse. Even the most ideationally focused post implies some form of assessment, having been selected by a social media user as worthy of being presented to the social network, whether for criticism or praise. The discursive domain at stake in such sharing is interpersonal meaning, a region of meaning concerned with adopting evaluative positions in discourse and enacting identities and social affiliations (Martin and White 2005). This chapter explores how attitudinal meaning is construed in social media texts. The focus is on the various ways in which stances are enacted and values negotiated. After a brief overview of the theoretical space of linguistic work on evaluation, I will consider research focused specifically on social media discourse. Social media research outside of linguistics has been preoccupied with the role that ‘emotion’ (in a broad sense) plays in social media communication across a range of groups of people and contexts. For example, research, typically relying on forms of content analysis, has explored how social media networks cluster in terms of the emotions expressed by users and the tendency of users to engage in “valence-based homophily” when interacting with people who share their opinions (Himelboim, McCreery and Smith 2013: 2). Other studies have also considered how social groups differ in terms of emotional expression (Ritter, Preston and Hernandez 2014). In media studies, there is currently a concentration of work on ‘affect’, leading to concepts such as “affective publics” (Papacharissi 2015) and “affective networks” (Shaw 2013: 221) centered on how feelings of belonging in relation to new media. Within health research there has been work on how negative emotion talk might impact on dimensions of health such as heart disease DOI 10.1515/9783110431070-016 In: C. R. Hoffmann and W. Bublitz (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Social Media, 435–458. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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risk (Eichstaedt et al. 2015: 164), support during cancer (Myrick et al. 2016), and mental health (De Choudhury et al. 2013). The expression of public opinion has been seen as relevant to crisis communication (Shaw et al. 2013), and political discourse (Bruns et al. 2015). However, while all of this research clearly presupposes some conceptualisation of evaluative meaning as a dimension of communication, specific linguistic parameters remain undefined or underspecified due to the disciplinary orientation of this work. The most widely used type of quantitative study of evaluative discourse and social media is computational work known as “sentiment analysis” (Pang and Lee 2008). It draws on linguistic theory to varying extent, often favouring a ‘bag of words’ approach that, by focusing on lexis alone, factors out a range of interpersonal meanings at clause level and above. Sentiment analysis aims to improve the automatic detection of evaluative features in corpora by applying various forms of machine learning to social media texts. It has been preoccupied with how to use these approaches to ‘mine’ social media as a datasource for exploring public ‘mood’, particularly in relation to predicting change in areas in which shifts in public opinion are critical, such as voting (Ceron et al. 2014; Tumasjan et al. 2010) and stock market fluctuation (Bollen, Mao and Zeng 2011). This chapter begins by providing a brief overview of linguistic theories of evaluation, focusing on interpersonal pragmatics, the Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2005), and coupling theory (a theory of how evaluation and experience come together to form values). It then surveys pragmatic approaches to social media that are focused on the role of evaluative language. Because many studies which have an evaluative focus have been in the area of social tagging (e.g. hashtag use), three subsections are devoted to this domain. Finally, because forging social relationships through facilitating interaction and building communities is the main aim of social media, the chapter concludes by introducing work on “ambient affiliation” (Zappavigna 2011, 2012, 2014a) that aims to understand how language works to enact relationships. 2.

Linguistic theories of evaluation

Research into evaluative language has become an important area of inquiry within linguistics despite the extent to which the affective functions of grammatical and discursive structures have tended to be underestimated by linguists for many decades (Martin 1992). Historically, interpersonal meaning has been marginalised in linguistics (Poynton 1990). The reasons are both practical and political. Interpersonal meaning is difficult to study because it is mostly prosodic in nature and thus not reducible to constituent components (Martin 1996; Halliday 1979). Since defining a constituent structure is a prerequisite for the kinds of counting of features needed for statistical analysis, prosodic meanings have tended to evade

