Your Data Is Shared and Sold…What’s Being Done About It?

The article below was published in the knoledge@wharton site, and I thought I might be of interest to you 😎 Your data is shared and sold... what's being done about it?

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#JeSuisCirconflexe and other French citizen sociolinguistics events

I would like to invite you to take a look at several French examples to illustrate some of the key claims made by this week’s authors about the role of language in society. All of these could use lengthier developments (and probably will in the course of the semester 😉), but I would like to use them here to paint a sort of introductory big picture of the situation in France. In retrochronological order: 1) The first one comes from our Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer. In April 2018, in the heat of new reforms of primary and secondary education, he mentioned in several speeches and op-eds the importance of teaching the “passé-simple” (a rather difficult past tense used mainly in literature). In November of the same year, he was invited to a TV show called “Au tableau!” in which famous guests standing at the black board have to answer questions from school children. And of course… he made two mistakes attempting to conjugate the verb “to run” in ...

Context Collapse and the Methodological Questions that Arise

Part I In his “unapologetically presentist reading of Goffman’s dissertation,” Dr. Moore presents several points with the intention of increasing our understanding of what is common and different in online and offline interaction, and I would like to begin the first part of my blog discussing one that resonated with me the most. One of the points that I found relevant for understanding communication interaction was the idea of “faulty participant,” which I understood as needing more than verbal cues to successfully communicate (see p. 280). This notion is relevant to me, as it goes back to the idea that there are layers of meaning to what we say. For example: Chilean friend 1: Hey buddy! Do you want to join me for ‘ once’ (Pronounced “awn-say,” it translates as ‘eleven,’ but it is actually the equivalent of ‘dinner’ in the US). Chilean friend 2: Nah! I have stuff to do. Chilean friend 1: Are you sure? It’s my treat. Chilean friend 2: No, I am...

"I don't want to call my husband's brother young master": How citizen sociolinguistic wonderment has led to the change in norms and practices

This past weekend in Korea, we celebrated a harvest festival called Chuseok . It is one of the only two three-day national holidays, which bring together family members who live apart in distant cities to visit their hometowns and family graves, to hold memorial services to their ancestors, and to share a feast of traditional Korean food. It is this very nature of the holiday that instigates active debate on various issues regarding family and traditions. Most controversial a mong them currently is the problem of the asymmetric address terms for one’s husband’s and wife’s family members. This issue has received considerable attention from both media and laypeople, which deserves examination from a citizen sociolinguistic perspective. As someone living abroad and not having engaged in the practices of addressing family members for a while, I watch the heat of social attention and debate with wonderment and awe: What makes people suddenly feel uncomfortable with the terms th...

Citizen Sociolinguistics 2019

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