Michele Zappavigna

Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter

This article explores how language is used to build community with the microblogging service, Twitter (www.twitter.com). Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL), a theory of language use in its social context, is employed to analyse the structure and meaning of ‘tweets’ (posts to Twitter) in a corpus of 45,000 tweets collected in the 24 hours after the announcement of Barak Obama’s victory in the 2008 US presidential elections. This analysis examines the evaluative language used to affiliate in tweets. The article shows how a typographic convention, the hashtag, has extended its meaning potential to operate as a linguistic marker referencing the target of evaluation in a tweet (e.g. #Obama). This both renders the language searchable and is used to upscale the call to affiliate with values expressed in the tweet. We are currently witnessing a cultural shift in electronic discourse from online conversation to such ‘searchable talk’.

Searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags

An important dimension of social media discourse is its searchability. A key semiotic resource supporting this function is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in social media posts. While popularly thought of as topic-markers, hashtags are able to construe a range of complex meanings in social media texts. This paper uses the concept of linguistic metafunctions, to explore how hashtags enact three simultaneous communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Corpus-based discourse analysis of linguistic patterns in a 100 million word Twitter corpus is used to investigate these functions and how they relate to the notion of social search.

Enacting identity in microblogging through ambient affiliation

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds (self-deprecation, frazzle and addiction) using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user.

Social media photography: construing subjectivity in Instagram images

This article explores interpersonal meaning in social media photographs, using the representation of motherhood in Instagram images as a case study. It investigates the visual choices that are made in these images to construe relationships between the represented participants, the photographer, and the ambient social media viewer. The author draws upon existing work on the visual systems of point of view and focalization to explore interpersonal meaning in these images, and proposes that an additional system – subjectification – is needed to account for the kinds of relationship between the viewer and the photographer that are instantiated in social photographs, as well as the ways in which subjectivity is signaled in these images. The dataset analyzed is the entire Instagram feed of a single user who posts images of her experience of motherhood and a collection of 500 images using the hashtag #motherhood.

Users in uses of language: embodied identity in Youth Justice Conferencing

Abstract This paper offers a multimodal perspective on how identities are performed and negotiated in discourse, concentrating on the interaction of language and body language within a particular genre, Youth Justice Conferencing. These conferences operate as a diversionary form of sentencing in the juvenile justice system of New South Wales, Australia. Typically, they involve a young person who has committed an offense coming face to face with the victim of their crime, in the presence of family members, community workers, police, and a conference “convenor.” We conduct close, multimodal discourse analysis of the interactions that occur during the Rejoinder step in a particular conference, and investigate an “angry boy” identity enacted by two young persons at this point in the proceedings. This persona is very different to the forthcoming and remorseful persona idealized by conference designers. The role of body language in intermodally proposing and negotiating bonds within the conference is explored.

Eliciting tacit knowledge about requirement analysis with a Grammar-targeted Interview Method (GIM)

The assumption that tacit knowledge cannot be articulated remains dominant in knowledge elicitation. This paper, however, claims that linguistic theory does not support such a position and that language should not be factored out of accounts of tacit knowledge. We argue that Polanyis (1966, p. 4) widely cited notion that ‘we know more than we can tell’ uses a folk model of language. This model does not acknowledge the linguistic patterns that competent language speakers deploy without direct awareness. This paper draws upon Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to propose a Grammar-targeted Interview Method (GIM). The GIM uses SFL to unpack linguistic patterning, which we refer to as ‘under-representation’, to reveal tacit assumptions. It is a strategy that can be applied within a traditional interview method when the interviewer feels that there is confusion resulting from assumptions, such as those often embedded in terminology, that have not been directly expressed. This paper reports findings from an empirical study of tacit knowledge about requirements analysis in a Content Management System redevelopment. We compared the GIM with a Content-motivated Interview Method (CMIM) and show that, when the GIM is used, interviewees respond with less nominalised talk, that is the less nominalised content has more meaning unpacked as verbs and agents rather than hidden tacitly in nouns.

