Does context really collapse in social media interaction?

'Context collapse' (CC) refers to the phenomenon widely debated in social media research, where various audiences convene around single communicative acts in new networked publics, causing confusion and anxiety among social media users. The notion of CC is a key one in the reimagination of social life as a consequence of the mediation technologies we associate with the Web 2.0. CC is undertheorized, and in this paper we intend not to rebuke it but to explore its limits. We do so by shifting the analytical focus from "online communication" in general to specific forms of social action performed, not by predefined "group" members, but by actors engaging in emerging kinds of sharedness based on existing norms of interaction. This approach is a radical choice for action rather than actor, reaching back to symbolic interactionism and beyond to Mead, Strauss and other interactionist sociologists, and inspired by contemporary linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics, notably the work of Rampton and the Goodwins. We apply this approach to an extraordinarily complex Facebook discussion among Polish people residing in The Netherlands - a set of data that could instantly be selected as a likely site for context collapse. We shall analyze fragments in detail, showing how, in spite of the complications intrinsic to such online, profoundly mediated and oddly 'placed' interaction events, participants appear capable of 'normal' modes of interaction and participant selection. In fact, the 'networked publics' rarely seem to occur in practice, and contexts do not collapse but expand continuously without causing major issues for contextualization. The analysis will offer a vocabulary and methodology for addressing the complexities of the largest new social space on earth: the space of online culture

Online-offline modes of identity and community : Elliot Rodger's twisted world of masculine victimhood

An investigation into the online-offline backgrounds of the worldview of a mass murderer, with special attention to the Manospher

Foreword

Family language policy can be seen as a form of sociolinguistic biopower, inspired not by the "raison d'état" but by a "raison de famille"

Pierre Bourdieu and language in society

This paper argues that Bourdieu’s oeuvre presents a radically new set of images on man and society in which language, as object and practice, assumes a key role. Three aspects of Bourdieu’s work are highlighted: (1) Bourdieu’s New Left-inspired search for a “socialized humanity” and his related interest in American symbolic interactionism; (2) the particular “methodological loop” he constructed in his work, in which ethnographic insight was used as the foundation for statistical work, which in turn yielded new ethnographic issues; (3) the development of “nexus concepts” such as habitus, in which the traditional “micro-macro” divide was crossed, leading to an analytic of “the big in the small” which enables ethnographic generalization. These three points, I argue, continue to serve as a fertile source of inspiration for innovative and explorative research into language in society

Formatting online actions: #justsaying on Twitter

The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter’s global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfill a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered ‘translingual’ framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused on the specific kinds of communicative actions it marks and organizes. I shall use the notion of formatting as the point of departure: hashtags, as part of an innovative online scripted register, can be seen as formatting devices that introduce, proleptically, a recognizable framing effect on the statement (the tweet), often as a reframing response to other statements giving keys for complex and multiple but equally formatted forms of uptake. The hashtag, thus, appears to have powerful interactional structuring effects in formatting specific lines of action