Caroline Tagg

Audience design and language choice in the construction and maintenance of translocal communities on social network sites

This chapter explores how multilingual users perceive their audience on semi-public social network sites (SNSs), and how these perceptions shape users’ language choices as they construct and maintain translocal communities. It does so by building upon a widely used framework for understanding style choices in spoken interaction: Bell’s ‘audience design’ (1984). Bell’s model posits that a speaker’s stylistic choices can in great part be shaped by their attempts to accommodate to their addressees and to others present in the exchange, and this basic principle also holds for online contexts. However, the particular affordances of communication via SNSs are likely to result in interesting differences between the type of audiences perceived by someone posting on an SNS such as Facebook, and the audiences which Bell’s model describes for spoken interaction. Firstly, unlike either conversational or broadcast talk, the type of interactions that typically take place on SNSs are conducted via the written mode, and yet at the same time they exhibit much of the interactivity and informality that is often found in speech. Secondly, given that they sit somewhere between personal conversation and public broadcasts, SNSs can be described as ‘semi-public’ forums in the sense that a user’s audience, while often large, diverse and unseen, generally comprises people they know.

Writing systems at play in Thai-English online interactions

Abstract This article explores the bilingual practices of a community of English-speaking Thai nationals on two online platforms: a social network site (Facebook) and an instant messaging service (MSN). Through a discourse analysis of informal conversation exchanges, the article examines the ways in which these participants play with the two languages and writing systems through practices of code- and script-switching as well as orthographic variation, and it shows how these practices contribute to the construction of interpersonal meaning, the negotiation of relationships, and the performance of social identity in these online contexts. One interesting finding which this study reports is that certain forms of orthographic variation occur not only in English but also in both romanised Thai and that written in the Thai script. This is in contrast to conclusions drawn in previous studies which find that non-Roman scripts are often imbued with values of tradition and purity and are therefore not open to the manipulation which characterises the use of the Roman script. The conclusion of this study is that, in the absence of paralinguistic cues online, the participants are drawing on all the semiotic resources available to them—including those supplied by different writing systems—in performing identities as modern, internationally-oriented Thais.

Introduction: The language of social media

In 1929, the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called ‘Chain-links’ in which a group of friends discuss the fundamental interconnectedness of the modern world: Let me put it this way: Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now. It shrunk — relatively speaking of course — due to the quickening pulse of both physical and verbal communication. This topic has come up before, but we had never framed it quite this way. We never talked about the fact that anyone on Earth, at my or anyone’s will, can now learn in just a few minutes what I think or do, and what I want or what I would like to do. (2007[1929], p. 21) The character who makes this speech goes on to argue that everyone in the world is related to everyone else though a series of chains of acquaintance, and that no-one is more than five acquaintances away from anyone else on the planet. Every individual is only six degrees of separation away from any other.

The ethics of digital ethnography in a team project

Abstract This article draws on researcher vignettes to explore ethical decisions made in the process of collecting and analysing mobile messaging data as part of a team ethnographic project exploring multilingualism in superdiverse UK cities. The research involves observing key participants at work as well as recording them at home and collecting their digital interactions. The nature of ethnographic research raises ethical issues which highlight the impossibility of divorcing ethics from project decision-making. We therefore take on board a reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process. The researcher vignettes on which we draw in exploring this process facilitate a reflexive approach and enable us to identify and address ethical issues in our research. In this article, we focus on the potential impact that digital communication technologies can have on the kinds of relationships that are possible between researchers and research participants, and on the roles that both carry out within the project. In doing so, we explore the part that digital communications play in the co-construction of social distance and closeness in research relationships. Our discussions around these issues highlight the need for an awareness not only of how our participants’ media ideologies shape their use and perceptions of digital technologies, but also how our own assumptions inform our handling of the digital data.

