The Discursive Construction of Place in the Digital Age 1032371471, 9781032371474

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Part I Macro approaches
1 The discursive construction of place through the online-offline interface: from physical locations to wikispaces
2 The best thing on Twitch today was a bike messenger: experiencing metropolis, mobility and place through live-streaming
3 Digital first-order place, velocity and chronotope in globalized communication
4 Space, place and TikTok: propaganda, documentation and accountability
Part II Micro approaches
5 The lived experience of place in a Twitter affinity space around the death of sports celebrity Maradona
6 The offline/online nexus and public spaces: morality, civility, and aggression in the attribution and ratification of the Karen social identity
7 The physical-digital interface: what does “ici” (“here”) mean in a written online discussion?
8 Spatial deixis within political discourse on Twitter
9 The role of location information sharing in e-service encounters on Mercado Libre
Index

Citation preview

THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

This collection calls for greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds. The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social afordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, the chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce “remixed” cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and refect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on locationbased media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the signifcance of place in today’s interactions. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies. Alejandro Parini is Dean of the Faculty of Languages and International Studies and Full Professor of English linguistics at the University of Belgrano, Argentina. His areas or interest and research include the study of digital discourse and language ideologies and new media. Francisco Yus is Full Professor at the University of Alicante (Spain). He has published extensively on internet communication, about which he has proposed the theory of cyberpragmatics. He has also studied the pragmatics of humorous communication.

Routledge Research in Language and Communication

The Language of Pick-Up Artists Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry Daria Dayter and Sofa Rüdiger Revisiting Trustworthiness in Social Interaction Mie Femø Nielsen and Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen Communicative Spaces and Media in Bilingual Contexts Discourses, Synergies and Counterfows in Spanish and English Edited by Ana Sánchez-Muñoz and Jessica Retis The Impact of Plain Language on Legal English in the United Kingdom Christopher Williams Political Myth-making, Populist Performance and Nationalist Resistance Examining Kwame Nkrumah’s Construction of the African Unity Dream Mark Nartey Metaphor and Argumentation in Climate Crisis Discourse Anaïs Augé Perspectives on Teaching Workplace English in the 21st Century Mable Chan The Discursive Construction of Place in the Digital Age Edited by Alejandro Parini and Francisco Yus

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Language-and-Communication/book-series/RRLC

The Discursive Construction of Place in the Digital Age

Edited by Alejandro Parini and Francisco Yus

First published 2023 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 © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Alejandro Parini and Francisco Yus; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alejandro Parini and Francisco Yus to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, 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 identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-37147-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-37148-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-33553-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Introduction

1

PART I

Macro approaches 1

The discursive construction of place through the onlineofine interface: from physical locations to wikispaces

7 9

ALEJANDRO PARINI AND FRANCISCO YUS

2

The best thing on Twitch today was a bike messenger: experiencing metropolis, mobility and place through live-streaming

33

APARAJITA BHANDARI AND LEE HUMPHREYS

3

Digital frst-order place, velocity and chronotope in globalized communication

47

ISOLDA E. CARRANZA

4

Space, place and TikTok: propaganda, documentation and accountability

66

DAVID NICHOLS

PART II

Micro approaches 5

The lived experience of place in a Twitter afnity space around the death of sports celebrity Maradona PATRICIA BOU-FRANCH

93 95

vi

Contents

6

The ofine/online nexus and public spaces: morality, civility, and aggression in the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen social identity

121

PILAR GARCÉS-CONEJOS BLITVICH AND LUCÍA FERNÁNDEZ-AMAYA

7

The physical-digital interface: what does “ici” (“here”) mean in a written online discussion?

152

MICHEL MARCOCCIA

8

Spatial deixis within political discourse on Twitter

169

ANA PANO ALAMÁN

9

The role of location information sharing in e-service encounters on Mercado Libre

210

MARÍA ELENA PLACENCIA AND HEBE POWELL

Index

233

Introduction

At the end of last century, a transformation could be witnessed in people’s interactions, socialisation and community bonding, in which they started to shy away from physical places and embrace, instead, the benefts of digital communication in its myriads of forms and shapes. In parallel, the development of mobile phones – and later smartphones with non-stop internet connection – freed people from physical places and emphasised people’s reluctance to be tied to a specifc location when engaging in their everyday digital exchanges (Yus 2021; Frith 2015). However, nowadays the notion of physical place (Cresswell 2004), understood in a narrower or broader sense, has not lost its importance even in areas where internet and smartphones are pervasive (Coyne 2010). Indeed, users still make reference to physical place or incorporate it into their interactions as one more contextual parameter to take into account or to exploit for communicative purposes. It is also a source of constantly changing information as these locations are tagged and commented upon by myriads of users, information whose accessibility and processing are also expected as part of the virtual acts of communication. This is clear, for example, in the use of apps or interfaces under the umbrella term of locative media such as Instagram, Yelp, Facebook Check-ins, Tinder, etc. These apps or interfaces enable and focus on the physical location of the user while communicating with peers, acquaintances or even unknown others in a digital environment that contributes to diferent forms of placemaking (de Souza e Silva 2013; de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010). Placemaking is often conceptualised as a collaborative endeavour among the diferent members or social actors in a community that seek to articulate space with human activity (see Courage 2011). In the age of connectivity and mobility, and in the culture of sharing, placemaking activities are potentiated and enhanced by the afordances, both technological and social, ofered by digital platforms that help create and maintain a sense of community around the construction of place as a shareable individual or collective experience. DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-1

2

Introduction

Thus, in the digital environment, placemaking is done and subsequently brought into interactions and socialisation, since internet communication intertwines with physical interactions taking place simultaneously. This takes place when media taken from physical environments (images such as selfes or food pics, video recorded on the fy, etc.) are used for everyday internet conversations, and in a much broader sense when physical place is the main topic of conversations, for example regarding migration or diaspora. Thus, drawing from concepts of place as a social product (Lefebvre 1974) and place as being constituted through social relations (Massey 1994), these observations point to the social construction of place through its relationship with digital mobile technologies. In this sense, place is experienced and construed as meaningful location by means of people’s interactions –both feeting and lasting – over digital media. Political geographer John Agnew (1987) described three fundamental aspects of place as meaningful location: (a) location, that is, the objective co-ordinates on the Earth’s surface; (b) locale, the material setting for social relations; and (c) sense of place, the subjective and emotional attachment people have to place. In our digital society, the way these aspects are being reconfgured and reinterpreted in the light of the impact of social technologies on human experience and interaction deserves much scholarly attention. Online infrastructures or technology have created new public spaces (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) which shape not only the sphere of our online social lives but also the social practices that we carry out in the physical world. These spaces constitute superdiverse areas where social action takes places through manifestations of digital mobility, identity work and placemaking. Some of these actions happen in the physical world and are brought into or emplaced in the digital world and vice versa, thus reinforcing the fact that our contemporary social lives are played out both on the online and the ofine arenas. This is what Blommaert et al. (2019) describe as the online-ofine nexus, an interface between two different social environments that infuence each other and that have to be conceptualised as one sociocultural, economic and political habitat. Digital spaces then tie together a range of activities and actors dispersed over several physical locations forming local and supralocal networks of actions that are collaboratively negotiated online. So, for example, a selfe or a food pic uploaded on Instagram may be locally emplaced in a particular location but the commenting, liking, tagging, and sharing of it constitute actions performed translocally by diferent actors who, being themselves in diferent physical locations, come to share the same digital space for the purpose of collaborative meaning-making. The genesis of this volume is partly owed to the fact that, in our understanding, the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age still remains underexplored. So, we think that work is needed to

Introduction

3

address the importance of discourse in constructing and enacting remix cultural practices that use an array of diferent semiotic resources (including textual, visual and multimodal discourses) and that users exploit to assemble episodes of their lives that are anchored to the ways they experience place. These remix practices put together diferent types of information, media and objects, and have mobile technology and language as key resources for the appropriation of place and the sharing of place with others in absentia. Therefore, this edited volume seeks to explore place as it is discursively entextualised (decontextualised and recontextualised) both individually and collectively in digital interaction. We argue that this entextualisation is performed in terms of three diferent layers of context (Parini 2023): (1) Sociocultural context, through which place is seen as liberating and at the same time constraining, i.e. tethering and untethering people to and from the physicality of a particular location. This is done against the background of today’s pervasive mobility and liquidity (Bauman 2000) as crucial components of the relationship between the internet and the culture of freedom and sharing that characterises contemporary society today. (2) Sociomental context, in which place is seen as evoking a feeling of togetherness and never-ending connectivity through the sharing of experiences both physicalised and virtualised with known and/or unknown others. (3) Situational context, in which place is discursively and interactionally conceptualised along four dimensions: (a) Temporal dimension through which place is experienced and constructed or co-constructed in synchronous or asynchronous forms of communication. In this environment, synchronicity is seen not only as an inherent property of a particular medium of communication but also in terms of how users perceive, interpret and assess temporality and their current physical location (as opposed to the virtual realm where interactions unfold) in a particularised instance of communication where a particular medium is used. (b) Functional dimension through which place is framed as a free-standing, one-of event or as a prelude or follow-up event connecting diferent social practices taking place in hybridised physical-virtual scenarios. (c) Multimedia dimension through which place is co-constructed either unimodally or multimodally using diferent semiotic resources, depending on the afordances ofered by the interfaces chosen for these interactions. (d) Interpersonal dimension through which place is collectively constructed in the form of a cultural mosaic or wikispace.

4

Introduction

Against this background, the chapters in this book represent various approaches, theoretical orientations, analytical frameworks and constructs associated with the study of digital discourse and the role it plays in the construction of place as an integral part of socioculturally informed everyday communicative practices. In terms of structure, Part I presents a set of chapters that look at discourse in relation to placemaking from a macro perspective putting special emphasis on macrosociological views of discourse as a practice of meaning making in digital society. In Chapter 1, Parini and Yus look at how place is discursively entextualised through the ofine-online interface and with the aid of so-called locative technologies. This entextualisation, the authors argue, is done at diferent levels of context and as a collaborative endeavour through the use of both visual and textual contributions. Bhandari and Humpreys, in Chapter 2, look at selflive streaming on Twitch across difering modes of transportation through urban spaces as a mediated form of placemaking. They examine video streaming as a way of socially producing place beyond text-based content sharing, and argue for a notion of platformed placemaking. In Chapter 3, Carranza engages with the concepts of chronotopes and sociolinguistics scales to explore the relation between place and time in the age of digital media. Through the analysis of video data containing a story, she argues that place is constituted through its relationship with time and should be viewed in terms of historicity as well as degrees in the local-global scope. Finally, in Chapter 4, Nichols takes a critical look at the ways in which TikTok can be viewed as a source for the production and redistribution of multimodal and multisemiotic content. The author argues that the nexus built through TikTok creations and commenters’ feedback can create new incarnations and understandings of both physical space and virtual – that is, imagined – places. Part II of this volume comprises chapters that, one way or another, specifcally address the construction of place through diferent kinds of discourse and on diferent platforms or apps, thus adopting a more microapproach to this placemaking strategy. In Chapter 5, Bou-Franch studies the social media discursive strategy of mourning (in this case of Maradona’s death) and how specifc tweets generate an afnity space, especially through deixis and certain place names used to generate identity efects associated with strong feelings and emotions triggered by Maradona’s death. In Chapter 6, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Fernández-Amaya also address a specifc place-connoted production of discourses on the Instagram page Karen Gone Crazy. Within a mainly politeness approach, their analysis shows how an emotional space is created through the posts on that Instagram page and how the explicit rejection of misogynist attitudes impact the reproduction of this criticisable strategy ofine as well, both realms, online and ofine becoming intertwined. In Chapter 7, Marcoccia

Introduction

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focuses on online discussion fora. Again, both online and ofine environments are said to mesh and be experienced simultaneously, since specifc discursive references to place (mainly through the indexical “here”) are posted on these fora but have a clear physical connotation and, curiously, these referents are present in both environments with parallel purposes. In Chapter 8, Pano analyses another specifc discursive construction of place, this time regarding spatial deixis produced in tweets by Spanish politicians. The results show how these political leaders navigate through different places of a physical, mental and virtual quality and how (specially) the proximal deictic aquí (here) not only signals the physical place where these politicians are located, but also highlights their subjective proximity to that place and its inhabitants, with the aid of other discourses such as hashtags. Finally, Placencia and Powell in Chapter 9 address the discursive construction of place in Mercado Libre, a platform for e-commerce. This is a space where buyers ask questions and get answers about a given product, and also an environment where buyer/seller location information may be shared or constitute a focus of the interactions, essential for eventual purchases. Therefore, a kind of hybrid space is generated where virtual and physical connotations of place get hybridised. In sum, this book provides the reader with diferent approaches to the study of place in today’s era characterised by an increasing imbrication of the physical and the virtual in quotidian online communicative practices. Unlike in the past, when people were liberated from the anchoring quality of place in their use of landline telephones, now the internet has brought back place and location to everyday conversations and both place and users themselves have become reinterpreted as an outcome of these everyday interactions. References Agnew, John. 1987. The United States in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Blommaert, Jan, Malgorzata Szabla, Ico Many, Ondrej Procházka, Lu Ring, and Li Kunming. 2019. “Online with Garfnkel. Essays on Social Action in the Online-Ofine Nexus.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Tilburg: University of Tilburg. Courage, Cara. 2011. “What Really Matters: Moving Placemaking into a New Epoch.” In The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, edited by Cara Courage, Tom Borrow, María Rosario Jackson, Kylie Leg, Anita McKeown, Louise Platt, and Jason Schupbach, 1–8. London: Routledge. Coyne, Richard. 2010. The Tuning of Place. Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2004. Place. A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Introduction

de Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2013. “Location-Aware Mobile Technologies: Historical, Social and Spatial Approaches.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 116–121. de Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Jordan Frith. 2010. “Locational Privacy in Public Spaces: Media Discourses on Location-Aware Mobile Technologies.” Communication, Culture and Critique 3 (4): 503–525. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17539137.2010.01083.x. Frith, Jordan. 2015. Smartphones as Locative Media. Cambridge: Polity. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parini, Alejandro. 2023. “Digital Discourse Studies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Discourse Studies, edited by Carmen López Ferrero, Isolda E. Carranza, and Teun A. van Dijk, 395–408. London: Routledge. Yus, Francisco. 2021. Smartphone Communication: Interactions in the App Ecosystem. Abingdon: Routledge.

Part I

Macro approaches

1

The discursive construction of place through the online-ofine interface From physical locations to wikispaces Alejandro Parini and Francisco Yus

1

Placemaking through collaborative participation

Placemaking is often conceptualised as a collaborative endeavour among the members in a community where space is articulated with human activity (see Courage 2011). It is this articulation that makes places not just a physical location or position but rather a space that is socially constructed around human experience. Place is then lived and experienced. The continuous use of the internet by individuals located anywhere in physical space while at the same time converging in virtual spaces has brought about a change in the way place as experienced space is to be conceptualised. Consequently, authors like Kluitenberg (2006), de Souza e Silva (2006), Castells (2010) and Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) view space in the digital age as a hybrid space where the digital and the physical or material come together in the construction of social relations. As Stokes et al. (2021) explain, digital placemaking involves digital practices that create emotional connections to place as it is considered “a hybrid of physical presence and digital fows mediated through mobile and social media.” Thus, in the digital age place is being reconfgured through the enactment of social practices that can be initiated in the digital space and then materialised in the physical space (e.g. a protest march, cultural gigs, etc.) or vice versa (e.g. a selfe taken at a tourist attraction, uploaded on social media and commented on by hundreds of users). So, in the age of connectivity and mobility, and in the culture of sharing, placemaking activities are potentiated and enhanced by the afordances, both technological and social, ofered by digital platforms and specifcally location-based smartphone apps that help create and maintain a sense of connection and community around the construction of place as a shareable individual and collective experience. In a nutshell, the experience of place exhibits both a physical and digital dimension, and this experience is made up of ofine social practices that are closely interlinked with online ones. Many of the investigations into DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-3

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this overlay of online-ofine interactions date back to internet studies of the 1990s, mostly characterised by a rather rigid dichotomy between virtual and real (we prefer physical, since “real” is biased, as if virtual interactions were devoid of “a real feel” for users) or online and ofine (Baym 2000; Dodge and Kitchin 2001; Curry 2002, among others). With technological advances and the afordances ofered by new portable internetenabled devices, typically smartphones (see Yus 2021a, 2021b), and their exploration by users in navigating their social world, this rigid separation became untenable. More recently, and from a sociolinguistic perspective, Blommaert et al. (2019) look at a shift from theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary communication centred on physical or ofine encounters to one in which the world of communication is seen as an ofine-online nexus. This, Blommaert et al. argue, poses a challenge to the way in which we need to study language in today’s society, an approach to internet research that needs to be revised, rethought and reconfgured. Granato and Parini (2015), in their study of evaluation and interpersonal meaning in discourse, also address the ofine-online social connectedness in their study of digital environments, particularly blogs and forums, conceptualised as social gathering spaces for political campaigning and citizenship participation. The authors argue that these spaces can be regarded as follow-ups to prior issues or events that may have originated in the physical world by providing an interactional space for meaning negotiation in the digital world. Thus, the ofine-online interface is at the heart of most contemporary social practices. From quotidian activities that happen in the physical world and get talked about on social media, to a virtual world like Habbo Hotel where teens anchor their virtual, mostly textual, interactions to the simulation of physical places that exist in the real world and are replicated online, to the building of “Gotham City,” a skyscraper in London whose construction, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, involved a hectic web of interactions, both textual and graphic, between engineers working from home and using digital modelling programs and engineers and builders working on the site in the middle of one of the world’s largest and busiest cities. Drawing from concepts of place as social product (Lefebvre 1974 [1991]) and place as being constituted through social relations (Massey 1994), these observations point to the social construction of place through its relationship with digital technologies. In this sense, place is experienced and construed as meaningful location by means of people’s interactions – both feeting and lasting – over digital media. The political geographer John Agnew (1987) described three fundamental aspects of place as meaningful location: (a) location, that is, the objective co-ordinates on the Earth’s surface, (b) locale, the material setting for social relations, and (c) sense of place, the subjective and emotional attachment people have to place.

Discursive construction of place through the online-ofine interface

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Giddens (1984) also conceptualises space as the result of human action within structuration theory. Giddens explains that structures are produced by way of human action, but to be lasting, they must also be reproduced by action. So space, for Giddens, is the setting within which social practices are enacted, and these practices themselves constitute the spatial setting and reproduce it in a repetitive way. In our digital society, these aspects highlight the interweaving of meaning-making practices in relation to place through embodiment, social relations, and personal and shared experience enacted via digitally mediated platforms and smartphone apps. This sociological concept of place (as opposed to merely geospatial space) becomes of particular interest when exploring the way in which people encounter and appropriate existing spaces. This appropriation is most often achieved as a collaborative endeavour in which diferent social actors contribute to the construction of place as shareable space or wikispace. This collaborative act, we argue, permeates the three levels or aspects of place as meaningful location mentioned previously. Thus, with the aid of digital technology, people can jointly “make place” by reconfguring a physical location where a social event or locale takes place that triggers feelings and emotions not only in those who may be physically experiencing the event in that location but also in those who participate virtually in what is going on through their textual, pictorial or audiovisual contributions posted on a digital platform. For instance, the recent military confict in Ukraine provides an example of collaborative placemaking in which ofine and online activities are intertwined. In this sense, Ukraine, an existing physical location, has become a locale where the horrors of war can be experienced not only by those living in Ukraine but by others, probably millions of people around the world, who comment on what they see in the photos and videos that are uploaded on social media by millions of other users in and out of Ukraine, and to which they attach their feelings and emotions. Ukraine, as place, is thus collectively (re)constructed and experienced geographically, socially and emotionally through collaborative multimodal discourses that are distributed and redistributed over digital media. From tweets to Instagram posts and photos to videos on TikTok and YouTube, this production and (re) distribution of content confates diferent modes of interaction and participation that are dynamic and contingent on the technological afordances available and on the social use to which these are put by users. Scott (2022) explains that the distribution and redistribution of content, as intentional acts of communication, constitutes acts of sharing, and sharing, John (2013) argues, in online spaces has become synonymous with telling, and has become “shorthand for participating in the site” (p. 169). Thus, participation in online spaces is manifested through diferent semiotic resources – textual, pictorial or audiovisual – that are shared around

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networked publics, many of which refer to actions and events taking place ofine and re-interpreted on social media. In the digital environment, we argue, place is constructed through a kind of montage or assemblage of diferent semiotic resources in a collaborative fashion by these networked publics against the background of participatory media culture and mashup cultures. Sonvilla-Weiss (2010) explains that “cultural mashups put together diferent information, media or objects without changing the original source of information, i.e. the original format remains the same and can be retraced as the original form or content, although recombined in diferent new designs and contexts” (p. 9). This practice of editing and piecing together diferent and separate elements can also be ascribed to the ways digital placemaking is done as a collaborative endeavour. For example, a photo of New York City is shared on a social media platform by an individual and it triggers a reaction from others in their network who comment on, like, and tag the photo, which, together with the addons (comments, likes, tags, etc.), is distributed and redistributed as a multimodal mosaic. This mosaic also (and crucially, see Yus 2018a, 2018b, 2021a) contains the feelings and emotions that all those who participate in this montage attach to the physical location called New York that brings to mind experiences, associations and evaluations that are digitally shared by those who live in New York or have visited New York, as well as by those who may have never been there. New York is then (re)created and reinterpreted by diferent authors or actors who enact the social construction of place through digitised forms of communication. And this (re)creation occurs at both local and supra-local levels as the actors can be scattered across diferent geographical locations while at the same time converging in a location-enabled app or platform. In the era of globalisation and mediatisation, as well as of increased mobilities and migration fows, digital platforms ofer a scenario where the (re)construction of place occurs through communicative (inter)action. This (re)construction of place can be enacted in the form of a narrativisation of place – not just as location but also as locale – where the ofine and the online are interconnected. Many studies in the feld of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics have shown this convergence. See, for example, Baym (2000) in relation to the stories in a soap-opera newsgroup, Georgakopoulou (2004) addressing the stories in private email messages, Page (2009) focusing on status updates on Facebook, Georgakopoulou (2015) regarding the rescripting of stories on YouTube, and more recently, Hardley and Richardson (2021) who focus on digital placemaking through the narrativisation of place during the COVID-19 pandemic. These studies, among others, reveal a consistent approach to digital environments as multi-layered spaces, mutually constitutive of the hybrid language and communication practices that occur therein.

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So, given the diferent afordances ofered by digital media, this narrativisation of place is done collaboratively, and contributes to sociality as a constitutive aspect or feature of place as experienced space. Thus, the interplay of sociality and spatiality is at the heart of placemaking as experiences that are anchored in the attributions of meaning by individuals. Individuals communicate in various ways and their communicative actions, Christmann (2022) argues, can be nonverbal, involving interaction with the space by using it or occupying it, and verbal, involving the use of language and other semiotic resources when, for example, speaking or writing about space. Apart from providing a participatory environment in which physical places can be referred to, talked about or commented on, digital platforms themselves can also be considered meaningful places in their own right. Although they are not physical in nature, they certainly provide delimiting boundaries within which space-related interactions are sustained. For example, YouTube, as a popular video-sharing and networking site, constitutes a new media space that invites both individual and collaborative acts of evaluation and stance-taking by participants who gather virtually to address a particular topic, issue or event depicted visually and discussed textually through the comments that are posted on the site, which often exhibit a polylogue structure (Bou-Franch et al. 2012; Chun and Walters 2011; Androutsopoulos 2011; Parini and Fetzer 2019). We can argue, for instance, that a YouTube reviewing site constitutes a hybrid place itself where participants – both reviewers and commenters – are engaged in meaning making. Following Agnew (1987), this reviewing site has a particular location – the link to the webpage, a locale, i.e. a setting for social relations involving the communicative acts of reviewing, assessing and positioning, and this site generates a sense of place given the emotions and feelings that participants attach to the site and to what is going on there. YouTube as a digital site that encourages the sharing of user-generated material with mediated publics (Warner 2002) is a virtual place where social meaning is negotiated on the basis of diferent interactivity formats and through the use of language and other semiotic resources that are constituent parts of these collectively generated and socially shared experiences. To conclude, the role of experience in placemaking is crucial as it transforms the Euclidean, more scientifc notion of space into a relatively lived and social notion of place. Digital media, and particularly mobile media, can help produce meaningful, embodied experience since, as Farman (2015) argues, through mediated experience users can go beyond the screen to interact with the places surrounding them. This intertwining of meaningmaking in relation to place, occurring through social relations, collaborative action and personal and shared experience enacted via digital media, contributes to both an immaterial and material (re)construction of place.

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This (re)construction can be understood as a form of entextualisation in the sense that place is being constantly decontextualised and recontextualised, physically and digitally, through collective communicative action. This entextualisation of place, we argue, is performed in terms of three diferent layers of context: sociocultural, sociomental and situational. 2

Sociocultural context

The study of globalisation processes addresses, among other issues, the way in which the notion of local place attached exclusively to local practices has been challenged. Early in the 1990s, Appadurai (1996) noted new forms of connections between spatial and virtual neighbourhoods as the result of the globalisation of digital media, challenging the term “local practices.” Blommaert (2018) argues that the dialectic of global and local complicates, both analytically and methodologically, the study of globalisation. He goes on to mention that areas of the study of language from a sociocultural perspective can contribute to the understanding of how movements in globalisation can be enacted by on-the-ground communicative practices that bring global forces into locally performed meaning. New digital technologies and the afordances they ofer for communication are no doubt part and parcel of this process. At present, all online communicative practices are embedded in a sociocultural milieu that bears the hallmarks of contemporary urban society in which mobility, networking and liquidity seem to be highly valued. This society, which Bauman (2000) refers to as “liquid society or modernity,” is characterised by increasing globalisation and parallel social mobility, feeting or ephemeral relations and fuid and fragmented identities. Mobile devices add non-stop connectivity to the mix, and thus help create and maintain a state of technosociality where the boundaries of the spatiotemporal context are blurred and the boundaries between public space and private space are also blurred. Contacts are portable and therefore carried around, and access to contacts or even a sense of access to contacts is constant. This, as Castells (1996) predicted, has had a massive impact on social organisation and has led to the development of a new type of social formation which he called “network.” In this blurring of spaces, the notion of network acquires particular relevance regarding the study of placemaking as a collaborative undertaking since placemaking actions, although they can be initiated by individuals, can be followed-up as they go viral through the network with members reinforcing and reconfguring them through their participation. In contemporary society, Wellman (2001) maintains, networks have become more personalised and centred on the individual rather than on the group. Interactional networks can therefore serve as an umbrella term that is in tune

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with the importance and value that contemporary society places on the construction of networks, contacts and links around which interpersonal relations are built, developed and maintained. We argue, however, that interactional networks constitute rather a continuum that goes from a type of network centred on the individual at one end to one that centres on the group at the other end. Mobile devices, with their ubiquity and portability, act as a catalyst for network developing and nurturing, and contribute to social grooming on an unprecedented scale. The way people exploit the communication afordances surrounding the use of mobile technology gives them a kind of mobile communication power that, in turn, provides social capital in terms of the resources, contacts and group afliations that contribute to the enhancement of their status in society. This empowerment, then, is achieved as a result of the purposes and commitments that individuals share with their ties: friends, relatives and acquaintances regardless of whether they are primary or secondary, weak or strong, local or supralocal – that they construct and maintain through encounters where the physical and the virtual have become increasingly intertwined, imbricated and hybridised. Hence, with the ubiquity of media convergence, cross-syndication and communication “on the go” with smartphones, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the online and the ofine as separate and separable realities and experiences. Consequently, the ofine-online interface serves as a catalytic for the emplacement, understood as a space or site produced through human sense-making, of experiences. Virtual worlds like Second Life, Habbo Hotel and more recently Facebook’s Metaverse, for example, constitute fertile arenas where place can be collectively recreated and (re)constructed though discursive and embodied performances. Habbo Hotel, for instance, is a virtual world aimed at teenagers that is structured around social spaces or rooms simulating real-life places like McDonalds, or an airport or a dance club (see Parini et al. 2013). These are user-created spaces where participants play user-defned roles through their avatars (see Biocca 1997 and Taylor 2002 for a close examination of participation through avatars, and Yus 2011 for a pragmatic account of interactions on Second Life). The enactment of these roles played by the participants in Habbo Hotel calls for the conceptualisation of frames (Gofman 1974) in virtual environments as being technologically mediated in their entirety and at the same time compounded of real-world frames that participants bring into their virtual-world encounters in the form of knowledge and experience about the typical organisation of ofine events, activities or places that may then be recreated online. Placemaking in the virtual world of Habbo Hotel is then enacted through the visual recreation of real-life places and the discursive practices that participants engage in.

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Mobility also plays a major role in the construction of place aided by digital technologies. This is refected, for instance, in the way tourism has developed as a major system for people’s mobility, fnancial and cultural resources, and a metaphor for contemporary life (Bauman 2000). Therefore, in liquid modernity, tourism, as a truly global cultural industry, can be regarded as an exemplar of entextualisation practices in which emplaced discourses recreate spaces and create a sense of place through tourists’ embodied experiences mediated by technology. In their study of tourist placemaking, Thurlow and Jaworski (2014) explore the way tourists use verbal, nonverbal and technological resources to make and shape the places they visit. Through multimodal analysis, the authors identify the mediated representations, the mediated actions and the remediated practices underpinning the construction of place as a social and collaborative process. More recently, drawing on these notions of mediatisation, mediation and remediation, Thurlow (2022) focuses on the infnity pool as a space that feeds the global semioscape through the circulation of images and discourses that help spread, the author argues, “a particularly privileged way of looking at, and being, in the world.” The infnity pool, we argue, constitutes a locale that is spatially orchestrated and socially enacted by people’s embodied actions that are performed both physically and digitally. Thurlow (ibid.) argues that digital media help understand how “tourists make sense of the infnity pool as a place of luxury and symbolic aspirational social status.” Importantly, mobility is also coupled with experience in the construction of place, particularly in the digital age as technology allows users to embark on virtual escapades that may be anchored to physical locations. For example, experience is a leitmotif in digital platforms like Airbnb, where physical place is explicitly monetised, sold and bought online and then physically occupied for fxed periods of time when the digital transaction is completed. Given its global reach, Airbnb epitomises global mobility and globalised commercial exchange in the experience economy. Apart from lodging, the platforms also sell “Experiences” which are bookable excursions hosted by locals that range from visiting a tapas bar in Madrid to exploring an ancient village in the north of France. When in 2020 tourism came to a halt due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform began to ofer a new way of travelling which did not involve making a journey. By using technological means like platforms enabling video communication and interaction, Airbnb added a new service to their oferings, one that was presented as “a new way to travel from home.” This new service was called “Online Experiences” and can go from having a casual digital exchange with native speakers to practise conversation in a foreign language to taking a virtual class on how to make homemade sushi with a Japanese chef. This service, Norum and Polson (2021) argue,

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constitutes “an act of placemaking that has become key to the sale of experiences in the new economy.” In their work on placemaking experiences in Airbnb, the authors examine how the discursive labour of the hosts frames the Online Experiences as a communicative activity through which places are meaningfully constituted through social relations. Hence, from virtual worlds to tourism and entertainment to tragic events like wars we can see how digital media engagements are deeply embedded into and intertwined with people’s everyday lives and practices and, therefore, interwoven into their habitus. These engagements involve collaborative and communal practices of content production and consumption (or prosumption) as an always ongoing, never fnished process of content development. Indeed, the way placemaking is construed as cultural prosumption has profound implications for the kinds of communication practices, modes of self-presentation and relations that are enacted through discourse and other semiotic resources in the online-ofine interface. The sociocultural context in which digital and physical emplacement occurs is characterised by increasing mobility and globalisation, feeting or ephemeral relations, shareable experiences, blurred spatio-temporal boundaries and a sense of never-ending connectivity. These characteristics constitute the background against which people can engage in social exchanges from which they can derive a sense of connection and constant social presence as features of the sociomental layer of context, as will be commented upon in the next Section. 3

The sociomental context

Users resort to diferent types of new media discourses (e.g. typed messaging texts, social media entries, etc.) and technologies (e.g. locative apps, locative media) to manage their interactive needs beyond a delimited physical space (as was the case before the advent of the smartphone). However, users still need to feel connected and bonded to other users, and they value the feelings and emotions that stem from online interactions, often much more so than the value of the objective information being transferred through these online acts of communication. Part of these efects lies in the feeling of proximity felt by otherwise physically scattered users when interacting online. Pragmatics has generally shied away from the analysis of feelings and emotions and has tended to focus, instead, on the informational value of the propositional content communicated through verbal acts of communication. However, as remarked in Yus (2021a: 28), in today’s acts of virtual communication, mainly sustained through smartphones, what is important is not so much the propositions conveyed explicitly or implicitly through verbal utterances, but the more indeterminate non-propositional meaning

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and afect expressed and understood in the act of communication or even leaking from this act unintentionally (but nevertheless resulting in relevant efects). Furthermore, as hinted in Yus (2018a), it is highly noticeable that most of the time spent by users interacting on smartphones nowadays, especially youngsters, involves what for many people (especially adults) entails a signifcant phatic component (i.e. this form of communication that is occasionally referred to as “silly,” “irrelevant” or “meaningless”). Miller (2008: 395/398) explains this as the shift from signifcantly relevant content to the increasing value of online communication as supportive of phatic connotations that compensate for the lack of quality in the information exchanged: content is not king, but “keeping in touch” is. More important than anything said, it is the connection to the other that becomes signifcant, and the exchange of words becomes superfuous. Thus the text message, the short call, the brief email, the short blog update or comment, becomes part of a mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence in an ever-expanding social network. . . . We see a shift from dialogue and communication between actors in a network, where the point of the network was to facilitate an exchange of substantive content, to a situation where the maintenance of a network itself has become the primary focus. Therefore, the objective value of the propositional content of discourses exchanged is often not the primary source of the eventual communicative satisfaction. Rather, certain non-propositional qualities, often exuding or leaking from propositional acts of communication, may radically infuence the eventual satisfaction from the processing of these discourses. Furthermore, in Yus (2018b), the umbrella terms afective attitude (feelings and emotions underlying the production of an utterance, held and intended as part of the act of communication) and afective efect (the resulting non-propositional efects, which are often intended but may also “leak” or “exude” from the act of communication unintentionally) were proposed for the whole range of non-propositional information eventually communicated or produced, nowadays mainly conveyed through smartphone-mediated acts of communication. Certainly, this afective attitude, i.e. the need to express and share feelings and emotions, underlies many of everyday acts of online communication, as already mentioned. Fortunati and Vincent (2009: 13–14) provide a general defnition of computermediated emotions as mediated emotions: A mediated emotion is an emotion felt, narrated or showed, which is produced or consumed, for example in a telephone or mobile phone conversation, in a flm or a TV programme or in a website, in other words

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mediated by a computational electronic device. Electronic emotions are emotions lived, re-lived or discovered through machines. Through ICT, emotions are on one hand amplifed, shaped, stereotyped, re-invented and on the other sacrifced, because they must submit themselves to the technological limits and languages of a machine. Internet users also hold and want to communicate feelings and emotions online similar to the ones that would be produced in physical scenarios. Maybe even more intensely so on the internet, since users often expect other users to react upon their feelings and emotions, and they often display emotions freely without the burden of the social constraints imposed on the interlocutors by physical co-presence. In the specifc context of this book, it can be stated that users feel a permanent and profound need for connectivity and co-presence, and they achieve this connection via their mobile phones invested with locative apps and other locative media. There appears to be an emotional investment in the mobile phone because it provides an unbroken and constant connection that mitigates or suppresses the default awareness of being physically apart. The instant availability of users, who are tethered to their devices, favours this feeling of non-stop connection. A similar term is perpetual contact, proposed by Mascheroni and Vincent (2016) as a communicative afordance of smartphone communication, in the sense that diferent interfaces open up diverse communicative possibilities but at the same time shape distinctive communicative practices as well as diferent norms concerning use, social expectations and emotions around smartphones. In short, locative apps and media enable the communication of feelings and emotions thanks to their ability to generate an overlay of physical and virtual information about the users’ whereabouts and their activities therein, and these feelings/emotions lie at the heart of many of these location-based online interactions. As already hinted, a feeling of connection between users is one of the major afective efects facilitated by locative media, overcoming lack of physical co-presence. Non-stop interactions among users and constant availability of friends regardless of their physical position have certainly altered the way places and interactions therein are viewed nowadays thanks to locative media (Özkul 2017: 223). Instead of taking for granted our location, as in physically bounded interactions, now it is the users themselves that are constantly disclosing location information while on the go and informing other users of their situation in their attempt to feel connected and maybe get together at an arranged physical setting. In this sense, Licoppe’s (2004: 141) term connected presence is important, since it emphasises how “the fow of online interactions helps to maintain the feeling of a permanent connection, an impression that the link can be activated at any time and that one can

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thus experience the other’s engagement in the relationship at any time,” that is, locative media enable feelings of connection regardless of actual physical location. Roberts and Koliska (2014) list similar labels proposed in the bibliography for this feeling of connection favoured by locative media, including social presence, which is related to the degree of salience of another person, or the sense of being with someone, in an interaction through online communication. Needless to say, this feeling of connection is facilitated by locative media but not detached from the physical context of the users. A clear example is the situation in which people share a physical place and one (or several) of them simultaneously engage in virtual interactions through their smartphones. This generates layers of connection of a physical-virtual kind. As Lasén (2013) correctly remarks, in this setting users “have to manage their presence in two diferent contexts, performing particular ways of modulating their presence. It is not a case of people withdrawing from the urban public place, forgetting where they are, but rather of sharing their attention.” Similarly, users now generate connectedness by exchanging images taken with their smartphones (see next Section). Özkul (2013) mentions how many users, rather than simply checking-in at a place (using locationbased social networking applications) and sharing locational information with the broader public, they now prefer to send photos to each other in the form of text messages, making the place (and the moment) special for only those who are emotionally close to them. This type of use creates a representational space, which is directly lived through its associated images and symbols. de Souza e Silva (2006: 269) points in the same direction when commenting on Japanese teenagers who exchange many text messages altering their notion of presence, in the sense that participating in the shared communications of the group generated an intense feeling of co-presence, an enfolding of contexts which allows users to feel as if they are in two places at once, with the parallel possibility of moving through space while interacting with others who are both remote and in the same contiguous space via one’s relative location to other users. Farrelly (2017: 175) summarises this feeling as users essentially imprinting themselves onto places by uploading their thoughts, impressions, and experiences to locative media, in the shape of behaviours such as photographing, geotagging, checking in, playing and self-tracking. Such interactions can potentially foster a sense of place in the shape of an existential connection, externalised as a sense of connection, a sense of attachment, and so on. And Fazel (2015: 136) proposes the term mediated social co-presence to account for this feeling generated by the use of locative media and the overlay of ofine and online spaces, providing users with the feeling of being socially copresent, while at the same time exploring spaces.

