Journal für Medienlinguistik : jfml = Journal for media linguistics
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In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Taylor Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019) and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.
Der inhaltlich umfassende Sammelband von Sarah Brommer und Christa Dürscheid bündelt vorrangig Forschungsarbeiten von Studierenden, die sich im Feld der Mensch-Mensch- und Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation in einer sich stetig technisch weiterentwickelten Welt verorten. Die Forschungsarbeiten, die im Rahmen des Seminars "Mensch. Maschine. Vertrauen." an der Universität Zürich im Wintersemester 2019 entstanden sind, nehmen verschiedene Kommunikationssituationen und aktuelle Phänomene in den Blick, die bis dato noch als Forschungsdesiderate zu konstatieren sind: z. B. (A) Formen interpersonaler Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation in medialen Formaten wie WhatsApp oder Tinder, (B) Perspektiven auf Streitgespräche mit Robotern oder die Frage nach Vertrauen im Umgang mit Pflegerobotern, (C) Kommunikationssituationen mit Siri oder Smart Homes und (D) Biohacking als technische Entwicklung in Bezug auf das Einsetzen von u.a. Chips in den menschlichen Körper. Insgesamt beinhaltet der Band zwölf Beiträge, die sich überwiegend zunächst aus linguistischer Perspektive den Forschungsgegenständen nähern und diese dann weiterführend in ethische Fragen und gesellschaftspolitische Zusammenhänge einbetten.
Funktionsverbgefüge stehen seit jeher in der Sprachkritik, die sich nun auch auf digitale Räume ausbreitet. Vertreten wird dort die These, Funktionsverbgefüge und ihre entsprechenden Basisverben seien äquivalent und könnten in allen Kontexten durch die verbalen Entsprechungen ersetzt werden. Dies kann durch die vorliegende korpusbasierte und textlinguistische Studie am Beispiel des Gefüges Frage stellen widerlegt werden. Anhand eines extensiven Datenmaterials aus den Wikipedia-Artikel-Korpora des IDS zeige ich die semantischen, grammatischen und textlinguistischen Unterschiede zwischen dem Basisverb und dem Funktionsverbgefüge im Gebrauch auf, die sich in der Anreicherung, Verdichtung, Perspektivierung, Gewichtung und Wiederaufnahme von Informationen im Text manifestieren.
Social media, asthe fifth estate, increasingly influence public dis-courses and play a major role in shaping public opinion.Undoubt-edly, they have the potential to promote participation and democra-cy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic soci-eties, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As aresponse,forms of counterspeech organisedby civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threateningdiscourses. In order to influence dis-course in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible alsoquantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed the activitiesof the German and Finn-ish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. The in-tensity and continuity of their activities is obviously influenced by their strategic organisation: conventionalised rules support them whereas lacking or inconsequent rules seemed to be counterpro-ductive.
As kindergartens and schools closed down during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, two hashtags emerged on Twitter: #CoronaEltern (#CoronaParents) and #CoronaElternRechnenAb (#CoronaParentsDocumentTheCosts). In this paper, we examine the positioning practices around both hashtags as expressions of “digital activism” (Joyce 2010: VIII). One characteristic of the hashtag campaign is that political demands are hardly ever made directly. Rather, the participants resort to five main linguistic patterns: (1) they address different target groups; (2) they refer to different protagonists; (3) in the subcorpus #CoronaEltern specifically, they constitute themselves as a collective through (4) the recurring use of first-person narratives; (5) and generalization and typification. Our findings show that #CoronaParents are not just parents in times of a pandemic: #CoronaParents are only those who see themselves as such, participating in an evolving, at times misunderstood community.
This paper investigates self-initiated uses of mobile phones (such as texting or making a call) in everyday video-recorded conversations among Czech speakers. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis, it illustrates how participants publicly frame their own device use (for example, by announcements), and how co-present interlocutors respond to it. Previous studies have described how participants manage two concurrent communicative involvements, but have not provided detailed sequential descriptions of how device use can be negotiated and accounted for. This study shows that mobile device use in co-presence is not a priori problematic (or vice versa). Instead, participants frame their technology use in different ways according to various features of the social situation they treat as momentarily relevant. These features include the course of the conversation and how the device use relates to it, the overall participation framework and the opacity of the device use for co-present others.
This study offers a contribution to the reception analysis of TV documentaries by focusing on viewer opinions expressed on social media. It analyses German and English comments from YouTube and Facebook in order to find out what aspects of documentaries the audience comments on. More specifically, it describes how the viewers evaluate strategies that the producers use for simplifying complex content while still creating an appealing and entertaining media product. The results imply that most viewers appreciate informative shows that are entertaining at the same time. They also show that viewers tend to focus on the music and image, rather than on the spoken text, and that documentaries where nature plays an important role are judged more positively than science and history documentaries.
