In sociolinguistics, we
learn about diamesic (from Greek dia- across and mes- medium) variation, or language variation across media.
Traditionally the word is used to describe the difference between oral and
written speech.
But in today’s reality, media
takes on a whole other meaning.
So does diamesic now also
encompasses the variation across various online platforms (if that’s even a
thing)?
When looking up diamesic online, I found a more recent and up to date definition provided by "Raj Bhuptani, Harvard '13 (Statistics)" on Quora:
“diamesic - variation in a language across medium of
communication (English over the phone versus English over email versus English
over IM)” but the list could go on and on: over Facebook over Twitter over
Snapchat…
[For those who are not familiar with Quora, it is a participatory
Q&A website that works in a similar fashion as Urban Dictionary, as anyone
can provide answers which then get up or down-voted. For some reason, I started
receiving updates via email with questions usually related to Paris (is it
overrated? is it dangerous? is it the best city on earth? and the like), I
tried to ignore it but realized that the answers are actually quite interesting
(and perusing the site is addictive). And apparently I am not the only one
wandering around, as the website gets 100 million monthly visitors. They also have
interest groups, including one called “Cult of Linguists”…]
When Rymes (2019) [what’s
an appropriate form of address on a class blog?] talks about the awkwardness of
cross-posting, it seems to be mostly in terms of audiences and topics, but I
also wonder if it has to do with the different stylistic conventions or genres
of each medium.
As a language teacher, sociolinguist,
and someone with (some) literary analysis background, I am fascinated by how
new media influence, transform, and reinvent language and style.
I’d love to hear your
thoughts (and learn more):
- What are some of your favorite language or stylistic creations that emerged on social media?
- Do various social media platforms have different genres according to you? How would you qualify them?
- Within social media, have you noticed a difference in style (and substance) between transient messages (Snapchat, stories) and permanent ones (tweets, Facebook wall)?
- As educators, what are some ways you could embrace or use social media in your classes?
My personal favorite is of
course Twitter and its character limit. Coming from the country of the Oulipo, I
believe that writing under constraints has a freeing potential.
And indeed, the French-speaking Twittersphere
is quite lively:
- there are frequent poetry contests (especially during the week of the French language and francophonie in March)
- some citizen sociolinguists claim that Twitter has made French language less formal, as people tend to replace the vous by tu to save two characters (I don’t know how accurate that is, but the fact that some people have this impression is illuminating in and of itself)
- famous writers use it as a way of describing the world/society in haiku style tweets (Bernard Pivot has become an expert in this genre/speech act)
- it encourages users to use abbreviations, or eye dialect, sometimes including numbers (French being a very opaque language, the way it sounds is usually shorter than the way it’s written as opposed to the PA accents provided in Rymes, for instance, “je ne suis pas sûre” I’m not sure, can be transcribed as “chui pa sur” or “chu pa sur” with a Northern or Quebecois accent…; “A demain”, see you tomorrow may become “A2M1”)
For all these reasons, I
love to use Twitter in my classes. Another is that my students are usually not
on Twitter so they create a “fake” account that is just for school and allows
them to keep these “slices” of their lives separate if they want.
I believe Twitter is the
perfect case in point of how medium influences substance and style. Lo and
behold, Professors at Penn have been investigating it! They have found that the
recent word-limit increase promoted civility (Donald Trump was probably not part of their sample...): https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/brevity-soul-twitter
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ReplyDeleteSophie, I really enjoyed reading your post, and I find the point you raise about different stylistic conventions or genres possibly playing into the awkwardness of cross-posting to be very compelling and worth exploring. Certainly, I see various social media platforms really as communities, with distinct utilities and parameters of accepted social actions. It makes total sense to me that certain styles of language become emblematic of these social media communities, and when that happens…social media interactions start looking at lot like face-to-face interactions. Personally, I do express myself in different ways on the social media platforms I use. I ended up having thoughts for all of your questions so please excuse the length of this response!!
ReplyDeleteAs a frequent user of Twitter, one of my favorite stylistic creations on the platform is the attachment of a meme, “reaction image”, GIF, or short video (RIP Vine) as a form of supplementary information or a way to accentuate how the audience should interpret the text in the Tweet – like this tweet from Megan Thee Stallion (https://twitter.com/theestallion/status/1167640249650089984). In many cases, these attachments are actually integral in conveying the tweet’s full message, such as this tweet here: https://twitter.com/DannyBate4/status/1176154194069377025 (casual warning: the French language gets roasted pretty bad). This style of expression isn’t nearly as prevalent on other social media platforms, in my experience, and it’s an aspect that actively makes Twitter enjoyable for me.
I think social media platforms do have different genres, and certainly have different kinds of functions. For me personally, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LINE are more “traditional”, in that I use them mainly to stay in touch with friends and family, especially since most of them aren’t in Philadelphia. I also use Twitter and Tumblr, which are “fun”. These are the platforms I use to participate in fandom, livetweet reactions to TV shows, engage in political or intellectual discussion, and enjoy memes. The linguistic styles I employ for these two “genres” are very different from one another for sure. There’s some crossover when it comes to my audiences, but I rarely attempt to cross-post across these genres.
For me and my friends (or followers), I find that many of us have migrated from the permanency of Facebook timeline posts (do people post on timelines anymore?) toward the transiency of Instagram Stories. Ten years ago, Facebook was the primary social media platform among me and my peers. Status posts, notes, and tagged photos were all frequent. Now it feels like most people don’t post anything at all. If I want to find out what my friends are up to without texting them, I have to go view their Instagram Stories. Of course, due to the nature of Stories, much of the “style” is visual rather than textual, though I’ll often see reposts of text-heavy images. I think the transiency of Instagram Stories addresses the implicit social faux pas of overposting or oversharing on social media. Instead of having posts stay on your timeline forever, they’re gone after 24 hours!