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A second type of feeling stemming from the use of locative media and the new conceptualisation of place is the one related to the user’s identityshaping, self-worth and self-display, which are now increasingly being performed in the interface between the physical and the virtual. In general, the meanings of places and our identities are built together, as people identify themselves with a spatial environment when they experience that environment as meaningful. . . . Location, when understood as “a sense of place,” can tell a lot of things not only about a place, but also about the inhabitants of that place, their personalities, preferences, likes and dislikes, and even ideals. One could easily gain an impression of a person by following the traces of the places and events that they share with others. (Özkul 2014: 30–31/99) In this sense, the term spatial self (Schwartz and Halegoua 2015) is relevant since it explores the presentation of the self based on geographic traces of their physical activity, a variety of instances where individuals document, archive, and display their experience and/or mobility within spaces in order to represent or reveal aspects of their identity to others. It provides a way of conceptualising the active marking of location as a modality of self-presentation. As such, as remarked in Yus (2021a), locative media trigger an ego-oriented psychological efect that gratifes selfidentity, empowering users with the feeling of having local knowledge of a new place. Additionally, a personal relationship with a place is created among users simply by sharing their locational information. Remembering feelings and emotions that a place used to stir, rather than the objective attributes of a place, can also contribute to a feeling of place attachment. Crucially, when users choose to broadcast their location in relation to a specifc venue, they are relating themselves to the values and, most notably, to social groups that are represented by that specifc physical place. In this way, users are building their social online identity through attaching themselves to the specifc information collected about that physical place (Yus ibid.). This is prominent in the case of check-ins (Yus 2021a, 2021b), where users display their current location to others. A possible intention underlying check-ins is the users’ self-display and self-management by letting others know that they have chosen precisely that location and not any other when checking in, and with expectations of audience validation (from friends, peers or acquaintances). As Wang and Stefanone (2013: 440) remark, self-presentation through checking-in may be understood as a means for enhancing one’s status within the social network; it may “facilitate a new level of exhibitionism to satisfy the need to express one’s chosen identity, to validate oneself within the social matrix, and to disclose location information as a method of forging social identities.”

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Finally, a third type of feeling generated out of location-based online interactions is the user’s feeling of group membership and community building. In Yus (2007) it was claimed that virtual groups and communities exhibit similar bonding features to the ones found in delimited physical groups and communities, and feelings of group membership are intensely valued in these virtual communities nowadays. Sustained virtual interactions generate feelings of in-group membership and communal support, of being “attached” to the other members of the group, that is, an awareness of the group members’ afective connection to and care for a virtual community in which they become involved. Similarly, location-centred information may generate an ofset of feelings related to virtual communities and group membership. Users frequently change their movements around the city depending on the social and spatial information arriving at their smartphones, altering or adapting their dwellings around town depending on who is nearby. Locative media are often used to transform the ways in which people come together and interact in public spaces. Similarly, users who contribute to the information attached to a physical place may also produce feelings of social or group connection. In this scenario of physical-virtual overlay of group-centred information, Humphreys (2010) and Humphreys and Liao (2013) analyse the locationbased apps Dodgeball and Foursquare, respectively, in terms of parochialisation. As summarised in Evans and Saker (2017: 17–18), in these apps users feel a sense of commonality among a group of friends in a public space through creating, sharing and exchanging information of a social and locational kind. This generates familiarity within often-unfamiliar public environments, and often leads to unplanned social interactions, with users changing their whereabouts depending on that social spatial information arriving at their devices, thus adapting their usual routes depending on nearby people. Evans and Saker (ibid.) conclude that mobile social networks are increasingly being used to transform the ways they come together and interact in public space. A similar term proposed in the bibliography is character of a place (Schwartz and Halegoua 2015: 1649), “a social construct that is continuously created and adjusted by the plethora of visitors to that location and the connotation of that place.” Crucially, when users choose to broadcast their location in relation to a specifc venue, they are relating themselves to the values and, most notably, with social groups that are represented by that specifc physical place. In this way, users are building their social online identity and feelings of group membership through attaching themselves to the specifc information collected about that physical place. 4

The situational context

The reconfguration of places through the use of locative media is carried out through a number of specifc apps and the discursive strategies

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facilitated by them, which allow for the overlay of physical and virtual information in users’ everyday practices. Lack of space prevents us from engaging in an exhaustive account of these apps and strategies. A starting point would be to emphasise that the extent of the aforementioned overlay depends on the specifcities of apps and programs, what is usually called interface afordances in the bibliography and specifcally labelled interfacerelated contextual constraints in Yus (2021a). Take, for instance, the messaging apps WhatsApp and WeChat. Both are similar in the way they allow for (a)synchronic (mainly) text-based interactions, but their interfaces differ enormously in terms of how they allow for location-based dialogues. As remarked in Yus (2021b), unlike WhatsApp, WeChat ofers users a whole range of options for location-based communication: Shake (users literally shake their phones to instruct the app to be matched with others who are shaking their smartphones at the same time); Look Around (to fnd other nearby users who have also used this feature and sorts users by distance); and People Nearby (reads in the current geographic location of the device to locate a list of other people using this feature and are in the vicinity). One of the discursive strategies that allows for an overlay of physical and virtual information on a place is the check-in, already mentioned in passing. Check-ins are a good example of location-mediated information. In the case of Facebook check-ins at locations (Yus 2021a, 2021b), they include the name and profle picture of the user, of the location and information on the place and time of the check-in. In the middle, a comment by the user justifes the publication of the check-in or provides additional information on the qualities of the place. Needless to say, simply informing someone of the user’s actual location seems irrelevant, but certain informative intentions may underlie, including social connection with friends, discovering new places to visit, keeping track of places already visited, etc. Similarly, users self-display and self-manage their identity by letting others know that they have chosen precisely that location and not any other when checking in, and with expectations of audience validation (from friends, peers or acquaintances). Finally, check-ins may be interpreted as an attempt to engage in ofine interactions with others regarding the specifc location communicated. Among the goals of check-ins, users often intend a mutuality of information with other users. Schwartz (2015: 95–96) proposes the term documentation of relationship for the action of checking in, because check-ins are often accompanied by other metadata such as photographs and tips that result in a rich documentation of the user’s daily interactions. Not surprisingly, the value of the content of the check-in is infuenced by the quality of the ties binding the users sharing the publication. Curiously, when location information is presented alongside or implicitly as part of more complex content, for instance entries with photos and descriptions, sharing a location may be both interesting and useful.

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A second discourse that binds physical place and online interaction is the act of taking and sharing images with smartphone apps. These are usually taken with the camera, then enhanced with flters and then shared on messaging or social media apps. In Yus (2021a), a distinction of two types of shared images is proposed that has relevance to the topic of this chapter: the overlay of physical and virtual place in everyday smartphone interactions. In the frst case, the referent of a photograph itself is interesting (or relevant) due to the objective interest of what is depicted and how it is depicted (angle, colour, framing, people, surrounding scenario, etc.). This case was generically labelled relevance of image-referent contiguity. The audience fnds relevance in interpreting the photo as being attached to the referent at the moment that the photo was taken, and the user is praised for managing to capture that contiguity. In this case, the user obtains an ofset of afective efects from the praising reactions triggered by the photos (e.g. feelings of connection, of self-worth, of being acknowledged, increased self-esteem). In the second case, photos may be relevant not because of the quality or the content of the referent, but because the photo allows for the derivation of a number of afective efects binding the initial user (and the place where he/she is located) and the audience. Indeed, a typical feature of today’s smartphone camera practices is the trivial and banal quality of many of the photos taken, also assumed to be ephemeral and tied to the synchronous present. In these cases, the eventual relevance cannot arise from the photo itself, but from how the photo connects the user and their location with their audience. This case was called relevance of user-audience contiguity (through the image). An example of this second type is food pics. The user publishes such a photo with an expectation to obtain comments and reactions shortly after publishing the photo, with an enhanced feeling of synchronous connection with their friends and an immediate overlay of the user’s whereabouts (physical place) while taking the photo and the audience’s processing of the image. Users’ comments and reactions subsequently get attached to the food pic constituting a unifed discourse made up of a physical referent and digital information. As Liu (2022: 174) correctly remarks, this type of smartphonemediated photography generates “spaces to express social identities and permit ways of seeing and being seen that create and disseminate distinctive imaginative geographies of many people and places.” The digitalisation of contemporary society has transformed the role of photography, from representation and recording to communication and self-presentation, which can promote virtual sightseeing and imaginative travel, connect personal experiences with distant others, and create networked social spaces (ibid.). Another example of visual discourse connecting virtual and physical places is the selfe. It clearly links the physical place occupied by the user and layers of digital information that subsequently become attached to it.

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Taking a selfe entails relatedness between the referent and the photo, with an overt intention that the subject(s) depicted be easily identifable at the moment of taking the photo. This is why selfes are often endowed with a feeling of authenticity, also conveyed by the “liveness” that surrounds the selfe, bringing the audience closer to the situation where it was taken, the feeling that the photo was shot instantly and incidentally when the current situation emerged. As Halegoua and Moon (2021: 650) emphasise specifcally regarding travel selfes, Deciding which photograph to post, or whether to post evidence of personal travel at all, means evaluating the cultural connotations of the places and place-based activities represented as well as the digital and social contexts in which these photographs will be embedded and interpreted. When read as digital placemaking practices, travel selfes become salient to producers and audiences as political and performative expressions of identity and one’s place in the world. The selfe is a digital expression of how people share the persistence of place in body. Predictably, as claimed in Yus (2021a), a major intention when taking selfes is to trigger audience reactions on social media or messaging apps. Users post selfes strategically so as to obtain social rewards, audience validation and relational development through comments and reactions. They want to boost their confdence and feelings of self-worth and selfes are a good means to achieve this intention as an interactivity trigger, that is, a discourse strategically uploaded with the overt intention to obtain comments and reactions. Selfes and digital photos are typically situated in the overlay of physical places and digital information, and especially so when produced within travel experiences shared on social media. Users employ these sites to connect to a higher audience and show their skills at taking and enhancing images. The term spatial self is, again, pertinent in the way it refers to users documenting, archiving and displaying their experience and/or mobility in order to represent or perform aspects of their identity to others. Users can view the poster’s location, curated moods, imaginaries, memories, lifestyles and intimate relationships. These locations are deliberately selected and embedded in the embodied experiences of making sharable photos, refecting the signifcance of afects in shaping the connections that develop between people and platforms (Liu ibid. 174, 176). A third digital discourse that clearly resonates with the topic of this book, namely the discursive management of place in digital communication, is the trend of tagging images, which clearly spreads a layer (or several) of digital information over the image that clearly alters the way in which the objective referent of the image (i.e. photos taken with the

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Figure 1.1 Tagged images by an Instagram user.

smartphone camera) is to be interpreted, and again, the image plus its physical referent and the tags attached to it form a unifed single discourse in the overlay of online discourse and ofine setting. Take, for instance, the images of landscapes taken by a female Instagram user reproduced in Figure 1.1. The images refer to specifc physical places but there are two layers of digital information attached to them: an initial layer made up of the description that the user makes of the referent depicted in the image, plus a second layer of tags that instruct the reader about how these images are to be interpreted. These discursive layers are translated subsequently. Left image Description: Alicante, my hometown. Its coast and its maritime façade. Mediterranean and palm trees in April. Tags: #alicante #alacant #spain #mediterranean #mediterraneing #coastalliving #coast #sea #blue #rocks #sunset #dusk #sky #april #spring #breathing #feeling #colors #smells #way #dontstop #goahead #horizon #more #liberty Middle image Description: Tags:

Sunset in the English Channel. Feel the warmth of it. Orange power. #orange #power #warmth #power #heat #fre #interiorisation #axis #endofday #sunset #sunshine #dusk #englishchannel #uk #england #feelthefreinyou

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Right image Description: Moorish house, Crevillente. Exuberant and exotic. Remote airs to relax and watch life go by. Tags: #moorishhouse #crevillente #carmenofcampillo #oasis #refuge #morocco #themoorish #alhambra #granada #plants #fountains #water #paradise #senses #candles #light #air #ways #feel #smell #tea #greentea #moorishtea #thesouthalsoexists The important role of tagging in these images is that the digital information spread on them alters the way the referent is to be interpreted, and also provides clues to the user’s feelings and emotions stirred by these images. She emphasises how the scene impacts her senses plus a feeling of liberty that pushes her to go ahead and not give up (left image), objective information regarding the referent and associated feelings (middle image) and broader attributes of Moorish culture and the impact on her senses while being at this Tea House (right image). Needless to say, feelings also stem from the wider availability of tagged discourse when searched on social media. As Yus (2021a: 156–157) remarks, the tagged photo “is not only available for viewing by both ‘tagger’ and ‘tagged’ users but also becomes accessible to the users’ entire network of friends, with or without the due knowledge of the tagged user. From this multiple tagging, several relevant afective efects may be derived.” 5

Concluding remarks

In this chapter, we have initially commented upon a paradox in today’s mobile communication practices: The mobile phone initially liberated us from the tyranny of having to be tied to the physical place where the phone is located while interacting with others, but new smartphone-centred technologies have tied as again to the physical place. However, this is no mere attachment to the place itself, or user-place contiguity, but a constant reconfguration of our social practices therein and parallel re-conceptualisation of the physical places themselves, provoked by users’ discursive practices within and around these places, which are now turned into data-driven locations managed by smartphone services such as locative apps. We have referred to an articulation that makes places not just a physical location or position but rather a space that is socially constructed around human experience and mediated by these locative media. In this scenario of physical-virtual articulation of communicative instances, we have also referred to labels in the bibliography that, one way or another, have tried to come to terms with this new trend in human interactions, most notably the label hybrid space, but also the notion of

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wikispace defning the way in which people encounter and appropriate existing spaces, frequently achieved as a collaborative endeavour in which diferent social actors contribute to the construction of place as shareable space. Crucially, digital platforms not only provide a participatory environment in which physical places can be referred to, talked about or commented on, but can also be considered meaningful places, with delimited boundaries within which space-related interactions are sustained. We have then emphasised the role of discourses in the accomplishment of this hybridisation of spaces, with the aid of diferent semiotic resources ranging from textual, pictorial to audiovisual and multimodal, discourses that are subsequently shared around networked publics, many of which refer to actions and events taking place ofine and re-interpreted on social media. The next section has been devoted to the sociocultural context, characterised by blurred social boundaries due to globalisation and also reconfgured social practices across public and private spaces. In this environment, we have underlined the importance of the notion of network, because placemaking actions can be initiated by individuals, but can also be subsequently followed-up as they go viral through the network, thus fostering user participation in placemaking reconfgurations. Mobility has also been emphasised in this section. Indeed, it plays a major role in the construction of place aided by digital technologies, as refected, for instance, in the way tourism has developed as a major system for people’s physical mobility that is mostly managed through virtual apps and sites. Thus, we regard mobility as an instance of entextualisation practice where emplaced discourses recreate spaces and create a sense of place through tourists’ embodied experiences mediated by technology. The sociomental context has been the focus of analysis in the next section. We start from the assumption that users also need to feel connected and bonded to other users, and they value the feelings and emotions that stem from online interactions, often adding to (and even acquiring prominence over) the initial value of the objective information being transferred through these online acts of communication. Among all the range of feelings/emotions that circulate online or are triggered by virtual acts of communication, we have underlined those related to the user’s identity shaping and self-worth, both in its personal and social varieties. Finally, an emphasis has been laid on the situational context. The reconfguration of places through the use of locative media is carried out through a number of specifc apps and the discursive strategies facilitated therein, allowing for the overlay of physical and virtual information in users’ everyday practices. Diferent interface afordances will allow for or limit the extent and quality of these location-based practices. Among these, we have underlined the role of check-ins (e.g. on Facebook) and the use of selfes and food pics as discourses delimited by physical (the user/food

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being photographed) and virtual practices (the editing and sharing of the image on social media). A last pervasive element found in this threshold between the physical and the virtual and also analysed in this chapter is the user’s tagging of images for other users to direct their inferences in a certain direction. All of these instances show the importance of place in today’s communicative practices online, and how the notion of place (or location) has been reconfgured thanks to today’s location-based technologies and the users´ appropriation of them to enact their various social practices. References Agnew, John. 1987. The United States in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2011. “From Variation to Heteroglossia in the Study of Computer-mediated Discourse.” In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek, 277–298. New York: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Baym, Nancy K. 2000. Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. London: Sage. Biocca, Frank. 1997. “The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3 (2). Blommaert, Jan. 2018. Durkheim and the Internet. London: Bloomsbury. Blommaert, Jan, Malgorzata Szabla, Ico Many, Ondrej Procházka, Lu Ring, and Li Kunming. 2019. “Online with Garfnkel. Essays on Social Action in the Online-Ofine Nexus.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Tilburg: University of Tilburg. Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos. 2012. “Social Interaction in YouTube Text-Based Polylogues: A Study of Coherence.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17 (4): 501–521. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Networked Society. London: Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Rise of the Networked Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Christmann, Gabriela. 2022. “The Theoretical Concept of the Communicative (Re)construction of Spaces.” In Communicative Constructions and the Refrigeration of Spaces, edited by Gabriela Christmann, Hubert Knoblauch, and Martina Löw, 89–112. London: Routledge. Chun, Elaine, and Keith Walters. 2011. “Orienting to Arab Orientalisms: Language, Race and Humor in a YouTube Video.” In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek, 251–276. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Courage, Cara. 2011. “What Really Matters: Moving Placemaking into a New Epoch.” In The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, edited by Cara Courage, Tom Borrow, María Rosario Jackson, Kylie Leg, Anita McKeown, Louise Platt, and Jason Schupbach, 1–8. London: Routledge. Curry, Michael R. 2002. “Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place.” In The Handbook of New Media, edited by Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone, 502–517. London: Sage. de Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2006. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Systems.” Space and Culture 9: 261–278. Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. 2001. Atlas of Cyberspace. London: Addison-Wesley. Evans, Leighton, and Michael Saker. 2017. Location-Based Social Media. Space, Time and Identity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Farman, Jason. 2015. “Stories, Spaces and Bodies: The Production of Embodied Space through Mobile Media.” Communication Research and Practice 1 (2): 101–116. Farrelly, Glenn E. 2017. Claiming Places: An Exploration of People’s Use of Locative Media and the Relationship to Sense of Place. PhD Thesis. University of Toronto. Fazel, Maryam. 2015. Locative Media: From Transcendental Technologies to Socio-Formative Spheres. An Examination of the Interface between Place, Agent and Locative Media. PhD Thesis. University of Shefeld. Fortunati, Leopoldina, and Jane Vincent. 2009. “Introduction.” In Electronic Emotion: The Mediation of Emotion via Information and Communication Technologies, edited by Jane Vincent and Leopoldina Fortunati, 1–31. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2004. “To Tell or Not to Tell? Email Stories between On- and Of-line Interactions.” Language@Internet 1: article 1. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2015. “Sharing as Rescripting: Place Manipulations on Youtube Between Narrative and Social Media Afordances.” Discourse, Context and Media 9: 64–72. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gofman, Ervin. 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay in the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gordon, Eric, and Adriana de Souza e Silva. 2011. Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Granato, Luisa, and Alejandro Parini. 2015. “Online Follow-ups as Evaluative Reactions to Two Visits of the Argentinian President to the United States.” In The Dynamics of Political Discourse. Forms and Functions of Follow-ups, edited by Anita Fetzer, Elda Weizmann, and Lawrence Berlin, 173–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Halegoua, Germaine R., and Ghiyong Patrick Moon. 2021. “Korean Travel Selfes as Contested Placemaking Practices.” Convergence 27 (3): 649–663. Hardley, Jess, and Ingrid Richardson. 2021. “Digital Placemaking: Embodied Mobile Media Practices in Domestic Space During Covid-19.” Convergence 27 (3): 625–636. Humphreys, Lee. 2010. “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space.” New Media and Society 12 (5): 763–778.

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Humphreys, Lee, and Tony Liao. 2013. “Foursquare and the Parochialization of Public Space.” First Monday 18 (11). John, Nicholas A. 2013. “Sharing and Web 2.0: The Emergence of a Keyword.” New Media and Society 15 (2): 167–182. Kluitenberg, Eric. 2006. “The Network of Waves: Living and Acting in a Hybrid Space.” Open 11. Lasén, Amparo. 2013. “How to Be in Two Places at the Same Time? Mobile Phone Use in Public Places.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life. Ethnographic Views, Observations and Refections, edited by Joachim R. Höfich and Maren Hartman, 227–252. Berlin: Frank and Timme. Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Licoppe, Christian. 2004. “‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 135–156. Liu, Chen. 2022. “Imag(in)ing Place: Reframing Photography Practices and Afective Social Media Platforms.” Geoforum 129: 172–180. Mascheroni, Giovanna, and Jane Vincent. 2016. “Perpetual Contact as a Communicative Afordance: Opportunities, Constraints, and Emotions.” Mobile Media and Communication 4 (3): 310–326. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Oxford: Polity Press. Miller, Vincent. 2008. “New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture.” Convergence 14: 387–400. Norum, Roger, and Erika Polson. 2021. “Placemaking ‘Experiences’ during Covid19.” Convergence 27 (3): 609–624. Özkul, Didem. 2013. “‘You’re Virtually There’: Mobile Communication Practices, Locational Information Sharing and Place Attachment.” First Monday 18 (11). Özkul, Didem. 2014. Mobile Nodes: Mobile and Locative Media, Everyday Life and Sense of Place. PhD Thesis. University of Westminster. Özkul, Didem. 2017. “Placing Mobile Ethnography: Mobile Communication as a Practice of Place Making.” In The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell, 221–231. Abingdon: Routledge. Page, Ruth. 2009. “Trivia and Tellabillity: Storytelling in Status Updates.” Paper presented at the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication Research Seminars. King’s College London, 14 October. Parini, Alejandro, and Anita Fetzer. 2019. “Evidentiality and Stance in YouTube Comments on Smartphone Reviews.” Internet Pragmatics 2 (1): 112–135. Parini, Alejandro, Verónica Vera, Edgardo Galende, Luis Ganga, and Renata Abuchaem. 2013. “Context and Participation in Virtual World Habbo Hotel.” University of Belgrano Working Papers. Buenos Aires: University of Belgrano. Roberts, Jessica, and Michael Koliska. 2014. “The Efects of Ambient Media: What Unplugging Reveals about Being Plugged in.” First Monday 19 (8). Schwartz, Raz. 2015. “Online Place Attachment: Exploring Technological Ties to Physical Places.” In Mobility and Locative Media. Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mimi Sheller, 85–100. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Schwartz, Raz, and Germaine R. Halegoua. 2015. “The Spatial Self: LocationBased Identity Performance on Social Media.” New Media and Society 17 (10): 1644–1661. Scott, Kate. 2022. Pragmatics Online. London: Routledge. Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan. 2010. Mashup Cultures. New York: Springer. Stokes, Benjamin, François Bar, Karl Baumann, Ben Caldwell, and Andrew Schrock. 2021. “Urban Furniture in Digital Placemaking: Adapting a Storytelling Payphone across Los Angeles.” Convergence 27 (3): 711–726. Taylor, Tina Lynn. 2002. “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds.” In The Social Life of Avatars, edited by Ralph Schroeder, 40–62. London: Springer. Thurlow, Crispin. 2022. “Liquid Power: Reading the Infnity Pool as a Global Semioscape.” Visual Communication 21 (1): 123–145. Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. 2014. “Two Hundred Ninety-four: Remediation and Multimodal Performance in Tourist Placemaking.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 18 (4): 459–489. Wang, Shaojung Sharon, and Michael A. Stefanone. 2013. “Showing Of? Human Mobility and the Interplay of Traits, Self-Disclosure, and Facebook Check-ins.” Social Science Computer Review 31 (4): 437–457. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Wellman, Barry. 2001. “Physical Place and CyberPlace: The Rise of Personalized Networking.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (2): 227–252. Yus, Francisco. 2007. Virtualidades reales. Nuevas formas de comunidad en la era de Internet [Real Virtualities. New Forms of Community at the Internet Age]. Alicante: University of Alicante, Servicio de Publicaciones. Yus, Francisco. 2011. Cyberpragmatics: Internet-Mediated Communication in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, Francisco. 2018a. “Positive Non-Humorous Efects of Humor on the Internet.” In The Dynamics of Interactional Humor. Creating and Negotiating Humor in Everyday Encounters, edited by Villy Tsakona and Jan Chovanec, 283–304. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yus, Francisco. 2018b. “Attaching Feelings and Emotions to Propositions. Some Insights on Irony and Internet Communication.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 22 (1): 94–107. Yus, Francisco. 2021a. Smartphone Communication: Interactions in the App Ecosystem. Abingdon: Routledge. Yus, Francisco. 2021b. “Cyberpragmatics in the Age of Locative Media.” In Internet Pragmatics: Theory and Practice, edited by Chaoqun Xie, Francisco Yus, and Hartmut Haberland, 75–105. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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The best thing on Twitch today was a bike messenger Experiencing metropolis, mobility and place through live-streaming Aparajita Bhandari and Lee Humphreys

1

Introduction

Every day, NYC delivery man Meikki traverses Manhattan on his bike delivering food for UberEats. However, unlike most other food delivery people, Miekii does so with a camera strapped to his body, narrating his opinions on the locations zipping by, while live streaming his route to thousands of viewers on the video streaming platform Twitch. Streams like Miekii’s of people traversing city streets and highways on bikes, cars, trucks, or foot have grown especially popular during the pandemic. As one Verge writer explains about Meikki’s streams, “Right now I can’t leave my apartment, but I can still see what it’s like in my city. . . . It’s not a tour, exactly. It’s more of an active, vocal appreciation for a place he clearly loves” (The Verge 2021). Created in 2011, Twitch is a platform for live video streaming. It is free to watch and create streams, follow channels and comment in stream chats, however users may choose to monetarily support creators through “subscriptions” (recurring monthly donations). Hamilton et al. (2014) consider Twitch to be composed of participatory communities, characterized by openness and “encouragement to engage in shared activities.” Communities on streams form around a shared experience drawn from both the stream’s content and the experiences of its participants. Twitch streams have also been posited (Dux and Kim 2018) to be virtual “third places,” informal public spaces where people engage in sociability to form and maintain communities (Oldenburg 1999). While it is most frequently associated with online gaming, Twitch hosts a wide variety of live-streamed content – one can fnd anything from cooking videos, to music, to work out routines. In 2018, Twitch launched a new streaming category called “IRL,” (“in real life”) which was intended to be “a place for users to share their everyday lives, thoughts, and opinions with their communities” (The Verge 2021). A subgenre of IRL streaming involves users live-streaming themselves while moving through urban DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-4

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spaces often through mobile phone or Go Pro cameras. These videos encompass people engaging in a range of work and leisure activities such as delivering food, driving passengers or vacationing in a new city. A range of forms of transport are also present in such streams including cycling, driving and walking. Such accounts vary in popularity, but the more widely watched streams draw in substantial viewership numbers (ranging up to 19,000 total views). While existing research has examined the complex relationship between physical urban space, social media, and experiences of place, it has mostly focused on image or text-based social media content. However, with the rise of live streaming and live streaming platforms such as Twitch, it is important to consider the ways that live video feeds can lead to mediatized experiences of place. In this chapter we investigate the case of streamers like Meikki, which we term spatial streamers, as a form of mediated placemaking. Through these streams we take into consideration the ways that movement, motion, and temporality are central to experiences of place. Before delving into the specifc case study of Twitch central to this chapter, we frst outline the necessary theoretical background needed to contextualize this case within historical theories of the social production of space and place and contemporary conceptions of digital place and placemaking. 2

Theoretical background

2.1 Social construction of urban space

Notable French theorist Henri Lefebvre (1991) argues in The Production of Space that urban space is not a neutral container but rather is a social product. According to Lefebvre, the social production of space can be understood through a triad between the three elements of: spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation. First, the notion of spatial practice, also called perceived space, refers to the physical, material city, and the ways that people perceive and move about in their everyday routines. Secondly, representations of space are the conceptualizations or ideas of a social space, usually for administrative and property development purposes. Representations of space are produced by architects, engineers, urban planners etc. Finally, spaces of representation are the lived experiences of people who interact with the space. In this element, symbolic value is given to a place by its inhabitants, and the places are given meaning. Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments encourage the focus to be shifted from understanding space to illuminating the processes of its production. However, just because space is understood as socially constructed, doesn’t mean that the material should be overlooked. For Lefebvre, examining space as purely abstract or concrete was paradoxical because it failed to account for the “lived experience” of space (Agnew and Livingstone 2011).

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Similarly, in the seminal “The Practice of Everyday Life” de Certeau (1984) places the notion of movement through urban space as central to the experiencing of it. He theorizes walking in the city as a “practice of everyday life” that involves a “spatial acting out of place” and is “a space of enunciation” (1984: 98). de Certeau states that one way the spaces in a city are created is through what he calls the “strategies” of governments, corporations, and other structures of power who produce conceptions of the city, such as through maps which describe the city as a unifed whole. He contrasts these “strategies” with “tactics,” which are “acts of the weak” and refer to the ways which people move through and create meaning from those spaces (de Certeau 1984: 37). For example, while a specifc street has material features that confne the activity that can occur on that street, these material aspects do not completely determine what will take place on it. “Ordinary” pedestrians walking on the street, can take shortcuts or follow unique paths, transforming the street from a space that is “geometrically defned by urban planning” into a lived space that is useful or pleasurable for them (de Certeau 1984). The spatial strategies of powerful actors as de Certeau understands them can be seen to be underpinning the creation of Lefebvre’s representations of space. Likewise, the spatial tactics enacted by the weak are akin to Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practices, both focusing on the ways that people experience space and move within their everyday routines. Within the case of Twitch, we see an interesting interplay of these notions. Through the broadcasting of their movements through urban spaces, spatial streamers can be seen to be recording and sharing their own spatial practices. The narrations are created by diferent people with their own varying experiences of these places, generating subjective forms of information that becomes attached to those narrated places. That is, their narrations produce “in real time” discursive constructions of representational space. Once a space becomes constructed with social meaning it becomes a place (Tuan 1977). Placemaking can be broadly seen as the way that we transform the places that we exist into places in which we live (Urry 2001). Within this paper we draw our framework of place and placemaking from both Cresswell’s (2010) tripartite notion of place and Harvey’s understanding of the production of place. Cresswell posits place as something that is experienced through the interplay of three elements: materiality, meaning (ascribed to and associated with place), and practice (how what people do is associated with the meanings that a place might have). Harvey (1989, in Urry 2001) states that it is actually through the act of producing or making place that we attain a sense of belonging somewhere. Places (and people) are constantly changing and in fux; they are not fxed entities. We can therefore conceptualize placemaking as the carving out of relative permanence in the midst of this dissolution and replacement (Harvey 1989).

