Addicting via hashtags: How is Twitter making addiction?

Persons, substances, bodies, consumption: an ever widening process of ‘‘addicting’’ is underway in Western societies. In this article, we turn our attention to the production of addiction on the microblogging social media platform, Twitter, as an important emerging site in which the addicting of contemporary societies is also occurring. Our analysis explores two questions. First, we investigate the ways in which addiction is enacted via Twitter. How is addiction being made on Twitter? Second, we ask how the technology of Twitter itself is shaping meaning: how do the technological ‘‘affordances’’ of Twitter help constitute the kinds of addiction being materialized? While we find a multiplicity of meanings in the 140-character messages, we also find a pattern: a tendency toward extremes—addiction riven between pain and pleasure. In addition, we find significant areas of commonality between approaches and notable silences around alternatives to common understandings of addiction. We argue that the constraints on communication imposed by Twitter technology afford a ‘‘shorthand’’ of addiction that is both revealing and productive. Illuminated is the importance of addiction as a piece of cultural shorthand that draws on and simultaneously reproduces simplistic, reductive addiction objects. In concluding, we consider what these realities of addiction being enacted through Twitter can tell us about contemporary conditions of possibility for drug use in society and for individual subjectivities and experiences

The Digital Transformation of Marketer Identities in Figured Worlds

The digital transformation of marketing has been ongoing for more than three decades but the breadth and depth of change in the last five years has been unprecedented. We know from extensive research on identities in organisations that change in work practices can prompt identity work, yet there has been relatively little prior research about marketer identities. Moreover, there has been even less research about marketer identities relating to digital transformation. This thesis addresses these gaps; however, it does so by looking at the intersection of marketer identities and digital transformation via a Pragmatist reading of Holland et al.’s (1998) concept of Figured Worlds, a social practice theory of identity with roots in Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Mead, and Bourdieu. This approach enabled the study of processes of transformation in relation to the various artefacts which make up figured worlds, such as vocabularies, practices, and materialities which come together to construct understandings about ‘how things work’ or what is considered ‘normal’ by the people who inhabit them. The main body of the thesis centres on an ethnographically-oriented case study of the marketing department of a large Canadian NGO (Canango) in the process of shifting from a traditional ‘NGO helper’ culture to a so-called ‘Agile marketing’ culture based on project management practices originating in software development that have been growing in popularity among practitioners. The thesis identifies a number of ‘classes’ of marketer identities: managerially supplied ; technologically afforded ; socially afforded ; emergent ; and, performed along with what each type enables one to do. Using ideas from Figured Worlds theory and multimodal discourse analysis, a heuristic framework is then developed made of the elements ‘ matter ’ (phenomena), ‘ meaning ’, mediators , ‘ me ’ (identity) and ‘ motion ’ (action) to study how these identities are used to accomplish contextual goals. This framework is then applied to study the way that three people variously appropriated or resisted a particular supplied identity: the ‘Agile organiser’. Finally the ideas developed through the first three phases of the thesis are applied in a final phase in which Canango begins using a new digital collaborative work platform. The study looks at the identity implications of this move, evidencing the ways in which the work platform serves as a ‘bridge’ between worlds and how such bridges may be used to change worlds and make new ones

Humanitarian Discourse in the Age of Mediatization

This thesis explores the history of humanitarian organizations as agents in public life. When taking on the role as mediators between Western publics and distant sufferers, what conception of social responsibility do humanitarian organizations promote? What are the consequences of the institutional context of these organizations on the form of social responsibility that they are able to promote? In a historical perspective, what changes in these conceptualizations can we observe and to what extent can we understand them as resulting from institutional changes? These questions are asked with the assumption that the discourse of humanitarian organizations is at once a reflection of and a force in the configuration of dispositions in target publics. Enquiring about the history of humanitarian organizations as agents in public life, thus, means enquiring about the ways in which over the past 40 years, these organizations have given meaning to our relation to different sufferers and contributed to shaping our individual and collective conception of the scope and nature of our social responsibility...

Media stylistics

In this chapter we review the concept of ‘media stylistics’. In particular, we disentangle the polysemy of these two terms which, when combined, describe but can also obscure work in this area; and we discuss key themes and concerns which emerge. Through analysis of two short extracts of media discourse in English, we elaborate a distinction between two alternative emphases: study of media language as concerned with the capabilities associated with changing technologies for conveying linguistic messages (e.g. language use in telegraphy, radio, or instant messaging); and study of media language as commentary on modern society’s dominant communication forms, which tend to take an electronic ‘media’ form. In the first emphasis, media discourse is important in understanding the social functions of language and as regards social change. In the second emphasis, media language is more a matter of linguistic resources being used to communicate within an array of contemporary media choices whose availability is simply taken as a social fact. In later stages of the chapter we examine interaction between these different emphases at the level of media ‘genres'. In the formation of media genres, we argue, patterns of linguistic choice are superimposed on a given technical infrastructure and history of media capabilities. Distinctive media styles gradually evolve from each such combination to serve specific and changing expressive and communicative purposes. We conclude with discussion of the implications of this view of media technologies and forms as regards the development of new communicative styles on the Internet

