Crispin Thurlow

From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media

As a way of tracking popular framing of CMC, this article critically reviews an international corpus of 101 print-media accounts (from 2001 to 2005) of language-use in technologies such as instant messaging and text messaging. From the combined perspective of folk linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this type of metadiscourse (i.e., discourse about discourse) reveals the conceptual and ideological assumptions by which particular communication practices come to be institutionalized and understood. The article is illustrated with multiple examples from across the corpus in order to demonstrate the most recurrent metadiscursive themes in mediatized depictions of technologically or computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Rooted in extravagant characterizations of the prevalence and impact of CMD, together with highly caricatured exemplifications of actual practice, these popular but influential (mis)representations typically exaggerate the difference between CMD and nonmediated discourse, misconstrue the “evolutionary” trajectory of language change, and belie the cultural embeddedness of CMD.

The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes

From a sample of 51 major international airlines, we offer a critical discourse analysis of so-called loyalty or frequent-flyer programmes and their related business-class services. As examples of cultural capital par excellence, these seemingly innocuous discursive formations act as significant agents of, and channels for, globalist relations of power in the context of international travel and tourism. The principal logic of frequent-flyer programmes hinges on establishing a synthetically personalized (see Fairclough, 1989) framework by which ‘loyalty’ is defined and rewarded, and by which privilege is then awarded and regulated. However, what actually sustains this commodified interpersonal appeal is the airlines skilful reworking of symbolic capital, their manipulation of the illusion of distinction, and the exploitation of social anxieties about status. This is all achieved through a series of discursive strategies that stylize(see Cameron, 2000a) ‘preferred’ passengers as elite. Our analysis of frequent-flyer programmes and business-class services exposes some of the ways social privilege and superiority are nowadays measured, as well as the normative production of luxury. We argue that, for the sake of global marketability and profit, the semiotic realization of super-elitism by the airline industry powerfully ‘re-organizes anachronistic modes of tourism while also reformulating very traditional notions of class distinction.

National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry

In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning potentials which underpin different visual resources; (c) a critical analysis links these decisions of design and branding to the political and cultural economies of globalism and the airline industry. Specifically, we show how airlines are able to service national identity concerns through the use of highly localized visual meanings while also appealing to the meaning systems of the international market in their pursuit of symbolic and economic capital. One key semiotic resource is the balancing of cultural symbolism and perceptual iconicity in the form of abstracted stylizations of kinetic effects. Although positioned unfairly in the global semioscape, airlines may resist straightforward cultural homogenization by strategically reworking existing design structures and exploiting possibly universal semiotic meaning potentials.

Symbolic Capitals: Visual Discourse and Intercultural Exchange in the European Capital of Culture Scheme.

In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in he official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for he title of European Capital of Culture between 2005 and 2011. In considering the political/cultural/economic ideologies that underpin the production of a supposedly an-European identity, we also show how these branding exercises manage local/global tensions by exploiting the intercultural meaning potentials of visual discourse.

Against Technologization: Young People's New Media Discourse as Creative Cultural Practice

Educators, businesspeople, and journalists–all of them adults–seem very preoccupied nowadays with young peoples supposed lack of “good” communication, leading to evaluation of their communication “skills” against standards of appropriateness and usefulness shaped by the needs of the market rather than everyday social and relational needs of communicators. This technologization of communication comes to a head in commentary (read: complaints) about young peoples new media discourse, where concerns about “literacy,”“employability,” and “social order” are refracted through adults often-conflicted feelings about technology. Whether young people are being lauded as ‘wired whizzes or pilloried as ‘techno-slaves,’ invariably overlooked is the situated, meaningful, and creative nature of their communicative practices–precisely what the papers in this special issue demonstrate.

Half-hearted tokens of transparent love? "Ethnic" postcards and the visual mediation of host-tourist communication.

One negotiation site of heavily mediated, indirect, and usually inadvertent communication between nhosts and tourists is the picture postcard rack. As “hegemonically scripted discourses,” postcards nmake important assumptions about the tourist’s touristic experience, as well as the image of that nexperience she/he will want to communicate to others “back home.” Of more importance, however, nare the assumptions being made in postcards about the people actually represented in them. Certainly, npostcard images of local people (locals rather than necessarily hosts) are often designed specifically nto communicate their ambassadorial hospitality—their host-like qualities—and to promote the kind nof ethnotourism discussed widely in the tourism literature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the npostcard images of local ethnic minority people such as the Zulus in South Africa and the Sami in nFinland. In these two instances of intense exoticization and commodified cultural representation, and nin stark contrast to postcard images of the Welsh in Britain, this study was interested in exploring the nways in which both the “represented host” and “consumer tourist” understand and view these visual nrepresentations. In this programmatic article, we therefore report our initial analyses of three distinctive nsets of postcards as a means for discussing how research might seek to situate and, thereby, ncomplicate assumptions inherent in these “ethnic” postcards about both the traversed, mediatized nOther, and the constantly directed tourist gaze.

Elite mobilities: The semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege

Tourism is immensely powerful in (re)organising large-scale inequalities and privileges. In the rapid expansion of ‘luxury tourism’ we find a wing of this truly global culture industry openly committed to the symbolic production of elite status, distinction and privilege. Our visual essay here offers a series of multimodal, multi-voiced statements arising from a research project that explores and critiques the lavish semiotic economies and strict interactional orders of these ‘new’ elite mobilities. Mimicking the fleeting encounters of super-elite travellers themselves, we undertook a series of ethnographically grounded but patently frugal sorties into five different spaces (or modes) of luxury travel. Drawing on our own fieldwork material and quoting the visual rhetoric of advertisers, we trace the normative production of an ostensibly enclavic landscape that imagines (or re-imagines) limitless aspirations and unbounded pleasures for all consumer-citizens regardless of their power or wealth.

Relating to Our Work, Accounting for Our Selves: The Autobiographical Imperative in Teaching about Difference.

The central thesis in this essay is the need to get more personal and more political in our thinking and especially our teaching about interculturality. Offering a ‘radical’ critique of the agenda of conventional Intercultural Communication scholarship, I draw my inspiration from the conceptual and philosophical roots of the field, while also proposing political and pedagogical routes for the future. In addition to ideas from feminist literary theory, philosophy, modern history and psychoanalysis, I am especially concerned to exploit the striking points of contact between the fields of Intercultural Communication, critical pedagogy and progressive theology. The stance I take towards interculturality upholds the role of the experiential and autobiographical (i.e. the local and personal) in engaging, both as scholars and as everyday communicators, with a more broadly, critically conceived notion of difference.