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2.2 Digital placemaking

Digital placemaking can be seen as the production of place through digital technologies. Many scholars have examined the ways that in the modern digital landscape senses of place are made through and with diferent forms of digital technologies including photographs, social media status updates, and locational check-ins. Özkul and Humphreys (2015) found through three studies with mobile media users in both the United Kingdom and the United States that digital traces, created from camera phones, locative applications, and social media applications, imbue places with both social and temporal meanings. These traces helped create and maintain memories of experiences of the city and increase users’ attachment to places (Özkul and Humphreys 2015), demonstrating how places are discursively constructed through users’ traces and social practices rather than endowed with objective information. Similarly, Schwartz and Halegoua’s (2015) theoretical framework of the spatial self examines how place and digital media can be used to perform identity. The spatial self refers to instances where individuals display and archive their own experiences within space and place in order to represent or perform aspects of their identity (Schwartz and Halegoua 2015). Evans and Saker (2017) found that users of Foursquare, a location-based social network that allows users to share their location with friends, via “checkins” partly used the site to create and maintain a sense of self through associations with particular places. Pushing back against arguments purporting that the increase of digital media use erodes people’s ability to meaningfully experience place, Halegoua (2020) puts forth a framework of digital placemaking termed re-placeing. Aligning with Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s frameworks of place as something that is done or created, re-placeing denotes the mundane and everyday ways that people use digital media afordances to produce a sense of place. The “re” in re-placeing highlights that the creation of a meaningful experience of place is a continual, iterative and oftentimes contested process rather than an isolated discrete act (Halegoua 2020). 2.3 Motion, movement, and mobilities

de Souza e Silva (2006) terms the space created by the merging of borders between physical and digital spaces hybrid space. The label refers to spaces that merge the physical and the digital in a social environment through the mobility aforded by mobile technology devices. Due to technology, there is no longer a “homogeneous context for a given spatial area, but rather pockets of diferent contexts” (de Souza e Silva 2006: 269) which are enfolded within the spatial area. Yet, mobile technologies allow one to

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move through space while simultaneously interacting with both remote and nearby connections. Therefore, hybrid spaces are such spaces in which the boundaries between remote and co-located contexts are completely blurred and can no longer be clearly defned. While technology is of course a central element of the framework, de Souza e Silva (2006) emphasizes that hybrid spaces are not constructed by technology. Rather, they are coconstructed through mobility and communication and materialized by social networks (de Souza e Silva 2006: 269). Similarly, through examining spaces of everyday life that are embedded with computer code, Kitchin and Perng (2016) argue that the relationship between code and space has become one that is mutually transductive. Space is constantly being produced and reproduced through the practices of code, changing the material conditions for the next iteration of codebased reproduction. The code of platforms and new technologies “mediates, supplements, augments, monitors, regulates, operates and facilitates many everyday task and routines related to domestic living, travel, work, communication, and consumption” (Kitchin and Dodge 2005: 178). These conceptions of the combination of digital and physical space bring up the messy and fuid nature of these entities. Scholars have begun to push for the importance of embodiment in conceiving of place and placemaking, as lived experience of the body in place (Caracciolo 2014). As Cresswell (2010: 18) states, “mobility exists in the same relation to movement as place does to location .  .  . involving a fragile entanglement of physical movement, representations, and practices.” Wayfaring describes practical engagement with lived-in environments through the integration of inhabited or lived knowledge. Hjorth and Pink’s (2014) conception of digital wayfaring extends the notion of wayfaring to help capture the fuid entanglement of digital and physical space through mobile technologies. Instead of focusing on the characteristics of the space that mobile and digital technologies occupy, they highlight the seamless and perpetual oscillation between online and ofine spaces of everyday life. Hjorth and Pink (2014) underscore the importance of considering not just the potential mobility aforded through mobile technologies, but the movement itself. Spatial streamers represent an interesting case of digital wayfaring and placemaking as they are not only using mobile media to make their way through the city but by streaming their movements through the city are actively mediatizing their digital wayfaring. 3

Case study: Spatial streaming on Twitch

For this chapter we examined spatial streams on Twitch from various geographic locations in urban areas worldwide (North America, Europe, and Asia) as a way to probe new forms of mediatized placemaking. In order to

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do this, we chose to sample the fve most popular streams from ten “spatial streamers” who livestreamed themselves moving through urban spaces. We took care to choose from a broad range of viewership (streamers varied from approximately 50,000 followers to 100 followers) and geographic locations. When watching these streams, we simultaneously examined both the textual chat feed content and video content in order to observe these streams in their entirety as they are experienced by viewers. A multitude of activities are represented within the spatial streams that we observed with some people choosing to live stream themselves at work, traveling, commuting, or simply exploring urban environments. There are also a range of modes of transportation present within these streams including driving, cycling, and walking. 3.1 Ethical considerations

When examining and discussing streams on Twitch we follow both the guidelines set out by the AoIR research working group (Markham and Buchanan 2012) and Markham’s (2012) concept of ethical fabrication as methodological and ethical practice. In order to preserve the anonymity and privacy of streamers and viewers, instead of reporting complete accounts or quotations from any one stream we combine data into composite representational accounts as recommended by Markham (2012). In doing this we provide accurate representations of the interactions, practices, and themes present in the streams while still preserving the privacy of the users within the streams we observed. When including screenshots of the streams within this chapter, we take care to present the images in a way that maintains privacy and have edited the screenshots accordingly. We found that examining live streaming through the lens of placemaking allowed us to observe a continuous merging of online and ofine space. By drawing from Hjorth and Pink’s (2014) notion of digital wayfaring as well as de Certeau’s (1984) emphasis on the analytic potential of the routines of everyday life, we also note that spatial livestreams on Twitch reinforce the centrality of motion and movement within experiences of place. Ultimately in this chapter we bring together these two themes, the continuous merging of the online and ofine and the centrality of movement, to argue for the consideration of a platformed placemaking framework as an extension of the existing digital placemaking framework in order to account for the ways that new practices of placemaking are enmeshed within specifc platform contexts in addition to physical and digital spaces. 4

Continuous merging of online and ofine space

Within the spatial streams we observed not just a hybridization between the online and the ofine but rather a continuous, recursive merging between the two. Both the physical and digital spaces occupied within these streams

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were in constant fux due to the afordance of live video and consistently updating chat streams. In particular, the liveness of Twitch was key in facilitating this continuous merge. Taylor (2018) describes watching content on Twitch as a “media event,” an experience that cannot be replicated because of its inherent sense of liveness. Van Es (2017) notes that liveness, akin to space, is socially constructed through the interplay of individuals, institutions, and media technologies. The liveness allowed the viewers to provide real time feedback to the streamers on the overall routes that they should take, places they should pass, and even the side of the road that they should bike or walk on. Within one stream viewers alerted a streamer of an upcoming road closure on the currently planned route leading the streamer to change their route in response to the chat leading to a change in the stream in real time. In another stream, a streamer who was biking crashed into a suddenly opened car door because they were checking the chat instead of looking at the road. Many of the streamers played with the notion of liveness on the stream explicitly by incorporating elements such as updating location maps on the screen or polls asking for feedback on routes. These elements added to the dynamic and continuous merging of the online and the ofine within spatial streams. These constructions also align with notions of the continuous and recursive nature of placemaking as highlighted by Halegoua (2020). Creating attachments to place is not just discrete onetime act, but rather something that is consistently occurring and being updated. 5

The movement(s) of everyday life

Motion and movement are central to the spatial streams that we observed on Twitch. Streamers were constantly moving through the urban spaces within which they were located and were rarely still in one location. In fact, even the term streams invokes a sense of movement and mobility which is of course a central feature of video-based media. Cameras were often set up to highlight this motion; they were placed on dashboards looking out onto the street or were strapped to bikes or people’s chests. The angle focused on providing a point-of-view angle, decentering the streamer from the frame and emphasizing the constantly changing and moving environment around the spatial streamer. While some streams had music playing, many streams embraced the noises of motion inherent to the locations within which they were moving. Environmental sounds such as trafc, wind, and rain capture what can be termed the ambient context (Hjorth and Pink 2014), afording the viewer of the stream the feeling that they are also present in these locations. These sounds add to the construction of a feeling not just of place but of being emplaced. As one viewer commented, “I almost feel as if I’m there with

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you!” In another stream a viewer remarked, “Who needs to buy a plane ticket when you have [streamer’s name]?” As Hjorth and Pink (2014: 54) state, “People, images, and technologies are always situated, in movement, and part of and constitutive of place” which was refected on Twitch. The emplaced and embedded quality of the streams also aligns with Halegoua’s previously mentioned framework of re-placeing (see Figure 2.1). Through this concept, Halegoua (2015: 3) draws attention to the “subjective, everyday practices of assessing and combining physical, social, and digital

Figure 2.1 Examples of live location maps embedded in the streams. These screenshots were taken directly by the researchers and have been altered to preserve anonymity.

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contexts . . . to understand one’s embeddedness within urban places.” The practices enacted within the streams can be understood as refections of processes of “re-placeing.” Within the streams there are also depictions of what de Certeau (1984) might note as the spatial routines or rhythms of the everyday. On Twitch people live streamed their daily commutes or work delivery routes, sharing an aspect of their everyday spatial experiences with viewers. These streams also illuminate the potential draw of viewing other people’s spatial routines, for example with viewers commenting, “Your videos make me almost miss commuting before covid.” These streams reinforce the routines of everyday life as sites of digital placemaking and connection to the spaces around us and can be seen as examples of the tactics of everyday people as ways to create their own conceptions of the city. 6

From digital placemaking towards platformed placemaking

Taken together, these frst two themes build towards a larger conception of platformed placemaking. We found that both streamers and viewers engaged in forms of placemaking within the live-streams that we observed. Streamers would engage with the places around them, narrating their experiences with places and chat members would engage back with their own experiences, creating spaces of representations and engaging in a recursive process of imbuing places with meaning. For example, in one stream viewers spoke about restaurants that they loved in their own cities in response to a restaurant that was passed and commented on by the streamer. Similarly, people discussed the best sites to see in Tokyo, or how they had always wanted to visit Amsterdam. Digital placemaking describes the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others – to embrace digital media afordances in order to cultivate or maintain a sense of attachment to place (Halegoua 2020). However, through our examination of Twitch we saw a need to move beyond digital placemaking to a notion of platformed placemaking in order to take into account the complex ways that platform environments shape practices and experiences of placemaking. Experiences of place observed within these spatial streams are inherently tied up with the larger platform context within which they were created, that is Twitch itself. Thus, extending our understanding of placemaking to incorporate conceptions of what scholars term platformization – a process in which technology companies serve as intermediaries connecting diferent parties (most importantly cultural producers and audiences) through websites and applications (Poell et al. 2021: 7) can help take these platform level dynamics into account. Viewers’ experiences of the places being depicted within the streams is mediated through the specifc streams, other views, and the streamer as

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well as through the platform. Thus, placemaking on and through Twitch is impacted by the platform policies, governance, culture in addition to the localized context. For example, there is ambiguity regarding whether streaming while driving is against Twitch’s terms of service. The terms of service prohibit “activity that may endanger your life, lead to your physical harm, or encourage others to engage in physically harmful behavior is prohibited. This includes but is not limited to . . . dangerous or distracted driving.” In response to this ambiguous policy, some streamers refrain from checking the chat while actively driving, relying on moderators to maintain and respond to viewers. However, others do not, potentially getting criticized for it. One viewer observed, Twitch’s IRL FAQ says not to broadcast while driving and to comply with all applicable laws, but I don’t see it in the TOS [terms of service]. Is there a frm policy anywhere from Twitch on whether you can broadcast and drive and read chat? I had actual anxiety from watching his stream and constantly moving his eyes to his phone. Twitch often defers to local laws in terms of what is specifcally allowed within a given stream, which difer based on the location of the streamer. Additionally, viewers themselves reinforced and referred to the broader physical contexts. In one stream, a viewer berated a streamer for “driving for about 8 hours, including reading chat while driving, which is illegal under state laws for the state he was in (not to mention he was speeding since he said what his cruise control was set on).” In addition to the platform governance of Twitch, the technological afordances of the platform also shaped the practices of placemaking available within it. Scholars have pointed out that the very infrastructure of Twitch is designed to encourage engagement between the viewers and streamers, positioning viewing on the platform as something that is interactive and connective (Dux and Kim 2018). Social afordances of the spatial streams such as the chat window, the seamless overlay of video and audio narration, and stream-specifc emojis (called emotes on Twitch) all contribute to the encouragement of engagement within the platform and lead to an experiencing of place-based content that is inherently social. On Twitch, viewers can amass channel points by watching and interacting within streams. Stream experiences are thus highly customizable and individual streamers can set up their own challenges or rewards for their viewers to redeem these channel points. These rewards allow viewers to control the elements of the stream. For example, on one stream viewers could redeem three points to get the streamers to turn around and start biking in the opposite direction. Other research has highlighted the social elements of other forms of digital placemaking (Haelegoua 2020; Evans

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Figure 2.2 Example of rewards (left) and the redeeming of emotes (right). These examples are from Twitch’s online help guide (https://help.twitch. tv/s/?language=en_US).

and Saker 2017). However, on Twitch we see not just the incorporation of social elements but rather a process of placemaking that is inherently and necessarily relational due to the explicit afordances and features of live streams (see Figure 2.2). We see that the experiences and practices of each stream depend on both platform policies as well as the socio-cultural specifcities of the physical spaces within which the streamers are being captured. This case study of Twitch illuminates placemaking to be a complex process and experiences of place to be co-constructed by multiple actors including individuals and communities and shaped by institutions and technologies. 7

Discussion

Within this chapter we examine the specifc case of spatial livestreams on Twitch in order to explore platformed placemaking. Our study highlights the importance of the platform itself in shaping digital placemaking. The Twitch platform enables a kind of representation of space, that is, how the platform itself conceives of space in its FAQ and Terms of Service, but also in its technological afordances. But placemaking also occurs through the IRL category more broadly in the ways perceived and lived spaces are visually represented and refected upon by the streamers. The livestream on Twitch layers the live video feed with the streamer’s narration, and

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audience chat function together to construct multiple kinds of platformed placemaking. The fact that the video is being streamed to an audience shifts placemaking from merely digital to platformed (Poell et al. 2021). It highlights the policies, economic structures, and afordances of the platform itself, alongside the importance of the streamers as cultural producers. As we argue, the platform, the spatial streamer, and the audience engage in layered and multiple forms of placemaking. Placemaking is both a social and an individual process. Experiences of place are shaped by discursive production as well as afective experience, both of which are individually and collectively produced and experienced. This case of spatial streamers on Twitch showcases this as individual streamers share their interactions and experiences with their local communities. This in turn is watched and commented on by individual audience members within the communal chat stream, showcasing how various individuals occupying diferent roles within spatial streams not only contribute to urban placemaking but refect and construct collective meaning as well. 8

Future directions and conclusion

Livestreaming has become a feature not just on Twitch, but across social media platforms. For example, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have recently introduced or expanded live video streaming features within their platforms. As livestreaming increases in popularity and proliferates into new dimensions of everyday life, researchers must expand empirical explorations of digital placemaking beyond just text and imagebased modalities. The liveness inherent to livestreaming also allows us to meaningfully consider not just the spatial, but also the temporal elements of place. The real time aspects of livestreaming coupled with the routinization of digital wayfaring reveals the multiple temporalities at play in spatial streaming. Future research might draw on mediated temporalities research (e.g. Keightley 2012) to further explore the interplay between spatial and temporal dimensions of livestreaming more broadly. Such research might also help us to understand platformed placemaking over time. City spaces have been flmed and broadcast for over 75 years through broadcast television, radio, home flm/videocameras, as well as security and CCTV systems (Garfnkel 2000). Each demonstrates how media can contribute to urban placemaking. But spatial streamers on Twitch represent the next version of this kind of mediated placemaking. The platformization of Twitch and such livestreams showcase the role of the platform itself in shaping placemaking. Our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of media, space, and everyday life.

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References Agnew, John A., and David N. Livingstone. 2011. The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge. London: Sage. Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. “Virtual Bodies.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, 503–506. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2010. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 17–31. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2006. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9 (3): 261–278. Dux, James, and Janghyun Kim. 2018. “Social Live-Streaming: Twitch. TV and Uses and Gratifcation Theory Social Network Analysis.” Computer Science and Information Technology 47 (1). Evans, Leighton, and Michael Saker. 2017. Location-Based Social Media: Space, Time and Identity. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Garfnkel, Simson. 2000. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Halegoua, Germaine R. 2015. “Digital Navigation Technologies and the Experience of Urban Place.” AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. Phoenix: AoIR. Halegoua, Germaine R. 2020. The Digital City. New York: NYU Press. Hamilton, William A., Oliver Garretson, and Andruid Kerne. 2014. “Streaming on Twitch: Fostering Participatory Communities of Play Within Live Mixed Media.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Toronto, Canada: ACM Publications. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hjorth, Larissa, and Sarah Pink. 2014. “New Visualities and the Digital Wayfarer: Reconceptualizing Camera Phone Photography and Locative Media.” Mobile Media and Communication 2 (1): 40–57. Keightley, Emily. 2012. Time, Media and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2005. “Code and the Transduction of Space.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (1): 162–180. Kitchin, Rob, and Sung-Yueh Perng, eds. 2016. Code and the City. New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Markham, Annette. 2012. “Fabrication as Ethical Practice: Qualitative Inquiry in Ambiguous Internet Contexts.” Information, Communication and Society 15 (3): 334–353. Markham, Annette, and Elizabeth Buchanan. 2012. “Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0).” Association of Internet Researchers: 1–19. Oldenburg, Ray. 1999. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Cofee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

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Özkul, Didem, and Lee Humphreys. 2015. “Record and Remember: Memory and Meaning-making Practices through Mobile Media.” Mobile Media and Communication 3 (3): 351–365. Poell, Thomas, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Dufy. 2021. Platforms and Cultural Production. New York: Polity Press. Schwartz, Raz, and Germaine R. Halegoua. 2015. “The Spatial Self: LocationBased Identity Performance on Social Media.” New Media and Society 17 (10): 1643–1660. Taylor, T. L. 2018. Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Vol. 13). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Urry, John. 2001. “The Sociology of Space and Place.” In The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, edited by J. Blau, 3–15. Malden, MA: Blackwell Press. Van Es, Karin. 2017. “Liveness Redux: On Media and Their Claim to be Live.” Media, Culture and Society 39 (8): 1245–1256.

3

Digital frst-order place, velocity and chronotope in globalized communication Isolda E. Carranza

1

Introduction

When we examine the spatial dimension of globally available media in general, one shared aspect stands out as most directly evident: physical distance between text-producers and text-receivers is perceived as superfuous. Compared to diferences in technological infrastructure between interlocutors, geographical obstacles and national borders seem irrelevant to the achievement of communication through digital media. Consideration of users’ experience of distance as seemingly negligible has led some researchers to argue that space becomes ‘compressed’ in interactive digital communication through social media. In fact, the ‘compression of space’ seems to be an inherent component of globalized fows of content. Cresswell (2015, Chapter 4 ‘Reading “A global sense of place”’) traces this idea in the work in the mid 1990’s by human geographer David Harvey and by cultural geographer Doreen Massey. With a diferent focus, the sociologist Anthony Giddens (2002) put forth the argument that globalization involves the compression of time and space. However, at the present state of development of technologically mediated communication, space and place in their various manifestations are still relevant and multifaceted. This chapter is concerned with various aspects of the spatial dimension, and particularly, with the constitution of place. An underlying working assumption is that the social constitution of place, including digital place, is achieved through its association with habitual, shared, relatively stable social practices throughout (a substantial period of) time. Investigating place as based on social life triggers the inescapable task of determining, frst, the nature of the social unit involved in the use of the particular type of place we are interested in. The guiding rationale in the development of the present theoretical proposal is that place is essentially related to time. From that standpoint, considering place in isolation should be a momentary analytical artifce while limiting our theoretical endeavors to place as self-contained or encapsulated renders incomplete the view of place that can thus be obtained. DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-5

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1.1 Media as place in global communication

A decade ago, researchers still discriminated between content-sharing sites and social-networking media, but as the features of sites and platforms keep changing, such distinction is no longer clear nor useful in research in the humanities oriented to advancing our knowledge of mediated social interaction. For that reason, the term social media will here be used in a broad sense. The immediate concern in this chapter is to review the spatial dimension in the use of social media with the purpose of reaching a defnition of YouTube in terms of place. The search for solid evidence in that respect will take us beyond the intuition that, basically, YouTube is a social place for displaying something to interested addressees. The empirical basis that supports the arguments to be presented is video data from YouTube. A direct antecedent of this choice can be found in longstanding work by Androutsopoulos (2013), a prolifc sociolinguist who delineates its central characteristics: “The spectacle metaphor suggests that these items are displayed to an audience; are viewed rather than read; are mainly perceived and consumed as entertainment; and prompt responses, which are usually expressed in comments” (p.  209). The YouTube data will be supplemented by information from Twitter which strengthens the velocity component of the proposal. The justifcation for choosing a visual text with a story about the scoring of a goal lies in the fact that stories (unlike other types of narratives) have a protagonist and a recognizable structure, i.e. a sequence of actions which can be interpreted causally.1 Not only is there coherence in the subjects’ actions and continuity in the movement given onto a ball, but also a narrative logic: a sequential connection which leads to a conventionally satisfactory or unsatisfactory denouement. (To put it simply, the narrative logic leads to a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ end, or an ending that could be considered to fall at some point of that continuum). A non-verbal narrative reveals better than anything else that place (i.e. within space, place in particular) and time are intrinsically linked and it is a fruitful basis to think of digital places and their time dimension (involving velocity). A more encompassing objective is to contribute to the characterization of social media in general as a place. To that efect, it is of paramount importance to keep in mind that they exist in the current historical context of global fows. Globalization is a cultural process, therefore, it cannot be studied as restricted to the efects of communication technologies. It is argued here that globalization is a crucial backdrop to any refection on the contemporary experience of place. The impact of the current wave of globalization on human communication, discourses and languages has given rise to numerous descriptions of its results and explanations of its implications for social life. An overview

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of these disciplinary advances points out that “we witness the growth of a novel, and generalized, global consciousness: people all over the world experience the speed and immediacy of global fows as signifcant factors in their ability to feel interconnected” (Jacquemet 2015: 329, the emphasis is mine). Interestingly, the remark singles out time, rather than place as the defning feature of contemporary stages of globalization. Akin to this interactional and sociolinguistic approach to discourse, a major breakthrough is to be found in the concept sociolinguistic scales which, in Blommaert’s work, is understood in terms of understandability: “we are thus looking at the degrees to which particular signs can be expected to be understandable” (Blommaert et al. 2015: 123). This instrument is fundamental for the interpretation of the case of interest because it will unveil the scalar efect of impersonating a global icon and the scalar efect created by choosing YouTube as a medium to tell the story. It will be argued that scalar efects would be diferent if a local soccer player had been impersonated instead of a global icon and if a personal blog had been used to communicate through instead of YouTube. Finally, the rest of the chapter is organized as follows: (a) Section 2 restricts the theoretical outlook to a cultural view of the research problem and advocates in favor of two proposed concepts: one is meant to capture the kind of social aggregate made up by the participants in a social media context (afnity network) and the other one is meant to classify any place as a category of place in relation to other (social) places that reproduce it (frst-order place). The latter leads to conceptualizing the digital counterpart: social media as a category of place in relation to other social media (digital frst-order place). (b) Section 3 ofers the background and the analysis of the case which serves as empirical evidence. In it, two by-products of ideas about chronotopes – chronotopic frames and sociolinguistic scales – are applied in forwarding an understanding of the examined case. (c) Section 4 defends the view that the time dimension is inextricably meshed with the spatial dimension and that it must be included in any investigation of chronotopic relations in social media. In doing so, velocity is identifed as a key feature. (d) Reafrming the importance of current globalization forces, Section 5 integrates the argumentative threads and synthesizes the conclusions. 2

Space, place and action

In line with a central tenet in human geography, the following proposition is assumed as a starting point “The things we do (practice) create a place that is always being produced and reproduced in a mobile, rather than a static, way” Cresswell (2015: 62). In previous work about ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ of place, and under the lens of interactional

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encounters and narratives, I have explored the social and discursive construction of the dichotomy ‘public space/domestic space’ (Carranza 2016). On the basis of data from a specifc barrio, the results of that study revealed that the barrio contained both the sources of danger and the safety net, with a spatial (and gender) distribution of violent retaliation in public places and refuge in domestic places. The key insight applicable here from that study is that space, and specifcally place, gets confgured in moments of interaction. In the rest of this chapter, then, the concept of place involves the use of space and the kinds of social interaction in it. Moving onto digital data, forms of narrative are again apt for an exploration of place, particularly if we detract from simplistic views that take for granted that digital narratives are fundamentally distinct from the wide variety of narratives people produce in everyday face-to-face or mediated interactions (Carranza 2020, Chapter 14). The analysis of a visual narrative in Section 3 later aims to live up to the pervasive visual nature of contemporary digital communication and to show that both the diegetic world and the narration world are adequate material to examine the role of place. With the purpose of grasping the kind of social connection between media users as well as their elusive degree of social cohesion, much research on digital communication insists on the application of the concept of community, often adding modifers such as community of practice, digital communities or light communities. To refer to the bonds an individual possesses through continuous interaction in some social media, the concept of loose social network – an element of the theory of social networks that Lesley Milroy has developed since the nineteen eighties (see Milroy 2002) – takes us closer to describing the social unit more appropriately. Nevertheless, data from YouTube is most precisely dealt with by means of a diferent conceptual tool which I would like to propose: afnity network. This term can be coined here as applicable to social media thanks to an inspiring contribution proposed for a diferent context: “people who may share little, and even difer dramatically on other issues, afliate around their common cause and the practices associated with espousing it via afnity spaces” (Gee 2005: 229). In YouTube, the sporadic interactions between content viewers and content producers and the restricted common ground they may share fall short of the characteristics of a community as traditionally defned. In addition, this kind of social network should not be confused with the ‘ambient afliation’ described for Twitter. The following observation is particularly relevant to the present argument: “Fans of everything (e.g., movies, comic books, television shows, video games, various lifestyle choices, etc.) create and sustain afnity spaces” (Gee 2005: 229, the emphasis is mine).

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2.1 Video, space, place and the cultural dimension

The kind of audio-visual material that permeates currently available digital platforms includes videos in which a single person speaks to the camera as well as videos of interviews with a pair of participants who remain seated throughout the event. However, the potential of a video platform is basically defned by the fact that it enables the reproduction of verbal and non-verbal action. Video platforms are directly amenable to be used for the representation of action through gesture and movement of the body in space, like the theatre. Even videos of monologues such as those in TEDtalks are clearly multimodal because in them images and written texts are usually projected onto screens and they normally show the speaker walking on a stage or using their arms and hands for emphasis or for pointing. The view ofered of an invited speaker’s non-verbal behavior in a space is part of what is interpreted by receivers of the video. A YouTube user can access a channel (either one time or repeatedly the same channel managed by a single source of content) in order to watch a video and very often to assess it too. More relevantly, a user can set up a YouTube channel for generating and sharing video content. Due to the increased availability of social media and types of platforms that can support video, in conceptualizing aspects of the digital world, we must give visual data in-depth consideration. As the prototypical platform for video broadcasting, YouTube provides material that can illuminate the search for the role of place in digital meaning-making involving video. Let us frst consider the scenario in which either a non-human event is unfolding or an action is performed by a subject and a co-present witness gets it on flm. As we know, merely by choosing the position of the camera – to mention just the most basic action – the camera holder can restrict the view of the event and condition its interpretation. Just as literary narrative studies have applied conceptualizations of the point of view and the focalization of storytelling as the perceptual and conceptual perspective in terms of which the narrated events are rendered (e.g. by Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal), analysis of visual discourse can apply the notion of point of view from which the narrative action is seen. The visual story under examination has an external focalization in which the point of view is that of a witness or co-present external observer. Mishal, the young ‘performer,’ is seen from a short distance. Visual closeness creates the efect of socioafective interpersonal closeness (e.g. Abril 2007: 191). The resulting visual product, potentially modifed in its degree of light or color contrast, for example, ofers a particular view of physical space, too. In other words, space is semiotized, that is, imbued with layers of meanings originating in the actual event and in the camera user’s intervention. Now let us focus on human action being deployed by some agent and being flmed during its development. Of special interest here are the meanings

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which can be drawn from the time and place of the witnessed event and from the time and place of the broadcast (‘sharing’) of the flm. Choice of place – be it physical or digital – for some action conditions the interpretation of that action because it induces the receiver to activate certain interpretive frames. At the same time, types of practices are seen as appropriate to a place. The sedimentation of practices in a certain place endows it with qualities and creates the expectation of similar practices. In other words, physical place is culturally signifed. It can, for instance, become a key component of historical memory and, for that reason, it can acquire symbolic meaning and become part of a cultural heritage. Examples of places inscribed in collective memory are: burial grounds, sites of major battles, landmarks associated with turning-point events and even imaginary places imbued with cultural signifcance. An event can be memorable for a specifc collectivity. That is the case when an outstanding achievement in a given sport is cherished by the (however fexible or difuse) collectivity of that sport’s fans, well beyond the group of fans who actually witnessed the event. 2.2 Place, chronotopic layers and global scales

We can think of the distinction between the physical location where the subjects who get caught on video are and the physical location (e.g. theater) or digital platform (e.g. social media) where the video is projected, shown or uploaded in terms of a frst-order place and a second-order place respectively. A video is a textual representation of an event that will acquire further meanings according to which venue is chosen to make it known and who constitute its target public. Since a visual text can be recontextualized onto other media, in the case to be examined, YouTube can be thought of as a digital frst-order place (in this case) and the myriad of websites and TV shows that replicate the video are digital second-order places though this order can be reversed (and very often is). Indeed, the young boy’s video analyzed in Section 3.2 later was shown on numerous news portals, on Argentine newspapers’ websites, sports TV shows and TV news programs. In other words, this narrative retelling reached out well beyond that boy’s afnity network and beyond the collectivity of soccer fans; it reached other publics. In fact, the speed of its dissemination and the variety of audiences that were its unforeseen recipients (including those in international and in small provincial venues for video sharing) are mostly, but not entirely, accounted for by the digital communication technologies available in 2020. In the next section, we will see that the story protagonist himself is a major force underlying the cultural scope and the range of recipients. The source of the idea that time and space are indivisible can be traced back to Bakhtin (1981) who fused both in a single term, chronotope, to indicate that the social world develops in history and that spaces display

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features of historical time and human life time. This conceptual instrument has been profusely applied to refer to the temporal and spatial core that enables action in the narrated universe. A productive line of research on social and verbal interaction has moved to combine the advantages of conceiving place as intrinsically connected to time, history and human activity, on the one hand, with a view, on the other hand, of scales aiming to link semiotic processes at a micro level of analysis with existing macro-social conditions (Blommaert et al. 2005; Blommaert 2007, 2010). A more precise, later formulation strengthens the proposal that chronotopes are mediated by scales as well as the importance of connecting discourse production and reception in theorizing about contemporary communicative practices: “Both concepts are useful to distinguish between two dimensions of context and contextualization: that of the availability of specifc contextual universes for invocation in discursive work (chronotope), and that of their accessibility for participants and audiences involved in discursive work (scale)” (Blommaert 2015a: 111). Instead of being content with the vague formulation “in the digital world,” the view proposed in the present work is that we are dealing with digital culture (Carranza 2019). By embracing the cultural aspects of any digital communication material under analysis, we look beyond the technological afordances and innovations, towards the huge undergoing transformations on the difusion of knowledge, ways of thinking and civilization. Further applications of ideas about chronotopic relations and chronotopic frames point in the same direction: Chronotopes “shed lights on various forms of cultural globalization in which local and global resources are blended in complex packages of indexically super-rich stuf” (Blommaert 2015b: 5, the emphasis is mine). The arguments to be developed here are illustrated with YouTube data that display complex space-time relationships and the results will throw light onto specifc features of place on various planes of analysis. The subsequent analysis shows the utility of the concept of chronotope because the data allow for the description of multiple chronotopic layers and a key factor: viewers’ recognition and ratifcation of various chronotopic frames. 3

Background, data and analysis

Scrutiny of the spatial dimension of a story proceeds by examining the following basic aspects (Carranza 2016): (1) some narrative plots may essentially consist of physical actions and movements in space, (2) through the narrative action and as a result of it, the represented place may be endowed with certain attributes in the story world, (3) places have consequences for the projection of future experiences for their occupants because certain narrative lines become potentially likely (or come to be expected), and

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(4) space is also involved in the creation of emotional and social proximity, in this case, among strangers and between the ‘performer’ and audiences. Consequently, in what follows, the spatiotemporal coordinates are traced in the story-world, in the story-telling world, and in the broader real world in search for the relevant structural aspects of society and the historical moment. 3.1 A global celebrity since the 1980s

Before delving into the data, it is necessary to keep in mind that the protagonist of the event to be narrated was a truly global fgure and had become so very early in his life. To that end, some background information is in order. In 1982, a 22-year-old Diego Maradona began to play for the Barcelona soccer team and he stood out for participating in that year’s World Cup, scoring 45 goals in two years and helping his team win three championships. In the European summer of 1984, he accepted the ofer of a modest team, the Napoli, which was just aiming to avoid the descent. In November of 1985 he scored what came to be known as ‘the impossible goal’ for Napoli; he leads the Argentine national team who won the World Cup in 1986, and in 1987 he drove the Napoli team to win the two most important championships in Europe. The famous goal was scored during the clash between Napoli and Juventus, from the city of Milan, on the 3rd of November, 1985. The game was nil to nil when, due to a foul by Juventus, the referee orders a free indirect shot. A Napoli player, Eraldo Pecci, walked up to Maradona and told him to notice that the barrier of Juventus men was too close to the spot from where the ball had to be kicked, but Maradona answered that it did not matter. He kicked the ball in such a way that it went over the barrier down into the goal. The black-and-white television of the time flmed the performance of the shot from a viewpoint above Maradona (the player who kicked it) and the group of standing Juventus players. That has since been referred to as ‘the impossible goal’ and defned the victory, one to nil. After that, Diego Maradona kept being a global sports celebrity mainly because he led the teams he played for to victory: Italy won the World Cup in 1990 and the United States, in 1994. He was distinguished with the Best Player of the Century Award in the 2012 edition of the Globe Soccer Awards. A month after his 60th birthday, he died of a heart attack in Argentina on the 25th of November of 2020. The screen shots in Figure 3.1 to Figure 3.3 map the distribution of the sad news through Twitter in a 44-minute span2: Soon after the shocking piece of news spread, a variety of tributes to his memory were performed. Regular international news networks, like the BBC and CNN, featured interviews to players who had played against

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Figure 3.1 Tweets on the passing of Diego Maradona at 13:15 on the afternoon of November 25, 2020.

