Riassunto Inglese II

Language and social media

What is social media?

Social media are Internet-based sites and services that promote social interaction between participants, such as blogs, wikis, or social network sites. The difference between mass media and social media is that mass media is presented as a one-to-many broadcasting mechanism (like television), whereas social media delivers content via a network of participants where the content can be published by anyone but is still distributed across a large-scale audience. Social media is an umbrella term which groups different forms, with different genres and different range of communicative channels and text types.

Social media platforms can be distinguished historically from other kinds of digitally enabled communication. Social media often refers to the range of tools and technologies that began to be developed in the latter years of the 1990s and became sites of mainstream Internet activities in the first decade of the twenty-first century. There is an increasingly interactive potential of social media. The email lists, bulletin boards, and text messages of the 1980s might be seen as precursors to the communicative channels of today. The mid-1990s saw a decisive shift in the way that social media sites enabled interaction between participants in public. Blogs and wikis extended the range of interactive possibilities, blogs allowing individual writers to connect to other bloggers and wikis promoting collective contributions.

The years 2003-6 saw a rapid expansion of social network sites (such as Facebook) thanks to the previous technological developments that have made it possible to reach popularity, such as MP3 file formats or Real Player that have facilitated digital animation and audio resources. In 1996 was launched the first smartphone. With increased possibilities for access, social media interactions could be produced and consumed in more locations and anytime. Further developments in markup language have made it easier to include multimedia content and to access that content via smartphones.

Social media is often compared with the term "Web 2.0". Web 2.0 is a new era for online interaction, different from the old web genres, it is a rhetorical label. Web 2.0 users create content (for example, Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone). Working from a media theory perspective, Kaplan and Haenlein compare the different ways in which participants might engage in interactions that are more or less direct and which allow a greater or lesser amount of information. A telephone conversation has communicative resources associated with speech (such as voice or volume) but it hasn’t paralinguistic resources typical of a face-to-face conversation (like gesture or body posture). Kaplan and Haenlein suggest that media-related characteristics intersect with the choices that participants can make within particular social media sites to disclose more or less information about themselves, which can vary according to degree and in the modes through which the participant can represent his or herself. Herring makes a distinction between the medium factors (like the size of the message) and the situation factors (like the participant characteristics).

The term "social" pays attention to the ways in which social network sites, blogs, and wikis enable people to interact with each other. Social media has a collaborative potential. The language used in uni-directional broadcasts can sometimes mimic the conversational styles found in face-to-face conversation (for example using the second person pronouns), but doesn’t allow the audience to interact. In contrast, social media formats have participation structures that allow interaction. Mainstream media has integrated social media platforms (the reality show audience can comment on the show on their social network).

Social media interactions tend to emphasize interpersonal exchanges, they are distinct from sites where the primary purposes might allow a customer to purchase goods. They allow members to share information with each other. Sites which emphasize the exchange of goods and services (such as online shopping stores) have evolved because they have adopted aspects of social media, for example, sites like Amazon include customer comments. You have to understand the purpose of the participants' interaction to understand the type of exchange.

In order to enable interaction between participants, most social media platforms allow members to display information about their identity on their profile page. The kind of information included in a social media profile can vary from site to site. Many people use anonymous or pseudonymous. The terms and conditions of Facebook require that its members use their real names when registering for the site; this doesn’t mean that all information posted to Facebook is necessarily true. Instead, Wikipedia profiles focus on information relevant to their contributions to the site (like listing which articles a user might have contributed to). Self-representation in social media sites is distinctive because of the ways in which individuals can present their relationship with others. Social network sites are platforms that allow a member to display their network of contacts (such as a friend list on Facebook). The impact of interacting via social media has been rated in positive terms (as a potentially democratizing context) and in negative terms (in relation to moral panics). When technological change is represented as the cause of social change, this is sometimes described as technological determinism, which is often problematic because it represents the relationship between technology and social change in terms that are too simple and reduce the complexity of the wider situation.

Social media platforms can also be differentiated according to their technological characteristics. The term "media" refers to the texts produced by the technology or to technologies used to transmit messages from one participant to another.

According to Herring, there are many semiotic modes as channels of communication, participants can transmit image, sound, or written words, for example. Kaplan and Haenlein’s use of media richness distinguishes one platform from another. Social media genres can be distinguished according to their richness; in fact, the previous genres had fewer resources (email had only verbal resources instead of social network sites, which have visual and audio-visual resources). However, there is a variation across different social media platforms in terms of which semiotic modes predominate (YouTube with audiovisual domination and Flickr with images that are the main focus, but in both there are written words). In any case, the architecture of these platforms is in constant change (Facebook has had many updates such as the introduction of the timeline). Social media use communicative terms associated with spoken discourse (such as Talk Pages). Computer-mediated communication has become a distinct language variety (such as Net Speak) and covers all modes of communication.

Herring uses the heading message format to list the technological characteristics of media important for describing social media context. There is a variation in how one site might use message formats as compared with another. Social media archives tend to use architectures that promote rankings or interaction (highlighting the material which has been interacted with the most). The semiotic modes and the tools and technologies used to communicate via social media sites are important influences on the choices people make when communicating with each other (the absence of facial expression when using written words in a message can require creating other resources such as emoticons). Social media platforms have points of similarity with others.