Playing videogames is a popular social activity; people play videogames in different places, on different media, in different situations, alone or with partners, online or offline. Unsurprisingly, they thereby share space (physically or virtually) with other playing or non-playing people. The special issue investigates through different contexts and settings how non-players become participants of the gaming interaction and how players and non-players co-construct presence. The introduction provides a problem-related context for the individual contributions and then briefly presents them.
This study explores how ‘gatherings’ turn into ‘encounters’ in a virtual world (VW) context. Most communication technologies enable only focused encounters between distributed participants, but in VWs both gatherings and encounters can occur. We present close sequential analysis of moments when after a silent gathering, interaction among participants in a VW is gradually resumed, and also investigate the social actions in the verbal (re-)opening turns. Our findings show that like in face-to-face situations, also in VWs participants often use different types of embodied resources to achieve the transition, rather than rely on verbal means only. However, the transition process in VWs has distinctive characteristics compared to the one in face-to-face situations. We discuss how participants in a VW use virtually embodied pre-beginnings to display what we call encounter-readiness, instead of displaying lack of presence by avatar stillness. The data comprise 40 episodes of video-recorded team interactions in a VW.
In so-called Let’s Plays, video gaming is presented and verbally commented by Let’s Players on the internet for an audience. When only watched but not played, the most attractive features of video games, immersion and interactivity, get lost – at least for the internet audience. We assume that the accompanying reactions (transmitted via a so-called facecam) and verbal comments of Let’s Players on their game for an audience contribute to an embodiment of their avatars which makes watching a video game more attractive. Following an ethnomethodological conversation analytical (EMCA) approach, our paper focusses on two practices of embodying avatars. A first practice is that Let’s Players verbally formulate their actions in the game. By that, they make their experiences and the 'actions' of avatars more transparent. Secondly, they produce response cries (Goffman) in reaction to game events. By that, they enhance the liveliness of their avatars. Both practices contribute to a co-construction of a specific kind of (tele-)presence.
This study analyzes how participants playing VR games construct co-presence and shared gameplay. The analysis focuses on instances of play where one person is wearing the VR equipment, and other participants are located nearby without the ability to directly interact with the game. We first show how the active player using the VR equipment draws on talk and embodied activity to signal their presence in the shared physical environment, while simultaneously conducting actions in the virtual space, and thus creates spaces for the other participants to take part in gameplay. Second, we describe how other participants draw on the contextual configurations of the moment in displaying co-presence and position themselves as active and consequential co-players. The analysis demonstrates how gameplay can be communicatively constructed even in situations where the participants have differential rights and possibilities to act and influence the game.
The paper presents research results emerging from the analysis of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) log data. Based on the assumption that media and data, as part of practice, are produced and used cooperatively, the paper discusses how IPA log data can be used to analyze (1) how the IPA systems operate through their connection to platforms and infrastructures, (2) how the dialog systems are designed today and (3) how users integrate them into their everyday social interaction. It also asks in which everyday practical contexts the IPA are placed on the system side and on the user side, and how privacy issues in particular are negotiated. It is argued that, in order to be able to investigate these questions, the technical-institutional and the cultural-theoretical perspective on media, which is common in German media linguistics, has to be complemented by a more fundamental, i.e. social-theoretical and interactionist perspective.
This paper investigates situations in French videogame interactions where non-players who share the same physical space as players, participate in the gaming activities as spectators. Through a detailed multimodal and sequential analysis, we show that being a spectator is a local achievement of all co-present participants - players and non-players.
In the present article we argue that all communication is medial in the sense that every human sign-based interaction is shaped by medial aspects from the outset. We propose a dynamic, semiotic concept of media that focuses on the process-related aspect of mediality, and we test the applicability of this concept using as an example the second presidential debate between Clinton and Trump in 2016. The analysis shows in detail how the sign processing during the debate is continuously shaped by structural aspects of television and specific traits of political communication in television. This includes how the camerawork creates meaning and how the protagonists both use the affordances of this special mediality. Therefore, it is not adequate in our view to separate the technical aspects of the medium, the ‘hardware’, from the processual aspects and the structural conditions of communication. While some aspects of the interaction are directly constituted by the medium, others are more indirectly shaped and influenced by it, especially by its institutional dimension – we understand them as second-order media effects. The whole medial procedure with its specific mediality is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of meaning-making. We distinguish the medial procedure from the semiotic modes employed, the language games played and the competence of the players involved.