Figure 3.2 Tweets on the passing of Diego Maradona at 13:28 on the afternoon of November 25, 2020.

him and showcased stories about his achievements in soccer. Internationally available specialized TV networks, like TandC sports and TNT sports, held special shows in tribute to Maradona. Guests on those shows narrated anecdotes and some of them described Maradona’s maneuvers on the feld, at times by standing up and acting out his movements.3 There were

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Figure 3.3 Tweets on the passing of Diego Maradona at 13:59 on the afternoon of November 25, 2020.

deeply felt tributes beyond the sports world, too. For example, a grafti artist in the war-torn city of Idlib, Syria, painted a large mural on a partly destroyed wall and world-famous music bands, The Rolling Stones, U2 and Oasis, turned to social media to pay tribute to the soccer legend. 3.2 The case

A 12-year-old soccer player, Mishal Abulais, in Kerala, a city in the south of India, has a YouTube channel – probably managed by an adult who props his public image – where he displays his soccer skills. A video titled Tribute was uploaded early in December 2020. Born in India in 2007, Mishal may have heard of the 1985 goal, a landmark in the history of his favorite sport, and most importantly, he can fnd the black-and-white video of that action on YouTube, the same media-sharing platform he uses to recreate it. We see, then, that YouTube allows its users autonomy to initiate a fow of exhibitions and commentaries by viewers. Some screen shots are provided in Figures 3.4 to 3.8. The backstage preparation for the story includes the young boy’s getting four things ready: (1) a sign with the word Maradona, (2) a striped, light blue and white T-shirt, which will be necessary to impersonate the hero, (3) a backpack and (4) the football which he does not pick up from the foor but raises with his feet as any pro would. At this stage, Mishal is shown frst cutting out letters in white paper, later, gluing the cuttings onto a black board to form the word Maradona, and then, using a black marker to draw

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Figure 3.4 The teammate passes the ball to the story protagonist.

Figure 3.5 Mishal acting as Maradona (seen from the back) kicks the ball, which goes over the line of children who make up a barrier for its trajectory.

a circle which stands for a face with a couple of dots for eyes and a tear drawn as a drop which comes down from one eye and turns the stylized face into a sad one. We see him walking along an unpaved path towards a small open area where there is a goal. The edited quality of the video and the musical background suggest the work of a communication manager or,

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Figure 3.6 For lack of a goalkeeper, the ball goes into the goal area through a small ring at the top, which enhances the difculty of the shot.

Figure 3.7 Mishal turns round to face the camera, pulls both forearms up and looks up to the sky imitating Maradona’s gesture after scoring ‘the impossible goal.’

at least, that someone other than the featured subject is in charge of flming, editing and uploading the video. In the same way, the representation of the story demands a carefully displayed scenario with the camera aiming at the right position to get a view of the goal, the goalkeeper, a boy acting as Napoli player Eraldo Pecci, Mishal acting as the protagonist and other children acting as the players of the rival team.

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Figure 3.8 Out of character, Mishal shows his T-shirt where there is a sad face with a mouth line going down and a tear drop fowing from the left eye.

Storytelling and joke-telling are common in videos uploaded on YouTube. Since jokes have a punch line and stories have a denouement, a likely reason for their abundance is the sense of completeness that both genres ofer. The visual narrative to be examined is a story, technically defned and distinct from other kinds of narratives (Carranza 1998), because it is about a human agent’s discrete actions in the past and it has a beginning, a complicating action and a resolution, the visual story to be considered here starts in the playground, which stands for the soccer feld.4 The character with the protagonist role in this non-verbal story is Diego Maradona, a subject who is more recognizable (more understandable in Blommaert’s (2018) terms or more presupposable in Silverstein’s (2003) terminology) than, say, Sergio ‘Kun’ Agüero (born in 1988), an Argentinian who played for the Manchester City and is considered the best striker of his generation. Therefore, Diego, the main character, operates on a higher scale than any other soccer player. Due to the scale of Maradona, the character or fgure, and the scale of the event (i.e. the extent to which it is well-known among fans), in terms of Blommaert’s theory of sociolinguistic scales, this story has a larger scope of understandability (and in a wider range of countries) than stories about other good players. Both the fgure and the event are intertextually related to a myriad of texts through time and across the globe. The locality of Mishal’s visual text on Maradona is consequential for some of its meanings attributed to it by Argentinians: the video was surprising to many of them because it originated so far away. In other words, many Argentine fans were surprised by the locally produced act of devotion for a shared hero. Incidentally, we can notice that a city in India and a city in Argentina are equally

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prone to experience some efects of contemporary globalization. Urban centers in peripheral countries too, not just in central developed countries, are involved in the global fows of communication either as producers or receivers. Cases of the consumer role reported in Carranza (2007) are the following: The English version of a new book in the Harry Potter saga was sold out to young children in Buenos Aires and hundreds young students of English in Córdoba, Argentina, were employed in locally based international call centers. Most relevant for the analyzed video’s circulation and consumption is the medium on which it is made public, YouTube. If we consider the spatial dimension of the sports event that went into the history of soccer, we notice the standardized size of the court, the physical distance between the talented player and the aimed goal, the trajectory of the ball in space, etc. The stadium, on the other hand, is a place in the culturally defned sense applied here and can be more directly associated with the team that owns it. The representation of that historical landmark has a spatial dimension, too. The extraordinary goal scored in the Italian stadium is evoked by means of the recognizable distribution of bodies in space and the recognizable physical movements and gestures by participants. As any other theater audience, the spectators of the reenactment of this historical event are required a degree of complicity with the actors. They are expected to project the participant roles performed by children onto the original adult performers, the playground onto the Italian stadium, the day of the production of this video in 2020 onto the day of the historical event in 1985, etc. Besides, many commentaries to the video get explicitly or implicitly anchored to places, but there is no room here to analyze the signifcance of the video recipients’ mentioning or evoking place. The importance of participation at the reception end has been acknowledged in various persuasions of interactional discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, including the theory of scales: “chronotopically organized social action needs to be ratifed in order to be made consequential, and this is done on the basis of ‘solid’ invokable intertexts and pretexts.” (Blommaert 2018: 4 the emphasis is mine). The notion of chronotopic layers provides insights into the social and ideological depth of the various confgurations of place and time present in the data. On the one hand, the concept of chronotope underscores the comprehensive view of the world which is in force at a given place-time confguration. It can illuminate contextual conditions concerning social relations between the hero fgure and his employers, his team and his team’s fans; biographical elements, such as the hero’s very young age and successful track record; and historical features, from sports outfts that were fashionable in the eighties to issues of soccer regulations and referees. Likewise, the view of the world at the place and time of the video representation involves the fact that the death of the hero had occurred

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only few days before and in a city far away from Kerala. It also involves the stage in Mishal’s biography as a future soccer player who exhibits his potential. Furthermore, it involves a perspective on the history of sports and the social expectations for tributes on the loss of a revered fgure. Finally, with the concept of chronotope we can tap into the understanding of the world which is manifest in the place-time coordinates of the viewers’ reactions. The commentaries (below the video in the YouTube site) express shared emotions and they praise either the deceased hero or the boy’s performance. As it was pointed out previously regarding theatrical representations (Section 2.2), here too there are relations between chronotopic layers. The allegedly faithful reproduction of the memorable event triggers further communication about the event and, inevitably, about the place and the time of its occurrence. In other words, multiple textual chains are developed which contribute to perpetuating the memory of the historically relevant event along with the memory of some elements that pertain to space and place. For the afnity network of soccer fans consuming Mishal’s YouTube video, the historical event is memorialized once again. With each dramaturgical recreation of a historical event, its memory is renewed and revitalized even if it gets subtly modifed through the repeated representations. In addition, those viewers who react to the video often mention the part of the world from where they are watching it. This confrms the view that technologically mediated communication involves multiple places. 4

Discussion

Given that it is constituted through social interaction and given the relative permanence of practices on it, YouTube can clearly be considered a place. Specifcally, YouTube is a social place for displaying semiotic products – oral and written texts, audiovisual material, music, videos without language, graphs or designs – to interested addressees and for watching (or watching and commenting) such material. With its widespread use, YouTube is continually ratifed as such kind of social place. I defend the view that social media as places and social places in general get molded by time in its various facets. Basically, time impinges upon social media as social places because it is a feature of the existence of the content posted on them. The display of any given content falls somewhere along the continuum of duration, i.e. between the ephemeral end and the long-lasting end. The content itself can be intrinsically related to an event that has just happened or is happening, as is the case with a report. Alternatively, time can be related to periods of planning and rehearsal for production and the moment of performing for the camera. Therefore, a specifc social media, for example, Twitter, is perceived and used as the place for what is most recent or most urgent ‘breaking news’ and

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its immediate responses, while another social platform, for example, YouTube, may be perceived as a place for what is devoid of those features. Time also manifests itself in brief, one-time social encounters among subjects whose paths will not cross again. That brief, single occurrence characterizes most of the verbal interactions consisting of responses and evaluative commentaries about the media-user productions. As a typical chronotopic frame of this day and age, YouTube encourages responses by means of easy-to-do clicks or written utterances. In such a way, videos and their protagonists or producers can be approved or disapproved of. Another facet of time which impinges upon social media as places is velocity. It must be remarked that velocity itself is a relative concept that gets a cultural defnition. Sufce it to think of what was considered speedy travel across the Atlantic a hundred years ago or which means of transportation were considered fast ffty years ago. Likewise, there were and there are expectations regarding the speed in which some content is shared or becomes widely known. This is, in fact, what was meant by time compression. In addition, with the generalized use of particular social media, normal expectations arise regarding actions involving kinds of content. In turn, certain actions become typical of certain social media platforms: announcements, for example, tend to be made through some media, while instructions for training apprentices tend to be given through other media. Social expectations concerning this temporal aspect must be distinguished from the constantly evolving technical afordances for each platform. It is clear that social expectations are an aspect of the social and cultural construction of a platform as a fast-paced place or a place ft for rather time-consuming text production and text consumption. In contemporary digital culture, velocity seems to undermine physical distance (and in some cases, favor social proximity). The way in which velocity and a specifc social media platform are related can be subjected to cultural analysis and is bound to keep changing in the near future. Other major manifestations of the time dimension of textual products are the set of social, political, economic and cultural conditions existing at a given moment in history. As it was mentioned in previous sections, the notion that expresses the interdependence of space and time, chronotope, has been applied to recognize the social and ideological values being evoked which are linked to a specifc historical context and its power confgurations. At present, by treating place as molded by time and conceptualizing both (place/time) as comprising various scales – historicity as well as degrees in the local-global scope – it is possible to account for the complexity of contextual conditions of production and reception. This line of thought promotes the idea that the concept of scales captures the spatiotemporal scope in which a certain textual product and the discourses it expresses are understandable. A word of caution is in order: familiarity

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with online social practices should warn us about the difculty of ascertaining with much precision the scale in force in any given case. In the examined video, we have seen that the textual product possesses a globalized character, frst of all, due to its globally relevant content, and also due to YouTube itself, i.e. the place used for its difusion and its circulation. Notwithstanding, the rudimentary staging of the target event revealed something else in line with the following remark by locationbased media specialists: “The global networks that enable these interactions shape the conditions, but they do not produce meaning. Meaning is produced locally” (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2010: 180). These authors’ statements should not be read to mean that ‘global’ is digital or virtual, nor that ‘local’ is material or real. The quote points to the fact that communication networks have acquired characteristics that derive from globalization processes and, in turn, they have spurred those processes. On the other hand, the generation of meaning must be searched for at a different level because the act of communication is shaped by local social and political forces. The authors warn those interested in globalization that “the local still matters, and in fact, it may matter more than ever because it can have an immediate and powerful global impact.” They add: “The local has become global; but the way in which the global produces the local is still very much a local matter” (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2010: 162). Here too, it must be noted that, however truly global the topic of a visual or linguistic text is and however translocal its reception may be, meaning is produced locally. However, in the last decade, the algorithms which govern social media have been developed to an extraordinary extent and will continue to become more and more sophisticated. Also, other data and data which difer from this pretty basic video may reveal other sources of meaning-making. Therefore, in the future, discourse analysts will have to look beyond mere technical afordances and investigate degrees of nonhuman agency. 5

Conclusion

The proposal laid out in this chapter is an attempt to contribute to viewing social media and specifcally of the video-sharing platform YouTube from a place perspective. As a result of the social and cultural view of place, a set of strands have been made to converge: (a) afnity network, a new concept for the kind of social unit made up by participants in YouTube interactions, either as receivers or producers; (b) digital frst-order place, the combination of the notion of social place and the idea that a visual text is frst distributed through a social media platform before it is recontextualized onto other media; (c) chronotopic frames and layers can be detected in the meaningful products which are created and received as

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part of cultural practices, corroborating that time as well as place are (still) equally relevant; (d) the available concept of scales, an instrument perfectly suited to the challenges of exploring the scope of globally ‘participatory’ social media. Briefy expressed, YouTube can act as a digital frst-order place which allows for scalar efects though it does not by itself endows all its visual products with the same global scale. The following programmatic remark anticipates the productivity of research along the lines followed in this chapter: “the globalized fows of semiotic material can be expected to create new scales and more complex forms of multiscalarity” (Blommaert et al. 2015: 123). In a dialogue with the solid, innovative theoretical sources cited, the view of social media revealed by examining the case studied here is that social media in general are essentially a stage, a place for performing, with the aim of accruing members to one’s own afnity network (as a producer) or becoming a member of an afnity network (as a receiver). Notes 1. The logical and structural characteristics of a story are described in this paragraph because ‘story’ is here is understood stricto sensu, that is to say, as a subtype of narrative, which is not equivalent to the terms coined in a British strand of discourse analysis. Narratives come in many shapes and lengths, for example, there are narratives of imaginary events, of what could have happened but did not, of habitual actions in the past, of actions that are being performed at the moment of speaking, etc. (Carranza 1998). Stories, on the other hand, are the full-fedged kind with a complicating action and a resolution, and crucially, with a narrative logic and developed characters. This view is compatible with long-standing schools of literary studies and interactional sociolinguistics. It is also the concept that will be useful later on for characterizing the protagonist and analysing the physical setting of the narrated actions. 2. Obtained from www.trendsmap.com/v/vg4u/w 3. Athletes in sports other than soccer also honored him in various ways. The rugby team All Blacks from New Zealand kept a minute of silence before a game, while many others used Twitter to praise him: former rally car racer Ari Vatanen from Finland, Formula 1 car racer Louis Hamilton, former gymnast Nadia Comăneci and tennis players Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. 4. Downloaded from Tribute to Diego Maradona || mishal abulais – YouTube. Available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzUTR3LehS4

References Abril, Gonzalo. 2007. Análisis Crítico de Textos Visuales. Mirar lo que Nos Mira. Madrid: Síntesis. Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2013. “Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web.” In The Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 203–231. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2007. “Sociolinguistic Scales.” Intercultural Pragmatics 4 (1): 1–19. Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2015a. “Chronotopes, Scales, and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 105–116. Blommaert, Jan. 2015b. “Chronotopic Identities.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Paper 144, 1–8. Blommaert, Jan. 2018. “Chronotopes, Synchronization and Formats.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. Paper 207, 1–5. Blommaert, Jan, James Collins, and Stef Slembrouck. 2005. “Spaces of multilingualism.” Language & Communication 25 (3): 197–216. Blommaert, Jan, Elina Westinen, and Sirpa Leppänen. 2015. “Further Notes on Sociolinguistic Scales.” Intercultural Pragmatics 12 (1): 119–127. Carranza, Isolda E. 1998. “Low-narrativity Narratives and Argumentation.” Narrative Inquiry 8 (2): 287–317. Carranza, Isolda E. 2007. “Globalized Trends in Local Contexts.” Lenguas Modernas 32: 7–23. Carranza, Isolda E. 2016. “Causalidad y Lugar en la Práctica Narrativa Interaccional: el Macro Relato de la Violencia en el Barrio.” Linguagem em Discurso 16 (1): 79–101. Carranza, Isolda E. 2019. “Participar en la Cultura Digital.” Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española. Portal. http://congresosdelalengua.es/. Carranza, Isolda E. 2020. Narrativas Interaccionales. Una Mirada Sociolingüística a la Actividad de Narrar en Encuentros Sociales. Córdoba: Editorial de la Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Cresswell, Tim. 2015. Place: A Short Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gee, James Paul. 2005. “Semiotic Social Spaces and Afnity Spaces: From the Age of Mythology to Today’s Schools.” In Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context, edited by David Barton and Karin Tusting, 214–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 2002. Runnaway World: How Globalization is Shaping Our Lives. London: Profle Books. Gordon, Eric, and Adriana de Souza e Silva. 2010. Net Locality. Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Jacquemet, Marco. 2015. “Language in the Age of Globalization.” In The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Nancy Bonvillain, 329– 345. New York: Routledge. Milroy, Lesley. 2002. “Social Networks.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, edited by Jack Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie SchillingEstes, 549–573. Oxford: Blackwell. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23: 193–229.

4

Space, place and TikTok Propaganda, documentation and accountability David Nichols

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TikTok and the discursive construction of place

Perth, Western Australia-based Isabel Blachford has a single issue she explores on TikTok: her obsession with Australian Rules football, specifcally the Fremantle Dockers. To this end, she has been one of hundreds of TikTokers to utilise a ‘sound’ supplied or appropriated within the app. This is a key feature of TikTok. Kaye et al. (2021: 3197) note that TikTok’s user base “thrives on the creative reuse of popular video, audio, or meme formats, and the platform promotes copying.” This can manifest in an extraordinarily diverse range of outputs from a single ‘jumping of point’, for instance in the many ways a ‘sound’ – that is, an appropriated soundtrack, a snatch of music or a line of dialogue from a flm or TV show or even another TikTok video – can lead to parodic interpretation. In 20-year-old Blachford’s case the jumping of point is a line of dialogue from the 2004 flm Mean Girls: “I spent about eighty per cent of my time talking about Regina, and the other twenty per cent of the time I was praying for someone else to bring her up, so I could talk about her more.” TikTokers lipsynch to the dialogue, but the text on the screen and the visuals supplied typically describe something they are ostensibly actually obsessed with – in Blachford’s case, the Dockers. Blachford’s is a very niche Australian contribution, and a high number of the 170 comments on her post when viewed in mid-2022 were simply reposts to other users. She appropriates from a minor global trend – a Hollywood movie known for its sharp script and fnely-tuned humour – to add to her own ‘gallery’ of football-related videos. The Fremantle Dockers are a national team in the Australian Football League, one of two West Australian teams, and Blachford’s allegiance to them is both a statement of local pride and a traditional expression of ‘fandom’ for (male) AFL teams, common in Australia to both men and women (Klugman 2012).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-6

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In their introduction to this book, the editors discuss the “production and (re)distribution of content” which “confates diferent [dynamic] modes of interaction and participation . . . contingent on . . . the social use to which these are put by users.” This chapter explores the construction of place in the TikTok app, which is a recent (fve years old, at time of writing) manifestation in a long line of media phenomena scafolded by particular tropes and ideals.1 I will examine the app’s approach to space and place from an Australian perspective and in the context of that continuity of (by some measure, ‘social’) media within the realm of moving image play, parody and whimsy. I argue that the nexus built through TikTok creations (that is, videos) and commenters’ feedback and suggestions can create new incarnations and understandings of both physical space and virtual – that is, imagined – places. Of course, in this chapter discourse is explored from a sociological macro perspective as it refers to the social practices by which individuals imbue reality with meaning. These practices, in the context of this work, involve the construction of place through the ofine-online interface. Yet this must also be set in context with a longer history of ephemeral moving-image media. Additionally, it is necessarily located on a plane largely removed from the physical world and instead typically inhabiting one of tropes, subverted tropes, and allusions. Citizens of small nations with unique language and culture often cultivate an international market for their own cultural production – either as exotic or, at least, alluring by its diference. Australians, like other citizens of minor Anglosphere nations, necessarily enjoy the advantages of being able to explore and engage with the culture of, for instance, the United States and the United Kingdom as well as other societies in which English is predominant. My Australian perspective allows for a particular marginal view on the culture and ideals of large countries, most importantly for the purposes of this chapter the United States. Australians are media savvy and attuned to mainstream Anglosphere narrative but, as a small and ‘distant’ nation fnd themselves often required to explain or discuss (even seek to override consideration of) their own place by those from other nations. Thus, Australians participating in TikTok often fnd it necessary to subvert global imaginings of the kind of society they live in – demolishing and then rebuilding a discursive representation of their own place – before providing commentary on, and constructing, another. While Australia’s TikTok presence is far less visceral than, for instance, citizen reportage has been of Ukraine atrocities in 2022, there is a similar need for Australians to establish their cultural presence before presenting comprehensible or valid commentary. A range of examples will feature in this chapter, illustrating the ways in which a place and its culture were presented on TikTok in 2022.

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David Nichols Social media and history I am like a butterfy collector who has become a sand hunter. (Shiraishi 1982)

To understand TikTok and what it does, we need to follow its historical genesis. TikTok is the internet success story of the frst few years of the third decade of the 21st century – the careful qualifcation of that statement indicates that it is at time of writing a major phenomenon, but almost certain to be overcome and outpaced by a new innovation in the near future. The contrast between virtual and physical environments has dominated much of the social discourse of this century and the Covid-19 pandemic heightened this contrast. Every published analysis has a use-by date, but in the ephemeral and fastpaced world of TikTok videos and trends, individual components of the site’s rich text are as feeting as a confguration of birds by a waterhole. Efective discussion of TikTok must include reportage and context, as neither of these will ‘last’ in the conventional sense. Similarly, it must be countenanced that the immediacy and reactive nature of TikTok means that videos will often be responses to ‘news’, or to contemporary global cultural events. Not only are these frequently neither explained nor contextualised by creators; they are also, it must be assumed, liable to misunderstanding by viewers. The result is a melange of perspectives and ideas which, algorithmic curation notwithstanding, must be regarded as – for want of a better word – unreliable. Study of most subjects from the 20th century or earlier – movements, people, nations, ideas, or other topics demanding historical research – will depend on a textual record and relics. To many it may seem exceptionally obvious that most archival material generated before the end of the late 20th century is in ‘hard copy’ or ‘analog’ form. Financial incentives are power incentives, and power must surely always play a role in what is kept and what is discarded. TikTok has its own, somewhat oblique, rationale for what is kept, and what is suppressed or minimised – a process known as ‘shadowbanning’. Those who seek to study the discourse of social media behemoths like Facebook or TikTok, then, must do so in the awareness that their source materials may have a limited lifespan, at the whims of both the provider and individual posts’ creators. These are problems which have workarounds, but there are worse issues for the researcher: in an earlier, coauthored piece on the TikTok phenomenon I waxed euphoric about an Ontarian TikToker named Sarah Fung who posted as femaledoglasagna (Mackenzie and Nichols 2020). Fung’s work was good humoured, mysterious (to me) and often, I am sure, represented a considerable amount of labour and craft. At some point since 2020 Fung has deleted all videos

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from her account, presumably seeing them as juvenilia; relics survive only in the form of others ‘duetting’ with Fung’s videos. Another deleted account, that of melbourne_transport72, is discussed subsequently. The demise of broadcast television as a mass experience and the nation – or even worldwide ‘water cooler’ experience of discussing the previous evening’s must-see shows at work, has been noted by many commentators. While it is true that streaming and apps have substantially impacted on broadcast media’s capacity to address national populations en masse, there are many other similarities between apps like TikTok and broadcast television; additionally, the latter is informed to a large degree by, and continues, narratives developed by the former, as will be seen later. 3

What’s new about TikTok?

‘Wath televithun?’ demanded Violet Elizabeth again. ‘It’s – it’s heads actin’ in a sort of hole’, said William. ‘A thort of what?’ ‘A sort of hole. They jus’ sort of make up a tale an’ – an’ act it in a sort of hole’. ‘It thounth thilly’, said Violet Elizabeth judicially. ‘That’s ‘cause you’re silly’, retorted William. ‘It sounds all right to people who’ve got a bit of sense. They pay money for it. Lots of money. Jus’ to have one of these things with heads actin’ in a sort of hole’. ‘All right’, agreed Violet Elizabeth sweetly. ‘What’ll we act?’ (Crompton 1938: 101) TikTok’s contribution to placemaking can only be understood through its precedents. British author Richmal Crompton (1890–1969) showed an admirable capacity to keep up with trends in her many William stories. William’s explanation of television does not involve discussion of technological advance or even delivery modes, much less recognition of users or producers, which is to say: he does not marvel at the broadcast of moving image over distance. William, a reactive, self-centred egotist as Crompton imagined all preteen boys to be, describes only what he sees and cares only about what it means for him. In the late 1930s, the only regular television broadcasts on the planet were within a few hundred miles of London. Where the acting ‘heads’ are, who they are or how they have become part of societal experience is of no interest to William. Indeed, what is perhaps most revealing about this eleven-year-old’s response to the phenomenon of television is not to aspire to watch it, but the immediate desire to participate in it performatively, in an extemporised play involving the conventional tropes of a kidnap story, something far removed from any of the participants’ experience. This late 1930s interpretation of television – ‘heads actin’ in a sort of hole’ – is very close to what TikTok has become in the early 2020s. TikTok makes an advantage of the fact that most users are experiencing it on a

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small screen. Much of the spoken word, and much of the miming, content is undeniably little more than heads. Yet it is hard to see this form as a negative, if only by dint of TikTok’s huge presence in 2022. Without denying the many negative aspects to TikTok – for instance, only the most glib commentator would seek to ignore the tragic deaths incurred by the ‘blackout challenge’ which, while undoubtedly a component of the TikTok world, are not suitable for discussion herein – the form is a window on the world of users’ experience and their explorations of their own environment and circumstance (Paul 2022). If there is anything specifcally new about TikTok it is the global reach of its curated For You Page. Hypothetically – although, once again, algorithmically – or human-based curation problematises the ways in which this might be experienced – any uploaded TikTok video, but particularly one which attracts a large number of views and does not tick any partisan boxes, might be seen in any user’s feed, especially when it carries a hashtag. Ji (2022: 150) writes: “TikTok intermediates between cultural diversities to link a variety of urban spaces, human actors and local commodities. This social platform allows netizens anywhere to connect to an assumed likeminded audience elsewhere with similar experience and shared memories.” By dint of population, then, larger nations predominate but smaller nations or creators from more nominally obscure places can expect that their work might be seen by a vast range of people. In this, TikTok and its coterie of associated global platforms such as Facebook and Instagram encourage interaction amongst diferent, primarily English language-oriented, customers and an opportunity for those lesser-known areas of the world to typify, exemplify and broadcast their experience of culture and place to others around the world. TikTok began by specifcally targeting teenagers and preteens (Zeng et al. 2021: 3162). Much of the unease researchers such as Petersen (2020) feel investigating – even describing – TikTok no doubt comes from the general trepidation people middle aged or older feel when investigating youth-oriented phenomena.2 This unease is not unjustifed, particularly given the tendency of much of the media created for, and occasionally by, young people is overtly exclusionary of older people (Ng and Indran 2022). That said, much of TikTok, like Facebook and other social media platforms which preceded it, has plainly come to be colonised by – which is to say, its user base has expanded to include – an older demographic. In only a few years it has moved far beyond its original lip-synching, dancing origins as a ‘lighthearted, silly and quick’ (Whitehouse 2019) node whereby, as one newspaper columnist in early 2019 put it, it was ‘a super easy way to make yourself a worldwide idiot’ (Brown 2019). It now conveys an infnite number of outlets for all ages and interests. It also, as Ng and Indran (2022: 8) point out, allows ‘interaction between members of the TikTok community’ such as the ‘duet’ feature, mentioned previously,

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which enables commentary on extant videos. The Economist (Anon 2022: 9) reports that ‘a quarter of American users say they consider TikTok to be a news source’, in itself an extremely slippery contention – what constitutes ‘news’? Does this ‘news’ come in terms of reproduced or repackaged news and current political items? Can ‘news’ include the latest exploits of TikTokers? It does however at very least demonstrate conclusively that the app has quickly travelled far beyond teenagers taking dancing challenges. TikTok’s formula has proven infectious; the previously mentioned item in The Economist noted that TikTok’s ‘larger rivals are rewriting their own apps to mimic the young upstart’. During the writing of this chapter, Instagram underwent a redesign which defaulted to the prioritisation of a video feed reminiscent of TikTok’s. TikTokers came up in my feed explaining why I should feel negative about this; whether they are responding to my algorithmically derived interests or seeded by TikTok itself as cunning propaganda, I do not know. Facebook ofers a comparable service to TikTok, at time of writing titled simply “Reels and short videos,” in a way perhaps calculated to entice the casual viewer to consider the propagation of user-generated video merely one aspect of social media, rather than a satisfying realm in itself. The use of the word reel is also peculiar, harking back as it does to an arcane world of tangible media. Ironically (or otherwise) the present author has found these new developments somewhat dazzling; whereas entering TikTok is a voluntary decision, I can fnd myself having lost some minutes scrolling through videos – primarily but not exclusively clips from TV – on Instagram, with only the barest awareness of having decided to engage with them. 4

Pinning it down: the algorithm and the ‘FYP’

remember algorithms don’t compute you are not a fraction but a prime number factor of one and itself

(On 2020)

To what degree does TikTok allow creators to inform or challenge conventional tropes? In 1973 the British children’s author Nicholas Fisk produced a slender novella entitled Grinny, in which an alien scout intending to colonise the planet Earth adopts a benign guise – an old relative – who insinuates herself into the good graces of all adults with a hypnotic gaze and the greeting, ‘you remember me’. In Fisk’s book, ‘Grinny’s’ fatal faw was failing to take children seriously; ‘her’ magic was calculated to work only on adults. The ‘Grinny’ story is arguably prescient: the alien was able to take over minds

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by appearing not only familiar but also by reinforcing extant expectations of normality. TikTok has found its place in our world not only by giving us things we want, but also by giving the impression that these things are not tailored to us, but naturally occurring in the physical world, and brought to viewer’s virtual interpretation through the TikTok app and through the app’s afordances. In 2019, as mentioned previously, I cowrote a chapter about the capacity to be subversive on TikTok with the visual artist Sorcha Mackenzie, who had made considerable impact that year with sardonic takes on TikTok challenges. She did not restrict herself to the use of available TikTok in-app tools, remixing audio and video in ways that stood out in the feed, although it was her drily sardonic approach which was most revolutionary at that time in my TikTok experience. In our chapter, written when TikTok was a new and niche platform, it was necessary to describe it in detail. We compared TikTok to the beauty or talent contests of the early 20th century: we suggested that many TikTokers were performing their party pieces, or their learned skills (Mackenzie and Nichols 2020). So much TikTok content is necessarily created in users’ homes or neighbourhoods, and urban spaces are either backdrop to, or a key element of, videos. Issues of urban design, place and use are thus often countenanced on TikTok in part because users’ comfort with the form creates the sense that her or his audience is nearby or at least empathetic and interested. Just as advertisers and indeed the app’s owner can utilise TikTok as a resource to target advertising and/or glean personal information from users, researchers can validly use the app to track the zeitgeist in particular felds of inquiry and interest (Timberg and Romm 2019). Zeng et al. (2021: 3163) write of TikTok’s For You Page as a key element of its appeal: TikTok’s proprietary recommendation system has turned its For You Page (FYP) into one of the most addictive scrolling experiences on the Internet. The FYP is the primary interface through which users interact with content on TikTok; videos are promoted to users via TikTok’s algorithmic recommenders, which are savvy at personalizing interests and engagement. The intricate logic behind this algorithm is to make the scrolling experience as addictive as possible. Bonifazi et al. (2022) further clarify the purpose of the FYP: it ‘is powered by user feedback’ and ‘designed to continuously improve, correct and learn from user engagement with TikTok’. The Economist claimed in July 2022 that the app’s ‘fearsomely advanced artifcial intelligence . . . helped TikTok sign up its frst 1bn users in half the time it took Facebook (Anon 2022: 9).’ Of course, Facebook’s defenders might argue that experience of

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Facebook was, for want of a better metaphor, a gateway drug to a conceptually related addiction. Canny users develop a dual mentality when using TikTok, tantamount perhaps to conscious pursuit of one’s ‘people’ in a new social situation. Reddit contributor ‘gardenia’ recently asked: Look, I think TikTok’s algorithm is pretty good at showing you what you want. You just got to give it a push in the beginning. But what tf just happened to my fyp. I was scrolling through some cool art, funny jokes, and nice people when suddenly that all stopped?? It’s only been showing me people that follow me or people in my contacts. The answer, according to ‘Quynn Stormcloud’, was that TikTok’s algorithm has staf at its controls charged to keep users scrolling regardless of traumatic happenings elsewhere in the world: From what I’ve seen in the past, TT sometimes pares down the variety in the face of big news or a tragedy unfolding. I remember a day when fyp for a lot of users went to boring old people dancing for the camera and 90% of all top comments were ‘what’s with fyp today?’ If I recall correctly, there was a mass shooting or something similar going on. Algorithmic selection has been a major aspect of, for instance, Facebook’s feed for much longer than TikTok has existed. However, a large part of TikTok’s success is the way in which it bolsters its users’ world views on the basis of presenting largely or ideally only work that conforms to their tastes and opinions. This is additionally problematic when one considers that research into TikTok is systematically hindered by the mediating and curational nature of the algorithm which refnes a user’s feed because of what has already been viewed. This in itself – almost by defnition – restricts objectivity and the ability to randomly sample. Perusal of the subReddit group known as TikTok sucks indicates many values are given screen time on TikTok in ways hidden to me. Apollo_Lol, for instance, remarks ‘It’s fucking staggering how hateful the community on tiktok [sic] can be. Anti LGBT content, posts hating in women constantly, everybody lies in the comments, etc etc etc.’ More worldly social media users than myself might be amused to hear that I was surprised to fnd, via Reddit, that it is possible to encounter videos featuring nudity, racism and animal cruelty on TikTok – because such things are never shown to me. Similarly, the words of ‘joshua treesssss’ on Reddit do not resonate with my experience in any sense, but for that very reason need to be reported here: ‘TikTok has some amazing creators and is a great place for inspo but it’s a vile breeding ground of toxicity, blatant excused bullying and insecurity. . . . It’s so exhausting and toxic and I’m deleting the app for good’.

