Sequential Organization
Extract 1.12: Original text, on-screen visual representation, and transcript of
vocalization of message from Kilpatrick (Mayor) to Beatty (Chief of Staff ) (WXYZ)
Original text On-screen transcript Introductory speech and message vocalization
NO THANK YOU! FOR LETTING ME MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD. IT GIVES ME SOOOOO MUCH PLEASURE TO SEE, FEEL AND EXPERIENCE YOU!
“Thank you for letting me make you feel good. It gives me soooo much pleasure to see, feel and experience you.!”
in June two-thousand three former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick writes
thank you for letting me make you feel good it gives me so much pleasure to see feel and experience you
d. text quoted via verb writes e. text read with falling intonation
Here, (a) indexes standard , through its shift to sentence case; formal , through its removal of the exclamation mark and the aff ect it might other- wise carry; and unidirectional (as read, the message itself is not contextual- ized as a response, nor does it invite a response—which is an example of the misrepresentation of message sequencing occasionally occurring in the broadcasts). (b) indexes written and formal in its shortened voicing of <sooooo>. (c) indexes interactive . (d) indexes written , and (e) indexes writ-
ten and formal . Inasmuch as none of the cues highlight the novelty of text
messaging, they all functionally represent the practice as mundane . I’ve conceived of these as axes of form because mass media metadis- course often concentrates on form, and formal features become the locus for ideas about the “eff ects” of new media. These axes provide ideologically grounded categories of form that are relevant in both explicit and implicit metadiscursive representations of new media (and in many cases, language in general), and they provide the foundations for constructions of the voices present in the representations. For instance, again from Extract 1.12, when a newscaster vocally produces “so” instead of a lengthened vowel in “sooooo,” they index the text as written and formal, and by doing so, they represent the author (Kilpatrick) as a user of written formal language. However, the presence on-screen of <sooooo> reveals the author’s practice as somewhat more speechlike. With the transcript on-screen taken as Kilpatrick’s own, the animator’s vocalization can maintain gravitas and professional conven- tion. Layered linguistic resources enable both voices to emerge.
The potential for heteroglossia is especially signifi cant when one takes into consideration the breadth of features Kilpatrick (the mayor) indeed used in his original texts, including all capital letters as a common format for whole mes- sages, acronyms, and exclamation marks (which are often ideologized as femi- nine). As author, Kilpatrick does not fi t what a typical “adult” texter might do according to common language ideology, and in fact, he uses many features commonly attributed to young texters. As his texts are animated, however, they use more standard formats, and the extent to which he draws upon the linguistic aff ordances of text as a medium is erased. Interestingly, in erasing many of these features, novel properties of the medium itself are erased, and the mass media metadiscursively construct adult texters as exempt from the stylistic resourcefulness portrayed for young people.
What I hope to have shown in my analysis here is that text-based linguistic practice in new media is not always represented as unique,
nonstandard, or disembedded (cf. Thurlow, 2003, 2006). Rather, “novel” features of the medium may be erased when transferred to other media contexts, with stereotypical properties omitted, obscured, or translated. When television media report on and represent text messaging, text mes- sages are transferred from private to public, from source to representation, from one mode to a diff erent multimodal space. In the case of the mayoral scandal in Detroit, the context of the original text messages concerns adult actors engaged in what are typically construed as adult activities (from pro- fessional duties to sexual endeavors). The context of their metadiscursive representation is also “adult,” television news being produced and presented by working professionals whose audience is adult viewers.
With a focus on adults, the erasure of novelty in the context of this par- ticular scandal can be linked to the same language ideologies that might in other contexts lead to its exaggeration. That is, in altering adults’ linguistic forms in new media to be more standard, these representations align with ideologies that stigmatize youth speech as novel in comparison with adult speech. While the Detroit offi cials’ use of text messaging as the preferred mode of communication is highlighted as notable through the deploy- ment of terms like “text message scandal,” the language used within this text messaging is not in itself presented as striking. And whereas public discourse about youth-based new media focuses on nonstandard features that are not in actuality present to a great extent, this public discourse about adult-based new media language erases some nonstandard features that are actually present in the adults’ text messages. The ideological, natural- ized connections between youth and new media language on the one hand, and adults and standard language on the other, are thus reinscribed.
Acknowledgments
I’m extremely grateful to the organizers, audience, and other attendees at the Language in the (New) Media Conference, especially Crispin Thurlow and Jannis Androutsopoulos; the chapter reviewers and volume coeditors; the SocioDiscourse group at the University of Michigan; and Eric Brown.
Notes
1. I used the program SnapzPro to screen capture the broadcast segments and QuickTime Pro to edit them.
2. Original texts were obtained from two court documents available at http:// www2.wxyz.com/dpp/news/local_news/BREAKING:-New- Text- Messages-
Released (dated July 7, 2008) and http://media.freep.com/ documents/ stefani042908/0429stefani.pdf (dated April 29, 2008). In the former, texts are in their digital form as obtained by lawyers from SkyTel; in the latter, texts are reproduced but appear to maintain the orthographic styles of the original texts. Neither court documents nor news reports say precisely which pagers were used, though a photograph in court documents seems to show a Motorola T900 with a full QWERTY keypad. It is unclear what the character limit was; the original messages read in this corpus had a high of 253 characters.