I’ve never been the main teacher in a classroom, but I’ve seen Facebook and Twitter be used effectively for class activities and management. My AP English Literature teacher created a Facebook group to post announcements, share class photos, and also to let prospective students get a glimpse of what the class is like. The format of Twitter, and specifically their threads, allows for nuanced and diverse discussions that extend beyond the physical boundaries of the classroom. The possibility for students to engage in perspectives different from theirs is incredible (but also potentially dangerous, so digital literacy needs to be taken to account). I’m also excited to hear about the creative ways other educators might come up with to use other social media platforms in their classes.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Sophie. I also like to use examples from German Twitter posts in my classes because it is so “text-heavy” and can give insights into language use that is one the one hand a more casual, spoken variety and on the other hand also demonstrates how English is seamlessly incorporated into German. So much so that, in some posts, every sentence contains at least one English word or in other cases the entire post is in English. Such posts are a useful example for language learners -especially those who are coming from a “No English!!!” classroom- to reflect on how people draw on all of their linguistic and translanguaging resources to get particular messages across.
ReplyDeleteIn class, I hope we will have a chance to talk about some of the ethics of (using) social media. Sarah touches on some important issues in her post and I would like to add concerns about privacy. I too have observed a shift from more “permanent” platforms to 24-hour Instagram stories or ten second snapchats. But such non-permanence is an illusion. We all know that. Yet, we are happily sharing even our most personal moments on the platforms of private companies that own and sell our data*.
If -as researchers- we find fertile ground in this environment, we also need to address ethical questions that concern our participation in a medium whose full implications we like to not fully address because -as consumers, especially when we get something for “free”- we can be quite irrational and impetuous. And that to me is Marshall McLuhan’s ultimately pessimistic outlook on technology. With “the medium is the message”, McLuhan means to say that content does not matter but rather our constant engagement with the medium. To what end? To be informed of news and keep up with family and friends? Or to be sold products (first through TV and now social media) and give away our data (internet)?
*https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/23/opinion/data-privacy-jaron-lanier.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Great questions, Sophie! I like using Twitter in my classroom because it's so easy to find out what people are talking about thanks to the hashtag feature that acts like an index to posts. Inevitably, when we start some of our classroom warm-ups with the "news of the week", students like pointing towards the Twitterverse to find out the reaction of others.
ReplyDeleteAs you already pointed out, due to the brevity, these are great slices to analyze. Sometimes though, a great deal of context is needed to be explained in order for some students to fully grasp the author's intent. As Cheryl pointed out so well, because these are communities, there might be a shared history that may not be as apparent to an outsider. However with much patience and scaffolding, it is worth analyzing these real-world texts with students to gain a different perspective on some issues.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post this week!
As I read it, I couldn’t help but notice that my presence in social media is almost nonexistent, and that I have very limited knowledge about the many sites and apps that quite a lot of people seem to be using these days. So, your question about how we can embrace or use social media in the classroom is a big question for me.
Since Facebook and Instagram seem to be platforms where a lot of content about the self is displayed, a way to use these sites, for me, could be through the exploration of the self. I am not really sure how to do it, but a couple of questions come to mind: Who am I online/offline? How am I “me” online/offline? This exercise of self-exploration can be used to draw attention to many things, one of them being the way we use language.
Hi Sophie! Thanks for sharing some valuable insights into how different styles and genres emerge in online forums and social media platforms. I can definitely see from my own practices of using social media that I use different styles for different platforms, or even for different types of postings within a single platform. For Instagram and Facebook, I tend to choose different languages (e.g. Korean, English, Japanese) depending on the topic of my post and the intended group of audience among my followers. I also see the permanency/transiency of media affecting the types of posts that I write on each platform. I normally use Facebook to post about important transitions in my life (e.g. entering grad school, moving to Hawaii and recently to Philadelphia), repeating the same content in Korean and English (and sometimes Japanese, too, for those of my Japanese friends who don’t speak either Korean or English). On Instagram, I use the Story to post (sometimes random) photos and short videos from my daily life, usually mixing Korean and English, whereas I use the regular Posts to “archive” and highlight the moments that I want to share with my family and friends back home and abroad. I also find myself using formal speech more frequently and attending more to standard grammar in my posts than in my story, just because I have this inner pressure that I want to use aesthetically neat and pleasant language on documents that will be preserved for a while.
ReplyDeleteTo go back to your first question, one thing I have recently been noticing a lot is that Korean people started spelling some of the korean vowels ‘ㅏ'[ɑ] as ‘ㅐ'[æ], supposedly to give a more ‘hip’ and ‘foreign (or English-like)’ feeling to some words such as ‘감성 (vibes)’. I heard that it was initiated on Twitter and spread out to other platforms like Instagram and other online forums, and I wonder how this phenomenon tells us about the change in ways Korean people attach socio-semiotic meanings to certain sounds.
Hi Sophie,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the interesting French-speaking Twittersphere. After reading your post, I have some thoughts about your question. I think language teachers could employ social media to faciliate their teaching. Taking Twitter as an example, teachers could regard the platform as a discusssion board and ask students to use the #hashtag attached to the course name and each topic they want students to discussion (e.g. #citizensociolinguistic, #crossposting), which may help teachers market and promote their courses and research. For another, if the teacher wants students to express their opinion in a concise and succint way, the character limitation of Twitter is a good way to employ this approach.