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Does this compromise the ability of academic research into TikTok? It is possible, of course, to create focused, straw users and to ‘data scrape’ fndings. However, as seen later, the key information to be gleaned about TikTok’s impact is less from actual creator videos and more from user comments and feedback. The inherent bias of the algorithm should not, therefore, be seen as a pure negative; acknowledgement of bias and an ability to work with knowledge of its existence are most important. Apart from these considerations the obvious truth must be borne in mind that all research sources are mediated and limited. During the Covid-19 pandemic users ‘found themselves with more opportunities for idle digital browsing and emotion-led sharing’, as Kaitlyn Tifany (2022: 62) has noted in a tangentially connected moral panicthemed investigation in The Atlantic. The contrast between virtual and physical real-life environments has dominated much of the social discourse of the 21st century. 5

Australians on TikTok I: The example of ‘Cory and Mackenzie’

Establishing yourself as ‘Australian’ on TikTok, and broadcasting ‘Australianness’ to the world, tends to require engagement with a set of tropes not easily understood by international viewers. Social media – indeed, all global media – categorises Australia largely as the habitat of dangerous animals and some variety of ‘redneck’. For much more than a century, Australians have been familiar with entertainers from the United States, and indeed the notion that such entertainment was the most professional, accessible and undemanding available has been predominant at least since the arrival of flms with sound in the late 1920s (see Hall 1980: 33–34). Since the late 1960s, content laws have decreed that a proportion of local media be Australian-made and indeed some of the nation’s most popular programs have been popular locally arguably because they were recognisably set in Australia, using Australian actors and with nominally Australian themes (see Nichols in press). When the Melbourne-made television detective series Homicide was enjoying exceptional success in the late 1960s, its producer Hector Crawford told the Melbourne Age that ‘the reasons for Homicide’s success in Melbourne is that people can easily identify themselves with the participants and the locales’ (Radic 1968). However, it is as true now as it was then that the majority of programming on Australian screens – much like the majority of Australian music sales, theatre tickets, and other popular cultural products – is derived from international product, and a large proportion of this is from the United States.

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Social media such as TikTok has provided an opportunity for Australians to comment on this phenomenon – to take their particular vision to the sociomental landscape – as never before. Such commentary is probably best regarded as typically afectionate, but it is the eye of the beholder that is of most interest herein. For at least 50 years many Australians have revelled in the idea that the national character on the world stage should evince a larrikin attitude to perceived pretension. This was described in 1978 by the Australian academic Jonathan King as ‘the perverse phenomenon of Ockerism which worships the irreverent and larrikin attitudes of convicts hitting out at authority .  .  . the struggling attempts to create a genuinely non-derivative Australian culture’ (King 1978: 145). It is additionally and relatedly perceived by many to be a national characteristic to eschew nationalistic breast-beating and strong patriotism. Given these qualities – which are of course fuid and subjective – it stands that Australians are unlikely to make stands on behalf of their own society or culture beyond an insistence that strong opinions, ideas or innovations exhibit unwelcome extremism. There are, of course, many individual exceptions to this rule. Cossetted as they often are from a global worldview, US internet users often fnd themselves derided and pilloried by those in other countries, for their lack of knowledge of (or concern about) the world outside their nation’s boundaries, and particularly when they resort to justifcations for US culture’s predominance in the western world stage. Facebook groups such as “Sepposplaining” and “This Just In: The USA is Not the Only Country” curate a large number of justifcations from chats, posts and other online avenues which are then held up to ridicule, primarily by nonUS observers. These range from howling down US citizens who assume that all internet users are from the United States (see Figure 4.1) and will

Figure 4.1 Image reposted by Molly Botelho on the Facebook group ‘This Just In: The USA is Not the Only Country’ on 30 March 2022. Botelho captioned the image ‘They’re becoming self aware’, with a screaming face emoji. Botelho’s own Facebook profle suggests she is British. www. facebook.com/groups/199100867309475

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readily understand US tropes such as ‘the Midwest’ or ‘Southerners’; cite pizza as a national food, or who embrace a simplistic interpretation of their ethnic heritage – such as many Irish-Americans might do – in which their desire to commemorate a point of diference only reveals their ignorance and insularity. One example shows efectively how ‘America’ is processed and understood by Australians on TikTok. Nick White, self-styled ‘silly gay comedian’ based in Sydney and Tilly Oddy-Black, about whom less is known, developed a series of apparently improvised TikTok skits under the title ‘How American TV sounded as an Australian kid’. Initially, White and Oddy-Black used the names Cody and Mackenzie to refer to characters of-stage, but within a few instalments these became the names of characters they played. A transcript of the frst of these videos adequately demonstrates the humour, conveyed in sing-song ‘American’ voices, derived from wild-eyed delivery of close to 30 references to US institutions and products that were simultaneously unfamiliar – as they are often not a part of Australian, or even non-US, daily life – but very commonly referenced on mainstream US television broadcast around the world: Nick: My aunt had to go all the way to Capital City to pay for her alimony for her subpoena for her sabbatical. Tilly: Did you hear that Mackenzie funked in her algebra pop quiz and if she doesn’t get a B average then Mr Schuester’s going to send her to summer school. Nick: I had to spend spring break in Calabasas with my aunt, she didn’t even have basic cable. Tilly: I just popped down to the bodega and they said to go to the diner for some late night toaster strudel and a cup of joe on 2 per cent. Nick: Did you guys see that new freshman at middle school, Cody? I frst saw him in the cafeteria when I was getting a sloppy joe. Then I later saw him right by the teachers’ faculty lounge. And then I saw him again right by the bleachers. Tilly: Oh crud I totally blanked! I’m not going to be able to make softball practice. I have cheer right before junior-senior prom. Academic authors Matamoros-Fernández, Rodriguez and Wikstrom – staf, incidentally, at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology, but writing from a globalist perspective – have discussed in detail TikTok and its users’ complicity in the creation or perpetuation of racial stereotyping practices. Citing Stoever’s ‘sonic color line’, which codes both vocal and musical timbre, they note that ‘harmful parodies’ seen on TikTok have allowed white users to mimic non-white people and appropriate elements of their culture. White and Oddy-Black are not parodying non-white

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Americans per se and in fact the objects of their parody are almost certainly ‘whitebread’ television characters, with intonation, expression and cultural reference points overwhelmingly describing lives of privilege rather than minimisation, much less oppression (Figure 4.2). It might be posited that, while it is largely impossible to establish the racial breakdown of their viewership, White and Oddy-Black are exposing US viewers to a degree of ridicule that white audiences tend not to expect from other white people. In this it is implied – or read as implied by many viewers – that Americans per se are wealthy, infantile and absurd. The nature of TikTok dictates it is impossible to know precisely – or at all – when the initial video of the series was uploaded, but at time of writing (July 2022) the app recorded that 186,600 people had viewed it. It was clearly seen as a success: the duo followed it with additional parts up to ‘Part 10’, as well as extras such as ‘Cody and Mackenzie do lunch’, ‘Cody and Mackenzie out and about’; explanatory videos in which they pick lines from their previous videos and discuss the words they would

Figure 4.2 Nick White and Tilly Oddy-Black, who have risen to prominence as ‘Cody and Mackenzie’ on TikTok in 2022. Image supplied © Nick White and Tilly Oddy-Black.

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instead use in everyday Australian life; there is also a ‘blooper reel’. White and Oddy-Black, presumably children in the early 2000s and exposed to the early years of Australian pay television which allowed for certain channels heavily dependent on American content, have found an expedient seam of humour to mine. They have added their own surreal elements to the dialogue including rifs and repetition on words they clearly fnd funny for their own sake, such as ‘crustacean’ and ‘alimony’. ‘Cody and Mackenzie do lunch’ features, for instance, Oddy-Black asking whether her ‘brisket balony on cornmeal rye’ contains alimony; in the frst of a few ‘Aussie translation’ videos, White claims not to know the meaning of the word ‘alimony’. In this case the appeal is multifaceted. While there is no way of knowing how many of these videos’ viewers are from Australia, the United States or any other part of the world – some self-identify for instance as British, though this is unprovable – there are enough comments of a particular type to glean a broad sense of the reception the videos have gleaned globally. Many viewers judge White and Oddy-Black not for their content or dialogue but for the ‘accuracy’ of their accents, notwithstanding – or failing to understand – that the imitation is of a specifc ‘television’ style of speech. It is frequently suggested amongst commenters that White and Oddy-Black sound Canadian or that Oddy-Black in particular sounds as though she is from the ‘Midwest’, commentary which itself has provoked pushback from non-US users who claimed not to understand this term. Many of the comments are complementary, and indeed commenters identifying as American register particularly positive responses to the duo. Others, such as Mike504444, are arguably ofended: ‘wish I had a reference to mock Australian TV but unfortunately they have no presence in media’. ellen_degenerate_69, whose nationality is not stated, says ‘I used to think people on TV sounded like people on TV and real people like real people. Then I went to America and realised the tv people were [American fag]. ‘God, is this what listening to English is like if you can’t speak English?’, says dellarius. Taking the third of these videos at random confrms that it is the comments made, rather than the videos themselves, which are most revelatory of TikTok ‘attitudes’. On 6 July 2022 the video – in which Oddy-Black plays a suburban mother, ‘Mrs. S’; a nervous teenage girl; ‘honors student of Varsity High’, and a hall monitor, while White responds to ‘Mrs. S.’ as a teenage boy and then plays a college student at frst high-achieving and then queasy – had attracted 438 comments. Many of them are unclear in intent, but the overwhelming majority – assuming that transcription of certain snatches of dialogue, or rifng on same, constitutes favour – are positive, and indeed, more than a third are indisputably positive. None are negative, with the possible exception of the commenters who insisted that the conversations held in the video were unremarkable; such as eggyjo, who commented ‘I wish I could understand which words yall don’t know [crying with laughter emoji] this all makes perfect sense to me’ or _lotsa_ like who is unclear about what is lacking in Australian culture: ‘srsly I

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don’t know if they don’t know “calculus” for example lol’. Others, such as chookitymooncake, whose national identity is not clear, remarks that as a child ‘and just simply learning to read I’d be like??? Am I stupid or does this not make any sense. I’d be like what the hell is xeroxing, and barrettes?’ White and Oddy-Black’s example shows, Australians hoping to enter a dialogue about elements of the assumptions and/or media of more ‘powerful’ cultures such as the United States need to skilfully balance and project a range of viewpoints. They must explain the place from which their parody is launched as Australian consumers/viewers, whereas creators from the United States can begin from a normative position. This situation is even more complicated for non-white Australians, and indigenous Australians, discussed in greater detail later, are compelled in many instances to push back on the assumption that in claiming blackness, or blakness, they are appropriating, or assuming, roles and tropes exclusively the property of African Americans. The example of the Corey and Mackenzie videos show, nonetheless, an attempt by Australians to grapple with popular culture from the United States and hold it up for examination – and ridicule – to the wider world, including Americans. While these videos are not ‘serious satire’, they compel viewers to reckon with the cultural colonisation inherent in US media exports. Australian viewers also, as is plain from the comments, consider what it is that makes Australian culture unique amongst the Anglospheric subset. 6

Australians on TikTok II: stigma and suburbs

The TikTok algorithm also allows creators to broadcast – for want of a better word – to her or his community. ‘Punching down’ is a concept well-known in comedy circles as a ‘cheap’ and easy way to curry favour with an audience. It entails holding people of low status up for ridicule. Some comedians, or commentators, seek to exempt themselves from accusations that they are ‘punching down’ by identifying with the same group/s they parody; this is usually tenuous, as anyone in the public eye with a ‘voice’ is typically seen to be in a position of greater power than most. In short, the locations of the subject, and the commentator, in relation to each other must necessarily be established to fully consider who is ‘punching down’, but at the same time, these positions are contestable and fuid. A video by @patrickbatemanhq – the username apparently referencing the protagonist from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – titled ‘Only in Kew’ depicts a shirtless man in an intersection of the Melbourne suburb of Kew confronting police. ‘You fucking dogs’, he yells, “shoot me, shoot me, go on, fuckin’ shoot me’ at which a voice – presumably that of the

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person flming – says ‘have a look at him. Look at this bloke mate. Look at this bloke.” Curiously, the captioning for the video translates ‘shoot me’ as ‘save me’ – commenter ‘tooshiatoosh’ suggests this indicates ‘TikTok saw into his soul’. The video ends with the man sitting on the low stone wall surrounding a park named for, and containing a statue commemorating, the Swedish humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg. Five days after it was posted the video had 1.3 million views and almost 58,000 likes; two weeks later another million had viewed the video. The creator commented that ‘there’s pt2 if you want it’, presumably the main reason this TikTok account gleaned 1,943 followers in less than a week having uploaded only one video. A second video, ‘Pt 2 they got the bloke’, appeared some weeks later, showing subsequent events. The man is now lying prone on the footpath close to where he had been sitting, having been sprayed with what commenters have concluded is pepper or capsicum spray, his hands tied behind his back. He is continuing to shout, but his cries are now inchoate. Many of the comments object to the lack of footage of the actual ‘takedown’: ‘Umm where is part 1.5’, says hclavell; ‘Camera man didn’t understand the assignment’, says hardcorehunter25. Others noted a key diference between the United States, with its strong gun culture, and Australia: ‘Take note USA’, writes yeahandandwhat, ‘“Violent” man taken down with pepper spray, and the Police didn’t fear for their lives and not [sic] put 80 holes in him’. The frst question that might occur to some readers is how these videos, of one person’s private trauma, has been allowed to remain on the app. TikTok has notoriously shadowbanned many videos automatically, and there is clearly greater control over content than is ofcially conceded by its owner, DaeYun. But within those parameters, it is also dedicated to chasing ‘likes’. Reddit contributor ‘Rainbow DashNet’ says: [F]rom my experience it is useless to report any content on TikTok, if it got a certain amount of likes. How much likes does this user get on average? Their auto-moderator is broken as shit. Report literal murder, but it has 100k likes: ‘After reviewing the reported content, we were unable to fnd a violation of our Terms of Service’. Many commenters on patrickbatemanhq’s video noted that the video exploited one person’s mental issues for the sake of TikTok impact. But more commonly, commenters were intrigued by the title of the video: aaroncarey79: behindtheeshades:

Wym only in kew? That would be the last place I’d expect something like this to happen. Literally the most opposite thing that ever happens in kew lol

Space, place and TikTok vincenzo92_: goodtimes_noodlesalad: aulin_002: aussiedougmcg:

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Dude ran out of bonsoy this morning How did HE get into Kew??? More like Frankston He must be from Frankston and got lost

While it is likely most readers of this chapter – even if they live in Melbourne, Australia – have little frsthand knowledge of Kew or Frankston, it is surely clear from these quotes where these two suburbs are located in socio-cultural terms. As is the case with most urban areas, the social or economic realm of each has been subject to variables in their centuryand-a-half long existences. Kew, a middle-class suburb, sufered the stigma of association with Melbourne’s major mental asylum for over a century, and also of an adjoining facility that ofered residential care to adults with longstanding handicaps. There is no suggestion in the post or in any of its comments of awareness of this legacy. Frankston, which in the early 21st century is a ‘go-to’ reference point for a locale redolent with disadvantage and drug use, enjoyed a reputation in the mid-20th century equal to many other beachside suburbs; it is also, notoriously, the backdrop to a number of iconic scenes in the 1959 flm On the Beach. 42 km from central Melbourne, Frankston is not a location likely to be frst-hand familiar to many Melbournians, but its reputation precedes – in fact, obscures – it. The fact that @victransport, when asked by a commenter to ‘Do Frankston’ in a series of posts that apply static images of Melbourne railway stations and places to audio of railway announcements, instead supplied an image of a buckled commuter train following a rail accident at Syndal, an entirely diferent location, speaks volumes (Kelly and Carrick 1989). The implication is, of course, that Frankston itself is a disaster or perhaps a ‘train wreck’. In this and similar ways, TikTokers frame and critique Frankston (and other Melbourne suburbs) in a more allusive, yet similarly textured, way as Christian Ilbury’s young East Enders do in his recent report on two ethnographic studies (Ilbury 2021). A search on the hashtag #frankston turns up a range of videos that exploit the popular conception of Frankston as a down-at-heel, putatively ‘bogan’ suburb (Nichols 2011). Most popular is stand-up comedian Lewis Spears’ ‘Guide to Frankston’, with close to 70,000 likes; Spears created a live comedy show, Straight Outta Frankston, in 2022. The video is short, seemingly shot on site in central Frankston and features four one-liners of the variety of: ‘here’s our vaccination centre, fun little fact, there’s actually more needles on the street here, than there are in that building’, Spears himself flls most of the frame with little background. Another, far simpler video from clairelomulder represents two women greeting each other; one says she is from Frankston and the other vomits. It appears that clairelomulder herself lives in Frankston – that is to say, while she’s playing

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both characters, she ‘is’ the one who declares herself to be from Frankston. Uploaded in November 2020, the video had attracted almost 30 000 views and 1015 comments by the end of July 2022; many were simply declarations of where each commenter lived in the broad region of Frankston, but others such as moomoohya’s were more thoughtful: ‘Yall I was born in Melbourne and lived here my whole life but I don’t understand the Frankston slander. I’m seeing it all over my fyp, why do we hate it?’ The answer to this can only be that there is a Frankston state of mind, which looms much larger in the mind of Melbournians than the real place could ever be. The use of the popular US slang term ‘Yall’ in a statement by someone claiming to have lived in Melbourne their entire life is another rabbit hole entirely, and this linguistic turn no doubt needs further analysis. 7

Australians on TikTok III: Exploring Melbourne by rail on TikTok The future is rumour and drivel; Only the past is assured. From the observation car I stand looking back and watching the landscape shrivel, Wondering where we are going and just where the hell we are (Hope 1955)

‘My top ten favourite stations’ was a two-minute TikTok video assembled from still pictures and short video snippets by a young creator known only as ‘melbourne_transport72’. The Melbourne-based user listed his preferred metropolitan railway stations with minor subjective detail on each, beginning with his local station in the middle-ring northern suburb of Watsonia, ‘everything on this station is good from the seating to the customer service’, through to the central station, Flinders Street Station, ‘it’s just the best station ever’. Undoubtedly this TikTok account resonated for me not merely as an urban historian and educator based in Melbourne, but also as someone who in the late 1970s, as an adolescent probably of melbourne_transport72’s age, travelled all the railway lines of Melbourne with a friend and rated each railway station we passed through out of ten. Our criteria were nominally aesthetic but we had no rubric, only our instantaneous, visceral responses, which we recorded in a nondescript exercise book, discarded many years ago. Had ‘melbourne_transport72’ been inspired to create his list in, say, 1982 or even 2002 – though he was almost certainly not born even at that later date – it might have been seen by a handful of family and friends at the most. Instead, in late April he had close to 12,000 followers and 20 times as many Tiktok users had ‘liked’ one or more of his 25 videos. In late April 2022 the video described previously had 2,457 comments, in reply to one of which the creator explains that his list was not ‘an assignment’ but ‘a dare’. Sometime between April and June, the account was deleted.

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Figure 4.3 Regan Kerr. Image supplied © R. Kerr.

‘Big Reg’ is a self-described ‘boomer on tik toke [sic], suburban Melbourne adventurer’; his real name is Regan Kerr (Figure 4.3). Kerr began uploading a regular series he called ‘Travelling [or ‘Going’] to a new suburb of Melbourne’ to his account ‘@itsbigreg’ in June 2022. While Kerr calls himself a ‘boomer’ he is clearly in his 20s. Another video, of a timelapse from his apartment, makes it plain that he lives in Eureka Tower, one of the city’s largest buildings. His minor mispronunciations of Melbourne names and landmarks – he emphasises the second syllable on ‘Footscray’, for instance, pronounces the frst syllable in the ‘Albans’ of ‘St Albans’ to rhyme with ‘pal’ rather than ‘pall’ – are explained by his Wollongong origins. Kerr’s frst video takes him to the inner-city suburb of Footscray, and it contains a subscript: ‘Got a bit of time on my hands atm so decided to go visit some suburbs that I’ve never been to cos I’m a city boy, where should I go next? I fear no train station’. This is followed by a range of hashtags, including ‘#melbournefood’, ‘#tourist’, ‘#phooooo’, ‘#stafy’ ‘#australia’ and ‘#aussiethings’. The majority of the videos are trips to places with bad local reputations, usually based in perceptions that they are ethnic ghettoes, violent or poor; these associations are often made with suburbs known for a

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higher-than-average proportion of public housing. This last measure is problematic, however, as public housing has historically been distributed widely around Melbourne and much of it hides in plain sight. Kerr’s video on the western suburb of St Albans shows a ‘nice new train station’; his experience of buying, then eating, a banh mi at a Vietnamese bakery then examining ‘protected native grasslands’. ‘I noticed a lot of the original housing is being knocked down into townhouses and duplexes so it’s a little bit soulless feeling’. He visits a local bike shop, ‘Saint Side’ and undertook a ‘spur of the moment’ visit to a local cake shop. He concludes by addressing the commenter on an earlier video, chino_leia77, who recommended the visit: ‘St Albans mate I don’t know if you said that as a joke, but that place is super underrated’. Soon afterwards Kerr visited Broadmeadows, a Melbourne suburb with a similarly poor reputation (see Figures 4.4 to 4.7). Commenters take Kerr seriously when he asks where they hope he will visit next, presumably because he shows he is open to suggestion: ‘Need to scrape the bottom of the barrel’, says ‘davenavarro6155’, who names two outer suburbs: ‘Melton or Epping.’ ‘miss.emmy’ and ‘manny.kay’ are

Figures 4.4 Image (1) from four of Regan Kerr’s ‘new suburb of Melbourne’ TikTok videos: Williamstown, Broadmeadows, Laverton and Clifton Hill. Images supplied © R. Kerr.

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Figures 4.5 Image (2) from four of Regan Kerr’s ‘new suburb of Melbourne’ TikTok videos: Williamstown, Broadmeadows, Laverton and Clifton Hill. Images supplied © R. Kerr.

both advocates for Frankston. For the frst, ‘Frankston gets a bad rep but it’s actually got a few nice cafes and a good beach’. The second implores: ‘Can you please do frankston so people can see what its actually like now, the foreshore, olivers hill and sweetwater creek are beautiful, drinks and food’. He/she then replies to him/herself with ‘there’s the hop shop, the deck, cheeky squires, theres [sic] a new arts centre too. honestly over the outdated reputation it has’. It seems likely that these commenters are actually residents of, or at least very familiar with, Frankston. Other comments on the St Albans video take a slightly diferent tone: jacobdahdah implores ‘come to altona next xx’, xostephydee ‘Come to Werribee!’ and helentsangar ‘Come to highett’. In short, after three videos in a few weeks, Kerr’s videos had attained sufcient bellwether status that particular viewers were moved to hope he would subject their suburb to the same kind of two-minute review as Footscray, Box Hill and St Albans. As per Homicide, mentioned earlier, Melbournians today might still be a little entranced by their own habitat framed by a screen. In the case of ‘itsbigreg’s’ videos, a TikToker has made himself a celebrity – of a sort – almost overnight amongst people many of whom, it has to be assumed, are at least as capable of making similar videos themselves.

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Figures 4.6 Image (3) from four of Regan Kerr’s ‘new suburb of Melbourne’ TikTok videos: Williamstown, Broadmeadows, Laverton and Clifton Hill. Images supplied © R. Kerr.

Figures 4.7 Image (4) from four of Regan Kerr’s ‘new suburb of Melbourne’ TikTok videos: Williamstown, Broadmeadows, Laverton and Clifton Hill. Images supplied © R. Kerr.

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Also notable amongst Kerr’s videos are the viewing numbers for specifc places. As of late July 2022, his videos enjoyed radically varied viewing numbers. Comparison between these, as well as contrasts with suburb ‘ratings’, is educative, even if the ratings themselves are almost completely out of sync across ratings sites (see Table 4.1). Column 2 of Table 4.1 shows the number of views of ‘itsbigreg’s’ TikTok videos exploring diferent suburbs of Melbourne, as of late July 2022. Column 3 shows the current, and most recent prior, ratings of each of these suburbs in Domain.com, a popular and authoritative real estate website which considers factors such as educational institutions, open space and crime rates. Column 4 shows the ranking of these places amongst ‘Melbourne suburbs’ on the website Homely.com, which aggregates residents’ own ratings of their environment. The Homely rankings are notably different from those of Domain, and included here primarily because Kerr refers to them in the caption to his St Albans video: ‘Ranked in the mid 300s for suburbs in Melbourne according to Homely, I thought St Albans was actually real nice’. It should be noted however that, contrary to most interpretations of the word ‘suburb’, Homely.com interprets every postcode – including country towns – in Australia as designating a ‘suburb’. In viewing the community self-assessments of Homely.com, Australians’ capacity for sarcastic form-flling should also not be underestimated. Table 4.1 Suburbs visited by ‘itsbigreg’ as of 30 July 2022. The Clifton Hill journey was posted inside 24 hours of the completion of this chapter, which partially accounts for the low numbers, though it is to be assumed that Clifton Hill sits in the same middle-class, inner-city suburb category as Williamstown or Parkville. Source: Amelia Barnes, ‘Melbourne’s 307 suburbs ranked for livability’, Domain.com www.domain. com.au/liveable-melbourne/melbournes-most-liveable-suburbs-2019/ melbournes-307-suburbs-ranked-for-liveability-2019–898676/; www. homely.com.au/fnd-places Suburb

No of views (k)

Domain.com rating

Homely.com rating

Sunshine Williamstown Dandenong Glen Waverley Balaclava Oakleigh Broadmeadows Parkville St Albans Box Hill Footscray Clifton Hill

64.9 24 296.2 58.5 35.9 79.0 188.4 36.6 67.1 41.7 66.6 12.4*

114 (from 97) 64 (from 36) 143 (from 232) 113 (from 130) 36 (from 12) 96 (from 144) 191 (from 188) 29 (from 9) 250 (from 253) 61 (from 41) 6 (from 74) 12 (from 11)

319 200 209 179 61 162 304 289 327 335 298 157

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Plainly, and even given the cache accorded Kerr’s imprimatur on particular Melbourne suburbs by his followers, the comparatively well-to-do and picturesque suburbs of Parkville, Williamstown and Balaclava have attracted a smattering of interest, compared with Broadmeadows and Dandenong. 8

What does TikTok tell us about place experience (and TikTok)?

How many city skylines Could have drawn tears from my eyes, I who know only the one city And by touch, in my sleep, I could fnd it . . .

(Akhmatova 1944)

This chapter has only touched on some pertinent elements regarding the quandaries of TikTok and its relationship to space. Social media has undeniably remade the social landscape; the internet crosses boundaries in a way that requires users to address their own cultural expectations and understandings before entering the space. TikTok – ironically, a Chinese creation – has provided a platform of kaleidoscopic fascination. Here, by appropriation, transgression and displays of talents both great, meagre and merely quirky, content contributors can engage in extensive ongoing discussion about the world within and without the platform’s settings. Sauda et al. (2022) survey a range of ways in which social media has changed expectations and use of the city. The authors’ examples include social media’s ability to alert users to new opportunities and newly created spaces for enterprise and experience within a given city – for instance, the location of food trucks. Social media events in the moment (for instance, livestreaming of dramatic and/or dangerous events) heighten psychological and experiential feeling about place and community (Sauda et al. 2022: 164). Examples given in this chapter are, arguably, more benign but still give important clues to a sense of national culture and local place. TikTokers, Australian and otherwise, can enjoy the world as seen through an Australian lens, as the Corey and Mackenzie videos readily demonstrate. At the same time creators and their followers – Kerr as ‘bigreg’ one of the rare exceptions – readily embrace old cliches and stereotypes, demonising particular areas and groups in the comments and also many videos, with surprising ease. Comments to the ‘only in Kew’ videos demonstrate the speed and ease with which users fall into old tropes, though whether its title is a subversion of normative readings of place stigma is in the eye of the beholder.

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TikTok’s algorithm, the sheer extent of the endless feed, the capacity it ofers to delve into an array of places and cultural landscapes, and the limited capacity to retrieve, save or return to specifc videos is not just a problem for the would-be archivist or researcher. It already serves as an invisible hand on community understandings of nations, neighbourhoods, regions and specifc places. It also has strong potential to be subject to interference by vested interests. Engagement with TikTok through appropriation of older tropes and modes by creators with their feet frmly in places that are not ‘mainstream’ geographically – as much as Australia, for instance, is undoubtedly a part of the afuent global north – casts a particular perspective on this melange of stories, references and performances. More research is needed on creators with particular specialised backgrounds and approaches to gain a better understanding of not only the way TikTok informs about place and identity, but also the ways in which its users shape and mediate responses to mainstream culture through their own local lens and their own discursive practices. In the early 2020s, the adage regarding standing in the same river twice is pertinent: what was true of the tiny fragment of TikTok in mid-2022 is undoubtedly no longer true, yet in the larger picture perhaps the same arguments continue to be prosecuted amongst creators, users and commenters eternally. Acknowledgements The author is grateful for assistance from Laura Carroll, Paul Fleckney and Sorcha Mackenzie. Notes 1. TikTok as a brand dates back to 2017, though of course this comes with a large range of conceptual and institutional precedents amongst social media, and of course a longer historical tail (see Hern 2019). The frst mainstream newspaper reports I have been able to locate regarding the app date from December of 2018 (for instance, Ohlheiser 2018). Soon afterwards, academic studies in a host of disciplines followed. Zeng, Abidin and Schäfer report that ‘TikTok studies began to appear in academic journals in 2019, with 13 articles published that year. In 2020, 66 papers were published, and 43 in the frst quarter of 2021 alone’ (Zeng et al. 2021). Some studies concentrated on the app as a form in itself, others used it as a social science data source. 2. Petersen, incidentally, is 41; the present writer is 57.

References Akhmatova, Anna. 1944 (2009). “Northern Elegies.” In Akhmatova, Selected Poems, 77. London: Vintage. Anon. 2022. “Who’s Afraid of TikTok?” The Economist, 9–15 July: 9.

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Bonifazi, Gianluca, Silvia Cecchini, Enrico Corradini, Lorenzo Giuliani, Domenico Ursino, and Luca Virgili. 2022. “Extracting Time Patterns from the Lifespans of TikTok Challenges to Characterize Non-Dangerous and Dangerous Ones.” Social Network Analysis and Mining 12 (1): 1–22. Brown, Shane. 2019. “Are They a Generation of Slackers or Media Moguls?” Moline, Illinois Dispatch, 20 May: A7. Crompton, Richmal. 1938. William – The Dictator. London: George Newnes. Hall, Ken G. 1980. Australian Film: The Inside Story. Dee Why West: Summitt Books. Hern, Alex. 2019. “Revealed: How TikTok Censors Videos that Do not Please Beijing.” The Guardian, 25 September. www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/ sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing. Hope, A. D. 1955. “Observation Car.” In Hope, The Wandering Islands, 13–14. Sydney: Edwards and Shaw. Ilbury, Christian. 2021. “A Tale of Two Cities: The Discursive Construction of ‘Place’ in Gentrifying East London.” Language in Society 51: 511–534. Ji, Pan. 2022. “Building Rural Memories into Mediated Cities: How Rustic Elements Boost Popularity of City Images on Tiktok.” In Art and the Global City Public Space, Transformative Media, and the Politics of Urban Rhetoric, edited by James T. Andrews and Margaret R. LaWare, 149–169. New York: Peter Lang. Kaye, D. Bondy Valdovinos, Aleesha Rodriguez, Katrin Langton, and Patrik Wikström. 2021. “You Made This? I Made This: Practices of Authorship and (Mis) Attribution on TikTok.” International Journal of Communication 15: 3195–3215 Kelly, Michael, and Hugo Carrick. 1989. “Safety Inquiry Call After Crash.” Melbourne Age, 21 November: 1. King, Jonathan. 1978. Waltzing Materialism. Sydney: Harper and Row. Klugman, Matthew. 2012. “Gendered Pleasures, Power, Limits, and Suspicions: Exploring the Subjectivities of Female Supporters of Australian Rules Football.” Journal of Sport History 39 (3): 415–429. Mackenzie, Sorcha Avalon, and David Nichols. 2020. “Finding ‘Places to Be Bad’ in Social Media: The Case of TikTok.” In Urban Australia and Post-Punk, edited by David Nichols and Sophie Perillo, 285–298. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Ng, Reuben, and Nicole Indran. 2022. “Hostility Toward Baby Boomers on TikTok.” The Gerontologist, February. Nichols, David. 2011. The Bogan Delusion. Mulgrave: Afrm Press. Nichols, David. in press. “‘Gumnut-Flavoured’ British Comedies and the Representation of Race, Sexuality and Suburb in Love Thy Neighbour in Australia.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Ohlheiser, Abby. 2018. “TikTok: Cultural Gathering Place.” Hartford Courant, 2 December: D3 On, Thuy. 2020. “Online Dating for Dummies.” In On, Turbulence, 76. Crawley: UWA Publishing. Paul, Kari. 2022. “Families sue TikTok after Girls Died While Trying ‘Blackout Challenge’.” The Guardian, 6 July. www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/ jul/05/tiktok-girls-dead-blackout-challenge. Petersen, Anne Helen, 2020. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. New York: Houghton Mifin Harcourt. Radic, Leonard. 1968. “Viewers (at Long Last) Make the Big Switch.” Melbourne Age, 7 February: 4.

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Sauda, Eric, Ginette Wessel, and Alireza Karduni. 2022. Social Media and the Contemporary City. New York: Routledge. Shiraishi, Kazuko. 1982. “The Genealogy of the Sand Clan” (trans. Kinoshita Tetsuo and Christian Flood). New Poetry 29 (1and2): 15. Tifany, Kaitlyn. 2022. “The Children Are in Danger!” The Atlantic, January/February: 62. Timberg, Craig, and Tony Romm. 2019. “Lip-Sync App Fined Over Privacy.” Los Angeles Times, 28 February: C2. Whitehouse, Beth. 2019. “What Parents Need to Know about the Hugely Popular TikTok App.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 27 April: F1. Zeng, Jing, Crystal Abidin, and Mike S. Schäfer. 2021. “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps: Introduction.” International Journal of Communication 15: 3161–3172.

