An outline of some future research issues for internet pragmatics

Internet communication has evolved a lot since it first became popular in the early nineties of the last century. Pragmatics has also evolved and has tried to come to terms with the non-stop changes that internet is constantly producing in our lives and especially in how we communicate and interact. We are probably now at a stage of internet development in which we can make some sound predictions regarding certain challenges that a pragmatics of internet communication will have to face in the next few years to deal with the radical changes that are taking place in today’s internet use. This article will be devoted to listing some of these research issues and to discussing what pragmatics can do to address them accurately, ranging from those issues centred upon the interpretation of online discourses to those involving interfaces and their options for contextualisation

17 ways to say yes:Toward nuanced tone of voice in AAC and speech technology

People with complex communication needs who use speech-generating devices have very little expressive control over their tone of voice. Despite its importance in human interaction, the issue of tone of voice remains all but absent from AAC research and development however. In this paper, we describe three interdisciplinary projects, past, present and future: The critical design collection Six Speaking Chairs has provoked deeper discussion and inspired a social model of tone of voice; the speculative concept Speech Hedge illustrates challenges and opportunities in designing more expressive user interfaces; the pilot project Tonetable could enable participatory research and seed a research network around tone of voice. We speculate that more radical interactions might expand frontiers of AAC and disrupt speech technology as a whole

From Everyday Information Behaviours to Clickable Solidarity

Digital social media has, in many ways, transformed the way people create, maintain, and sustain their social information networks, and has also influenced their information-related behaviours such as searching, seeking, finding and use of information. This is especially true in technologically-mediated environments. In many ways, social media is the contemporary incarnation of the Internet itself. It is a complex information-and-communication environment, very much analogous to physical environments, but consisting of symbolic matter rather than physical matter. All social situations are information environments and social media is no different. This paper is an inter-disciplinary literature-review essay that examines the social media phenomenon using the lens of selected theories in information science and allied disciplines such as communication and media ecology with a specific focus toward its possible role in civil society using the conceptual framework of spatial metaphors drawn from the study of traditional physical environments. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v5i3.348

Public heritage and the promise of the digital

The “promise” of the digital has been a democratization of the notion of heritage, and a disruption of ideas about ownership, authorship, and authenticity that might have seemed more straightforward in the recent past. This chapter overviews the possibilities brought about by these developments before introducing a series of ethical questions that they bring sharply into focus for museum and heritage practitioners. It appraises three practices which exemplify this conflicted terrain and demonstrate the issues at stake: heritage institutions’ uses of social media, crowd-based methods, and immersive mobile encounters. The chapter concludes that reflexivity is fast becoming a core professional competency for those working in digital heritage contexts

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Self-description and phatic function in organisation culture: the case of Ouishare

https://www.ester.ee/record=b5260546*es

Language, writing, and social (inter)action: An analysis of text-based chats in Macedonian and English

The purpose of this study is to investigate the text-based chatting practices of a particular community of native Macedonian speakers who chat both in Macedonian and in English (as their foreign language). Much research in computer-mediated communication (CMC) over the last decade has been done in English as L1. Some of the few studies which explored CMC cross-linguistically include the comparison of French vs. English (Werry, 1996), Japanese vs. English (Nishimura, 2003b), Spanish vs. English (del-Teso-Craviotto, 2006), Serbian vs. English (Radic, 2007) and Turkish vs. English (Savas, 2010). In these studies, a number of different language features (e.g., orthography, code switching) and functions (e.g., representation of gender) common to TBC have been analyzed, but none has explored in-depth the use of language as social action in online text-based interactions. Data collected from surveys, text-based chats, and interviews were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using methods and concepts borrowed from discourse analysis, conversation analysis, systemic functional linguistics and communication accommodation theory. Seventy text-based chats in Macedonian and English from seven native Macedonian speakers, who form an intact group, were collected over a period of four months. By investigating linguistic elements, extralinguistic phenomena (e.g., emoticons, typographic forms such as LOL), and contextual phenomena (e.g., appraisal, limitations of the medium) in the text-based chats of my participants, and by conducting follow-up text-based interviews regarding their individual chatting practices, this study has explored how all these phenomena are used for performing social action in two languages. Text-based chat was also found to be a convenient medium for participants to co-position in various ways while carefully accommodating to various contextual factors

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marshall McLuhan and Communication Ethics: The Taming of Americanitis

In 1880 neurologist George Miller Beard identified the diagnosis of neurasthenia. Popularly referred to as Americanitis, Beard treated an increasing number of people for symptoms of anxiety, malaise and gastric discomfort. Per Beard, the illness resulted from the rapidly changing mechanical landscape of modernity. Similarly, contemporary Media Ecology literature suggests that Americanitis continues amidst our current digital moment. Manifest as narcissistically anxious nervous exhaustion, digital Americanitis results due to technological encouragement of existential and communicative closure, thereby negatively implicating the human condition, human communication and communication ethics practices. As such, this project considers Marshall McLuhan’s Media Ecology to examine the communicative phenomena of Americanitis. Based on affable grounding assumptions as well as calls in recent literature, McLuhan’s work is read through the presently underrepresented Media Ecology scholarly approach of existential phenomenology. In particular, this Merleau-Pontean existential phenomenological reading enhances understanding of the implicit theory of human communication and communication ethics informing McLuhan’s Media Ecology criticism. Once elucidated, McLuhan’s theoretical assumptions, aims and ends comport with theoretical dimensions of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology to reveal how and why technology encourages our digital Americanitis. When placed into conversation, the two thinkers also offer possible responses to our ills – approaches to “taming” Americanitis

Digital methods for ethnography: analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments

The aim of this article is to introduce some analytical concepts suitable for ethnographers dealing with social media environments. As a result of the growth of social media, the Internet structure has become a very complex, fluid, and fragmented space. Within this space, it is not always possible to consider the 'classical' online community as the privileged field site for the ethnographer, in which s/he immerses him/herself. Differently, taking inspiration from some methodological principles of the Digital Methods paradigm, I suggest that the main task for the ethnographer moving across social media environments should not be exclusively that of identifying an online community to delve into but of mapping the practices through which Internet users and digital devices structure social formations around a focal object (e.g., a brand). In order to support the ethnographer in the mapping of social formations within social media environments, I propose five analytical concepts: community, public, crowd, self-presentation as a tool, and user as a device