Der Einfluss extremistischer Gewaltereignisse auf das Framing von Extremismen auf SPIEGEL Online
(2020)
In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir die Darstellung von Rechtsextremismus, Linksextremismus und Islamismus im medialen Diskurs am Beispiel von SPIEGEL Online, einem der deutschen Leitmedien. Wir leiten vier zentrale Dimensionen für die Konzeptualisierung von Extremismen ab: Ideologie und Organisation, Herkunft der Akteure, Stellung zur Gesellschaft und Typische Handlungen. Wir beobachten die Entwicklung der Darstellung der drei Extremismen an möglichen Bruchpunkten: Wir untersuchen das assoziative Framing der drei Extremismen vor und nach prominenten extremismusbezogenen Gewaltereignissen, namentlich die Anschläge des 11. September, die Veröffentlichung des NSU-Skandals und linksextremistische Aktivitäten während des G20-Gipfels in Hamburg. Mittels einer Kollokationsanalyse identifizieren wir mit den Extremismen assoziierte Aspekte und ordnen diese den Konzeptualisierungsdimensionen zu. Wir beobachten Veränderungen im Framing, die durch die ausgewählten Ereignisse bedingt sind, und vergleichen das resultierende Framing mit den Kerndefinitionen des Verfassungsschutzes aus dem Bericht des Jahres 2017, um mögliche Unterschiede in der Konzeptualisierung von Extremismen mit möglicherweise unterschiedlichen Handlungslogiken als Resultat divergierender Konzeptualisierungen herauszuarbeiten.
Der Einfluss extremistischer Gewaltereignisse auf das Framing von Extremismen auf SPIEGEL Online
(2020)
In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir die Darstellung von Rechtsextremismus, Linksextremismus und Islamismus im medialen Diskurs am Beispiel von SPIEGEL Online, einem der deutschen Leitmedien. Wir leiten vier zentrale Dimensionen für die Konzeptualisierung von Extremismen ab: Ideologie und Organisation, Herkunft der Akteure, Stellung zur Gesellschaft und Typische Handlungen. Wir beobachten die Entwicklung der Darstellung der drei Extremismen an möglichen Bruchpunkten: Wir untersuchen das assoziative Framing der drei Extremismen vor und nach prominenten extremismusbezogenen Gewaltereignissen, namentlich die Anschläge des 11. September, die Veröffentlichung des NSU-Skandals und linksextremistische Aktivitäten während des G20-Gipfels in Hamburg. Mittels einer Kollokationsanalyse identifizieren wir mit den Extremismen assoziierte Aspekte und ordnen diese den Konzeptualisierungsdimensionen zu. Wir beobachten Veränderungen im Framing, die durch die ausgewählten Ereignisse bedingt sind, und vergleichen das resultierende Framing mit den Kerndefinitionen des Verfassungsschutzes aus dem Bericht des Jahres 2017, um mögliche Unterschiede in der Konzeptualisierung von Extremismen mit möglicherweise unterschiedlichen Handlungslogiken als Resultat divergierender Konzeptualisierungen herauszuarbeiten.
The present article shows an experimental subject investigation on elements of video telephony in relation to experiencing and feeling connectedness and intimacy within private interpersonal communication. Particular interests are questions about possible relationships between image detail, angle of view or perspective as well as image format or the foreign and personal perception of the communicators. Central to this is the question of whether the practices and interactions of users in dealing with communication technology can be used to derive possible conclusions on negotiation measures or even adaptation services. The obtained results are presented on the basis of an introductory theoretical discussion. It is followed by a summary and analysis as well as an outlook on the further use and significance of the results.
This paper adds to the growing field of conversation analytical re-search on smartphone-use in face-to-face interactions. Whenever smartphones are used in mobile-supported sharing activities - e. g. to show a picture to co-present others - the smartphone user needs to search for and find the “searchable object” in the World Wide Web, an App or on the device’s local memory. Analyzing audio-recordings of naturally-occurring conversations, this paper iden-tifies two types of practices of speech that explicitly orient to on-going smartphone-supported searches: Collaborative search (cf. Brown/McGregor/McMillan 2015) and search-accompanying com-mentary by the smartphone-user. Both practices verbally provide for the accountability of the otherwise opaque device use. They differ in the way they produce opportunities for co-present others to substantively contribute to the progression of the search as well as the degree to which they produce the search as an interactionally public event.