Part II

Micro approaches

5

The lived experience of place in a Twitter afnity space around the death of sports celebrity Maradona1 Patricia Bou-Franch

1

Introduction

The present chapter investigates perceptions and entextualisations of space and place in online interactions. The role of place in communication has come under scrutiny over the last decades although discourse studies of its meaning and function in online communication, especially in Spanish, are in short supply. The present chapter seeks to contribute to this feld by examining the multifunctionality of references to space/place in a Twitter debate containing reactions to the news of the death of a controversial public fgure. In addressing place in digital discourse, the study also examines the social practices twitterers engage in and the identities they enact therein. Social practices and identities reveal how participants perceive and use the digital space of twitter. This study draws from the Maradona corpus of tweets containing the terms #Maradona/Maradona (Bou-Franch and Palomino-Manjón 2021) and the Maradona/Place subcorpus of tweets which also contain place deictics and place names. A corpus-based discursive pragmatic approach was adopted in the analysis. This approach combines quantitative methods from corpus linguistics (Baker 2010) and qualitative research methods. The latter involved a discursive pragmatic perspective that pays attention to the three levels of sociological inquiry, namely, macro/meso/micro levels of analysis (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifanou 2019), and a thematic analysis of the data (Braun and Clarke 2006). The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 provides insight into the interconnections between place/space and discourse in everyday online communication and argues for the view of Twitter interactions as creating afnity spaces (Gee 2005). By engaging in social practices and enacting particular identities and ideologies, users reveal how they perceive the digital site while frequently invoking physical places which are integrated into their discourses. Thus, said social practices and evaluations around

DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-8

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physical place on tweets become the object of our investigation. Next, the methodology designed to carry out this investigation of place on Twitter is explained in detail (Section 3). This is followed by the analysis and discussion of the main fndings in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. The chapter comes to an end with a concluding section, where the research questions posed previously are addressed and concluding remarks made. 2

Place, discourse, and everyday digital interaction

The last two decades have witnessed a surge in interest in the relationship between language use and place/space in sociolinguistics and discourse studies in general (e.g., Blommaert 2013; Jones 2010; Scollon and Scollon 2003, among others). In the present study, we concur with Georgakopoulou (2015: 65) in opting for the notion of place to refer to any kind of space – including that of digital platforms – “as an experienced, lived, and practised social arena by social actors” which comes with specifc afordances, constraints, and norms. The interest in place mentioned previously is not new, for dialectology and sociolinguistics have always been concerned with the infuence of geographical location on language variation. What is more recent is the view of place vis-à-vis discourse in constructivist, constitutive, and dynamic terms (Georgakopoulou 2015; Heyd and Honkanen 2015). In this sense, Jaworski and Thurlow (2010) understand place as a social construction linked to personal experience and emotions while Blommaert (2013: 15) argues for a social understanding of space in which “specifc and ordered identities, actions and meanings can be generated2” (see also Jones 2017). For his part, Gee (2005) develops a useful framework for the study of what he calls semiotic social space (p. 216), which puts space at the centre of interaction and aims to replace the notion of community of practice. In his own words, the focus is on the “space in which people interact, rather than on membership in a community” (p. 214). In this framework, space design and the social practices and identities of the people who interact therein infuence and shape each other. Another related strand of research has explored the intersection of communication, technology, and place, and examined the efects that location-aware technologies, locative media, or locative apps have on social interaction (e.g., de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010; Licoppe 2013; Yus 2021, 2022). Location-aware technologies provide information on place and allow for nearby people to connect with each other. It is argued that this challenges perceptions of the public and private division, gives rise to the creation of hybrid spaces, and questions the traditional view that users of mobile communication are disconnected from local spaces (de Souza and Silva 2013; Yus 2022).

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Despite the evidence that online users can be both networked and connected to specifc localities, the key role that semiotic entextualisations of place play in digital communication remains under-researched, especially within the feld of Spanish pragmatics; indeed, for Heyd and Honkanen (2015: 15) considering the social meanings imbued in the digital discourse of place can be understood as an emergent phenomenon in need of further attention. The slowness with which digital language scholars have turned their attention to the discursive phenomenon of place has been attributed to the features of the frst wave of internet-mediated communication studies (Androutsopoulos 2006; Bou-Franch 2021a) which saw communication as mainly anonymous and disembodied (de Souza and Silva 2013; Heyd and Honkanen 2015; Xie et al. 2021). During the second wave of research, with its emphasis on diversity and the performance and negotiation of identities alongside the advent and popularity of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, attention began to shift towards the social meanings of place. It is relevant to highlight that social media platforms have contributed to dropping anonymity in favour of “a culture of real names” which has tied identities to physical and geographical locations (Heyd and Honkanen 2015: 16). Some notable exceptions to the previously mentioned slow interest in discursive studies of place and space online are, among others, the early works of Licoppe (2013) and Aguirre and Davies (2015), and the special issue edited by Georgakopoulou in 2015, on the communication of time and place on digital media. The studies in this special issue have advanced our knowledge of the social meanings and discursive representations of place in diferent ways across various digital platforms. Of special interest to the present work are the studies of Heyd and Honkanen (2015) and Giaxoglou (2015), which focus on the role of place reference terms as linguistic means for users to position themselves and for stance-taking. Giaxoglou (2015) explored the use of place and time deictics in sharing practices on Facebook memorial walls and found how framing through deixis contributes to the digital performance of users as mourners and to communicating their stances towards the event, the memorialised and the networked audience (see also Giaxoglou 2021). For their part, Heyd and Honkanen (2015) used corpus linguistics and qualitative methods to show how deixis and afective toponyms make place relevant and are used as positioning resources in an online forum on the African diaspora. Importantly for this study, their research demonstrates that digital communication is currently far from dislocated and taking place in an abstract virtual space; instead, they argue, place is important and made relevant by users in their digital interactions. The present chapter seeks to contribute to this feld of research by examining the lived experience of place on Twitter from a discursive pragmatic perspective. The study’s objective is to explore the inventory

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of place-related semiotic resources such as deixis and place names and to focus on their functionality, that is, the social practices users engage in and the identities they construct that shape the digital space of Twitter. Thus, my aim is to also investigate how users refer to physical place and how they perceive and use Twitter. This platform enables the creation of afnity spaces, i.e., instances of a semiotic social space (Gee 2005) in which individuals gather around a shared interest through ambient afliation (Zappavigna 2011, 2012). The analysis is based on a case study of the death of a controversial public fgure – namely, Diego Armando Maradona, an Argentinian football player who excelled in sports but was accused of sexual abuse and drug addiction in his lifetime. Furthermore, he passed away during the pandemic, and on the UN’s Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls. For this reason, place references were expected to be found in expressions of condolences and praise of the footballer as well as in accusations and protests for his sexual behaviour. The online discourse of death and bereavement has only recently come under scrutiny as an increasing number of internet spaces are being used or specifcally generated for memorialising the deceased (e.g., Giaxoglou 2015, 2021; McGlashan 2021). The discourse of protest and resistance, for its part, has been addressed within studies of social media activism (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Bou-Franch 2022; Palomino-Manjón 2022). Exploring the lived experience of place was expected to shed light on the multimodal resources for making meaning in tweets containing place terms, on the social practices and identities that shaped (and were shaped by) the afnity space of the twitter debate under analysis, and the associated discourses and ideologies. The following research questions guided the study: RQ1. What linguistic resources are used to refer to place in the data? RQ2. How do twitterers use the digital space of Twitter vis-à-vis place markers in their reaction to the news of the death of a controversial sports celebrity? RQ2.1. What themes become the object of discussion in the tweets containing place references? RQ2.2. What social practices do users engage in in such tweets and through which specifc social actions? 3

Methodology

The study draws from the Maradona reference corpus (Bou-Franch and Palomino-Manjón 2021), which was compiled to investigate general Twitter’s reactions to the death of Maradona. Bou-Franch and Palomino-Manjón

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(2021) specifcally focused on how users evaluated the football player and were especially concerned with feminist activism and the role that the accusations of sexual abuse played in such evaluations. The Maradona reference corpus consists of 7,425 tweets (N = 186,581 words) containing the terms #Maradona/Maradona, which were published between November 25 and 26 of 2020, in reaction to the news of his death. The term Maradona was far more frequently used in the corpus than #Maradona. Hashtags are characteristic of Twitter and serve important organisational and interpersonal functions in performing identities, orienting to social relationships and building communities (Zappavigna 2017), and, in the case of this corpus, the term without hashtag also proved to serve both these functions as users socially bonded around (the name of) the footballer, mentioned with or without hashtag, thus displaying their interest in this sports celebrity as a topic of discussion; participants in the corpus, therefore, generated an afnity space where they shared ambient afliation (Zappavigna 2011). The corpus was compiled using the Google Sheets’s add-on Twitter Archiver (Agarwal n.d.), which also allowed non-Spanish tweets and retweets to be fltered out. Using the software R, the corpus was cleaned by removing usernames, manual retweets (i.e., tweets which include the retweet acronym “RT”), and links that could afect the frequency analysis. The resulting clean corpus consists of 110,054 words. In addition, and even though the tweets were posted in a public space that can be searched freely, without previously registering on the site, they were anonymized by removing @ mentions and any remaining username, in compliance with the ethical recommendations of good practice in digital research issued by the Association of Internet Researchers (Markham and Buchanan 2012; Page et al. 2014). In the subsequent discussion, (extracts from) the tweets are reproduced as found, without corrections or modifcations. The present study adopted a corpus-based discursive pragmatics approach to examine the data. This approach is a variation of what is known as corpus-assisted discourse studies or CADS (Partington 2004; Partington et al. 2013), which refers to studies which combine the use of quantitative and qualitative methods to examine language and discourse types and make use of “computerised corpora” (Partington et al. 2013: 10). The quantitative stage of the present study involved the use of traditional corpus linguistics tools like Frequency and Concordances (Baker 2010) while the qualitative reading drew from discursive pragmatics (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifanou 2019; Zienkowski et al. 2011), which “needs to account for the three tiers of sociological enquiry (macro/meso/ micro levels of analysis)” (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifanou 2019: 92). Therefore, this study focused on the macro level of communication (social

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structures, power, ideologies) and the micro level of discourse patterns and strategies containing semiotic devices for place reference, and it also paid attention to the meso level, i.e., the afnity space shaped by specifc social practices and identities (Gee 2005), in which the interaction around a specifc interest shared by twitterers unfolded. The analytical procedure comprised two stages. The frst stage of the analysis was quantitative and involved the elaboration of a Frequency List of the 150 most frequent content words in the Maradona corpus of reference. The Word List was generated using the Frequency tool from the corpus software AntConc 3.5.9 (Lawrence 2020), with a stop list that fltered out function words. However, bearing in mind the aim of this study, function words of deictic reference to place such as acá and aquí (“here”) and ahí, allá, and allí (“there”) were removed from the stop list. All the words concerning spatial deixis and place reference in the Frequency List were computed and classifed (RQ1) and then subjected to further concordance analysis. The second stage consisted in the creation and qualitative analysis of a specifc subcorpus for the present study that would include tweets from the Maradona corpus containing linguistic devices of place reference. Therefore, 10 random concordance lines per place-referring term from the Frequency List were selected for the Maradona/Place subcorpus (Baker 2010; Hunston 2002). Importantly, in compiling the subcorpus, instead of compiling just extracts from each line yielded by the Concordance tool, the whole tweet was recovered for each concordance line. The resulting Maradona/Place subcorpus consisted of 200 tweets containing references to place, which were qualitatively scrutinised (RQ2). The qualitative analysis was carried out using NVivo 1.6.1 and involved two steps. First, a thematic analysis of the tweets was carried out in order to identify the main themes in the data that would reveal the lived experience of place. A thematic analysis is a well-established qualitative method that lets “categories and themes ‘emerge’ . . . from the data through researcher interpretation, rather than being strictly determined in advance” (Paulus and Wise 2019: 162; Braun and Clarke 2006). Importantly, the term “emerge” (within inverted commas in the original) does not mean that the analyst was passive during the scrutiny. On the contrary, the themes were actively identifed and organized by the author of this study in ways that would be meaningful to the research questions (RQ2.1). The second step of the analysis involved the identifcation of the social practices and identities of users through an analysis of the specifc social actions (Searle 1975) performed by twitterers in the Maradona/ Place subcorpus and the discursive resources employed in their realisation (RQ2.2).

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4.1 Linguistic resources for place reference

In order to identify the most frequent linguistic resources for place reference in the reference corpus, a Frequency List of 150 items was developed. Only 20 items referred to place. Of these, two were deictic resources (Levinson 1983; Maldonado 2021) – proximal acá (here) and distal ahí (there) – and the remaining 18 were place-referring terms (Enfeld and San Roque 2017). Deictic devices frequently referred to Argentina, to the conversational topic, to Twitter as a social interactional space, and to a specifc tweet. For their part, the 18 place-referring terms were nouns and adjectives which were classifed into the following groups: 1) Toponyms: Argentina, argentino, argentinos, (Argentina/ Argentinian(s)), Italia (Italy), Nápoles (Naples). 2) Common places: Casa (house), Pueblo (town), país (country), mundo (world). 3) Mourning-related place names: Cementerio (cemetery), cielo (heaven), funeral (funeral), velatorio, velorio (memorial3). 4) Football-related place names: Cancha (feld), estadio (stadium). 5) Government-related place names: Casa Rosada.4 6) Digital place: Redes (social networks). The results of the Frequency List began to suggest which would be the themes of interest of the Twitter debate around the death of Maradona. The Maradona/Place subcorpus of 10 tweets of each of these linguistic resources for place reference was then further scrutinized. 4.2 Functionality of place reference: themes and actions

The qualitative analysis of the 200 tweets containing linguistic resources for place reference aimed to investigate the functionality of place terms in the data by identifying the main themes, the social practices and identities of twitterers through the social actions they performed, and the discursive resources used therein. The analysis was expected to provide insights into users’ lived experience of place, i.e., the socioemotional meanings attached to place, in their reactions to the news of Maradona’s death. Four main themes were identifed in the analysis (see Table 5.1). The most frequently recurrent themes included expressing grief and admiration for the football player, followed by the discussion of his public memorial and burial. Another recurrent theme contained negative evaluations of the deceased football player, his supporters, and his critics. The fnal theme that emerged in the analysis

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commented on the socio-political situation of the country. It should be noted that while some tweets focused on one theme, others invoked several themes. When a tweet discussed several themes, all of them were identifed and computed (Braun and Clarke 2006). Also, themes are not discrete, clear-cut categories, which means there were some inevitable overlaps. Independent frequency lists for each (sub)theme were created using NVivo and the place terms from the 10 most frequent words in each list/ (sub) theme were extracted (Table 5.1, right column). These place terms will be discussed for each theme later. However, it is worth noting that Argentina was the most common place term, featuring in nearly every thematic category, which underlined the national scope of the event. In addition, three place terms related to vigil sites and the cemetery only occurred in theme #2, which discussed the vigil and funeral of the deceased. The four themes were discussed in the data through the performance of a number of (in)direct social actions which were identifed, classifed and computed. The results are provided in Table 5.2. The themes and the social actions performed in the data will be later discussed and illustrated together. Table 5.1 Frequency of occurrence of themes in the data and place terms found in the ten most frequent words from Wordlists of each thematic category THEMES

# Occurrences

Place terms

1. Grief and praise

92

2. Public memorial and burial 3. Negative evaluations

82

Argentina, mundo, pueblo, Nápoles, cancha, Casa Rosada, velorio, cementerio, velatorio Argentina, país, redes, cancha, ahí • País, ahí, acá, Argentina, cielo • Argentina, Italia, casa, redes • Argentina, cancha, mundo

• of the player • of player’s critics • of player’s mourners/ supporters 4. Socio-political situation

52 • 21 • 17 • 14 32

Casa Rosada, país, Argentina, pueblo

Table 5.2 Frequency of occurrence of social actions in the corpus Social actions

# of occurrences

Assertives Expressives • Positive emotion • Negative emotion Directives Commissives

179 144 • 75 • 69 44 3

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Assertive actions were the most frequent social actions in the data and often included giving opinions, denunciations, and sharing (small) stories (Georgakopoulou 2007). Reporting was also common but was half as frequent as the frst three assertive actions, while disagreeing was the least frequent action. Expressives were the second most frequent social action. The number of expressions of positive and negative emotion was quite similar. Among positive emotions were the expression of praise and, far less frequently, gratitude and good wishes. Among negative emotions, expressions of anger and grief were the most frequent. Less frequent expressive actions included mocking contempt and fear. Directives were far less common social actions in the data and commissives were the least frequent of all. In the following section, the tweets will be discussed and illustrated arranged by themes although reference to the most frequent place terms, and the social actions therein will also be addressed. 5

The lived experience of place in a Twitter afnity space

This section looks at how place deixis and place names were used to engage in the diferent themes in interaction and perform specifc social actions in the Twitter afnity space triggered by the death of the sports celebrity. 5.1 Expressing grief and praise

The expression of grief and praise for the football player was the most common theme in the corpus. Over half of the tweets invoking this theme showed extreme formulations (Pomerantz 1986) of grief and admiration for Maradona using terms like “legend,” “my hero,” or D10S/“GOD.” D10S conveys an additional tribute to the athlete as the vowels “IO” have been replaced by the visually similar number 10, which was the number of Maradona’s football shirt in diferent teams throughout his career. The most frequent place terms in extreme grieving and praising were Argentinian(s), world, village, and feld, which underline a sense of belonging to the nation, the impact the decedent had the world over, and, more specifcally, his relevance in football where his skills excelled. (1)

Por siempre y para siempre Diego Armando Maradona. Seras eterno y Argentino. El mejor de todos los tiempos Forever and ever Diego Armando Maradona. You will be eternal and Argentinian. The best of all times

Example 1 employs expressive and assertive actions to (in)directly claim that the athlete will exist and be remembered forever. Then, the decedent is directly addressed by the user to underline his eternal bond to Argentina; the tweet ends with a positive evaluation of Maradona in the form of an

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extreme claim of his uniqueness in football. It must be noted that the use of adverbial expressions of time (forever and ever) and the discursive strategy of directly addressing the decedent are linguistic resources for afective positioning (Giaxoglou 2015, 2021), typically found in the discourse of bereavement and mourning (Giaxoglou 2021; McGlashan 2021). These resources, tied to the national toponym, contribute to the construction of the social identity of Argentinian mourners of the passing away of Maradona and the identity of Maradona as a symbol of the country. In the next example, extreme praise is realised through repeated epithets of positive evaluation, repeated emojis, extreme formulations of time like “forever” and “eternity and beyond” and the also superlative term “exquisite.” (2)

Hermoso hermoso . . . vuela alto . . . hazte estrella . . . toca el cielo con la mano D10S!!! Hasta siempre DIEGO ARMANDO MARADONA . . . Astro del fútbol mundial . . . generador del fútbol más exquisito . . . te amaremos hasta el infnito y más allá tu pueblo, tu gente . . . 💙💙💙⚽🇦🇷👏👏👏👏 Beautiful beautiful . . . fy high . . . become a star . . . touch heaven with the hand of GOD!!! See you forever DIEGO ARMANDO MARADONA .  .  . World football star .  .  . generator of the most exquisite football . . . we will love you to eternity and beyond your village, your people . . . 💙💙💙⚽🇦🇷👏👏👏👏

The post begins with directive actions that see death and parting in terms of a journey to heaven, thus resorting to the “Death is a Journey” metaphor, identifed as a common resource in Spanish epitaphs (CrespoFernández 2013). The player is not only instructed to fy high and become a star but also to touch heaven with “the hand of D10S.” The tribute implied in using number 10 in the Spanish word for God was already explained; mention of “the hand of God” is a further tribute to Maradona as he scored a famous goal with his hand – which the referees failed to see and punish – in a match of the Football World Cup of 1986 that Argentina would later win. The directive to become a star also draws from the metaphor of “Death is Change,” common in euphemisms that address death but avoid its direct mention (Crespo-Fernández 2013). The post continues with farewells and assertive actions in the form of extreme formulations (Pomerantz 1986) of admiration, and it comes to an end with a commissive that promises love in spatial and temporal terms, i.e., “to eternity and beyond.” This is enhanced multimodally, through the use of three hearts of the colour of the Argentinian fag and football shirt. Coloured hearts have been shown to work as discursive contextualization cues guiding interpretation and to signal emotional group identifcation and stance-taking (Cantamutto and Vela Delfa 2020). The hearts are followed by emojis

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and acronyms that bring together football, Argentina, and strong approval in the form of clapping hands emojis. The expression of praise and eternal remembrance has been identifed before in the literature on the discourse of bereavement, both online and ofine (Crespo-Fernández 2013; Giaxoglou 2015; McGlashan 2021). However, to my knowledge, the use of emojis and acronyms (other than RIP/DEP) in the communication of grief has not received attention in online memorials. The place terms “heaven,” “world,” “beyond,” and “AR” contribute to the intensifcation of this emotionally loaded post and the construction of the twitterer as an unquestionable supporter of the deceased. Feelings of loss and grief alongside feelings of eternal remembering were communicated using other devices like hashtags characteristic of digital communication and, more specifcally, of Twitter (Bou-Franch 2021b; Mancera Rueda and Pano Alamán 2013). In the subsequent example (3), the pragmatic function of intensifcation (Albelda Marco 2007; Briz 2017) is used to heighten the efect of praise and grief through a number of mechanisms such as repeated farewells that manipulate the orthography of the word ADIOS/“Good bye” to include Maradona’s iconic number 10; an exaggerated commissive action promising that the decedent will always be in the heart of the people and the use of multiple hashtags that employ a series of terms commonly used to refer to the player in the world of football. In this post, the heart is metonymically used as the place for loving emotions where the deceased will remain (see Crespo-Fernández 2013). (3)

¡AD10S Diego! Siempre en el corazón del pueblo #AD10S #Diego #pelusa #barriletecósmico #elpibedeoro #Maradona #Diez10 GOOD BYE Diego! Always in the heart of the people #GOODBYE #Diego #pelusa #cosmicbarrel #goldenboy #Maradona #Diez10

In their praise, users also shared personal stories that reminisced their specifc life experiences related to Maradona, as illustrated subsequently. (4)

EL MUNDO DEL FÚTBOL HA PERDIDO A UN GRANDE ! Tuvimos la suerte de ver en nuestro estadio a DIEGO MARADONA, jugando un amistoso, tenía 17 años y ese día la volvió como un limón ! A Quique Moreno, arquero del BMANGA5 lo puso a buscar el balón como a una gallina comiendo maíz ! THE WORLD OF FOOTBALL HAS LOST A GREAT ONE ! We were lucky enough to see DIEGO MARADONA in our stadium, playing a friendly match, he was 17 years old and that day he returned it like a lemon ! He got Quique Moreno, keeper of BMANGA seeking the ball like a chicken eating corn !

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The tweet in (4) opens with an assertive action that brings in the metaphor of Death as Loss already identifed in the literature on death and bereavement (Crespo-Fernández 2013; McGlashan 2021). The expression of loss includes a positive evaluation of the decedent as a “great one” in a specifc location: the world of football. This statement of grief and praise, anchored through the placename to the space of a specifc activity, is followed by a personal anecdote, told in the plural of the frst-person pronoun, which begins with an expression of good fortune at having seen Maradona playing football in “our stadium.” The plural frst person pronoun and the possessive before the placename underscore the sense of alignment with a group of football fans that mourn the death of the footballer and underline the emotional attachment to a place that they consider their own, namely, the stadium. The expression of emotional bonding with a personally signifcant place is a case of place attachment (Scannell and Giford 2010: 1, in Yus 2021). The shared, small story (Georgakopoulou 2007; Page 2012) unfolds with details of the game that underline the player’s excellence. The bonding with Maradona vis-à-vis the emotional attachment to the football feld was also frequent in the tweets commenting on the farewell to the player in Naples, as the Italian city considered naming the stadium after Maradona. 5.2 Public memorial and burial – the Covid Pandemic

The discussion about the player’s public memorial and subsequent burial was another important theme in the Maradona/Place corpus. Tweets often discussed the Casa Rosada as the place chosen for the memorial, the size of the attending crowd, and the incidents that took place therein. The most frequent place terms in this theme were Casa Rosada, “cemetery,” and the two Spanish terms for “memorial” (velorio and velatorio). The organisation of a public memorial in the Government House during the covid pandemic, when thousands of attendees were expected, was seen as nefasto (disastrous) súper injusto (extremely unfair), a token of irresponsabilidad (irresponsibility), and an action that showed a total falta de respeto (complete lack of respect). In sum, many twitterers expressed moral indignation (Moulinou 2014) at the fact that a crowd was allowed to gather to pay their fnal tribute to Maradona in the Casa Rosada. (5)

Nefasto la CANTIDAD de gente que fue al velorio de Maradona, pensar que miles de personas murieron y su familia no pudo ir al funeral. En el medio de una pandemia se juntan MILES DE PERSONAS, lamentable el presidente que tenemos y la política de este país 🙄🙄 Disastrous the AMOUNT of people who went to Maradona’s wake, to think that thousands of people died and their families could not

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go to their funeral. In the middle of a pandemic, THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE getting together, unfortunate the president we have and the politics of this country 🙄🙄 As can be seen, angry users related the “disastrous” situation at the vigil to the country’s President and politics (example 5). The previous expression of disbelief and disapproval is enhanced with the use of two rolling eyes emojis. The negative evaluations of the public memorial and the governmental decisions, therefore, suggest that users lived these locations and the actions that took place there, in socio-emotional terms, as breaching social norms, Covidrelated regulations, and moral expectations of fairness and equal treatment (Bou-Franch 2022; Haidt 2012). This is in line with research that underlines that some deaths receive great media attention which communicates the idea that some lives are more deserving of grief than others (Giaxoglou 2021). However, there were exceptions to the frequent view in the previous section. This is the case of example (6), in which a user narrates their experience of entering the Casa Rosada for the frst time to pay tribute. In sharing the story, this user describes their feelings by referring to “shaky legs” when seeing the World Cup and Maradona’s cofn, and thus shares the emotion felt at the time. The example ends with a textual expression of gratitude and a visual metaphor expressing love. For this user, the Casa Rosada seems to be the right place to pay the last tribute to the deceased sports celebrity. (6)

Hoy entré por primera vez en mi vida a la Casa Rosada y lo primero que vi fue la Copa del mundo al lado del cajón. Me temblaban las piernas. Muchas gracias Diego Armando Maradona por todo ❤ Today I went into the Casa Rosada for the frst time in my life and the frst thing I saw was the world Cup by the cofn. My legs were shaking. Thank you very much for everything Diego Armando Maradona ❤

Sometimes, tweets containing the same place terms served two very different functions: protesting the government decision in example (5) and sharing the personal tribute to the player in example (6). The former can be understood within the online discourses of public denunciations and grassroots resistance and activism (Bou-Franch 2022) while the latter brings into play the discourse of bereavement, through expressions of gratitude and love. A number of tweets informed of the unrest and rioting during the funeral. (7)

El funeral de Diego Maradona concluyó, al menos en su etapa pública, con varios detenidos y heridos por la policía, que disparó balas de goma. 🇦🇷⚰ #Maradona #Disturbios #Velorio #Argentina #Suspensión #Funeral

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Patricia Bou-Franch Diego Maradona’s funeral concluded, at least in its public stage, with several arrested and wounded by the police, who fred rubber bullets. 🇦🇷⚰ Maradona #Riots #Memorial #Argentina #Suspension #Funeral

Example (7) contains a newspaper report of how the funeral ended with some people arrested and others injured by the police, who fred rubber bullets. Interestingly, despite being a newspaper report, the tweet contains the acronym AR for Argentina, the cofn emoji, and a series of six hashtags that retell the story of the funeral. This contrasts with the following tweet that reports on the deceased’s burial in the cemetery. (8)

🔴 Minuto a minuto | [Video] Con una bandera argentina y con su círculo más íntimo, Maradona es enterrado en el cementerio de Bella Vista. Los últimos asistentes al funeral se despiden de Diego, ante un fuerte resguardo policial. 🔴 Minute by minute | [Video] With an Argentinian fag and with his inner circle, Maradona is buried in Bella Vista cemetery. The last attendees to the funeral say goodbye to Diego, under a strong police guard.

Unlike example (7), the report in example (8) is formal and characteristic of print media discourse, with the use of formal lexis and a more complex syntactic structure i.e., opening with manner complements and use of passive verbs. No acronyms, hashtags, or emojis are found in the tweet, except for a red circle prefacing the tweet that functions as an attention-grabbing device and is commonly found in online newspaper reporting. In this theme, invoking place further served the function of identifying the diferent stages of the narrative of the farewell to the deceased, along with the afective positioning (Giaxoglou 2015, 2021) and stances towards the places and the mourning events that took place ofine. 5.3 Negative evaluations

Negative evaluations make for the next theme in the debate. The most frequent target of criticism was the deceased himself, although both his critics and his supporters also went down for criticism for supporting or failing to support him. The deceased was negatively evaluated for his addictions, for being a sexual abuser, and for sleeping with minors. Negative evaluations were realised by public denunciations, accusations, and expressions of disagreement among users. Importantly, speaking ill of the deceased

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involves breaching a traditional social norm entrenched in many societies. The most common terms referring to place were “Argentina,” “country,” “social networks,” “feld,” and “there.” The following example expresses shame and accuses Maradona of going to their country to dance while high, at a time when many fellow countrymen were dying for their country. This user employs direct address in expressing disagreement with another twitterer and accuses them of feeling grief for a drug addict. The writer of (10) evaluates both Maradona and his fan(s) negatively. (9)

Vergüenza dio maradona q vino a MI PAÍS a bailar reventado de droga, mientras en el asfalto quedaban las vidas de nuestro futuro luchando por un país mejor. A ti te duele tu paisano q se mato a punta de droga. A mi me duelen los míos cuyas vidas fueron arrebatadas I felt shame when Maradona came to MY COUNTRY to dance while high, when on the road lay the lives of our future fghting for a better country. You feel grief for your country fellow man who killed himself with drugs. I feel grief for mine whose lives were taken

Place references anchor the story in the ofine world (Georgakopoulou 2015). In the previous tweet, the place term MY COUNTRY plays key emotional and organizational roles. Emotion is expressed through use of the possessive and the capital letters, while the content of the tweet relates to the problems facing the country, which are seen as far more important than the death of a controversial public fgure. The following example responds to several users – three @ mentions have been deleted – who praised Maradona and expressed grief for his death: (10) @name @name @name Mis errores no involucran las adicciones, ni la violacion, ni el acostarme con menores de edad. Pero sigues dándome la razón de que no quieres que tu hijo sea como Maradona fuera de la cancha. Nada más acepta que era una mierda de persona y un fenómeno con el balón @name @name @name My mistakes do not involve addictions, rape, or sleeping with minors. But you still agree with me that you wouldn’t like your son to be like Maradona outside the feld. Simply accept that he was a shitty person and a genius with the football The user in example (10) accuses the player of several crimes and reinstates the position of other twitterers that do not wish their children to be

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like Maradona outside the football feld. This user makes a clear distinction between Maradona as a person and as a player and directs supporters to accept the reality of the two views of Maradona. Interestingly, it is place, i.e., the football feld, that sets the limits for the positive or negative evaluation of the decedent and, therefore, for his attributed identity. This view is so widely accepted that those who focus on Maradona’s private life are accused of being flled with hatred: (11) Así es. En la cancha! Por eso lloran en Argentina, por eso declaran 3 días de duelo. . . . Por lo que #Maradona hizo en la cancha. Hay gente llena de odio que se enfoca en su vida privada y olvidan todo lo que le dio al futbol. #HastaSiempreDiego That’s it. In the feld! That’s why they cry in Argentina, that’s why 3 days of mourning have been declared.  .  .  . For what #Maradona did in the feld. Some people flled with hatred focus on his private life and forget all that he gave to the sport of football. #ForEverDiego In view of these tweets, we can see how place functions to position users as Maradona’s supporters and mourners and to attribute critics – or those who do not forget Maradona’s private life and focus instead on his actions outside the feld – the identity of haters. The football feld is discussed as the right and only location for celebrating the player’s excellence. Critics of Maradona, especially those that denounced his sexual abuse, were attacked in diferent ways. (12) Gracias a su militancia de redes con la foto de Maradona, se acabó la violencia machista 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Mientras tanto tu hermano sigue sin pasarle guita a sus hijos. Thanks to your activism on social media with the picture of Maradona, violence against women is over 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Meanwhile your brother still doesn’t pay his money to his children. The user in example (12) belittles social media activists that denounce the decedent for his sexual abuse by sarcastically claiming that their eforts have been successful while they have at home other forms of gender abuse. Users further referred to redes/“social media” to comment that people can speak their minds on social media but this should be done respectfully. It is interesting to note that the sense of national pride in discussing Maradona vi-à-vis Argentina, pervasive in the frst thematic category,

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clashes with the view of Maradona as Argentina’s failure found acá/“here,” on Twitter: (13) Falta que lo saluden de la estación espacial, pero acá tenés gente que dice que Maradona es símbolo de nuestro fracaso como país. Missing that he is greeted from the space station, but here you have people that say that Maradona represents our failure as a nation. Example (13) opens with a sarcastic remark that makes fun of the excessive praise the player is receiving and continues sharing information about twitter users that view both Maradona and Argentina negatively. It is interesting to note how the construction of the identity of Maradona alongside that of the nation varies among users. Also interesting was the use of the deictic acá/“here” to refer to the social network and, more specifcally, to the afnity space created therein around the decedent; a digital space which is viewed as containing divergent opinions. 5.4 Socio-political situation

The fnal theme in this discussion regards comments on the country’s socio-political situation. Not surprisingly, the most common terms from the Frequency List in this theme were Casa Rosada, country, and Argentina/Argentinian(s). Twitterers discussed the socio-political circumstances in terms of “shame,” “decadence,” and “corruption.” (14) Por su Capricho de Hacer el velorio de Maradona en la casa Rosada, casi la destruyen por completo, pero eso es la Argentina simple y llanamente. #VerguenzaNacional #VerguenzaMundial For his Whim to Hold Maradona’s Memorial at the casa Rosada, it was nearly destroyed, but this is Argentina plain and simple. In example (14), the author complains of the presidential decision to use the Casa Rosada as the place of mourning (see also theme #2) and of the inappropriate and violent actions that followed. For this user, this defnes the country. The author is very critical of the government and views the organisation of the funeral as a national and a world shame. Other users felt the government was using Maradona’s death to their advantage. (15) Al pueblo . . . . . pan y Circo!! le cayó del cielo al gobierno la muerte de #Maradona así por unos días nos olvidamos del cobit de la economía y de la falta de laburo To the people . . . bread and Circus!! The death of #Maradona was sent from heaven for the government so for some days we forget covid economy and lack of work