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quantification. The Chomskian hegemony entrenched in the 1960s also resulted in a structural hierarchy in linguistics which tended to privilege “the cognitive and individual over the interpersonal and social” (Poynton 1990: 8). Nevertheless, linguistic research into the nature of evaluative language is currently a burgeoning area. Most studies now recognize that “beyond the function of communicating referential information, languages are responsive to the fundamental need of speakers to convey and assess feeling, moods, dispositions and attitudes” (Ochs and Schieffelin 1989: 9). Attitudinal meanings have variously been viewed as dimensions of “stance” (Biber and Finegan 1989; Hunston and Thompson 2000; Hunston 2007), “appraisal” (Martin and White 2005; White 2002) and “evaluation” (Bednarek 2008). Most approaches attempt to taxonomise or systematise evaluative meaning using strategies such as defining “evaluative parameters” (Bednarek 2008) or mapping relevant discursive resources (Martin and White 2005) which will be explored in the following section. In particular, there has been a concentration of corpus-based work on evaluation (Conrad and Biber 2000; Bednarek 2006, 2008; Hunston and Thompson 2000; Hunston 2011). 2.1.

Interpersonal pragmatics

Work within pragmatics on evaluation has largely arisen out of the focus on the interpersonal dimensions of communication originating in Leech’s (1983) study of interpersonal rhetoric as well as Brown and Levinson’s studies (1987) of politeness in interactions. Haugh, Kádár and Mills (2013) provide a useful overview of this history in terms of the issues and debates arising out of related work into pragmatic perspectives on interpersonal communication. They note Locher and Graham’s (2010: 1) definition of interpersonal pragmatics as being about investigating how “social actors use language to shape and form relationships in situ”. In their overview, they also point out that such concern with exploring relationality in communication and interaction is seen in other disciplines (e.g. anthropology) and methodologies (e.g. ethnography). Locher (2014) has surveyed pragmatic approaches to computer-mediated communication, of which social media communication might be seen as a sub-register. Her overview notes the difficulties that have been faced in finding a term for describing language use mediated by computer technologies that is not too broad or too specific: […] terms such as “digital discourse”, “electronic discourse”, “e-communication”, “digitally mediated communication”, etc. are too broad “since it would also include mass media communication via TV and radio, which is not in the focus of researchers analyzing language use in the new media” (Jucker and Dürscheid 2012: 40). For this reason, Dürscheid and Jucker (2012: 40) prefer the term keyboard-to-screen communication (KSC), which, for example, allows mobile phones and text messages to be included in the analysis in a more transparent way […]. (Locher 2014: 556)

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Herring, Stein and Virtanen’s (2013) edited collection brings together pragmatic work on computer-mediated communication, focusing largely on email, instant messaging and blogging. Much of the work surveyed in their 2013 handbook was focused on “interpersonal metacommunicative” communication such as the use of emoticons and various kinds of abbreviation (Gruber 2013: 61). As we will see later in this chapter, such interest has been reignited in relation to social tagging (e.g. hashtag use) in social media communication. 2.2.

The Appraisal Framework

The most comprehensively theorized model of evaluative language that has been used across a wide range of contexts, and by researchers from both qualitative and corpus-based traditions, is the Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2005). This framework was developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to account for how evaluative language functions in situational and cultural contexts. Appraisal has been used in a number of social media studies, including studies of affiliation (Zappavigna 2015, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2012, 2011), solidarity-building (Drasovean and Tagg 2015), identity (Vásquez 2014), narrative (Page 2012), computational sentiment analysis (Vásquez 2014), and social tagging (Chiluwa and Ifukor 2015; Zappavigna 2015). As noted earlier, evaluation is a domain of interpersonal meaning where language is used to express attitudes and to adopt stances regarding other texts and voices. Martin and White’s (2005) model, based on Painter’s (1984) work on language development, has suggested that the kinds of emotional reaction to the world expressed through infant protolanguage develops into more complex systems of meaning-making as we are socialised into a culture and into institutions. Feeling becomes institutionalized as ethics and morality, forming the judgement 1 system, with which we construe rules and regulations regarding behaviour (top example, Figure 1). Feeling is also institutionalized as aesthetics and value, forming the appreciation system, with which we generate assessments based on our reactions to phenomena (bottom example, Figure 1). Before considering each of these discursive systems of evaluation, it is necessary to explain what ‘system’ means within the theory and the particular modelling strategy that it uses to represent systems, namely the system network. SFL systematizes meaning as choice. This systemic orientation arose out of the Firthian tradition in linguistics (Firth 1957). Firth asserted that a distinction needed to be made between structure and system, that is, between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language. Firth’s ideas about how the notion of a system might be used

1



Small caps are used here to differentiate the technical use of these terms from their everyday counterparts.

