Language and Media on Twitter

Language and Mediation

• A photo and caption on Twitter show school children in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• Twitter modifies language using hashtags and RT.

Understanding the Message

• To understand the significance of a tweet, it is necessary to understand the picture, typical museum behavior, current ideas, and knowledge of language, visual communication, and societal expectations.

Complexity of Media

• Media is more complicated than commonly perceived.
• Media is transmitted through a specific medium like Twitter.
• Media portrays people using different media and expresses opinions about their use.

Impact of Twitter

• Twitter affects message construction.
• Ordinary people can produce, broadcast, and share messages.

Important Points About Language and Media

• Media includes various forms and connects with other media in complex ways.
• Media affects the types of messages transmitted, how messages are formulated, and who can formulate messages.
• It determines who the receivers are and what they can do with the messages.

Language Complexity

• Language encompasses verbal and non-verbal forms.
• Message understanding depends on how different language forms interact.

Functions of Language

• Language conveys meaning.
• Language performs actions, such as thanking, apologizing, and requesting.
• Language shows identities and creates relationships with others.
• Language expresses someone's opinions.

What is Mass Media?

• Media includes various tools used for action, such as coins, maps, sculptures, stamps, clothes, seals, and stones
• Even the human voice and body are considered media.

Definition of Medium and Mediation

• Medium: Anything that facilitates communication or interaction between entities.
• Mediation: The process of facilitating interaction between two entities.

Vygotsky's Perspective

• Lev Vygotsky (1962) stated that all interactions are mediated through cultural tools, including physical tools (e.g., hammers, telephones) and mental tools (e.g., language, counting systems).
• Tools shape actions and thoughts.

Example of Mediation

• A person with a hammer can perform tasks that someone without one cannot.
• A person who speaks a language can do things that someone who cannot speak that language cannot do.

McLuhan's View

• Marshall McLuhan (1964) described media as extensions of man, enhancing our abilities in the world.
• Media affects what we communicate, how we communicate, and to whom we communicate.

Key Concept: Affect

• Technological Determinism: Media determine our actions, thoughts, and communication.
• Humans creatively use media and find new ways to use old media against expectations.

Conclusion on Media

• Media affects what people do, but how people use media influences media development.

Media and Mediation

• Media use is influenced by social conventions within communities and cultures.
• Each media outlet has its conventions.
• Different groups consume media differently.

Media Ideologies

• Ilana Gershon defines media ideologies as beliefs about how different media should or should not be used.
• Includes when and where media should be used, who should use them, whether they should be used alone or with others, and the types of messages that should be communicated.
• An example: how to break up with a romantic partner.

Development of Media Ideologies

• Media ideologies are developed through observing others using media, using media with social groups, and exposure to metadiscourse about media use.
• Metadiscourse shifts discourse levels to convey multilevel messages.
• Media ideologies are linked to moral and ethical ideas about romantic relationships, privacy, and personal responsibility.

Language and Discourse

• Focus on what media do rather than what they are.
• Media is processes of mediation, not just objects.

Differences Between Discourse Analysts and Other Linguists

• Discourse analysts focus on how people use language, not just the rules of language.
• Analysts analyze longer stretches of language (texts and conversations) rather than isolated sentences or words.
• They examine how language interacts with other forms of communication (multimodal).
• They explore the relationship between language and societal organization, ideologies, and power dynamics.

Impact of Media on Communication

• Different media enable various texts and conversations.
• Each form of communication can manipulate people, maintain or challenge power dynamics.

Mediated Discourse Analysis

• Starts with the idea of mediation.
• Aims to understand how different mediational means affect social actions.
• Language use is influenced by media, not just individual choice.

Meaning Making through Media

• Media enable different kinds of meaning making through modes and materialities.
• Media are not limited to language; they also include still and moving pictures, music and sounds, and emerging modes like smell and touch.

Context and Interpretation

• Captions provide specific meanings to photographs.
• Context includes the social situation surrounding the transmission of media.
• Interpretation of photographs depends on viewers' personal or cultural associations and learned ways of reading images.

Definition of Mode

• Kress and Jewitt (2003) define mode as a set of resources for meaning making, including image, gaze, movement, music, speech, and sound effects.
• Modes are distinct from media, which are physical tools for communication.

Examples of Media and Modes

• Radio allows communication through spoken language, sound, and music.
• Photography enables communication through image, color, layout, gesture, and gaze.

Affordances and Constraints

• Different media have affordances and constraints regarding modes.
• Different modes provide various ways of meaning making.
• Kress (2000) states that semiotic modes have different potentials for human expression and engagement.

Types of Logic in Communication

• Writing and speech follow linear and temporal logic (sequentiality).
• Images use spatial logic (simultaneity).