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Example (15) denounces the government for making a spectacle of the player’s passing away so that Argentinians would be entertained and would forget the many problems facing the country. The author sees this “Circus” as a sign of good fortune for the government, since it is represented as heaven-sent. The tweet in example (16) begins with a quotation from a previous tweet that takes pride in Maradona as national icon. (16) “Cuando vas a otro país dicen: Argentina=Maradona” . . . . Porque no te van a decir en la jeta: Argentina=Corrupción. Vos capaz que vas y le haces un monumento al choreo. Idiotas. “When you visit another country they say: Argentina=Maradona” . . . . Because they cannot tell you in the face: Argentina=Corruption. You are capable of making a monument to the robbery. Idiots The user responds directly to this quotation arguing that no one is going to tell the previous user, in the face, that it is corruption – and not Maradona – that is Argentina’s characteristic trait. Interestingly, the twitterer mirrors the patterns used in the quotation, containing the placename, the equal sign, and what each user sees as the most representative aspects of the country. The author of (16) ends with verbal attacks that associate the previous user with a shameful action – celebrating state robbery – and with insults. The name of the country is used, therefore, as the platform from which to express (dis)alignment with the deceased and the government. 6

Conclusion

The present study set out to investigate place and space on social media. The study had a twofold objective, namely, to identify the inventory of linguistic resources for place reference in a place-sensitive corpus of tweets reacting to the death of the sport celebrity Diego Armando Maradona, and to examine their functionality, that is, the social practices users engage in and the identities they construct that shape the digital space of twitter. The study draws from the Maradona corpus, an ad hoc corpus of reference containing the terms #Maradona/Maradona (Bou-Franch and PalominoManjón 2021). From a Frequency List, a total of 20 linguistic resources for place reference was extracted. Using the frst 10 concordance lines for each of the twenty terms for place reference, the Maradona/Place subcorpus of 200 tweets was generated for the specifc purpose of this study. Two main research questions guided the present study. The frst research question (RQ1) inquired about the linguistic resources used to refer to place. To answer this question, the 20 linguistic resources for place from the Frequency List of the Maradona corpus of reference were identifed

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and grouped into seven categories, namely, deictic devices, toponyms, common places, place terms related to mourning, place terms related to football, place terms related to government, and to the digital space itself. The second research question (RQ2) asked how twitterers used the linguistic resources for place reference identifed in the data. To answer RQ2, the Maradona/Place subcorpus was analysed for the identifcation of discussion themes that would reveal the lived experience of place (RQ2.1), and the social practices and identities that would shape the afnity space of the data; this involved an analysis of the specifc social actions and the discursive resources used in their performance (RQ2.2). The thematic analysis of the Maradona/Place subcorpus yielded four main themes: expressions of grief and admiration, comments on the public memorial and burial, negative evaluations of the player, his critics, and his supporters, and deliberations on the socio-political situation of the player’s country of origin and its government. The most frequent social actions in the subcorpus were Assertives and Expressives. The former included the giving of opinions, sharing (small) stories, denouncing, reporting, and disagreeing. For their part, expressive actions included, on the positive side, praising, thanking and well-wishing and, on the negative side, expressing anger and grief. Directive and Commissive actions occurred less frequently in the data. Regarding the discussion around theme #1 Praise and grief, the most frequent place categories were the toponyms Argentina and Naples, the common place names “world” and “town” and the football related place term “feld.” The use of these place terms underlined feelings of belonging to the nation and to the city where the decedent played for many years, the impact and recognition he had around the world and especially his relevance and excellence in football. In praising and grieving the death of Maradona, users drew from patterns and strategies characteristic of the discourse of bereavement (McGlashan 2021) and social media mourning (Giaxoglou 2021). Resources included extreme formulations of admiration, use of adverbial expressions of time to intensify promises of eternal remembrance, directly addressing the decedent, use of frst-person pronouns to share stories that reminisce about the player, and use of possessive pronouns before a place name. These resources imbued tweets containing place terms with socio-afective meanings and allowed twitterers to bond with each other and express their alignment with the decedent, that is, to discursively express their afective positioning (Giaxoglou 2015, 2021). A myriad of emotions like love, loss, grief, condolences, nostalgia, belonging, and admiration were multimodally expressed by using hearts of the colour of the Argentinian fag and football shirt (Cantamutto and Vela Delfa 2020), clapping hand emojis, orthographic manipulation of the Spanish word for “God” to include Maradona’s iconic number 10, as in D10S, acronyms, and hashtags. Multimodal resources for mourning on twitter

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were common and, to my knowledge, have not been studied in the feld of Spanish digital discourse. Furthermore, a number of metaphors characteristic of the Spanish discourse of bereavement found on epitaphs (Crespo-Fernández 2013) were also identifed in relation to the expression of praise and grief. These included the metaphors of Death as Journey (to heaven), Death as Loss, and Death as Change, which allowed twitterers to address death euphemistically. Frequently, the heart was used metaphorically as the place for feelings of love and the place where the deceased will remain. These metaphors were also identifed in the English discourse of online memorials related to the Covid pandemic (McGlashan 2021), thus suggesting their commonality in cross-linguistic and cross-genre texts of bereavement. In sum, the previous resources for the expression of praise and grief were tied to the nation of origin of the decedent and the city where he played and contributed to the construction of the social identity of Argentinian and Italian supporters as mourners of the passing away of Maradona. The emotional association with these toponyms and with the football feld, underlined the place attachment that mourners expressed in their tweets (Yus 2021). Regarding theme #2 Memorial and burial, the most frequent place names were the government-related Casa Rosada and all three mourningrelated terms. These were frequently discussed in relation to the Covidpandemic. Most twitterers protested and denounced that holding the vigil at the Casa Rosada and allowing a large crowd to gather to pay tribute was inappropriate during the pandemic, when so many ordinary people had been denied attending their relatives’ funerals. The public denunciation of unfairness and lack of respect alongside the expression of moral indignation suggest that twitterers lived these locations and the events that developed therein in socio-afective terms, as a form of negative place attachment, since they were seen as breaching social norms, specifc Covid regulations, and moral expectations of fairness and equality (Bou-Franch 2022; Haidt 2012). Only one user expressed positive emotions in entering the Casa Rosada for the frst time to pay tribute to the decedent. Thus, the same placenames were used for diferent ends: to protest government decisions and to share a personal tribute. While the former can be framed within online discourses of public denunciations and grassroots resistance and activism (Bou-Franch 2022), the latter signals the discourse of bereavement (McGlashan 2021). Tweets from newspapers also reported on the public memorial and the incidents that followed and on the private burial. The use of place terms in the tweets in theme #2 functioned to anchor the diferent stages of the narrative of the farewell to Maradona to diferent ofine locations

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(Georgakopoulou 2015), in addition to expressing users’ afective positioning (Giaxoglou 2015, 2021) and (dis)afliation. The identity of mourners mainly found in theme #1 contrasts with the identity of protesters, activists, and victims of the government’s decisions and regulations, closely tied to the government-related place term, who tweeted to express their opposition to the public memorial. Theme #3 – Negative evaluations of the deceased, his supporters, and his critics – was less frequent and discussed. The most frequent place terms in this theme referred to Argentina – through the national toponym, the common term país/country and the deictic ahí/there – social media, and the football feld. These place markers played important emotional and organizational roles as a clear distinction emerged between the positively evaluated identity of the Argentinian player in the feld and his negatively evaluated identity outside the feld. These invocations of place, therefore, set the spatial boundaries for very diferent identity attributions and for the set of emotions and positions that could/should be attached to each of them. Those users that focused on the deceased in the feld constructed their identity as supporters and mourners, and they attributed to users that focused on the deceased outside the feld the identity of haters, an established identity in the digital world. The latter, however, projected their identities as social media activists through their public denunciations of the decedent. It is interesting to note that while the national toponym was used in theme #1 to discuss the decedent as Argentina’s symbol of success and pride, it was used in theme #3 to discuss the deceased as Argentina’s failure. The afnity space that unfolded around this public fgure contained divergent lived experiences of place. A similar case can be made for the tweets in theme # 4 Socio-political situation, which invoke toponyms, common place names, and government related terms in very negative terms. Twitterers denounced the government’s use of the death of Maradona for their own beneft and criticised the spectacle made of his ofcial farewell. Through social actions of denunciation, protest, and accusations, users emerged as political critics angry at presidential decisions and disappointed with their government and country. Negative emotions like anger, despair, and frustration were associated to the place terms found in this theme. The present study adopted a corpus-based discursive pragmatic perspective that involves paying attention to the three tiers of sociological inquiry (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifanou 2019: 92). Regarding the meso level of sociological inquiry, the technological afordances of Twitter allowed for the emergence of diferent social practices associated to place reference that shaped the afnity space created around reactions to the death of Maradona. These included the social practice of mourning

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and memorialising alongside the social practice of protesting and resisting. Various identities were projected and attributed in relation to these social practices, including the mourner, the supporter, the reporter, the critic, the hater, and the activist. These were crucially constructed, at the micro level, through mainly assertive and expressive social actions performed around place-referring terms and realised by multimodal meaning making resources associated to a myriad of socio-afective meanings. At the macro level, the social practices of mourning and protesting drew from the discourses of bereavement and death, and from the discourses of denunciation and social media activism, respectively. Incidentally, although activism was expected to deal with Maradona’s sexual abuse, this was infrequent in the data, and most denunciations concerned the government’s policies dealing with the pandemic. Importantly, unlike online sites specifcally designed for mourning and memorialising the deceased, Twitter provided an afnity space around death that aforded the hosting of discourses and practices other than bereavement. The discourses of bereavement and protest can be associated to diferent values and beliefs, that is, ideologies regarding social norms around mourning in general and mourning a controversial celebrity versus mourning an ordinary citizen in particular, ideologies about pandemic restrictions, sports, the deceased, women, and national politics. In sum, the Twitter afnity space under scrutiny, therefore, became both a site for a collective obituary (Fowler 2005), in which supporters mourned and praised the footballer, and a site of resistance and activism (Themistocleus 2021), critical of the sport celebrity and the government. Importantly, these actions were socio-culturally situated through the invocation of physical places and their location in the Twitter afnity space under scrutiny. This paper has brought together, and contributed to, research in the feld of the lived experience and socio-afective meanings of place in Spanish digital discourse, and studies on (Spanish) social media reactions to the death of controversial celebrities. It has contributed to these felds by carrying out a corpus-based discursive pragmatic analysis that has placed an emphasis on the relationship between the macro level of discourses and ideologies, the micro level of multimodal resources for making meaning, and the meso level of an online afnity space shaped by social practices and identities in confict. Notes 1. I would like to express my gratitude to Patricia Palomino-Manjón for her help in the compilation and cleaning of the corpus and subcorpus used in this study. 2. Italics in the original. 3. Please note that the two Spanish words for memorial refer both to the action of keeping vigil and to the site for a memorial, according to Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE). 4. The Argentinian Government House where the presidential ofce is located.

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5. Bucaramanga Athletic club, from Colombia. Enrique (Quique) Moreno was the goalkeeper.

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6

The ofine/online nexus and public spaces Morality, civility, and aggression in the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen social identity Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Lucía Fernández-Amaya

1

Introduction

The main goal of this paper is to explore the ofine/online nexus of post digital societies (Blommaert 2019) and how it may afect the synergy between ofine/online public spaces in what regards conceptualizations of in/civility and concomitant evaluations of morality. In that respect, it will be argued that ofine/online public spaces are mutually co-constitutive. It does so by continuing the exploration of Karen, a stigmatized social identity attributed, mostly in the context of the United States (but see Gahnmi 2021), to middle-aged individuals who look white and have womanlike or manlike (in the case of Ken/Kevin, the male version of the identity) characteristics (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022a) and will be here referred as women and men respectively. Karen is seen as acting inappropriately, rudely, or in an entitled manner (Greenspan 2020). Often, this inappropriate behavior is linked to displays of perceived racism against black people by confronting them in public spaces and reporting them to the police for random, nonillegal infractions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-masker facet of the Karen identity also gained notoriety. This ties back to other well-known facets associated with the Karen identity kit (Gee 2014), such as terrorizing service workers and refusing to abide by rules and regulations. Crucially for this chapter, the Karen identity was found to emerge in ofine public spaces which Gofman (1963: 9) referred to as “any regions in a community freely accessible to members of that community” and was deemed as inappropriate, and thus uncivil and immoral (Calhoun 2000), when judged against the norms of civility that regulate such spaces and the genred practices (Blommaert 2013), mostly service encounters, she engages in. Karen incidents are videotaped, i.e., entextualized by coveillance practices (see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022b; Jones 2009, 2017), and then recontextualized to dedicated online public spaces, such as Instagram’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-9

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Karens Gone Crazy (KGC), where the data for this study – 600 posts evaluating 12 videos depicting Karen-like behavior – were extracted from. On these spaces, the attribution and ratifcation (Joseph 2004) of this stigmatized identity are further carried out by groups of posters in ways that come across as highly moralizing and uncivil. Karen is, therefore, imbued in incivility: it emerges and is attributed because Karen is perceived as being uncivil to others ofine and it is ratifed online by other being uncivil to her. It is this latter online, part of the attribution/ratifcation process that the present analysis sought to probe by applying mainstream im/ politeness models (Brown and Levinson 1987; Culpeper 2011, 2016), general notions of morality (Monroe and Plant 2019; Workman et al. 2020, among others), moral emotions as expressed in discourse (Haidt 2003; Bednarek 2010) and strategies of digital technology facilitated (DTF) violence against women proposed by Esposito and Alba Zollo (2021). Results showed that, from an emotional geographies perspective (Davidson et al. 2005), KGC constitutes an “other condemning” (Haidt 2003) emotional space where behavior that is considered antinormative in ofline public spaces is further assessed as morally defcient and, in turn, uncivilly evaluated. Importantly, the dynamic between explicit incivility against Karen and ingroup civility emerges as central to site normativity. Further, the analysis unveiled the widespread use of DTF, which could lead us to preliminary conclusions regarding widespread misogyny and the emergence of Karen. In sum, these uncivil online public spaces become evaluative and moralizing sites of what constitutes civil behavior in ofine public spaces, efectively co-constituting each other. The chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2, we explore the relationship between the Karen identity and the online/ofine nexus, and we explain why KGC should be conceptualized a moralizing, other condemning space. This section concludes with the formulation of the two main research questions that guide this study. In Section 3, a description of the dataset is provided as well as the theoretical frameworks applied to and the analytic procedure followed in the analysis. Results are presented and discussed in Section 4. Finally, in Section 5, the conclusions of our study are presented by explicitly addressing the research questions that led it, considering its limitations and making suggestions for future research. 2

Background to the study

2.1 The Karen social identity and the online/ofine nexus

Karen is a stigmatized social identity (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022a) attributed mostly to a group of American women (and some men, Ken/Kevin) who tend to be middle aged, middle class, look white, and who are perceived as behaving in ways which are deemed uncivil and thus immoral (see

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Calhoun 2000). Although precedents to Karen can be found, especially in the parlance of the African American community,1 Karen became a household name amidst the establishment of what has been called Outrage Culture (also Call-out and Cancel Culture), which uses forms of online/ofine public shaming as one of its main means-to-an-end tools and is tied to societal understandings and evaluations of morality (see, among others, GarcésConejos Blitvich 2021, 2022b). It is in this context that Karen’s multimodal, situated actions are assessed as uncivil. Furthermore, from a morality perspective, Karen is seen as not upholding the Harm/Care foundation (Haidt and Graham 2007) as her behavior is often related to the perceived abuse of vulnerable populations – visible minorities, service workers, etc. – and to the refusal to abide by rules and regulations – such as wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic, which can also be harmful to others. In the frst part of the study, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2022a) analyzed Karen in action to provide a data-driven and nuanced description of the recurrent patterns of multimodal behavior that are part and parcel of the Karen identity kit (Gee 2014). However, she argued that identifying recurrent actions was, in this case, just the beginning of the process of identity attribution. Ofine behavior had to be entextualized, recorded via coveillance practices (see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022b; Jones 2009, 2017), and then recontextualized to dedicated online spaces – such as Instagram’s KGC where the analytic corpus for the study was extracted. Before being displayed, however, decisions needed to be made by page moderators regarding whether the video depicted actions that were deemed Karen-enough (Blommaert and Varis 2013) to be included in the repository. Then, page followers and others were invited to express their views on the behavior, which they did by further ratifying identity attributions via the use of hashtags (#karensofnstagram, #racistKaren, etc.), the use of labels such as referring to the women/men involved in the video as Karen, Ken, or Kevin, and by assessing their displayed behavior through the expression of negative moral evaluations often couched in aggressive, uncivil forms of communication. Interesting for this chapter (and for the volume in which it is included) were the essential connections established between in/civility and public spaces in the frst part of the study. Following Gofman (1963), Scollon and Wong Scollon (2003) and Blommaert (2013), space was understood as being regulative and thus historical and political. Concerning public space more specifcally, societal expectations exist regarding strong adherence to the norms of what are deemed acceptable, civil behaviors (Bonotti and Zech 2021). Traditionally, the concept of civility, i.e., the existence and maintenance of intergroup empathy and mutual respect, has been associated with the codes of conduct expected in public spaces, also regulating the verbal and non-verbal communication used in the presence of others in daily face to face interaction (Bannister and O’Sullivan 2013; Smith et al. 2010). Consequently, some may be very ready to levy accusations of incivility against those thought to

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have violated said norms. That was certainly Karen’s case, whose actions were perceived as antinormative when judged against both the norms of civility that regulate, and are thus expected, in public spaces (places and accommodations2) and the norms associated with the genred practices (mostly service encounters Karen engages in) (Blommaert 2013), which also involve expectations of civility, realized through diferent semiotic modes associated with politeness. Conversely, it was also observed – but not analyzed in detail – that the universality regarding expectations of civility seemed to be often subverted in public online spaces, such as those dedicated spaces where Karen’s identity attribution and ratifcation processes take place. Indeed, it seemed online incivility, which can range “from aggressive commenting in threads, incensed discussion and rude critiques, to outrageous claims, hate speech and harassment” (Antoci et al. 2016: 1), may have often become normative and “ftting in” (à la Gofman 1963) as it involves explicitly aggressive, even abusive conduct towards certain others. The Karen social identity was therefore seen as imbued in incivility: it emerged ofine as Karen was perceived as being uncivil to others and was ratifed online by others (Joseph 2004) being uncivil to her, exposing her actions and negatively evaluating those. This identity attribution/ratifcation process presented itself as a prime example of the online/ofine nexus of post-digital societies (Blommaert 2019), i.e., clear-cut demarcations between our online/ofine lives cannot be established, as the boundaries between the two are very porous (Androutsopoulos 2021; Blommaert 2019). Crucially for this study, the online/ofine nexus is also seen as afecting space (Blommaert and Maly 2019). As argued by de Freitas (2010: 631), “The contemporary urban public spatial realm is neither physical nor digital, but an intricate and relational combination of the two” (see also Iveson 2007). Therefore, in light of this interconnection, a (re)conceptualization of public space seems to be in order. Along those lines, we view the relationship between public ofine/online spaces as co-constitutive and a sine qua non condition for the emergence of the Karen identity. In the second part of the study, we delve into those dedicated online spaces, the groups that gather therein, and describe their interaction vis-àvis in/civility as posters relationally attribute and ratify Karens and, importantly, construct their own identities along the immoral/moral cline. We also seek to probe the reasons behind the subversion of expectations in (at least some) online public spaces where incivility, rather than civility, seems to be the norm. 2.2 Online groups and spaces: KGC as a moralizing space

Groups (KGC posters, in this case) and other types of communities are always tied to “spaces” or “scenes,” i.e., locations where group defning

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activities are carried out. Indeed, in his extensive analysis of groups, Fine (2012: 160) saw shared space as one of the main characteristics of groups. The interconnections between groups and dedicated spaces are so strong that, when trying to reconceptualize the more traditional notion of community to adapt it to the afordances and constraints of the digital medium, Gee (2005) reformulated it as afnity space. Alternative concepts such as ambient afliation (Zappavigna 2014) or conviviality (Varis and Blommaert 2015) were proposed to capture the light nature of online groupness, the often-limited requirements for group afliation (shared activities, interests, and common goals) and participation (see Blommaert 2018). Often, these online groups have been described as communities of knowledge or epistemic oriented communities, although eudaimonic social variables such as the establishment/maintenance of social relationships of conviviality, group cohesion, desire for happiness, self-efcacy, etc. have been seen as facilitating the formation of that collective knowledge (see Blommaert 2018; Vähämaa 2013). Scholars have also devoted signifcant attention to hashtag/memic activism and the groupings that are temporarily or more permanently united via the common use of a hashtag or the continuous permutation and recontextualization of memes (see Blommaert 2017; Bonilla and Rosa 2015). Clearly, ambient afliation, online afnity spaces are not traditional groups, but a sense of community is evident in the diferent and often frequent ways in which online users attempt to reach and connect with each other. In this respect, cyberspace ofers multitude of translocal digital spaces where likeminded individuals engage in diferent types of group-shared practices. Importantly, the spaces where groups assemble are crucially related to practices. In this respect, Angouri (2016: 325) has convincingly argued that a group is what a group does, and groups can certainly engage in diferent shared practices within the same space. Afnity spaces and the practices associated with them tend to be tied to conviviality, sharing, construction of knowledge (Gee 2005; Blommaert and Varis 2013; Zappavigna 2014), i.e., positivity, in general. However, there are also spaces which facilitate practices mostly dedicated to negativity, i.e., what seems to bring groups together is engaging in the deprecation of others. These online spaces are reminiscent of what Percy-Smith and Matthews (2001) described as tyrannical spaces, or no-go places associated with aggression and threat. In our view, Instagram’s KGC may be one of such spaces. Indeed, we will probe whether KGC is tied to practices that mostly evoke what would be considered negative moral emotions, conveyed via incivility, more specifcally through the generalized use of aggressive language and other semiotic modes. To do that, we will follow the tenets of emotional geographies (Davidson et al. 2005), understood as the study of the feelings people attach to physical places (i.e., how emotions both have spatial afects and afect space).

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Against this theoretical backdrop, this study seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) Do posters’ emotions – triggered by their perceptions of Karen’s ofine behavior and expressed on the interactional, publicly accessible online spaces provided by KGC – play a major role in the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen social identity? If so, what are the characteristics of KGB as an emotional geography? 2) Does incivility/language aggression play an important part in the attribution and ratifcation of Karen? If so, has incivility become normative in the publicly accessible online space provided by KGC? 3

Methodology

3.1 Sampling procedure and data

As we have previously mentioned, the goal of this paper is to investigate the ofine/online spatial synergy involved in the construction and attribution of the Karen identity focusing on dedicated online spaces where feeting groups congregate to evaluate Karen’s associated behaviors, entextualized in videos. Focusing thus on user-generated comments, the corpus for our study was extracted from the page KGC which claims to be the “Original Anti-Karen Instagram” and encourages followers to get involved by sending related videos (“DM us your crazy Karen videos”). At data collection point, May 2022, KGC had 170,000 followers and 424 videos: The frst was posted on May 13, 2020, and the last on April 15, 2022. As discussed, and also shown by Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2022a), Karen’s identity is crucially linked to public spaces. Her analysis of 256 Karen videos, also extracted from KGC, identifed the public places where most Karen incidents occurred. In this chapter, out of those, we selected the six places which had a 6% or higher incidence in the corpus for closer scrutiny. Those spaces included roads/streets (33%), stores (20%), family or fast-food restaurants (9%), near home/neighborhood (7%), parking lots (6%), and parks (6%). To add a chronological angle to the analysis, as Karen’s identity is in fux, we randomly chose two videos for each of aforementioned places: one among those that were recently posted and another one posted closer to the beginning of KGC’s presence on Instagram. This yielded a reference corpus of 12 videos depicting Karen. We also collected all the user-generated comments triggered by those videos using Phantombuster, a tool that allows the extraction of comment threads into excel fles. As Table 6.1 shows, the number of comments posted in response to recently posted videos was signifcantly higher. To homogenize the sample, the frst 50 posts in response to each of the videos were selected for analysis. This resulted in an analytic corpus comprising 600 posts. Regarding ethical considerations, incidents which lead individuals to be positioned as Karens occur in the public domain and are thus part of

Table 6.1 Dataset. Number of comments on each site in response to posted videos File Place

Date

Video description

Posts

www.instagram.com/p/CYfInKTo493/

8/1/22

Karen was harassing skateboarders when a man stepped up to reprove her behavior Karen displaying road rage Karen throwing BLM candles at a store Karen refuses to wear a mask Karen reprimands someone for flming at Taco Bell Karen pours her drink on a Starbucks worker Karen threatens to call the police after being disturbed by children playing Karen bothering a black man working for UPS Young woman honked at by Karen Karen arguing with a Hawaiian policeman Karen smoking at a non-smoking area Karen choking her dog

266

1.

Road/street

2. 3. 4.

www.instagram.com/p/CALjpIkF-bY/ www.instagram.com/p/CbCEEoFlXhi/ www.instagram.com/p/CAVJB8IFDOR/ Restaurant(family www.instagram.com/p/CabaPMUFuaM/ and fast food) www.instagram.com/p/CAgcwv5nCz6/

14/5/20 13/3/22 18/5/20 26/2/22

Near home/in the neighborhood

www.instagram.com/p/CcJU1QfJ1o1/

9/4/22

www.instagram.com/p/CA3xMDmnEcJ/

1/6/20

Parking lot

www.instagram.com/p/CbWedyHFlZV/ www.instagram.com/p/CAI-ymRD5l0/ www.instagram.com/p/CZv8SsHla-C/ www.instagram.com/p/CAoIUX8HQMM/

21/3/22 13/5/20 9/2/22 26/5/20

5. 6. 7.

Store

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Park

23/5/20

72 657 78 382 78 645 358 423 72 613 230

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public discourse. Currently, public discourse refers to political or social debates found in newspapers, magazines, television, flms, radio, music, and web-mediated forums (Marlow 2017). Public discourse is fully accessible to researchers with the customary caveats. The main source of the data included in the corpus was extracted from Instagram’s KGC, which had its privacy settings selected for public display. However, in compliance with the Association of Internet Researchers’ 2019 report on ethics in Internet research,3 and in attempt to protect privacy, all individuals included in the corpus have been referred to as Karen+short description or Ken/Kevin +short description rather than their real names (when available), and no sensitive information as that could be obtained through doxing, for instance, has been reproduced. Further, all posts have been anonymized and all potential personal references to posters deleted. In the following sections, comments will appear in their original form, including any spelling, grammar, and punctuation idiosyncrasies. Posts may also be slightly rephrased to further avoid personal identifcation. 3.2 Theoretical frameworks and analytic procedure

For the analysis phase, NVivo 1.6.1 was used. NVivo is designed for qualitative researchers working with very rich text-based and/or multimedia information, where deep levels of analysis on small or large volumes of data are required. Regarding the creation of the coding scheme, and in order to address the frst research question, the analysis explored the data to identify patterns of moral emotions expressed by posters when reacting to and evaluating Karen’s behavior. According to Haidt’s (2003: 853), moral emotions are those “that are linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent.” Applying Haidt’s classifcation, we created both parent and child codes for these moral emotions (see Figure 6.1):

Figure 6.1 Haidt’s classifcation of moral emotions.

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In the case of sufering emotions, and also following Haidt (2003) who argues that empathy is not a moral emotion and, for their part, compassion and sympathy are hard to tease apart, we merged all sufering emotions into a single category: compassion/sympathy. Furthermore, we were interested in how these moral emotions were linguistically realized. To that efect, we created codes following Bednarek’s (2010: 40) distinction between emotion talk and emotional talk, according to which emotion talk is constituted by expressions that denote afect/emotion, for example love, hate, joy, envy, sad, mad, enjoy, dislike and so on (as well as fxed expressions such as He had a broken heart). Emotional talk relates to constituents (linguistic and non-linguistic) that conventionally express or signal afect/emotion (e.g. interjections, intensifcation, expletives). Since our analysis was multimodal and emojis were sometimes used to express emotions, we relabeled these codes as emotion communication and emotional communication. Moreover, we added a third category to code those instances in which the posters’ emotions were conveyed implicitly rather than explicitly, i.e., tied to particular lexical items: emotion laden discourse (see Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2021). The second research question addressed the potential role and normativity of incivility on KGC. It is important to state that, along with Sifanou (2019: 54), we consider that the term in/civility encompasses both verbal and non-verbal actions. As discussed previously, online incivility includes – among others – many diferent forms of language aggression. Within linguistics felds, language aggression has mostly been studied from the point of view of impoliteness models, where impoliteness is generally understood as behavior that causes ofense. Impoliteness is always situated, i.e., it is an attitude towards specifc behaviors occurring in specifc contexts when there is a mismatch between these behaviors and how one would expect/want/think they ought to be (Culpeper 2011: 254). Here as well, the analysis of aggression carried out by language often in conjunction with other semiotic modes, such as emoji, was based on Culpeper’s (2016: 441) classifcation of impoliteness, and child codes were created accordingly. Importantly, in a bottom-up fashion, the following impoliteness manifestations not included in the extant taxonomy emerged in the analysis and were added as child codes to the codebook: • Disagreements: These are not inherently impolite (Angouri and Locher 2012; Fernández-Amaya 2019); however, in this afnity space where

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posting a video implies evaluating Karen’s behavior negatively, not agreeing with the mainstream, in-group’s view that deems Karen’s action as immoral could be considered impolite. • Boosters: Words whose main function was to increase the level of impoliteness (e.g., “as a hawaiian she’s fucking stupid,” F104). In addition, using the classifcation of strategies provided by Brown and Levinson (1987), we will also analyze politeness, which is mainly present to create in-groupness and to show empathy for the victims of Karen’s abuse. Moreover, as Karen-like behavior is mostly associated with women (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022a) and all the randomly selected videos included in the corpus involved women, we also examined the data for potential instances of digital misogyny. To that end, we adapted and developed codes for the classifcation of strategies of digital technology facilitated (DTF) violence against women proposed by Esposito and Alba Zollo (2021). We created a parent code for DTF strategies and child nodes for each of the four main categories that were then subdivided into further child nodes: 1. Strategies of body shaming: Negative comments on physical appearance, facts and rumors about private life or reference to lack of personal hygiene (e.g., “That’s just a dude with saggy tits,” F8). 2. Strategies of gender stereotyping and gatekeeping: Rendering women incompetent; stereotype that women are “too emotional”; women as irrational or having mental illness; women as stubborn or arrogant; insults for being feminist; sending women back to “where they belong” (e.g., “More like cheap crack her face is a threat to society she’s crazy 🤡✨”, F8). 3. Strategies of moral degradation: Slut-shaming (e.g., “Fuck this bitch”, F12). 4. Strategies of direct threatening and abuse (e.g., “And that’s when she should have been shot”, F2). A multimodal analysis of the comments was also carried out that considered the use of hashtags, @mentions, and emojis. @mentions were coded as both instances of politeness and impoliteness. As discussed later, multifunctionality is not uncommon in polylogal interaction that addresses a multiplicity of audiences (see Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014). On the one hand, @mentions function as a positive politeness strategy by means of which a poster addresses another poster and points their attention to relevant information, thus intensifying their interlocutor’s

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interest (Brown and Levinson 1987). Conversely, since by doing so, they are calling posters’ attention to a Karen video mostly to entice deprecating commentary, @mentions were also coded as of-record impoliteness targeted at Karen. For the coding of emojis, not only their lexical meaning but also their pragmatic force was considered, as emoji meaning is highly dependent on context. Thus child nodes were created to account for instances when emoji (i) reinforced the propositional content of the utterance, e.g., “Lol, 😂 too funny 🤣” (F9); (ii) substituted for part of the propositional content e.g., “She hating cuz her 🐱 is too dry for ⚫🐔” (F3); (iii) expressed emotions, e.g., “Her scream at the end!!! 😂😂 😂” (F2), and (iv) conveyed the propositional content on their own, e.g. “😷🐑🐑🐑🐑” (F1). Finally, the analysis also focused on the use of textese, i.e., the language variation typical of digital interactions, such as reduplicated letters to indicate graphic prosody (“The fucking dooooogggg”, F12), capital letters (“NOT HER AGAIN JEEZ”, F1) or abbreviations (“Lmao”, F10). Accordingly, child nodes were created for these textual phenomena. The codebook was created and refned over several joint-coding sessions during which both authors extensively discussed each code, resolved doubts regarding units of analysis to be assigned to one or more codes, agreed on adaptations, and applied these to further data samples. This process was repeated until data coding saturation was reached. Then, the corpus was coded by both authors and discrepancies resolved through further discussion. Once the coding was completed, we ran three main matrix coding queries – which included selected parent and child nodes – to examine relevant coding intersections between DGT and im/politeness triggers, emotions and their linguistic expressions and emotions and im/politeness, respectively. Through these queries, we searched for further patterns in our coded data as well as for access to the content in which those patterns occurred. The outcomes of these queries added nuance to our results and informed our discussion. 4

Results and discussion

4.1 Moral emotions

The frst part of the analysis sought to answer RQ1, namely: Do posters’ emotions – triggered by their perceptions of Karen’s ofine behavior and expressed on the interactional, publicly accessible online spaces provided

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by KGC – play a major role in the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen social identity? If so, what are the characteristics of KGB as an emotional geography? Emotions (whether positive or negative valenced) would seem key in predicting (especially in a context, such as the one provided by KGC, where anonymity and accountability levels are diminished) posters’ subsequent behavior. Further, the very nature of KGC may predispose one to assume that emotions would be skewed towards the negative valence end of the continuum and be closely tied to perceptions of morality. As discussed, (negative) evaluations of Karen’s behavior are one the main raisons d’etre of KGB and Outrage culture in general, as we saw in Section #2. Results showed that indeed negative moral emotions are strongly behind the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen identity (see Figure 6.2). As discussed, Haidt (2003: 853) defnes moral emotions as those that are tied either to the common good of society or of other individuals rather than to the judge or agent who expresses them. Haidt (2003) further divides moral emotions into two large and two small families. The large ones include the “other condemning” family where we fnd contempt, anger, and disgust as main emotions (and indignation and loathing as minor ones) and the “self-conscious family” that groups together shame, embarrassment, and guilt. The two small families, for their part, are the “other sufering

Figure 6.2 General moral emotions.

