Samu Kytölä

Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media

Drawing on insights provided by linguistic anthropology, the study of multisemioticity and research in computer-mediated discourse (CMD), this chapter discusses how entextualization (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Silverstein & Urban, 1996; Blommaert, 2005, pp. 46–8) and resemiotization (Iedema, 2003; Scollon & Scollon, 2004, pp. 101–3; Scollon, 2008) are key resources for identity work in social media. Three key arguments inspire and give direction to our discussion, each of them laying down touchstones for language scholars who wish to investigate identity in social media. First, for many individuals and social or cultural groups, social media are increasingly significant grassroots arenas for interaction and cultural activities (Androutsopoulos, 2011; Kytola, 2012a, 2012b; Leppanen, 2012; Peuronen, 2011) which overlap, complement and intertwine in different ways with their offline activities. Importantly, social media encompass a range of diverse formats for social action, interaction and performance; thus they can be ‘social’ in quite different ways (see Baym, 2011, pp. 6–12) and offer various kinds of affordances for, and constraints on, identity performance.

Peer Normativity and Sanctioning of Linguistic Resources-in-Use — on Non-Standard Englishes in Finnish Football Forums Online

While the previous chapters in this volume have dealt with more institutionally constructed language-ideological discourses, this chapter shifts the lens to language ideologies at play on a markedly ‘grassroots’ level of language use. The sociocultural and technological context of this chapter is interactive, multi-authored discussion forums of the web that allow participants an extent of anonymity. Web forums are a distinctive format of computer-mediated discourse (CMD), most often a discourse domain with little institutional control, and thus relatively free of high-modernist constraints and demands for ‘purity’ of language use. Instead, late-modern hybridity, freedom of stylized expression, and identity play enable a different order of peer regulation and normativity, on which this chapter aims at opening a conceptual and empirical window.