Meaning-making
Digital environments enable users to draw on a series of representations (visual, auditory and written) with an immediacy (time-space) of communication that have resulted in the production of texts which cross the boundaries (imagined and erected by theorists, grammarians and educators) between the characterizations of written and spoken texts. Kress (2003, p. 5) explains the relations amongst multimodal elements in the new technologies in terms of functions of “interactivity” whereby interactions gain a more interpersonal nature as the user can ‘write back to the producer of a text with no difficulty’. Interactivity is also directly referred to the notion of hypertextuality which ‘permits users to enter an entirely new relation with all other texts’ (Kress, 2003, p.5). The notion of interactivity has been associated with an alleged informality whereby users of virtual communities, chat rooms and e.mails communicate (see Reed and Massey, 2011). I have discussed above that this has motivated the description of language used in these means of communication as speech-like and written-like.
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However, if seen from a sociolinguistic perspective (Halliday, 1978), the occurrence of new features of speech and meaning between digital media users can be explained as a natural result of the new social relations and models of interactions that these technological tools enable. As social interactions are set in diverse environments with their different situational components (social action, participants’ role relations and rhetorical channels), different text registers are bound to emerge. In other words, as the environment and participants’ role relations change so may the meaning potentials and consequently the linguistic features of the text (such as choice of vocabulary and levels of formality).
Yet, while on the one hand, interactions in digital environments can be characterised by a certain level of flexibility towards language, on the other, the advent of the new technologies, socio-political transformations and the consequent changes in the political discourse of the last decades have together placed a new demand on individuals to master the new languages of the workplace. I discuss these issues later in this chapter.
On new and old ways of socialisation
One of the aspects mostly identified by theorists as being affected by the new media is youth’s ways of socialization (Ito et al. 2008; Pempek et al. 2009; and Barton 2010). Theorists have argued that those aspects that are central to adolescents’ development, such as identity formation, peer group support and romance, have remained the same in the technological era (Ito et al., 2008; Pempek et al., 2009). These are, however, now shared and reinforced through a platform with different time and space dynamics. In this way, social network sites, like the Orkut, which was much in vogue amongst adolescents
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in Brazil at the time of this study, function as an extension of face-to-face socialisation where identities are shared, negotiated and publicised in real time to large groups of people all with the affordances of visual, audio and written resources.
In cultural terms, in spite of being engaged in an online means of global proportions and sharing a common template of communication with adolescents around the globe, there is evidence in this study that the adolescent participants use this means mostly as an extension of communication within their local community. In this way, rather than being used as a means to communicate at a more global scope, as in the case of Flickr discussed in Barton (2010), adolescents in the study herein used the Orkut to keep in touch with friends made off-line, reinforcing, in this way, their local bonds (see also Ito et al., 2008; Pempek et al., 2009) for a discussion of adolescents and young adults’ uses of Facebook and Myspace). This dynamic has been referred to as glocalization whereby global means of socialisation have come to strengthen local cultures and connections (see Barton, 2010).
Social network sites offer users a number of ways to display their profiles and build their identities in allegiance with multiple groups and communities. Friends are added or excluded, pictures, movies and videos are downloaded and deleted, all to serve the flexible display of enduring or passing allegiances. Yet, in spite of all these multimodal affordances, language has arguably secured its place as central in youths’ socialization, as adolescents are enabled to send private messages to each other and to comment on their daily moods and feelings. In addition, photos, movies and films are subtitled and open to the written comments of others. Likewise other means of written socialization, identified by Barton and Hamilton (1998) ‘as personal communication, such as the notes, cards and
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letters people send to friends and relatives’ (Barton and Hamilton cited in Barton, 2010 p. 110), the writing that goes on in social network sites is a vernacular practice which also enables users to play with their ‘creativity, invention and originality’ (Barton, 2010 p. 110), but in different ways offline means ever did.