Proverbs in Martin Amis’s London Fields: A Stylistic Analysis

The aim of this paper is to present how Martin Amis uses proverbs in order to achieve a particular stylistic effect. The study draws on the corpus of 18 proverbs identified in London Fields of which paremias used in the canonical form represent precisely 50%. The findings show that the most qualitatively considerable alteration of proverbial structure includes changes in terms of lexical substitution. Examples are provided in order to examine the hypothesis that the proverbs altered by means of lexical substitution display polemics with traditional wisdom, whereas adages used in the canonical form are an attempt to re-evaluate proverbial truths. It has been observed that the use of structural changes or canonical forms has a different value for a given discourse. As regards the methodological tools used in this study, the analysis of proverbs with different paradigmatic relations and their literary relevance is largely based on the semiotic commutation test and the systemic-functional grammar approach applied as a component of discourse analysis. In particular, the transitivity theory proposed by M.A.K. Halliday is used to investigate the semantic links between proverbs and discourse. The conclusions drawn from this analysis may be further used for stating that Martin Amis’s novel displays a high level of stylistic dexterity as regards the use of proverbs to suit literary purposes

Proverbs in Martin Amis’s London Fields: A Stylistic Analysis

The aim of this paper is to present how Martin Amis uses proverbs in order to achieve a particular stylistic effect. The study draws on the corpus of 18 proverbs identified in London Fields of which paremias used in the canonical form represent precisely 50%. The findings show that the most qualitatively considerable alteration of proverbial structure includes changes in terms of lexical substitution. Examples are provided in order to examine the hypothesis that the proverbs altered by means of lexical substitution display polemics with traditional wisdom, whereas adages used in the canonical form are an attempt to re-evaluate proverbial truths. It has been observed that the use of structural changes or canonical forms has a different value for a given discourse. As regards the methodological tools used in this study, the analysis of proverbs with different paradigmatic relations and their literary relevance is largely based on the semiotic commutation test and the systemic-functional grammar approach applied as a component of discourse analysis. In particular, the transitivity theory proposed by M.A.K. Halliday is used to investigate the semantic links between proverbs and discourse. The conclusions drawn from this analysis may be further used for stating that Martin Amis’s novel displays a high level of stylistic dexterity as regards the use of proverbs to suit literary purposes

Translanguaging business: Unpredictability and precarity in superdiverse inner city Leeds

The Leeds business case study focuses on Klára, a Czech-speaking community interpreter and her work with advocates providing interpreting services on an hourly-paid basis for a number of organizations. Klára’s business is her interpreting work with advocates who are primarily concerned with assisting Czech and Slovak Roma migrants in Leeds with the problems they face with life in a new country, principally the complex business of claiming benefits. Our work with Klára allows an insight into the lives of these new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions. We examine translanguaging in four different areas: English/Czech/Slovak interlingual translanguaging, intralingual translanguaging in English, intralingual translanguaging in Czech and Slovak, and interdiscursive translanguaging. Our study extends into Klára’s home life, where we see that Klára works hard to ensure that her children have access to the Czech language. We also examine her electronically-mediated communication, much of which exemplifies the blurring of boundaries between work and social interaction in online communication. The study took place in the Leeds suburb of Harehills. In the process of collecting data with Klára, we gained an insight into the lives of new migrants, living in precarious conditions, on the borderline between low pay employment and benefit claiming. We examine in detail the role of the different languages in these migrants’ interpreter-mediated interactions, using the notion of translanguaging. Klára’s work as a community interpreter means that language is crucially her business. Our study also extends into Klára’s home life, and we see that Klára also makes language her business there, working to ensure that her children have regular and consistent access to the Czech language. This report comprises eight sections overall. Following this introduction we provide background on the Roma in Leeds, the population who Klára has most contact with in her professional life. In Section 3 we discuss the foundational literature relevant to our study: superdiversity and neoliberalism; the employment and also exploitation characteristic in early stage migration; how linguistic ethnography can afford rich insights that it does into the events and practices we observe; a focus on the interpreting event from a literacy studies perspective; the site of interpreting as a contact zone; translanguaging at work and at home; and the use of social media in superdiverse multilingual environments. Section 4 on methodology details our overall approach, gives an overview of data collection, and describes the individual data sets, and how our analysis enables them to work in combination. The two central analysis sections (5 and 6) cover respectively interaction at work and translanguaging in the home, and we include a short section (7) on mediated discourse which straddles the work/life boundary

Media stylistics

In this chapter we review the concept of ‘media stylistics’. In particular, we disentangle the polysemy of these two terms which, when combined, describe but can also obscure work in this area; and we discuss key themes and concerns which emerge. Through analysis of two short extracts of media discourse in English, we elaborate a distinction between two alternative emphases: study of media language as concerned with the capabilities associated with changing technologies for conveying linguistic messages (e.g. language use in telegraphy, radio, or instant messaging); and study of media language as commentary on modern society’s dominant communication forms, which tend to take an electronic ‘media’ form. In the first emphasis, media discourse is important in understanding the social functions of language and as regards social change. In the second emphasis, media language is more a matter of linguistic resources being used to communicate within an array of contemporary media choices whose availability is simply taken as a social fact. In later stages of the chapter we examine interaction between these different emphases at the level of media ‘genres'. In the formation of media genres, we argue, patterns of linguistic choice are superimposed on a given technical infrastructure and history of media capabilities. Distinctive media styles gradually evolve from each such combination to serve specific and changing expressive and communicative purposes. We conclude with discussion of the implications of this view of media technologies and forms as regards the development of new communicative styles on the Internet