Typological Description

• Lemke (1999) describes language in terms of types or categories, such as boy, girl, blue, green, happy, sad, president, and peasant.

MEDIA, MODES, AND MATERIALITIES

• Images can show subtle differences in feelings, like shades of blueness or happiness, even when we lack precise words to describe them.
• Modes that are ‘regularized' and ‘organized' become effective tools for communication.
• Writing and speech have rules documented in dictionaries and grammar books.
• Traffic signs and emojis have clearer meanings compared to other forms like images, gestures, or music (polysemous).

Types of Signs (Charles Sanders Pierce, 2003)

• Icons: Signs that resemble what they represent.
• Symbols: Signs that have a conventional meaning with no resemblance to what they signify.
• Indexes: Signs that derive meaning from their context.

Materialities in Media

• Materialities refer to the physical aspects of media that influence social interactions around messages.
• They affect how media exist in the physical world and shape user experiences.

Three Main Ways Materiality Affects Communication

• Materiality determines the context of use (where, when, how), influences participation in communication (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many), and affects the types of messages conveyed by defining the modes used and their combinations.

MEDIA, GENRE, AND STYLE

• Genre: A category or type of text.
• Genres are recognizable forms of discourse with specific purposes for particular audiences, sharing structural and content elements.
• Example: A recipe in a magazine.
• Hybrid genres: Combinations of different genres that reflect evolving conventions.

Questions About Genre

• Who defines genres and on what basis?
• Is genre prescriptive (how texts should be produced) or descriptive (how texts are actually produced)?

Origins of Genres

• Genres develop over time based on conventions influenced by social, political, and cultural changes.

Tzvetan Todorov's "Horizons of Expectations"

• Refers to the expectations about features accompanying texts, like a detective in a crime mystery show.

GENERIC DISRUPTIONS AND INNOVATIONS

• Fixed genres become repetitive and uncreative, leading to deviations from conventions.
• Breaking from conventions is risky, and may lead to negative evaluations.
• Hybrids can be innovative and successful, like a mockumentary.

STYLE

• Style: The manner of doing something and composed of distinctive features like textures, colors, and sounds.
• Traditionally viewed as formal vs. informal, but in sociolinguistics, style is seen as a repertoire.

Styles and Social Identities

• Robert Le Page describes linguistic choices as ‘acts of identity'.
• Identity is performed through language and semiotic resources, influenced by social contexts.
• Styles mark social belonging and can also lead to stereotypes.
• Mainstream media reinforce stereotypes through language and behavior associations.
• Judith Irvine and Susan Gal describe iconization as linking speech elements with non-linguistic features, often through media representations.

MEDIA STORYTELLING

• Storytelling is a universal activity.

Bruner's Perspective on Storytelling

• Humans organize events into memorable stories.

Narrative Genres

• Narratives include anecdotes, fables, fairy tales, and love stories.
• Focuses on the product of storytelling and organization.

Canonical Model of Narrative

• Developed by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky.
• Occurs during interviews where interviewees speak naturally.

Components of a Narrative

• Abstract: Story summary
• Orientation: Details about who, what, where, and when.
• Complicating Action: Events that move the plot forward.
• Evaluation: Significance and implications of the actions.
• Result or Resolution: Final outcome.
• Coda: Statement summarizing the story and returning the listener to the present.

Narrative as a Performance

• Storytelling involves social and cultural practices of the teller and the listener.
• To capture attention, tellers use conventional storytelling rules and create unconventional narratives.

Power of Storytelling

• Stories give tellers power over listeners.
• Tellers use conventions to create unique effects on the audience.
• Common storylines include "rags to riches" and "the voyage and return".
• Stories are influenced by cultural scripts and contexts.

Talk-In-Interaction

• Dynamic communication between the teller and listeners as in talk shows.

Small Stories

• Michael Bamberg and Alexandra Georgakopoulou describe "small stories" as used to share news.
• Examples include, breaking news, projections of future events, and shared stories.

Power of Narrative

• Narratives function similarly to myths, encoding our understanding of ourselves and society.
• Narratives demonstrate linguistic skill.
• Personal experience narratives are true accounts.

Frames

• Framing organizes stories to emphasize certain perspectives.

Contextual Cues (John Gumperz)

• Signals through words, style, facial expressions, or tone guide interpretation.

Media Reception

• How audiences interpret media content.

Media and Discourse Processes

• Entextualization: Lifting discourse from its original context.
• Involves decontextualization (removing discourse) and recontextualization (inserting it into a new context).
• In decontextualization, discourse elements are adapted and recombined creatively.

Communities of Practice

• Tacit Knowledge: Unwritten norms and ethics within a community.
• Firewalls: Boundaries that exist in a community of practice.