Furthermore, one aspect of transformation between past and new forms of written socialisation is the reach and longevity of online vernacular practices. While print vernacular texts are seen not to circulate very far and to be ‘often treated as ephemera’ as Barton and Hamilton (1998) explained, ‘they tend not to be kept and are easily disposed of’ (Barton and Hamilton, 1998 cited in Barton, 2010 p.110), online texts can be reached by the users’ chosen community and be multiplied by its recipients. This, in turn, has an effect on online identity formation or, in other words, on how users choose to portray themselves. Zhao et al. (2008) posit that as online and offline lives are connected, individuals have to be careful about how they construct their identities online:
[…] it is […] incorrect to think that the online world and the offline world are two separate worlds, and whatever people do online “hold little consequence” (Clark, 1998, p.180) for lives offline. In the Internet era, the social world includes both the online and offline environments, and an important skill people need to learn is how to coordinate their behaviours in these two realms. (Zhao et al. 2008 p. 1831)
This aspect, the authors conclude in their study with Facebook users, tend to result in users behaving more in line with normative expectations that are set for them in offline settings than as inhabitants of a ‘dreamland for deviant behaviors’ the online world has been alleged to be (Zhao et al., 2008). In addition, users are also found to picture themselves in positive lines rather than to find in these “nonymous” environments ‘the
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venue for expressing their “hidden selves” or marginalized or contested identities’ (Zhao et al., 2008 p. 1831). The authors ponder, however, that
[…] not all socially unsanctioned identities are hidden. Some are performed openly, for example as acts of resistance. (Zhao et al., 2008 p. 1832)
On the other hand, they also challenge the notion that an attempt to conform to norms or to picture oneself in these lines should be deemed as a construct of a “false self” (Zhao et al., 2008 p. 1832):
In a nonymous environment, “hoped-for possible selves” are socially desirable selves individuals would like to present to others […] They are “socially desirable” or norm- conforming, but that does not necessarily mean that they are not true selves; even though they are not yet fully actualized offline, they can have a real impact on the individuals. (Zhao et al., 2008, p. 1832)
In this way, the relations that have been constructed between students’ offline and online lives in the views of the teachers in the study herein as of their being respectively settings for the construct of “real selves” and “virtual selves” or “true selves” and “false selves” are challenged by Zhao et al.’s (2008) findings.
Returning to the aspect of vernacular writing online, although these practices are more flexible, freer and may, therefore, employ more creativity than the dominant practices students are imposed to in school, they are also associated with youths’ offline vernacular practices and therefore to dominant practices. Barton (2010) explains that vernacular and dominant practices overlap and are intertwined as people draw on resources that they have acquired in both domains. Barton (2010) goes on to add that dominant texts, i.e. a
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letter from the bank, can be read or dealt with in a vernacular way, in this way, the text is official but the practice is vernacular. He posits that:
What is interesting here is how people make literacies their own, turning dominant literacies to their own use, by constant incorporation and transformation of dominant practices into vernacular activities. (Barton, 2010, p.111)
In this way, it is expected that adolescents bring to their online pages the language they use offline, these, in turn, will be influenced by the components of the situation including issues of interactivity, multimodality and hypertextuality, as discussed above.
Socialization and learning
Social network sites have been argued as strong environments for peer-based learning where peer collaboration is not as closely monitored as it usually is in schools (Ito et al., 2008). Ito et al. (2008 p. 26) refer to ‘messing around’ with media as a way of exploring and learning from media:
[…] The tinkering with MySpace profiles and the attention paid to digital photography are all part of the expectation of an audience of friends that makes the effort worthwhile. Youth look to each other’s profiles, photos, videos, and online writing for examples to emulate and avoid in a peer-driven learning context that supports everyday media creation. (Ito et al., 2008, p.26)
Ito et al. (2008 p. 26) go on to add that adolescents’ engagement with these multimodal resources, as has been observed in the engagement of participants of this study with the Orkut, is a process of creativity and involvement with the new media which can be a first step towards more expert interest-driven media experiments which may also take them beyond ‘their local network of technical and media expertise’ to more global ones:
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[…] In other words, messing around with media is embedded in social contexts where friends and a broader peer group share a media-related interest and social focus. For most youth, they find this context in their local friendship-driven networks, grounded in popular practices such as MySpace profile creation, digital photography, and gaming. When youth transition to more fo- cused interest-driven practices, they will generally reach beyond their local network of technical and media expertise, but the initial activities that characterize messing around are an important starting point for even these youth. (Ito et al., 2008 p. 26)
Also of relevance to this study is the issue that digital media, along with other forms of popular culture such as music, have provided a voice to those whose voices are least heard and valued in the academic and professional domains where dominant practices are the norm. It will be discussed in the study herein how adolescents play around with language variants and actively construct and disclose their senses of agency using language in a creative and sophisticated manner. In this subject, Barton (2010, p. 111) comments that
[...] what is important for “ordinary people” [...] is the ways in which vernacular activities can provide a voice not otherwise available, for instance, to marginalized people. (Barton, 2010, p. 111)
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Drawing on schoolteachers’ resistance to bring these media into their classrooms, Marsh and Millard (2000) argue that the digital technologies enable a number of affordances for children’s learning:
The electronic media are able to take children into new worlds, create new perspective on their own and other peoples’ lives and allow the stories of human experience to be shaped and reshaped into ever changing messages, which are yet able to retain something of the past. (Marsh and Millard, 2000 p. 6)
They go on to add that the new media affordances for learning can also be extended to the access to those aspects of culture valued at schools:
Consider, for example, the power of the World Wide Web to provide rapid access to a wide range of poetry and literature no longer available in conventional print, alongside biographical and critical materials which help with the study of particular writers. (…) the new media are establishing contemporary forms of “narratives we live by” in the same way that parables,
myths, fairy stories, epics and legends have done for previous generations. (Marsh and
Millard, 2000 p. 6)
The aspects which contribute to schools’ resistance to the new technologies and digital literacies are discussed further in Section 3.4.7.