In synchronous systems, the participants in an interaction are co-present in the same time frame; in social media context, it requires participants to be logged to the system at the same time (as in the case of a Skype call). In asynchronous systems, the participants' interaction is in a different time; in social media context, it allows one participant to post a message and the other person to answer later (as in the case of an email or posting a comment in response to a blog post). Some sites can have synchronous and asynchronous options. CMC can be ephemeral or be preserved in time. Social media genres can vary depending on their persistence (Facebook with its timeline keeps posts, while Snapchat posts are visible only for a short time). Knowing that a message will be preserved and viewed later in public format may influence both the selection and style of the messages posted to a site. The increasing rapidity of online interaction is reducing the scale of asynchronocity.

Two key facets of communication which are important for social media genres are the relationship between the speaker and their audience and the public or private nature of communication. The number of participants involved in an interaction can vary from one-to-one (such as a chat), one-to-many (such as a wall post on a personal Facebook account), or many-to-many (such as a collective forum). The communicative norms which emerge in a given social media site can also be influenced by if the context of the interaction is private (like Direct Messages) or public (like Wikipedia). People adopt their language according to the context.

What might a linguist say about social media?

Social media are a relatively recent phenomenon. There is a distinction between digital natives (who grew up using social media and have never known a world without) and digital immigrants (who adopted social media only as adults). Linguistic research which explores social media platforms is rich and includes analysis of how elements of the language system are reconfigured in online context and how the dynamics of interpersonal communication are managed.

Linguists are still arguing about what exactly language is. According to the traditional theories of the role of language in communication, language is seen as a semiotic system (a system of signs used to encode meaning that senders intend to communicate). The signs may be abstract but take a conventional meaning, the meaning can be transmitted in spoken, written, or signed forms. Other kinds of signs (such as the color of a written letter) may influence the meaning; all communication is multimodal. Language is also a way for individuals to interact with others, it is always situated in a particular context and acquires meaning only in its context. Linguistic and non-linguistic practices are used together. Almost all uses of language are linked with past and future uses of language. Analyzing YouTube comments, we realize the importance of context and the relationship of each comment to other previous ones. There has been a move away from the idea of there being distinct languages, the boundaries between languages are not clear. In social media, there is a mix of different semiotic resources. Through the punctuation and font, the user can express meaning. Some visual resources cannot be classified as belonging to one language rather than another (like emoticons, used with many language varieties). Researchers are developing new ways of conceptualizing language: some of them have used the idea of polylanguaging, which refers to the ways in which users simultaneously use features associated with different languages. Some researchers sustain that traditional notions of diversity in sociolinguistics don’t work in the contemporary world. Superdiversity is closely related to changes in communication media and it means that notions of diversity are difficult to sustain. One important aspect for someone doing research on social media is that there is constant change online. Language can be analyzed at different levels, such as: linguistic practices (what people do with language), texts (collection of words, clauses, and sentences that have a clear communicative function), clauses and sentences (words arranged in a structure), words (units of meaning consisting of one or more morphemes), morphemes (the smallest units of meaning), and phonemes (individual sounds or signs). Users in social media contexts code-switch using several different languages or varieties in the course of an interaction, or style-shift, using formal and less formal language in different parts of a text.

The relationship between different forms of communication in social media can sometimes make it hard to identify the boundaries or the textual units you need to collect. This relates to two pairs of terms: text and context. Deciding what counts as the text is not always easy, but it’s important because the decision will guide what material you might collect for a research project and the ethical considerations you might need to make and because your choice of textual unit will be linked to the ways you choose to analyze the material. There is no rule about what kinds of unit will work best for analyzing language use, it’s important to consider the text in a particular context. Linguistic and sociological researchers have paid attention to the contextual factors that might be important when interpreting data, such as:

• Participants: the people who take part in the interaction and their relationship to others.
• Imagined context: the projected context created cognitively by participants on the basis of their world knowledge.
• Extra-situational context: the offline social practices in which the participants are involved.
• Behavioral context: the physical situation in which the participants interact via social media.
• Generic context: the social media site in which the communication takes place including the site’s purpose, rules, and norms.

Some users are used to combining punctuation marks in creative ways to indicate tone of voice or other kinds of meaning, these are called emoticons. Some other typical orthographic features of written CMC are acronyms (like LOL for laugh out loud), word reductions (like hv for have), or letter homophones (like U for you). They are used in informal text. Emoticons aren’t synonymous with Internet language as a whole.

Each new social media platform generates descriptions of how language is used, and how language use has changed or is changing as a result of particular technologies. According to Herring, CMC researchers have to consider more deeply the question of what determines people’s use of mediated communication; she said that technological innovation is mostly superficial in CMC. There is a distinction between spoken, written, and in-between language use. The netspeak is the written language in a digital context. Linguistic research has searched to define language use in digital contexts with reference to earlier genres, such as conversations compared with instant messaging or letters compared with emails. More recent approaches have emphasized the linguistic practices in social media contexts and the way people use language to construct and negotiate their identities. The different domains of language are: structure, meaning, interaction, social behavior, participation, and multimodal communication. There is a rich and diverse range of research that has begun to emerge in social media sites contexts. Even if many of these studies consider verbal forms of language as the primary feature for analysis (such as register or word choice) they also include multimodal resources (such as gesture and image) used in communication. Each study varies in the kinds of questions and in the methods of analysis that are used.

What does it mean to research?

Research means investigating a particular phenomenon in order to...