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The pragmatics of textual participation in the

social media

Article in Journal of Pragmatics · November 2014

DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.08.009

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Editorial for the Journal of Pragmatics. 2014

The pragmatics of textual participation in the social media

Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich

This special issue presents a collection of papers exploring textual participation

in the social media from different pragmatic perspectives. The rationale for this

volume is twofold. On the one hand, social media are extremely popular and

part of the everyday practices of large numbers of people, corporations, and

institutions. Statistical studies of the world population vis-à-vis use of social

media reveal that, in 2013, over 1.5 billion people used social networks and that

the number of users is increasing so rapidly that an estimated population of plus

2.3 billion people will participate in new media by 20171. On the other hand,

although there is a growing body of research on social media, a specialized

handbook on the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication, also

published in 2013, signaled a gap in research regarding Web 2.0 phenomena,

about which “significant bodies of language-focused research have yet to

accumulate” (Herring et al. 2013: 4-5). This special issue aims to contribute to
this body of research on social media by analyzing its textual realization from

various pragmatic perspectives.

Known also as social networking sites, Web 2.0 systems or participatory

websites, social media are communication platforms which combine a number

of technological affordances which support the sharing of textual, visual, and/or

audio information as well as different frameworks for interaction (Ellison et al.

1
http://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/
2014; Herring 2013; Walther & Jang 2012). Although it is difficult to come up

with a comprehensive definition, the feature of sociability - in the sense of

supporting social interaction and reconfiguring on-line communities (boyd &

Ellison 2008) - seems to be at the heart of social media (but see Thurlow 2013).

As users position themselves alongside different social media, complex

communication systems, social spaces for debate and interaction, and new and

evolving social practices for dyadic/polylogal, interpersonal/intergroup

communication emerge, making vibrant objects of research.

The multiplicity of these new communication practices, i.e. genres, poses a

series of questions and challenges that are at the heart of current scholarly

debates. Of special interest to pragmatics are the forms of participating,

relating, and negotiating activities and identities in the social media, and how

language is used alongside other semiotic means of communication in

ideologically loaded ways (Bou-Franch 2013). Central to contemporary

discussions is the methodological reflection on ways of examining

communication in social media, as traditional divisions between private and

public, personal and institutional, and corporate and social are vanishing

(Thurlow 2013). The methodological debate further questions the validity of

adapting and applying research methods designed for the study of, mainly,

face-to-face, oral communication, to the analysis of digital discourse and it

underlines the need to design natively digital methods which will explain the

challenges posed by communication in the social media (Androutsopoulos &

Beiβwenger 2009; Bou-Franch et al.2012; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010;

Rogers 2009).

This special issue proposes a unifying theme to begin to address these issues

within broadly pragmatic approaches - textual participation in the social media -

a theme which acknowledges the centrality of language in digital

communication (Herring 2013). In what follows, we turn to explain the

organization of the volume and to introduce the focal themes of the papers

included in the issue.

Along with the main topic of the special issue, Jannis Androutsopoulos’s paper

focuses on the set of practices that individuals use to entextualize significant

moments for and with their audience. More specifically, the paper analyzes two

case studies in which individuals use their linguistic repertoires, which mainly

revolve around Greek and German with English as a further choice, to

entextualize moments of sharing with their heterogeneous networked Facebook

audience. The paper delves into the features of language use on-line as it is

materialized by means of keyboards and variability. It also looks at how this

language use assumes contextualizing pragmatic functions and indexes social

identities and relationships, as it draws heavily on other semiotic resources

afforded by the web. The findings of the paper point to the need to theorize

social media as a discursive space not only delimited by technology but

fundamentally constructed by speakers and audiences; the findings also

suggest that social media should be understood as a blended space,

intermingled with daily offline practices, and point to a dialectic relationship

between linguistic repertoires and entextualization practices.