Taking Offence on Social Media

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Mobile messaging by migrant micro-entrepreneurs in contexts of superdiversity

price are net prices, subject to local VAT. Prices indicated with * include VAT for books; the €(D) includes 7% for Germany, the €(A) includes 10% for Austria. Prices indicated with ** include VAT for electronic products; 19% for Germany, 20% for Austria. All prices exclusive of carriage charges. Prices and other details are subject to change without notice. All errors and omissions excepted. C. Tagg, P. Seargeant, A.A. Brown Taking Offence on Social Media

Online Communication as Context Design

This chapter explores an aspect of contemporary social life that is only now coming to the attention of either the superdiversity or business communication literature, that of the use of mobile phones by small business owners, including those who have migrated to the country where they now work. A growing body of research has focused on the role played by the internet in fostering superdiversity, both by enabling migrants to maintain links with their home countries and by bringing people together into groups shaped by common interest or purpose, regardless of geographical distance or of ethnic, cultural and linguistic difference. As we shall see, research into such groupings often focuses on internet forums and other public, multiparty online spaces. In contrast, a focus on migrant business owners suggests that private, often one-to-one communication through mobile messaging apps such as WeChat and Viber can play a very different role for individuals working and living within a superdiverse neighbourhood. First, it reveals how mobile messaging apps may be used by migrant micro-entrepreneurs in establishing somewhat ethnically and linguistically homogeneous social support networks; and second, how their virtual, seemingly decontextualised interactions are in fact grounded in their everyday social lives and business transactions. In this chapter, having outlined the core topics and issues around the roles that digital technologies play in superdiversity and in contemporary business communication, we elaborate on the observations made above, drawing on examples from our own research.

Social Media and Intradiverse Networks

This chapter introduces and explains the new theoretical concept of context design. Our starting point is a concept central to much theorizing of online interaction: ‘context collapse’ —that is, the bringing together in one space of people who would not normally interact in offline contexts. This concept has been much cited in social research as a means to explore how users negotiate the management of communication in semi-public sites where they cannot fully predict the audience for their posts and so struggle to evaluate their self-presentation strategies. Although highly influential, the concept has a number of limitations, and we offer instead our own theoretical model premised on the idea that participants on Facebook imagine particularly complex contexts to which they respond as they construct their posts. We call this process context design , building on work in sociolinguistics which has explored the dynamic structure of spoken interaction. Context design examines how participants take on board a range of factors in imagining the various ways in which their online posts may be re-contextualised (embedded and reinterpreted in new contexts), and looks at how this awareness both shapes and constrains what they say.

The Impact of Intradiversity on Online Offence

This chapter draws on our sample of Facebook users to explore how networks facilitated by this particular social media platform give rise to acts of offence , and shape people’s responses to being offended or giving offence. As was touched upon in the previous chapter, there has been increasing recognition of differences between online platforms or modes of communication and a growing focus on how particular communities exploit or deal with the affordances of online technology in distinct ways for their own purposes. Facebook, although often grouped together with sites like Twitter, YouTube and Reddit in the broader category of ‘social media’, represents a particular type of online site and thus exhibits a distinct communicative dynamic (Androutsopoulos 2005). In order to explain this we introduce the concept of intradiversity —the way in which the audience that people are writing for on Facebook is shaped by complexes of personal networks, individual experiences and mutual friendships, rather than being organised along traditionally defined community lines. This is illustrated though an explanation of the network which provides the sample for our research study.

Afterword: Beyond Facebook

This chapter continues the focus on intradiversity by exploring how our data sheds light on people’s awareness of the intradiverse nature of their online audience on Facebook and how this awareness shapes their online behaviour. It does this through detailed analysis of the strategies that people report using in order to manage their online interactions, the reasons for why offence is given or taken, and the actions people take towards it within the context of constructing and maintaining their online communities. This analysis builds on our discussion in Chap. 4 around the structuring of diversity on Facebook with reference to explicit social categories (e.g. age), by highlighting other more submerged sources of difference , including education, personal values and political beliefs, as well as the particular kind of relationship that the node user has with each of their Facebook Friends . As we shall see, people’s awareness of the variety of worldviews that make up the potential audience for their online communication shape their decisions regarding what to post in various ways.