Stephen Pihlaja

“Christians” and “bad Christians”: categorization in atheist user talk on YouTube

Abstract This article presents an investigation of the use of social categories in talk about Christians in a small community of users discussing religious issues on the popular video-sharing site, YouTube. The article focuses on how self-proclaimed atheists employed and modified the category of “Christian” to describe others in a series of antagonistic debates – called “drama” by users. Three video pages, including video talk and comments, were analyzed using membership categorization analysis (Housley and Fitzgerald 2002) to focus on how users, and in particular atheists, employed and modified the category of “Christian” to talk about others. The analysis shows the category of “Christian” was used in different ways to evaluate the actions of others, often leading to conflict about the use of the category. The study shows how the meaning of categories is dynamic in talk, and how local, specific uses emerged as stable on different timescales in the drama. Findings also show that categorization often revealed user beliefs and expectations about social interaction, particularly when the categorization led to moral judgments.

‘It’s all red ink’: The interpretation of biblical metaphor among Evangelical Christian YouTube users

Among Evangelical Christians on the popular video-sharing site YouTube, the Bible is an important resource for justifying and challenging specific words and actions. Such justifications and challenges provide researchers with an opportunity to study how authoritative text is interpreted in social interaction. To that end, this article presents analysis of a single debate – an episode of what YouTube users call ‘drama’ – around one Evangelical Christian’s controversial use of a passage from the Bible to justify calling others ‘human garbage’. This analysis shows first, that conflicting interpretations and use of the Bible’s moral authority led to the development of ‘drama’ because users evidenced differing beliefs about the development of biblical metaphorical language; and second, that users appropriated the Bible’s words to their own discourse activity through exegesis and metaphor development. This article thus provides both an empirical case study in the interpretation of figurative language and a challenge to the common assumption that Evangelical Christians are committed to a ‘literal’ interpretation of the Bible.

‘What about the wolves?’: The use of scripture in YouTube arguments

Reading and interpreting the Bible is an important practice in Evangelical Christian communities, both online and offline. Members of these communities employ biblical exegesis not only in convincing others about the validity of their beliefs, but also influencing the development of the social context in which they interact. Thus, reading and interpretation of the Bible serves both a theological purpose, allowing users to provide textual evidence for beliefs, and a practical social purpose, allowing users to map their own and others’ actions onto biblical texts, either to condone or to condemn them. For users who hold the same belief about the importance of the Bible in making moral judgements, the biblical text can be a particularly useful tool to position oneself and one’s actions. In this article, I employ concepts from positioning theory, to analyse how Evangelical Christian YouTube users read across the books of the Bible by treating similar uses of metaphorical language as interchangeable, and using them to position particular users and to make moral judgements about their actions. The analysis shows that reading and exegesis of scripture can be used in dynamic online environments to map characters and storylines from diverse biblical passages onto a particular online argument, providing a common resource for users from different backgrounds and contexts. Findings show that reading and interpretation of scriptures provide a powerful means of claiming authority for Evangelical Christians in the community, and are used to position oneself and one’s actions, influencing the subsequent discourse and emerging social context.

Reading in the age of the internet

Reading has changed with consumer adoption of digital technologies, and its changes are many: from the new ways in which users of such technologies can now access texts to the opportunities those users now have for discussing them online. Given technological developments, changes in behaviour may seem inevitable. However, for researchers investigating reading and interpretation in the internet age, questions remain, as they do with any social activity online, about whether ‘new’ practices are indeed new, and about how they are inflected through mediation on the internet (Herring, 2004). How researchers – and particularly those interested in the interaction of readers with texts and of readers with one another around texts – can uncover, describe, and analyse these changes is an important emerging topic. The articles in this issue make an attempt to offer methods for investigating how the internet and associated technologies affect reading. They look in particular at how readers reproduce, appropriate, and subvert traditional practices for reading and interpreting texts in online environments. The connection between the global and local, as Androutsopoulos (2010) has shown, is dynamic and complex, with local practices and readings by individual readers influencing global practices, and global readings in public forums influencing individual readings. The effects of the connections between readers that the internet facilitates are not homogeneous, but instead manifest themselves in different online locations and forums, through different technologies, and with shifting cultural trends. The internet has offered readers new ways to interact with texts and with other readers, but how these technologies have changed behaviour and what effect these changes have on the practices of reading and interpretation is still largely unknown. At the same time as making a start on the important task of finding out how the internet matters for reading and interpretation, this special issue contributes to several 652781 LAL0010.1177/0963947016652781Language and LiteratureEditorial editorial2016

Temporary liberties and uncertain futures: young female Muslim perceptions of life in England

ABSTRACT This article explores how young female Muslim university students in London and Birmingham experience life in England. Through focus groups and interviews, talk about three main topics was collected: how young Muslims frame their identities; how they are perceived by others; and how they perceive Muslims to be portrayed and represented in public life. Analysis shows that the participants: presented themselves as ambitious and autonomous; experienced direct and indirect exclusion as young Muslims; perceived a lack of diverse Muslims role models and ambassadors in public life; and that, despite their optimism, felt their futures in Britain were uncertain. The young people recognised the temporary liberties they have around dress and practice as university students that are potentially restricted in wider society. The research highlights the problems created by stigmatising public discourse around Islamist extremism that fuels narrow, deficit-focused policy that exacerbates the exclusion of young Muslims.