Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: A Post-digital Ethnography PDF
Preview Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness: A Post-digital Ethnography
Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness This book advocates a new post-digital linguistic ethnography approach to unpacking mobile communication and enabling a more informed understanding of individuals’ communicative practices in cities today. Drawing on data from a group of ordinary working people, multilingual individuals from superdiverse cities across the United Kingdom, the volume brings observations from this data together to form a new concept of ‘resourcefulness’ as a means of explaining the emergent sense of agency individuals develop towards remediating existing forms of technology in their everyday lives. The book in turn establishes the notion of the ‘networked individual’ by way of demonstrating the ways in which communicative practices cross spaces and platforms. Further chapters detail examples to highlight resourcefulness at work in enabling more efficient business communication, routes to self-expression and the creation and development of social support systems, while a concluding chapter looks at both the limitations and possibilities of resourcefulness and directions for future research. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and media and communication studies. Caroline Tagg is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK. Her research into language and digital technologies rests on the understanding that digital communication practices are deeply embedded into individuals’ wider lives. She is author of Taking Offence on Social Media (with Philip Seargeant and Amy Aisha Brown, 2017) and Message and Medium (with Mel Evans, 2020). Agnieszka Lyons is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research employs multimodal and mediated discourse analytic as well as ethnographic approaches to explore the discursive construction of embodied identity in polycentric migrant environments. She has published on issues related to migration and mobility in Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics and Social Semiotics, among others. Routledge Focus on Language and Social Media Editors: Sirpa Leppänen and Caroline Tagg Designed for socially oriented researchers with an interest in language and technology, this series covers innovative and in-depth studies of communication through and around social media. The series takes a broad and inclusive approach, which recognises the rapid expansion of the field, due not only to the recent proliferation of social media platforms and the increasing reach of the internet across our working, social and personal lives, but also to broadening interpretations of what both ‘language’ and ‘social media’ entail, including growing recognition of the multiple modes used alongside language, and the embedding of social media in our everyday lives. Language and Social Media publishes studies concerned with a wide range of relevant issues and concerns. These include, but are not limited to: • Identity work; identity trouble • Constructing and debating belonging, communality, relations and networks • Sharing, collaboration and participation • Discourse trajectories and recontextualizations • Complexity, diversities and differences • Governance, surveillance and control of/in social media activities and interactions • Digital literacies and informal learning • Creativity and play • Affect and attachment • Language and social media in commercial and professional practices • Media/language ideologies • The wider roles of social media in the lives of individuals, groups and communities. Language, Gender and Parenthood Online Negotiating Motherhood in Mumsnet Talk Jai Mackenzie https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Focus-on-Language-and-Social-Media/ book-series/LSM Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness A Post-digital Ethnography Caroline Tagg and Agnieszka Lyons First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Caroline Tagg and Agnieszka Lyons The right of Caroline Tagg and Agnieszka Lyons to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367143541 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032269412 (pbk) ISBN: 9780429031465 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429031465 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction 1 2 Post-digital Ethnography and the Networked Individual 13 3 Mobile Resourcefulness 32 4 Polymedia Repertoires 54 5 Sharing in Mobile Conversations 78 6 Conclusion 104 References 115 Index 131 Illustrations Figures 2.1 Interweaving of the digital and the non-digital 13 3.1 Ordering meat on WeChat 32 3.2 A shift in register on WeChat 46 3.3 Setting up a WeChat business 48 3.4a, b Pricing powdered milk through WeChat 49 3.5 Extending a texting repertoire 52 4.1 Moving from Skype to Viber 55 4.2 The polymedia nest (Tagg and Lyons 2021) 57 4.3 Edyta and Taduesz’s polski sklep 60 4.4 Chatting on Viber while at work 65 4.5 Checking up on children through Viber while at work 66 4.6 Coordinating a stock order through SMS 68 4.7 Checking product availability through Facebook Messenger 71 4.8 Pre-ordering shop items through Facebook Messenger 73 4.9 Relieving boredom at work through Viber 74 4.10 Negotiating the boundaries of the customer–shop owner relationship 75 5.1 Sharing a weblink on WhatsApp 78 5.2 Sharing a screenshot on WhatsApp 86 5.3 Inviting someone into the moment through WhatsApp 87 5.4 a, b, c Creating a focus for attention in a WhatsApp group 89 5.5 Sharing location on WhatsApp 94 5.6 Location sharing as a conversational turn 94 5.7 Sending