This paper explores how refugee families in Germany draw on me-diational repertoires to accomplish a range of digital literacy prac-tices on their smartphones. We introduce the concept of ‘mediation-al repertoire’, i.e. a socially and individually structured configuration of semiotic and technological resources for communication, and use it in an ethnographic case study with participants from Syria and Af-ghanistan in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18. The collect-ed data includes nine semi-directed interviews, video demonstra-tions of smartphone usage, and ethnographic fieldnotes. Qualitative analysis draws on mediagrams, i.e. visualizations of mediational re-pertoires in two families. Findings suggest that individual mediation-al repertoires in these families differ especially by generation and other factors, such as literacy competence, type of social relation-ship and purpose of online use, including smartphone-based lang-uage-learning.
In this article, we build on research arguing that linguistic self-representation on social media can be viewed as a form of face-work and that the strategies employed by users are influenced by both a desire to connect with others and a need to preserve privacy. Drawing on our own analyses of usernames as well as that of others which were conducted as part of a large-scale project investigating usernames in 14 languages (Schlobinski/T. Siever 2018a), we argue that these conflicting goals of wanting to be recognised as an authentic member of an in-group while retaining a degree of anonymity are also observable in the choice of username. Online self-naming can thus be viewed as a key practice in the debate of face-work on social media platforms, because names and naming strategies can be studied more readily than broader and more complex aspects, such as stylistic variation or text-image interdependence, while at the same time forming part of these.
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
Narratives 2.0 : a multi-dimensional approach to semi-public storytelling in WhatsApp voice messages
(2019)
Based on a corpus of voice message narratives in German WhatsApp group chats, the present study contributes to research on social media storytelling in that it focusses on stories of personal experience which are embedded in a communication platform which favours a continuous dialogic exchange, narrated to well-defined non-anonymous publics and multimodal (comprised of visual and audible posting types). To capture the characteristics of this type of social media storytelling, the paper argues that Ochs and Capps’ (2001) dimensional model originally developed for conversational narratives (including the dimensions of tellability, tellership, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance) should be expanded by the dimensions of publicness, multimodality and sequencing. The prototype of storytelling in WhatsApp group chats is based on recent personal experiences; it is related by a single teller as an initial, sequentially non-embedded and linearly organised “big package” story (in a single voice message sometimes introduced by a text message containing an abstract); other group members routinely document their evaluative stances in rather conventionalised text message responses in the semi-public group space.
This contribution aims to describe privacy, publicness and anonymity as essential analytic dimensions for media linguistic research. The dimensions are not inherent in and predetermined by the technical features and forms of communication provided by mobile devices, but are used by the participants as an orientation grid for shaping their online and offline practices in and with mobile media. Considering both mobile device use in the public realm and the dissemination of increasingly private content in social media (which is said to lead to ‘blurred boundaries’ between the private and the public), the paper provides a brief overview of the main developments in mobile media research: Studies adopting various approaches – e. g. sociological-ethnographic, linguistic and media studies – illustrate how publicness, privacy and anonymity are actively shaped and brought about by mobile media users in face-to-face and remote social encounters. As this shows that publicness, privacy and anonymity are still relevant concepts for users, future media linguistics studies should focus on the dynamic multimodal practices by which they are contextualized and accomplished.
The aim of this paper is to present the results of an empirical analysis of the use of non-alphabetic graphic signs (e.g. asterisks, slashes, plus signs etc.) in the context of repairs in Russian and German informal electronic communication. The data for the analysis were taken from the “Mobile Communication Database MoCoDa” (http://mocoda.spracheinteraktion.de/), which contains Russian and German private electronic communication via SMS, WhatsApp and other short message services, and the “Dortmunder Chat-Korpus” (http://www.chatkorpus.tu-dortmund.de/korpora.html). This paper describes the functions of various graphic resources in the context of repairs in both data collections and compares the occurrences of these functions in current Russian and German computer-mediated communication. It concludes that particular signs in both data sets share the same subset of functions, but they differ in terms of how frequently these resources occur in each form of communication.
All linguistics should be media linguistics, but it is not. This thesis is presented by using linguistic landscapes as an example. LL research does not belong to the traditional core of either mainstream linguistics or media linguistics. This is why not everything within power has been done yet to make full use of their thematic, conceptual and methodological possibilities. Visible signs in public space, however, are an everyday phenomenon. You have to pull out all the stops to research them extensively. The distinction between linguistics and media linguistics turns out to be counterproductive. But this does not only apply to the case of linguistic landscapes. It also stands for any comprehensive investigation of language and language use. (Exceptions may be very narrow questions for specific purposes.) The above thoughts are supported by a database of the project „Metropolenzeichen“ with more than 25.000 systematically collected, geocoded and tagged photographs.