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Figure 1. The institutionalisation of affect, adapted from Martin and White (2005: 45)

to model language were taken up in Halliday’s development of system networks. System networks are networks of interrelated options that are organised paradigmatically, in terms of “what could go instead of what”, rather than syntagmatically in terms of structure (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 22). They are an alternative to modelling language as a catalogue of structures. Figure 2 provides examples of each region of appraisal (shown in bold) as a system network theorised by Martin and White (2005). The network adopts the convention whereby capitalised labels

ATTITUDE

APPRAISAL

affect

Absolutely adore the people I’ve met here so far

judgment

Stupid people amaze me. They are fun. #Idiots

appreciation

The linguine looks delicious #mkr

monogloss

This is the end of the road.

heterogloss

@User Hey you! Saw your Mom the other day, she said you were very happy! Congrats!!

force

@User This is an extremely epic tweet!

focus

@User you are truly my hero

ENGAGEMENT

GRADUATION

Figure 2. The appraisal system, adapted from Martin and White (2005: 38)

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in front of the arrows indicate different systems of meaning, and the lowercase labels at the end of each path mark features within systems. A square bracket represents a choice between two options in a system (an ‘or’ relation), while a brace represents simultaneous choices (an ‘and’ relation). The example tweets appended to this network in the speech bubbles each illustrate a type of appraisal . The network may be further specified to greater levels of delicacy depending on the kind of analysis for which it is being used. Evaluative meaning is clearly a complex semantic domain, and to a certain extent every utterance we make is tinged with evaluation. The framework attempts to account for this complexity by distinguishing attitude which is ‘inscribed’, that is, realised via explicit evaluative choices, from attitude which is ‘invoked’, that is, suggested via ideational choices that imply evaluation. The discourse semantic region of meaning concerned with adopting stances is attitude . Appraisal specifies three domains of attitude : affect (expressing emotion), judgement (assessing behaviour) and appreciation (estimating value) (Martin and White 2005; see Figure 3). These domains are not intended to simply act as devices for categorising particular lexical items, but instead for systematising the different semantic regions of evaluation. Depending on the target and source of the evaluation, lexis such as ‘good’ can construe any of the attitude systems. Consider the difference between judgement in the following tweet assessing the morality of a human actor: Your beliefs don’t make you a good person, your attitude and behavior does.



and

affect ,

expressing an emotion:

Now I know why I don’t feel good.

or appreciation , estimating the aesthetic value of something:

Heading to Covent Garden, where is the best place to get good coffee?

ATTITUDE

TYPE

affect

Absolutely adore the people I’ve met here so far

judgement

Stupid people amaze me. They are fun. #Idiots

appreciation

The linguine looks delicious #mkr

Figure 3. The attitude system, based on Martin and White (2005: 38)

The rest of this section will focus on affect , the region of meaning concerned with “registering positive and negative feelings: do we feel happy or sad, confident or anxious, interested or bored?” (Martin and White 2005: 42). In microblogging,

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for instance, it is not uncommon for users to devote an entire post to detailing their current emotional state. For example, searching for I feel via the Twitter search interface results in tweets involving emotion talk such as the following (affect shown in bold): I feel like I can’t breathe. Why do I feel so awkward when I talk to you? I feel Good Today … I’m wayyyyy up I feel blessed! I feel really really shitty

Table 1 gives examples of the types of affect Martin and White (2005) specify, along with illustrative tweets (instances marked in bold). Table 1.

Types of affect , adapted from Martin and White (2005: 51)

Affect

Positive

Negative

Dis/inclination

@User seriously – I long to come back and lounge poolside for five or six days …

@User I’m wary to say. Don’t want you laughing at me.

Un/happiness

@user and I adore you.

Can’t shake this melancholy. Early back to work from the doctor’s office. I hope work feels good.

In/security

@User has emily been getting more confident with her skating?

@User I have not thought much about anteaters before, and I am now truly freaked out.

Dis/satisfaction

@User Congrats Darius! So chuffed you made the final! Good luck for next week!

fckn sick of takin these nasty ass pills! ughhhh :(

Zappavigna (2012) has employed this model of evaluation to consider patterns of attitude in a 100 million word corpus of tweets. In this corpus ‘love’ was the most common instance of affect , and I love you was the only inscribed affect in the top twenty 3-grams.2 This pattern was frequently followed by the heart emoticon