3. Obviously, it would be useful to know what material newscasters referred to when reading the messages from the press releases, the original spreadsheet of the text messages, and so forth, and what editorial selection and editing took place prior. I can only acknowledge that I am unable to account for this information. 4. I use angled bracket notation for orthographic form.
5. I extracted audio from the video clips using MPEG Streamclip and used Praat to investigate pitch.
References
Androutsopoulos, J. (2006). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer- mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics , 10, 419–438.
Androutsopoulos, J. (2009). Policing practices in heteroglossic mediascapes: A commentary on interfaces. Language Policy , 8, 285–290.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination (M.J. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Baron, N.S. (2003). Why e-mail looks like speech: Proofreading, pedagogy, and public face. In J. Aitchison & D. Lewis (Eds.), New Media Language , (pp. 102–113). London: Routledge.
Coupland, N., & Jaworski, A. (2004). Sociolinguistic approaches to metalan- guage: Refl exivity, evaluation and ideology. In A. Jaworski, N. Coupland, &
D. Galasinski (Eds.), Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives ,
(pp. 15–52). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Detroit Free Press (2008). The chain of events. Retrieved from http://www.freep. com/article/20080124/NEWS05/801240419/0/NEWS01/The-chain-of- events (July 16, 2010).
Gallagher, J. (2009). Free press wins Pulitzer for coverage of mayoral
scandal. Detroit Free Press , April 20. Retrieved from http://www.freep.
com/article/20090420/NEWS01/90420047/Free-Press-wins-Pulitzer-for- coverage-of-mayoral-scandal (August 7, 2009).
Goff man, E. (1981). Forms of Talk . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Herring, S.C. (2003). Media and language change: Introduction. Journal of
Herring, S.C. (2004). Slouching toward the ordinary: Current trends in computer-mediated communication. New Media & Society , 6(1), 26–36. Hutchby, I. (2001). Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet .
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Irvine, J., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic diff erentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities , (pp. 35–84). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Jones, G.M., & Schieff elin, B.B. (2009). Talking text and talking back: “My BFF Jill” from boob tube to YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , 14, 1050–1079.
Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire, T.W. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication. American Psychologist , 39, 1123–1134. Lieberman, P., Katz, W., Jongman, A., Zimmerman, R., & Miller, M. (1985).
Measures of the sentence intonation of read and spontaneous speech in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 77, 649–657. McLemore, C.A. (1991). The pragmatic interpretation of English intonation:
Sorority speech. The University of Texas at Austin: Ph.D. Dissertation. Podesva, R.J. (Forthcoming). Salience and the social meaning of declarative con-
tours. Journal of English Linguistics .
Sacks, H., Schegloff , E.A., & Jeff erson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language , 50, 696–735. Shortis, T. (2007). Gr8 txtpectations: The creativity of text spelling. English
Drama Media . June: 21–26.
Squires, L. (2010). Enregistering internet language. Language in Society ,
39(4), 1–36.
Tagliamonte, S.A., & Denis, D. (2008). Linguistic ruin? Lol! Instant messaging and teen language. American Speech , 83, 3–34.
Thurlow, C. (2003). Generation txt? The sociolinguistics of young people’s text- messaging. Discourse Analysis Online . Available at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/daol/ articles/v1/n1/a3/thurlow2002003-t.html
Thurlow, C. (2006). From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscur- sive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , 11(3). Available at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/thurlow.html
Thurlow, C. (2007). Fabricating youth: New-media discourse and the technologi- zation of young people. In S. Johnson & A. Ensslin (Eds.), Language in the Media:
Representations, Identities, Ideologies , (pp. 213–233). London: Continuum.
Thurlow, C., & Poff , M. (2011). Text messaging. In S.C. Herring, D. Stein, & T. Virtanen (Eds.), Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC . Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
U.S. Census Bureau (2010). State & County QuickFacts: Detroit (city), MI. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/26/2622000.html (July 16, 2010).
At a time in their lives when friendships, relationships, and broader ques- tions of identity are especially signifi cant, it is no surprise that teenagers discuss their own and others’ behavior, reporting interactions and circulat- ing accounts of what has been said and done in social settings. Young peo- ple across cultures actively embrace tools of communication, from literacy and the telephone to the internet and cell phone, in order to enhance proj- ects constituting self and society. These technologies of semiotic media- tion provide resources for elaborating media-specifi c message forms and create channels for extending communication in space and time. They also off er users opportunities for communicating about communication, and specialized forms of communication for communicating about.
Researchers have found that adult metadiscourses often misconstrue young people’s new media practices (Herring, 2008; Jones and Schieff elin, 2009a; Thurlow, 2006, 2007). In our chapter here, however, we focus on teenagers’ own normative assessments of peers’ online practices. The assessments we consider do not take the form of refl exively elaborated metadiscourses but, rather, emerge through and within metacommunica- tive gossip, that is, morally motivated stories about others’ online com- munication. In particular, we concentrate on gossip conducted via Instant Messaging (IM) about communications on the social networking site (SNS) Facebook . Such gossip is not only metacommunicative; it is also metasemiotic insofar as participants incorporate materials from one new media channel into another through circulatory processes of decontextu- alization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs, 1990). To under- stand how they accomplish this, we begin by describing the communicative