Analyzing speech to comment coherence

For the analysis of the data I deliberately chose a qualitative approach for several reasons: the corpus of comments belonging to the vlog corpus that I collected, which would allow for a quantitative analysis, is a record of interaction from 2010 when I systematically assembled the data. In the meantime, YouTube’s design has changed – so the actual context for which the contributions were created is no longer available. I suspect, however, that the surroundings in which a contribution is situated have a major impact on users’ design of these contributions. Thus, for the purposes of the present chapter, that is, to identify coherence and sense-making strategies employed by users of a certain type of CMC, I deem the CA premise that instances of language use should only be analyzed in the context they occurred in particularly applicable.

185 Before I move to the sequential analysis of selected examples, I explain what type of interactional work a seemingly simple act such as commenting on YouTube involves.

The existence of interaction through commenting on vlogs is a reflection of a certain unspoken agreement between those who self-select to participate: the publically accessible space allocated by the site to written comments is treated as a forum where it is considered appropriate behavior to voice one’s opinion about any aspect of the video that is playing above it, and thereby to mark them as reactions to this video. The vlogger, as the initiator and creator of this space, signals that he or she is receptive to such reactions (this is especially true as there is the option to disable comments).

The act of commenting then is an acknowledgement of the existence of a video and of the fact that any contribution within the commenting space below will be understood as relating to the video and/or another contribution within that space. This convention is not free of violations. There is even a function that lets users submit a decision as to whether they find a contribution appropriate for the space it is in: when hovering over a comment with the mouse cursor, the option to “Flag for spam” appears (cf. Figure 7.3 below).

Figure 7.3

Once “enough” (YouTube n.d.) users have marked a comment as spam, it is hidden and can be retrieved by clicking on a link (cf. Figure 7.4 below).

186 Figure 7.4

The site designers have, therefore, implemented a tool to help negotiate what is considered appropriate behavior, and what is not. Needless to say, this tool can be used to flag any comment, so contributions that some might consider perfectly appropriate might be hidden, as well. In practice, many of the thus hidden comments seem to contain links to other videos or advertisement (cf. Figure 7.5 below).

Figure 7.5

Initially, I analyze a very basic technique frequently found in vlog comments: repetition of words or phrases from the vlog. The example consists of an excerpt from a

transcript of a vlog and a screenshot of three comments left underneath this vlog by viewers. The speaker (Zipster08) is telling a story about an incident involving his dog and a dog trainer at a pet store.

187 Example 7.1

Figure 7.6

1 and everybody, 2 one by one,

3 all of the people who were there to have their dog trained, 4 they started laughing,

5 she’s like you are disrupting my class, 6 I’m like “so so:rry:”

7 anyway, 8 so yeah,

9 you were cute today, 10 Butch,

188 Figure 7.7

Zipster’s video contribution created a space for interaction, with his audio-visual recording being the initial act. In order to access this space, a viewer has to click on the video (they can then pause it or mute it, of course, but it is assumed that most viewers will play it until it is finished or they leave the space). The three comments shown here were specifically placed in a context where they can be understood as coherent

actions, making sense, maintaining social order (note, for example, that they could not easily appear underneath any other video on YouTube, or any other space on- or offline without creating some confusion as to what they might be referring to). And by posting these comments, the viewers signal that they understand the vlog as part of an interaction that they, too, can choose to be part of.

The tying technique that all three comments make use of is that of repetition/quoting (see Chapter 5 of this study on repetition as involvement technique; Tannen 2007 (1989); Herring 1999). Comments 1 and 3 repeat the direct speech Zipster quotes from the dog trainer, which apparently functions as part of the complicating action, or the funny bit, of his narrative. By repeating Zipster’s words, the commenters signal understanding of these words, and more specifically, they signal that they consider them in some way essential to the story. The significance of the word “disrupting”

seems to lie in its humorous nature in this context. Comment 1 reflects this by

extending the inappropriate use of the phrase “disrupting my class” when addressing a

189 dog to the equally inappropriate term “AUDITING”. Comment 3 expresses the

humorous uptake of the phrase even more directly through the well-established acronym “lol” (laughing out loud). Comment 2 repeats the assessment “cute”, which expresses agreement with Zipster’s evaluation. The commenter then ties back to the orientation section of the narrative through a question relating to why Zipster went to a pet store in the first place.

What needs to be emphasized is that these three comments (which appeared in this sequence, as depicted in the screenshot, within the larger comments section of 70 comments) manage to form a tie between two modes, the spoken and the written.

This is done through means that are well established as tying techniques in

synchronous conversation, namely repetition. However, the situation here is different in that both parts of the interaction, the spoken and the written, are asynchronous:

the spoken is recorded, and is thus perceived with a delay, and the written likewise leaves a permanent (digital) record, which can be accessed later. Thus, the problem that commenters have to overcome is a complex task. Not only do they have to make their comment relevant despite a temporal delay, both on the recording and after the video has been uploaded, they also have to bridge a spatial gap. In other words, as the spoken language is a continuous monologue, a commenter cannot interrupt or take a turn to tie their own contribution to a relevant utterance when it occurs; by the time a commenter sees the video, Zipster has already continued talking. In fact, by that time he has already stopped talking and completed uploading the video, so both time on the video as well as regular, everyday life-time has passed – and thus a commenter must (necessarily) ‘skip-tie’ (Sacks 1995), that is, tie two non-adjacent units, to a particular utterance, as adjacency is out of the question. At the same time,

commenting takes place in a visual context that translates time into a particular spatial grammar: in the case of YouTube, the latest comment appears at the top, from where it will be replaced (‘pushed down’, if you will) by the next one. A commenter has to keep in mind that spatial immediacy to the video is not (permanently) possible, and one cannot predict what will appear above one’s own comment. Consequently, the author of a comment X has to provide for the possibility that another comment Y will

190 appear in the space above, and that there is a comment Z below it, both of which comment X does not relate to. If the author of X wants to comment accountably on the video, this intention has to be signaled in some way to avoid confusion stemming from the availability of two potential contexts a comment can tie to: another comment, thus staying in the written mode¹³, or the video, thus switching to audio-visual mode.