updates via WhatsApp while on the move 95 Illustrations vii 5.8 Expressing ritual appreciation through WhatsApp 97 5.9 Drawing attention through photo sharing on WhatsApp 98 5.10 Checking-in multimodally on WeChat 99 5.11 Sharing a sticker on WeChat 101 5.12 Sharing WeChat news articles 102 Table 4.1 The polymedia repertoire (Tagg and Lyons 2021) 58 Acknowledgements We’d like to thank all our participants on the TLANG project, whose mobile messaging practices and generosity with their time made this book possible. Our thanks go also to the project team for their support and insights, particu- larly Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese, Rachel Hu, Li Wei and Zhu Hua. 10.4324/9780429031465-1 1 1 Introduction This book explores how mobile communication – in the form of mobile messages sent via apps like WhatsApp and WeChat – fits into and shapes people’s social and working lives. It looks at how mobile messaging facili- tates carrying out everyday tasks and maintaining relationships with family, friends and colleagues, and the opportunities it provides for self-expression and self-presentation. It also considers the extent to which the new technol- ogy transforms our lives and what it means to be social – to do, to be and to relate to others – in the early twenty-first century. The book points to the need to recognise ordinary people’s agency in navigating and exploiting increasingly complex technological environments, while acknowledging that choices are constrained and enabled by the surrounding practices, dis- courses, people, technologies and material objects. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, our lives, relationships and identities have become increasingly dominated by mobile devices, espe- cially internet-enabled mobile phones (or smartphones). Mobile phones not only allow us to carry out conversations with people who are not physically present, but to do so while we are on the move and simultaneously engaged in other activities. Our mobile phone interactions – whether mediated by voice, video or mobile messaging apps – interweave with and mutually sup- port our physical contexts and offline activities, facilitating our journeys, helping curate significant life events, or distracting us from boredom. On the one hand, through our mobile phones, we are constantly available to others regardless of our physical location; but, on the other hand, our atten- tion is divided and we are present simultaneously in different spaces – we can, for example, send sporadic messages to a colleague and post a selfie on Instagram while on a voice call with a friend and helping to prepare a family meal at home. Whether this is perceived positively or negatively, how we present ourselves, how we maintain relationships and how we get things done are shifting in line with our changing use of technologies. For many people, their mobile phone has become an indispensable tool for DOI: 10.4324/9780429031465-1 2 Introduction maintaining a sense of self, managing relationships, socialising and carry- ing out professional and personal activities. In other words, mobile phones, along with various social media platforms, messaging apps, emoji and gifs have become part of our communicative repertoires, the set of resources through which we make meaning. In this book, we work with the concept of the communicative reper- toire – the range of linguistic and other semiotic resources available to indi- viduals and which people draw upon in communication with others. We are motivated by the key observation that our repertoires have expanded in recent years to include mobile technologies, social media and a whole range of digital resources. We seek to understand the implications of this reconceptualisation of repertoire for individuals, exploring the ways in which their mobile communication intersects with and mutually shapes their offline interactions. We show how people draw resourcefully on their mobile phones as part of their wider communicative repertoires, highlight- ing their human agency in exploiting the available technologies to achieve communicative and social goals, while foregrounding the contextually bound nature of their technology use. In doing so, we show how detailed sociolinguistic understanding of seemingly ordinary, fleeting conversations carried out via mobile phone messaging apps can play a key role in helping us appreciate the nature of individual lives and relationships in contempo- rary society. In the rest of this introductory chapter, we explain the research project on which this book is based and introduce the key mobile phone users who fea- ture in the book, before outlining how our study builds on and extends exist- ing understandings of communication mediated by mobile messaging apps. The Research behind the Book The book explores the communicative practices of six multilingual individu- als living and working in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in Birmingham and London. Our participants use various communication apps on their mobile phones to carry out business transactions, maintain social support networks and express themselves in the context of their wider working, social and domestic lives. We focus on how mobile messaging exchanges carried out through multiple apps intertwine with everyday face-to-face activities and wider identity projects, strengthening existing relationships, and we point to the role that language and other semiotic resources play in achieving this. The research in this book is part of a four-year ethnographic project called ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’ (TLANG)
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