Volume 38, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Society in Digital Contexts: New Modes of Identity and Community Construction, Guest Editor: Najma Al Zidjaly

As digital interactions become more global, individuals who bring divergent practices ‘to the keyboard’ must interact with other participants who come to the digital space with different cultural norms and expectations. This study explores the interface between local expectations and global practice through emoji use in online gaming – a venue which brings people from around the globe together on a common ‘playing field’. Since emojis were originally designed to tap into universals in human experience and expression, they are a ready-made resource through which individuals can integrate their culture-based expectations with communicative norms that are rooted in the common denominators of the (global) digital environment. Using live chat data from the game streaming platform Twitch, this study examines emojis posted to the open chat room during game streams of one female and one male gamer. The analysis examines the ways that participants use these semiotic images to orient toward gaming communities of practice and claim identities within gaming groups. It also explores whether emoji use is affected by the gender of the streamer. Analysis indicates that participants in the man’s stream differ from participants woman’s stream in the ways they use emojis to claim community membership and employ emojis as phatic devices.

This study examines other-initiated repair as what has been termed a light practice , demonstrating how it facilitates interactivity and moments of community creation online. Specifically, I analyze user comments on expert-written blogs that appear on an English-language weight loss website, showing how posters collaboratively initiate, accomplish, and show appreciation for repair activities. These activities, which are, as in face-to-face conversation, typically mitigated through various linguistic strategies, are aimed at aspects of blog text (including vocabulary and amount of information provided), as well as the choice of accompanying images. I show how various people – commenters, a person profiled in a blog, and bloggers – all may play roles in collaboratively accomplishing repair and thereby engage in the community. In addition, I suggest that repair not only facilitates participation, but also simultaneously serves as a means of highlighting shared expectations, or what have been called cultural discourses , about expert-written blogs. In other words, in engaging in repair activities, participants create routine forms of interaction that also (re)affirm shared expectations among members of this community.

This article discusses the intersection of language choice, identity and online political activism in the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising by bringing together the notions of entextualization and chronotopes . The data is drawn from a longitudinal analysis of two Syrian dissidents’ Facebook pages between 2010 and 2012 as part of a study of Syrian dissidents’ digital practices. Through an analysis of their status updates and their friends’ comments, I show how the repertoire of these two Syrian dissidents changed abruptly with the onset of the 2011 uprising. The shift in repertoire underlies the emergence of distinct chronotopic identities, through which both subjects re-positioned themselves vis-à-vis the sociopolitical context: cosmopolitan identities before and dissident identities after the uprising. The article contributes to the study of chronotopic identities by showing how processes of entextualization are chronotopically informed, particularly in a context of socio-political upheaval. Additionally, it sheds further light on the role of technology in social and political change.

This article investigates YouTube metalinguistic comments about language varieties in Ukraine as a “light” practice to demonstrate how knowledge and identities are negotiated online against the backdrop of larger sociopolitical discourses that circulate in and about Ukraine. This work adds to our understanding of online, or “light”, identity construction by suggesting that taking up epistemic stances and overtly asserting epistemic statuses are often a part of such identity work. Furthermore, deliberate linguistic choices not only serve to index identities but also create (dis)affiliations and thus can be deployed as a means of inclusion or exclusion from a particular online group, often shifting between (and integrating) local and global themes and audiences. The analysis shows how by drawing on repetition, deixis, pronouns, and lexical choices, YouTube commenters police, reify, and contest the extant language practices and underlying ideologies and in so doing create a foundation for grassroots ideological and political mobilization.

The papers in this volume all articulate a keen awareness of the shift in sociolinguistic economies caused by online technologies. We now live in an online-offline nexus of communication, and realizing this invites changes in the ways in which we traditionally view and imagine the foundations of our disciplinary approaches. In reviewing the papers, I focus on two important aspects of such revisionist enterprises. One is the emergence of an analytical triad of infrastructures, actions and moralizations, evidence of which is offered in the different papers. The second aspect is of a more general nature: we can suggest, on the basis of the evidence presented in this volume, to reverse the general heuristic of research from groups-individuals-language towards interaction-individuals-groups. This reversal of direction would equip our disciplines with an extraordinarily powerful theory of social action.