CoffeeTweets: bonding around the bean on Twitter

This chapter explores how we use social media to communicate our experience of the world and bond with others by forming communities of shared values. Microblogging services such as Twitter and Weibo are a form of social media allowing users to publish streams of length-delimited posts to internet-mediated audiences. As such they afford new kinds of interpersonal interaction via the conversation-like exchanges that occur (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009). An example of a length-delimited post (hereafter ‘micropost’) is the following. It contains one of the most common patterns in microblogging, an expression of thanks for personal endorsement: @Tim I love #coffee too This post is addressed to Tim using the @ symbol before the name, a construction which can also function as a reference to the person (e.g. @Tim makes great coffee), and contains a hashtag, the # symbol, which acts as a form of metadata labelling the topic of the post so that it can be found by others. This chapter will consider microposts such as this in terms of how they illuminate the way microblogging as a practice creates alignments around shared quotidian experiences by conferring upon the private realm of daily experience a public audience. The kind of personal expression of the everyday that we see in microposts has never been subject to real-time mass dissemination in the way that we are currently witnessing on Twitter. This chapter focuses on one such personal domain, coffeetalk, that is, discourse relating to coffee as consumed in everyday life.1 I will consider this discourse from two

Beyond the self: Intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie:

As an iconic image of our time, the selfie has attracted much attention in popular media and scholarly writing. The focus so far has been on the representation of the self or subjectivity. We propose a complementary perspective that foregrounds the intersubjective function of the selfie. We argue that the presence of selfhood is often an assumption. What distinguishes the selfie from other photographic genres is its ability to enact intersubjectivity – the possibility for difference of perspectives to be created and this difference to be shared between the image creator and the viewer. Based on a social semiotic analysis of selfies on Instagram, we identify four subtypes of selfie, each deploying a combination of visual resources to represent a distinct form of intersubjectivity. Our analysis suggests that the potential for empowerment is inherent in the visual structure of the selfie, and that, as a genre, it is open for recontextualisation across contexts and social media platforms.

Ambient Affiliation in Microblogging: Bonding around the Quotidian:

Microblogging is an increasingly prevalent communicative practice for negotiating identity and engaging in networked publics. It is currently of particular interest to new media and communication theorists, due to the lens it provides to view ‘real-time’ expression of online opinion and sentiment about both public events and domestic life. While many studies have investigated microblogging in relation to large-scale political events and crises, this article focuses on the latter private domain, exploring the interfacing of the personal realm with mass communicative discourse. A million-word corpus of Twitter posts (MORPHEUS) will be used to investigate a form of ‘ambient affiliation’ that is enacted as microbloggers bond around expressions of the quotidian. This corpus features discourse in the semantic domain of sleep, a surprisingly frequent topic in microblogging posts. Drawing upon corpus linguistic methods, combined with close discourse analysis of communicative patterns, the focus will be on the role of hashtags in supporting ambient communion about the everyday.

The interplay of (semiotic) technologies and genre: the case of the selfie

ABSTRACT The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues – be they representational or compositional – alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requires viewers to interpret the image in relation to the technological and sociocutural context in which the photo was taken and shared. In this paper, we consider the technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of the selfie as a visual genre. Central to our discussion is the premise that the selfie is not simply a genre for self-representation, but means of generating various perspectives: that of the selfie maker, the represented visual participant, and the viewer identification. This unique perspective-generating affordance of the selfie is both facilitated and constrained by the various technologies involved in selfie practices. On the one hand, the technological and physical constraints of the smart phone camera give rise to a specific form of “distorted” look which makes certain types of selfie possible. On the other hand, social media platforms facilitate the sharing of selfies, which results in increasingly stylized and creative ways in which perspectives of the self can be represented, negotiated, and, in the case of selfies manipulated via apps, augmented.