For their part, Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich carry out a

detailed analysis (both quantitative and qualitative) of the ways in which conflict

begins, unfolds, and/or ends in massive, on-line polylogues. These stages of

verbal conflict had been dealt with extensively in the literature, but never

previously analyzed in the context of a massive polylogue such as those

afforded by YouTube’s texting facility. One of the main goals of the analysis was

to test whether established methodologies for the analysis of those stages of

conflict in dyadic, face to face interaction were easily digitized, i.e. transferable

to an on-line environment. The analysis showed that digitized models appear

not to be supported when applied to social media polylogues. Furthermore, the

persistence of the on-line textual conflictive interaction pointed to a necessary

problematization of the very categories used in the analysis (beginnings,

middles, and ends) which appear as reified constructs ill-equipped to account

for on-line, polylogal interaction. The analysis also made perspicuous the need

to take a diachronic approach to conflict, in addition to the traditional synchronic

one, as well as to further problematize the clear demarcation between concepts

such as witness and recipient or offensive and defensive strategies. On-line

conflict is seen as on-going, mostly polarized and thus unresolved and closely

tied to social identity.

Along similar lines to Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Marta Dynel’s

paper is also premised on the belief that various forms of communication in

the media and new media are not amenable to classical models of interaction

involving the standard speaker-hearer dyad. To resolve this impasse, Dynel’s

paper proposes a new participatory framework for multi-party interaction on

YouTube, which is in turn compared to that underlying films and televised

programmes. The author argues that YouTube users’ participation is more

complex than that of television viewers, who are involved primarily as recipients

of discourse. For their part, YouTubers engage in asynchronous computer-

mediated interaction, changing their participatory statuses at the production

and reception ends. Dynel’s analysis further unveiled three levels at which the

participatory framework she developed for YouTube resides: the level of the

speaker and hearers/listeners in video interaction, the level of the sender

(together with the embedded collective sender) and the recipient of a video, as

well as the level of the YouTube speaker who produces a comment and

YouTube hearers who read it.

Also drawing data from YouTube, Patricia Lange analyzes a potentially

conflictive genre, rants, and the responses these rants trigger. The main goal of

the analysis, which combines first and second order approaches to the study of
im/politeness, is to unveil whether YouTubers deem rants appropriate or

inappropriate, whether they are interested in or offended by them, and whether

they accomplish social purposes such as exposing communicative problems or

providing support for the ranter. Results indicate that most YouTubers

expressed solidarity or empathy with the ranter and few labelled rants

inappropriate or impolite. The significant number of comments posted in

response to rants shows that ranters do strike a nerve and that this genre has

the potential to create civic engagement and foster participatory democracy.

Therefore Lange argues, ranting can, under the right circumstances, construct

an emotional public sphere.

In the final contribution to this special issue, Wei Zhang and Cheris Kramarae’s

analysis focuses on a corpus of data extracted from Shanghai No. 2 Metro

Operation Company’s microblog. These comments were triggered by an initial

comment posted by the company criticizing women’s clothing style which was

deemed, at least partially, responsible for jumpstarting China’s first on-line

SlutWalk. The very active role of feminist groups and other netizens on the blog

contributed to turn the metro company’s weibo into a public space of discussion

of sexual harassment, a first in the context of China. Drawing on the notions of

face, frame, and footing, the authors identify three prominent framings enacted

by the participants of the discussion— campaigning, debating, and playing—and

analyze how the groups and individuals developed, changed, or disrupted the

on-line “SlutWalk” led by feminist NGOs. Findings point to Chinese traditional

patriarchal ideology having reinvented itself partly by the appropriation of

social media, most likely a side effect of the rise of capitalism. Furthermore,

the authors argue that this social media discussion on sexual harassment,

although somewhat controlled by its taking place on an official site, has the

potential to increase public attention to discourses regarding sex and

gender, thus mobilizing resources for the promotion of gender equity, and

strengthening (trans)national feminist networks in the Chinese context.

In sum, the collection of articles in this special issue unveils different means,

roles, and devices through which textual participation, as well as other meaning-

making devices, unfolds in the context of different social media and how these

social media reshape social and cultural practices.

References

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methods in computer-mediated discourse analysis. Language@Internet

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Bou-Franch, Patricia, 2013. Domestic violence and public participation in the

media: The case of citizen journalism. Gender and Language 7: 3, 275-

302.

Bou-Franch, Patricia, Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar, 2012.

Social interaction in YouTube text-based polylogues: a study of

coherence. J. Comput. Mediated Commun. 17 (4), 501--521.

boyd, danah m., Ellison, Nicole B., 2008. Social network sites: definition,

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Ellison, Nicole B, Vitak, Jessica, Gray, Rebecca, Lampe, Cliff, 2014. Cultivating

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