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family” (compassion) and the “other praising” family (gratitude and elevation) (p. 855). Posters revealed their disapproval of Karen by expressing emotions related to the “other condemning” family, with 610 occurrences in the corpus (see Figure 6.3). More specifcally, they expressed contempt (432 occurrences), moral indignation (138 occurrences), anger (35 occurrences), and disgust (5 occurrences). Regarding the two most prevalent in the corpus, contempt involves looking down on someone and feeling morally superior to them (Haidt 2003), which fts in well with the overall construction of the Karen identity. As we will argue later, and because identities are relational (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), the Karen identity is attributed to others who are thereby positioned as aggressive, immoral individuals. Simultaneously, posters position themselves as judges of “bad” behavior claiming, as it were, a moral high ground. It is those purported moral values that posters share (but Karen does not) that contribute to glue the group together and create strong feelings of in-groupness. This is illustrated in (1) later, where the poster positions Karen as a member of an undereducated and disenfranchised group of people in which the poster themself is clearly not included: (1)

Large and growing population of undereducated, disenfranchised people in this country. (F10)

Figure 6.3 Moral emotions (subcategories).

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For its part, moral or righteous indignation is a reactive, condemning emotion of anger elicited by the perceived mistreatment of and the aggression and/or cruelty towards third parties. Again, this emotion is very ftting here, since as we saw in Section 2.1 and as can also be gleaned from the description of the contents of the videos included in the corpus (see Methods section), Karen usually emerges in relation to others who are seen as vulnerable: visible minorities, service workers, children, adolescents, and animals, among others. This is exemplifed in (2), where the poster refers to a very famous case, that of Central Park Karen, who called the police on an African American male claiming he was threatening her life when, in fact, he was a birdwatcher who had asked her to leash her dog. Given the track record of US police and the African American community, calling the police on an African American male may involve serious risks for said individual: (2)

That “African American man threatening my life” is that old trope still alive and well. It’s gotten MANY Black men and bor (F12)

In view of the significant numeric differences shown, it is interesting to note that, in the case under scrutiny, posters as judges are more inclined towards the denigration of Karen and the establishing of their own moral high ground, through the expression of contempt, than they are in conveying righteous anger in regard to the victims’ plight. This is also made manifest by the comparably lower number occurrences of the suffering emotions in the corpus, i.e., compassion/sympathy (86 occurrences). Compassion/sympathy, according to Haidt (2003) are prompted when others are perceived as suffering or experiencing sorrow; importantly, although people can feel suffering emotions for strangers, emotions in this small family are more strongly felt for own kin and others with whom a close relationship is maintained. This may explain why they were less frequently triggered by video contents/ expressed by posters, as the incidents depicted involved far removed third parties. Interestingly, example (3) refers to a case which posters can most likely personally relate to, i.e. being a service worker, as many Americans hold jobs in this area – as restaurant servers, bartenders, retail assistants, etc. – while attending college or as summer job growing up: (3)

Why can’t people show some compassion to the people that serve them? You act all high and mighty thinking your better than them because of your high paying job, but without them who would run things like this? Damn (F6)

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In addition, and not surprisingly due to the ethos of KGC, substantial diferences were also found in the corpus between condemning and praising emotions (see discussion on denial of mind in subsection #4.3). Regarding the latter, two types were present in the data: elevation, triggered by moral beauty such as loyalty, self-sacrifce, acts of charity and kindness (9 occurrences) and gratitude or the perception that other has done a good deed for the self (1 occurrence). One of our matrix queries showed that these emotions were triggered by bystanders standing up for those who were seen as being abused by Karen, as can be gleaned from examples (4) and (5): (4) (5)

👏👏👏👏 I’m so proud of this manager for sticking up for his employees!!!! (F4) I’m so happy this guy stood up for those kids! Ty!! We all need to step in when it comes to kids. Let them skateboard and mind your business Karen. (F1)

Also revealing was the absence of self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, or moral distress. Posters seemed secure in their higher moral ground and did not engage in any self-refection regarding themselves as judges and individuals or the derogatory practices they engage in in respect to Karen or others. As part of our analysis of emotions, we explored the data for the diferent ways in which emotions are conveyed in discourse. Generally, we saw that the expression of emotions played an important role in the attribution and co-construction of Karen; therefore, their explicit and implicit occurrence in the posts was notable. Emotion communication occurred 95 times in the corpus, as in (6), where the verb “hate,” which denotes very strong negative feelings, is used: (6)

I hate this chick ! Love the mj in the background tho. (F4)

For its part, as discussed previously, emotion laden communication (103 occurrences) is conveyed implicitly. In (7), for instance, extremely negative emotions towards Karen are expressed by the poster who wishes she were dead: (7)

And that’s when s should have been shot (F2)

Finally, emotional communication (300 occurrences) had the highest incidence in the corpus and is exemplifed in (8), where an intensifed (via

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graphic prosody) interjection is used to convey feelings of joy at Karen being put in her place: (8)

Yoooooo fnally!! This lady was so overdue (F1)

These are signifcant results as in most cases, 395, communication related to posters’ emotions was explicitly conveyed, tied to the explicature, and therefore not necessarily subject to cancellability or much indeterminacy. Posters felt no qualms at expressing how they felt about Karen in ways that left much room for interpretation. With very few exceptions (as what counts as moral is always subject to, even minimal, discursive struggle), Karen’s behavior was seen as objectively and morally reprehensible by posters, as she breached social norms of civility and was often perceived as preying on vulnerable populations which triggered condemnation and moral indignation. Once Karen is established as immoral by the group, posters can feel justified in retaliating to Karen’s perceived offense with further offense addressed, in turn, at her and potential supporters (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022b). In this respect, it seems important to conclude this discussion subsection that refects on Karen and moral emotions trying to account for why further ofense is considered as a moral and fair retribution to perceived ofense. This view can be explained in terms of what has been called “the dark side of morality” (Workman et al. 2020; see also Monroe and Ashby Plant 2019; Rempala et al. 2020). It refers to instances in which our deeply held moral convictions serve as justifcation for actions which are usually deemed morally impermissible, such as engaging in collective violence with the goal to regulate social relationships, as in the case with Karen. Moral convictions do not only regulate the self, but also what others ought to do. As Workman et al. (2020: 2) explain: “When the morally convicted are confronted with societal attitudes out of sync with their moral values, some may fnd this sufciently intolerable to justify violence against those who challenge their beliefs.” This violence may range in scope from the display of incivility via aggressive communicative behavior (as we have observed in the corpus) to the bombing of abortion clinics. In the present case, Karen’s behavior is seen as morally reprehensible (as it often involves actions perceived as harming vulnerable others, disregarding rules and regulations, etc.); the morally convicted see themselves, therefore, justifed in exposing Karen (often via doxing) to show who she “really” is, make her face consequences for her actions (legal, fnancial) and – also aiming at social regulation – try to dissuade other from displaying similar behavior or risk being similarly exposed.

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In view of these results, i.e., the explicit and pervasive expression of “other condemning” emotions, such as contempt, and applying to these findings the tenets of emotional geographies (Davidson et al. 2005), we see KGC emerge as tied to negative moral emotions. Therefore, KGC, as an emotional geography, evokes negative moral emotions in posters, whose expression of those constitutes the basis on which the space affect is co-constructed. Importantly, by omission, the lack of any self-conscious emotions points both to posters being confident in their own moral superiority and to how gelled and homogenous they had become as a group (which, as we will see in subsection #4.2, is a result of strong feelings of in groupness raised by the deployment of positive politeness). To further continue our exploration of KGC, we explored the role of im/ politeness in the co-construction of the Karen identity. Although emotions/ im/politeness were here separated into two subsections for analytic clarity, it needs to be emphasized that the expression of emotion and the expression of im/politeness often occur simultaneously. Indeed, according to Culpeper (2011), one of the most important functions of impoliteness is to convey heightened emotions – mostly anger – and to blame the target for inducing such emotional state (Culpeper 2011: 252), as we will see in the next subsection. 4.2 The functionality of im/politeness

Here – and to address our second research question: Does incivility/language aggression play an important part in the attribution and ratifcation of Karen? If so, has incivility become normative in the publicly accessible online space provided by KGC? – we will delve into how emotions and the ofensive retaliation against Karen described previously are conveyed via the deployment of impoliteness (Culpeper 2011, 2016) and strategies of DTF violence (Esposito and Alba Zollo 2021). In opposition to this dynamic, we will also describe how politeness was targeted at other posters to create in-groupness. This interplay between impoliteness and politeness and their multifunctionality is not uncommon in digitally mediated, polylogal interactions (see Dobs and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013; BouFranch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014). Table 6.2 shows the results of our analysis of impoliteness triggers intersected with the targets of such impoliteness. Not surprisingly, due to KGC’s ethos, impoliteness was mainly directed at Karen, with a clear predominance of implicational impoliteness (212 occurrences, mainly form-driven) and pointed criticisms and complaints (275 occurrences).

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Table 6.2 Impoliteness triggers and targets Impoliteness triggers (Culpeper 2011, 2016)

Target of impoliteness A: Karen B: Posters

C: Victims

D: Witnesses

1. Boosters 2. Condescensions 3. Disagreements 4. Dismissals 5. Insults 5.1. Personalized 3rd person negative references 5.1.a. Karen 5.1.b. Ken 5.2. Personalized negative assertions 5.3. Personalized negative references 5.4. Personalized negative vocatives 5.4.a. @mentions 6. Message enforcers 7. Negative expressives 8. Pointed criticisms or complaints 9. Silencers 10. Threats 11. Unpalatable questions or presuppositions 12. Implicational Impoliteness 12.1. Context-driven 12.2. Convention-driven 12.3. Form-driven

47 8 30 12 121 111

1 4 38 2 25 24

1 3 28 2 27 26

5 0 12 0 20 19

75 2 0

21 2 0

20 1 0

14 3 0

1

0

0

0

9

1

1

1

1 1 24 275

1 0 0 37

0 0 0 44

0 1 2 34

1 35 68

0 1 9

0 2 14

0 3 6

212 16 41 155

4 3 0 1

6 2 2 2

9 4 0 5

In the case of form-driven impoliteness, often posters ridicule and tease Karen through mimicry, as we can see in (9), where Karen’s words are mockingly repeated verbatim by the poster, which Culpeper (2016) describes as a particular type of echoic irony, whose main function is to ridicule the opinion echoed (Sperber and Wilson 1986): (9)

“Listen you short fucking piece of shit” 🤣🤣🤣🔥🔥🔥 (F10)

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Other instances of form-driven impoliteness directed at Karen were @ mentions (45 occurrences). However, @mentions were found to be multifunctional as they also conveyed positive politeness (see Table 6.2). With these, posters call others’ attention to the contents of a certain Karen video, thereby implying said contents would also be of interest to them, thus creating in-groupness (positive politeness). Simultaneously, by implicitly criticizing Karen’s reprehensible behavior and making others aware of it, posters increase face threat to Karen, since impoliteness is magnifed in relation to the larger audience. In addition, other types of implicated meaning related to form-driven impoliteness towards Karen were criticisms, complaints, and unpalatable questions by means of which KGC posters reproved Karen in highly situated ways; for example, alluding to the highly negative attributes related to this stigmatized social identity (10) or establishing a connection between her behaviour (road rage in (11)) with a violent videogame (“Grand theft auto”): (10) Who tf wants to be a karen?? (F2) (11) Grand theft karen (F2) Insults hurled at Karen were also very common in the corpus (121 occurrences). Not only did we fnd conventional insults, as can be observed in example #12, often gendered in nature and/or questioning Karen’s intelligence (e.g., bitch, stupid, dumb, etc.), but also more creative ones such as those in (13) and (14), which use a pop culture movie reference and grotesque architectural feature respectively to allude to Karen’s lack of sexual appeal. These last two, more specifcally, ft under the notion of genuine humorous insults, defned as “wittingly/creatively formulated,” but purposefully ofensive messages (Dynel 2021: 27) and could be considered as one of the manifestations of entertaining impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) present on our dataset. Furthermore, the explicit use of the name Karen here was coded as an insult, too, as posters employ it as a reference with very negative connotations. (12) What a dumb bitch (F4) (13) The forty year old virgin (F3) (14) Was that a gargoyle? 😳 (F9) Unpalatable questions, which convey an underlying criticism addressed at Karen, feature as the fourth most widespread formulae in our dataset (97 occurrences), followed, to a lesser extent, by boosters (54 occurrences), employed to increase the level of impoliteness. The impoliteness in the unpalatable question in (15) is boosted by the use of the noun phrase “the

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fuck” whereas Karen’s unkind treatment of the dog is boosted by the use of the adjective “fucking” in (16): (15) What the fuck is wrong with these Karens and skateboards there didn’t do anything wrong 😮😮 (F1) (16) She is chocking the fucking dog wtf (F12) Furthermore, results in Table 6.3 show that, despite Karen being the main target, there were also instances in which impoliteness was addressed at other (i) posters, (ii) victims (i.e. those who were perceived as being abused by Karen), or (iii) witnesses (of Karen’s abuse). In these dissenting posts (38 occurrences), posters express disagreement with other posters, and display empathy and thus positive politeness (“Assert or presuppose S’s knowledge of and concern for H’s wants” and “notice, attend to H,” Brown and Levinson 1987) towards Karen. This can be observed in (17) and (18), where it is argued that the individual depicted in the video should not be considered a Karen, as she is just doing her job; posters empathize with Karen as her “victims” are seen as mocking and being disrespectful to her and even if Karen is a bit pushy, and in (19), she should be given a pass, as she is an elderly woman: (17) She’s doing her job (F5) (18) Honestly can’t tell who the Karen is here their be some ppl that’ll take extra long to leave specially when they know theirs someone waiting!! Like why you got your seatbelt on? 😬 (F9) (19) Respect the elderly people (F9) In addition to deploying positive politeness towards Karen, as we saw previously, posters also use positive politeness to convey empathy for the victims (of Karen’s abuse) (48 occurrences) as in the subsequent examples, in which commiseration is shown and support given to a customer at a Taco Bell and a service worker at Starbucks, both targeted by Karen: (20) People need to worry less about what others are doing with their lives and worry more about their own life. Taco Bell should give him free chalupas for a week. He was recording a damn menu not someone in the bathroom wiping their ass. (F5) Table 6.3 Politeness strategies and targets  

A: Karen

B: Posters

C: Victims

D: Witnesses

1: Form-driven 2: Negative politeness 3: Positive politeness

26 5 45

13 20 269

5 5 48

1 1 5

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(21) This makes me extra sad the girl is willing to make it again make it for you again I have to say that two times but you decide to throw the drink at her you should be banned from every single Starbucks (F6) Very signifcantly, positive politeness is also used to create afliation and claim “common ground” within the poster group (269 occurrences; see Table 6.4). To this end, in-group identity markers (153 occurrences), such as jargon, slang, dialect, address terms, contraction and ellipsis, were used. These presuppose shared mutual knowledge among group members for them to be able to grasp the meaning conveyed by the comment, as can be seen in the following examples: (22) karen woulda got dirty lickns back home (F10) (23) lmao lemonade (F2) More specifcally, to understand the face threat in example (22), posters would need to know that “dirty lickns” means spanking in Hawaiian Table 6.4 Positive politeness strategies and targets Positive Politeness Strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987) 1. Assert or presuppose S’s knowledge of and concern for H’s wants 2. Assume or assert reciprocity 3. Avoid disagreement 4. Be optimistic 5. Exaggerate 6. Give gifts to H 7. Give or ask for reasons 8. Include both S and H in the activity 9. Intensify interest to H 9.1. @mentions 10. Joke 11. Notice, attend to H 12. Ofer, promise 13. Presuppose, raise, assert common ground 13.1. Abbreviations 14. Seek agreement 15. Use in-group identity markers

Targets A: Karen B: Posters C: Victims D: Witness 27

17

14

2

0 1 0 1 0 19 0

0 2 0 17 2 70 9

0 0 0 2 1 16 2

0 0 0 0 1 1 0

0 0 0 6 0 3

53 45 56 8 0 108

0 0 2 19 0 6

0 0 0 0 0 1

3 2 14

78 6 153

6 7 18

1 2 3

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slang. Similarly, for (23), posters need to recognize “lmao” as the acronym for “laughing my ass of” and “lemonade” as a slang term for illegal drugs. The poster of (23) is thus implying that Karen’s behavior is a consequence of her drug use, a conclusion drawn several times in the corpus. Posters also asserted in-groupness by presupposing, raising, or asserting common ground (108 occurrences). Especially signifcant in this case was the use of abbreviations (78 occurrences), characteristic of textese, as such “tho” for “though” in (24) and “Tbh” for “to be honest” in (25): (24) Why her voice deeper than mine tho (F8) (25) Tbh I think it’s wonderful to see kids playing outside! Imagine instead of yelling if she brought out cookies. (F7) Quite often, posters justifed their opinion of Karen to other posters by giving reasons (70 occurrences), another positive politeness strategy. Reasons were given, for instance, to explain why her behavior did not meet the norms of civility expected in those public spaces against which her behavior was found inappropriate: (26) This is exactly why the native Hawaiian people do Not want them there. Polluting their land and disrespecting their laws and culture. I don’t know why these damn Karen’s think they can keep putting their hands on people!! They seldom run into the “RIGHT” one and hitting them. (F11) Another interesting example of the interplay between politeness and impoliteness was posters’ use of jokes to make fun of Karen (56 occurrences). Joking is a positive politeness strategy that furthers in-groupness. However, it also functions as impoliteness since humor is aimed at ridiculing and deprecating others. This clearly shows the link between entertainment and impoliteness mentioned previously: posters are entertained at the expense of a (potential) victim (Culpeper 2011: 233), in this case, Karen, as can be seen in (27): (27) Is she buying a freaking 10 foot dildo or why is she so freaking embarrassed about what she’s buying 😂😂😂😂?? (F4) This part of the analysis clearly showed that impoliteness plays a fundamental role in the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen identity, as Karen was – by far – the main target of impoliteness in the corpus. However, other less anticipated fndings also surfaced. For one, Karen was not the only target, as impoliteness was also directed at other posters, witnesses of Karen’s perceived abuse, or even purported victims. This shows

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the discursive struggle, present in online/ofine polylogues regarding what, for example, is considered appropriate or reprehensible behavior or who may be at fault in a given situation. Also less predictable, when thinking of Karen related interaction, was the large number of positive politeness used in the corpus. These were deployed either towards victims or, mostly, to create social bonding and in-groupness among posters. Identities are relationally co-constructed (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) and Karen is here attributed and ratifed in relation to a group: that comprised of posters who thereby claim a higher moral ground and see themselves as legitimate judges of inappropriate behavior (see subsection #4.1). Interesting as well were cases in which strategies, such as humor, could function either as politeness or impoliteness depending on intended target and the functionality of impoliteness in providing entertainment and, in view of section #4.1, in the expression of emotion (Culpeper 2011). All in all, it seems that impoliteness towards Karen/the outgroup has become normative in KGC: posters may struggle discursively regarding perceptions of Karen’s or other social actors’ behavior but, across the board, the use of impoliteness per se is never questioned or assessed as inappropriate. Politeness, however, is expected and normative in relation to the ingroup. Politeness, as a means to in-groupness, emerges as a pre-requisite for the joint deployment of impoliteness. 4.3 Strategies of DTF violence

In the second part of our analysis of incivility, we delved into potential misogynistic motives behind the deprecation and, in general, the attribution of the Karen social identity. In her study, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2022a: 28) suggested that “future research could also delve into how widespread (ofine/online) misogyny may be related to the emergence of Karen.” A point that echoed Negra and Leyda’s (2020: 6) claim that, “Karen embodies the persistent cultural sanctions on women’s anger, and she defnes by opposition the preference and value accorded to white women who are accommodating rather than complaining.” Important for perceptions of Karen, and women in general, in public spaces is Slater’s (2016) discussion of the public/private divide which resulted in the marginalization of women from the public sphere, efectively making them and children the denizens of the private sphere. Respectable femininity thus became associated with privacy, whereas men and boys could move with ease from private into public spaces; this – Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2022b) argued – may lead to accentuate the perception of marked behaviors, such as impoliteness, when engaged in by women in the public sphere, making them even more salient, hence the more notable interest in Karen than in Ken/Kevin.

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Figure 6.4 Strategies of DTF violence.

To explore potential misogynistic attitudes, we searched the data for instances of the strategies of DTF that Esposito and Alba Zollo (2021) found in their corpus of YouTube posts regarding women in politics in the United Kingdom. If present in ours, despite the very diferent nature of the data, preliminary conclusions could be drawn regarding misogyny as a trigger of the generalized aggression involved in the co-construction of the Karen social identity (see Figure 6.4). Indeed, results showed a considerable number of digital attacks to Karen that were also found in Esposito and Alba Zollo’s corpus. More specifcally, there was a high incidence of the “body shaming” DTF strategy (68 occurrences). In our data, posters attack Karen in several ways. They derogatively assess her physical appearance with, for example, specifc comments about her hair, as in example (28), in reference to the bob hair style which seems to be one of Karen’s stereotypical traits (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022a): (28) The bowl cut hair 💀 (F1), and also describing her as not being feminine or womanlike, i.e., not conforming to beauty concepts of a properly “gendered self” (Bailey et al. 2013): (29) That a whole man (F8).

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Furthermore, they spread facts and rumors about Karen’s private life, geared towards the attribution of negative characteristics to Karen, mostly being racist, as shown in (30), which is in line with Karen’s perceived ofine identity (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2022a): (30) Her relatives kept slaves (F3), and she is also positioned as a consumer of illegal substances, as mentioned earlier and also seen in the following example: (31) She is on something good. It’s called fake white privilege n crack (F10). To a lesser extent, we also found references to Karen’s lack of personal hygiene: (32) Your 🐈 stinks (F3) Moreover, our fndings reveal that Karen is not only debased on KGC for her physical appearance but also for her intellectual skills. This “gender stereotyping” DGT violence strategy occurred 49 times in the corpus. Posters construct Karen as irrational or sufering from a mental illness as shown in these examples in which she is repeatedly referred to as crazy: (33) Wow, to be that triggered by something that has NOTHING to do with you. Krazy K Karen (F3) (34) More like cheap crack her face is a threat to society she’s crazy 🤡✨ (F8) Attributing irrationality is an example of denial of mind, a potent dehumanizing strategy. Humans are mostly strongly predisposed not to harm other humans, but if a person is believed to be deprived of a human mind, they are then no better than an animal and this is a strong justifcation for inficting harm (of any type, reputational as in the case of Karen, for instance). As Monroe and Plant argued (2019: 344) perceiving a person as less of a human increases blame, decreases praise, and leads to moral exclusion, which means that moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness no longer apply to that individual, and everything is fair game. This is a very accurate description of what the co-construction of the Karen social identity is all about. Interestingly, denial of mind is prominently displayed in the title of the Instagram page under scrutiny: Karens Gone Crazy.

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Furthermore, posters also render Karen as incompetent (16 occurrences), another DTF violence strategy, using descriptive adjectives such as “stupid” and others drawing from similar semantic felds: (35) She reminds me of my aunt when she’s drunk. Won’t let no one talk and she’s always right, stupid hoe. (F8) and as stubborn and arrogant (6 occurrences): (36) Why can’t people show some compassion to the people that serve them? You act all high and mighty thinking your better than them because of your high paying job, but without them who would run things like this? Damn (F6) More instances of gender based DTF violence were also found in 30 posts that threatened to infict physical harm on Karen: (37) Run that bitch over (F2) Posters also engaged in moral degradation (slut-shaming), questioning Karen’s morality as it relates to her sexual behavior. These attacks are linked to women’s long-standing, established connection to their reputation (Esposito and Alba Zollo 2021). Moral degradation was the least frequent in our data (26 occurrences) and can be seen in these examples: (38) Oh it’s the transplants in NYC that get me. 😂 This ain’t your city Bish 👏🏾 (F1) (39) Fukn cunt could’ve costed this man his life (F12) Based on these fndings, we could tentatively conclude that misogynistic ideologies play a substantive part in the attribution and ratifcation of the Karen identity, as there is signifcant overlap regarding DTF strategies used in targeting two very diferent types of social identities: Karen and women in politics (Esposito and Alba Zollo 2021) which do share a main demographic feature: womanhood. Both corpora are also digital, YouTube and Instagram, which lends itself well to comparison in this respect. 5

Conclusions

The results of the analysis of the 600 posts evaluating Karen’s behavior on KGC have clearly shown that, as an emotional geography, this publicly available online space emerges as tied to negative “other condemning” moral emotions, mostly contempt towards Karen. In addition, one of the ways that shows the poster group has become gelled is the complete

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absence of “self-conscious” moral emotions, which would indicate that the group as whole feels they are on solid moral ground and can thus assert themselves as judges of Karen. This certainty is also related to the unequivocal, explicit way in which negative moral emotions are generally expressed in the corpus. Negative moral emotions and evaluations, to attribute and ratify Karen, are realized through the vast number of impoliteness that occurs in the corpus, mostly with Karen as a target, but also addressed at other posters, victims, and witnesses. Whereas some dissent was found among posters regarding perceptions and evaluations of Karen and other social actors, there are no recriminations made regarding the use of language aggression, which points to incivility having become normative in this space. For its part politeness, also a constant in the data, is mostly directed towards the poster in-group as a means to bring them together. Once in-groupness has been co-constructed, the group as an agent can jointly realize the deprecation of Karen. In this sense, it is indeed paradoxical that the attribution and ratifcation of Karen’s social identity is premised on her ofine behavior being assessed as uncivil, mostly due to her aggressiveness, rudeness, and inappropriateness (Culpeper 2011); however, those very same identity processes are realized by posters online in very uncivil ways. Therefore, we also see a nexus here – as Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2022a: 27) did: “the Karen identity emerges ofine out of her own face-threats to diferent others but is ratifed as an identity online via diferent others’ face-threatening behavior.” Also connected with aggression towards Karen, the analysis explored whether widespread ofine/online misogynistic ideologies played a role in the online attribution and ratifcation of Karen. Results showed that many of the same DTF violence strategies found by Esposito and Alba Zollo (2021) in their corpus of YouTube comments regarding women politicians in the United Kingdom were also frequently deployed against Karen. This fnding could tentatively lead us to conclude that, indeed, misogyny may be at the core of this stigmatized social identity. In this regard, it is important to consider that impoliteness, and other forms of uncivil or aggressive behavior, have been described as an attention-gathering device (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2009). As a result, although individuals positioned as Karen waged impoliteness ofine to coerce others and express their anger, displaying this impoliteness online, along with the exposure and social regulation described previously, fulflls basic entertaining functions which receive even more attention because this marked behavior is carried out by women. This would also help explain the widespread interest in Karen rather than in Ken/Kevin. All in all, the analysis showed how uncivil public spaces – such as KGC, become evaluative and moralizing sites about ofine normativity and expectations of civil behavior in ofine public spaces; it is in that synergetic

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way that the ofine/online nexus efectively emerges. Furthermore, in view of the characteristics associated with KGC, we feel quite confdent in regarding it as a “tyrannical space,” i.e., no-go places associated with aggression and threat (Percy-Smith and Matthews 2001) not very diferent from the geographies of bullying described by Andrews and Chen (2006). Whereas the initial defnition of the concept situated it in physical ofine spaces, it would seem necessary to reconceptualize it to account for its application to online spaces. Further research should probe into the reconceptualization of online tyrannical spaces as well as the very probable interconnections between what has been deemed as a global epidemic by the United Nations – in a 2015 report regarding online violence against women – and the emergence of Karen. This is not meant to necessarily excuse Karen’s often very reprehensible behavior, but it may help explain the widespread focus on Karen rather than on Ken/Kevin, despite the potential displays of similar types of demeanor. Notes 1. For a detailed discussion, see https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HTLE9McF5k dUqQMOnQbXG?si=7BMNsk86TiCc4vUszqpU2wandnd=1 2. More specifcally, a public place is an indoor or outdoor area, either privately or publicly owned, which can be accessed by the public either because they have the right to be there or by (implicit or explicit) invitation. Sometimes, payment may be required to enter public places. Examples of public spaces are roads (including the pavement), public squares, parks, beaches, etc. For their part, public accommodations, as legally defned in the United States, are establishments that lodge transient guests (such as hotels and hostels), facilities engaged in selling food for consumption (including those at gas stations) and any place for exhibition or entertainment, among others. Examples of public accommodations include restaurants, retail stores and rental and service establishments. Under federal law, public accommodations need to be accessible to the disabled and cannot discriminate based on race color, religion, or national group. https:// defnitions.uslegal.com/p/public-place/ 3. https://aoir.org/ethics/ 4. All the examples have been extracted from the corpus and labelled after the fle where they appear.

References Andrews, Gavin J., and Sandra Chen. 2006. “The Production of Tyrannical Space.” Children’s Geographies 4 (2): 239–250. Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2021. “Polymedia in Interaction.” Pragmatics and Society 12 (5): 707–724. Angouri, Jo. 2016. “Studying Identity.” In Research Methods in Intercultural Communication: A Practical Guide, edited by Zhu Hua, 37–52. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

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Angouri, Jo, and Miriam Locher. 2012. “Theorising Disagreement.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (12): 1549–1553. Antoci, Angelo, Alexia Delfno, Fabio Paglieri, Fabrizio Panebianco, and Fabio Sabatini. 2016. “Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach.” PLoS ONE 11 (11). Bailey, Jane, Valerie Steeves, Jacquelyn Burkell, and Priscilla Regan. 2013. “Negotiating with Gender Stereotypes on Social Networking Sites: From ‘Bicycle Face’ to Facebook.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 37 (2): 91–112. Bannister, Jon, and Anthony O’Sullivan. 2013. “Civility, Community Cohesion and Antisocial Behaviour: Policy and Social Harmony.” Journal of Social Policy 42 (1): 91–110. Bednarek, Monika. 2010. “Emotion Talk and Emotional Talk: Approaches to Language and Emotion in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Beyond.” In Proceedings of ISFC 35: Voices Around the World, Vol. 2, edited by Canzhong Wu, Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, and Maria Herke, 39–45. Sydney: The 35th ISFC Organizing Committee. Blommaert, Jan. 2013. Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, Jan. 2017. “Ludic Membership and Orthopractic Mobilization: On Slacktivism and All That.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 193. Blommaert, Jan. 2018. Durkheim and the Internet: On Sociolinguistics and the Sociological Imagination. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Blommaert, Jan. 2019. “Political Discourse in Post-Digital Societies.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 236. Blommaert, Jan, and Ico Maly. 2019. “Invisible Lines in the Online-Ofine Linguistic Landscape.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 223 (11). Blommaert, Jan, and Piia Varis. 2013. “Enough is Enough: The Heuristics of Authenticity in Superdiversity.” In Linguistic Superdiversity in Urban Areas: Research Approaches, edited by J. Duarte and I. Gogoli, 143–159. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42 (1): 4–17. Bonotti, Matteo, and Steven T. Zech. 2021. Recovering Civility during COVID19. Cham: Palgrave McMillan. Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2014. “Confict Management in Massive Polylogues: A Case Study from YouTube.” Journal of Pragmatics 73: 19–36. Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2021. “The Role of Emotional Evaluation in Social Media Activism: A Case Study.” Paper delivered at the 13th International Politeness Symposium, 7th iMean Conference. Basel, Switzerland. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies 7 (4–5): 585–614.

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Calhoun, Cheshire. 2000. “The Virtue of Civility.” Philosophy and Public Afairs 29 (3): 251–275. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Ofence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2016. “Impoliteness Strategies.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, edited by Alessandro Capone and Jacob L. Mey, 421–445. Cham: Springer. Davidson, Joyce, Mr Mick Smith, and Liz Bondi, eds. 2005. Emotional Geographies. Abingdon: Routledge. De Freitas, C. Alex. 2010. “Changing Spaces: Locating Public Space at the Intersection of the Physical and Digital.” Geography Compass 4 (6): 630–643. Dobs, Abby, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2013. “Impoliteness in Interaction: Accounting for Face-Threat Witness’s Responses.” Journal of Pragmatics 53: 112–130. Dynel, Marta. 2021. “Desperately Seeking Intentions: Genuine and Jocular Insults on Social Media.” Journal of Pragmatics 179: 26–36. Esposito, Eleonora, and Sole Alba Zollo. 2021. “‘How Dare You Call Her a Pig, I Know Several Pigs Who Would Be Upset If They Knew’ A Multimodal Critical Discursive Approach to Online Misogyny against UK MPs on YouTube.” Journal of Language Aggression and Confict 9 (1): 47–75. Fernández-Amaya, Lucía. 2019. “Disagreement and (Im)Politeness in a Spanish Family Members’ WhatsApp Group.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 23 (4): 1065–1087. Fine, Gary Alan. 2012. “Group Culture and The Interaction Order: Local Sociology on The Meso-Level.” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (1): 159–179. Gahnmi, Mohamed R. 2021. “What’s the Most Karen Thing You Have Seen? Perceptions of Ofense as a Vehicle for Spreading a Gender Stereotype in a Transnational Online Community.” Paper Delivered at 13th International Politeness Symposium, 7th iMean Conference. Basel, Switzerland. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2021. “Getting into The Mob: A Netnographic, Case-Study Approach to Online Public Shaming.” In Analyzing Digital Discourse: Between Convergence and Controversy, edited by Marjut Johansson, SannaKaisa Tanskanen, and Jan Chovanec, 247–274. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2009. “Impoliteness and Identity in the American News Media: The ‘Culture Wars’.” Journal of Politeness Research 5: 273–303. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2022a. “Karen: Stigmatized Social Identity and Face-Threat in the On/Ofine Nexus.” Journal of Pragmatics 188: 14–30. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2022b. “Moral Emotions, Good Moral Panics, Social Regulation, and Online Public Shaming.” Language and Communication 84: 61–75. Gee, James Paul. 2005. “Semiotic Social Spaces and Afnity Spaces: From the Age of Mythology to Today’s Schools.” In Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context, edited by David Barton and Karin Tusting, 214–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gee, James Paul. 2014. How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Gofman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: The Free Press.

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Greenspan, Rachel. 2020. How the Name ‘Karen’ Became a Stand-In for Problematic White Women and Hugely Popular Meme. www.insider.com/ Karen-meme-origin-the-history-of-calling-women-Karen-white-2020-5. Haidt, Jonathan. 2003. “The Moral Emotions.” In Handbook of Afective Sciences, edited by R. J. Davidson, 852–870. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haidt, Jonathan, and Jesse Graham. 2007. “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize.” Social Justice Research 20: 98–116. Iveson, Kurt. 2007. Publics and the City. Malden: Blackwell. Jones, Rodney. 2009. “Dancing, Skating and Sex: Action and text in the Digital Age.” Journal of Applied Linguistics 6 (3): 283–302. Jones, Rodney. 2017. “Surveillant Landscapes.” Linguistic Landscapes 3 (2): 149–186. Joseph, John. 2004. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Cham: Springer. Marlow, Mikaela. 2017. “Public Discourse and Intergroup Communication.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, edited by Jon Nussbaum. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monroe, Andrew E., and E. Ashby Plant. 2019. “The Dark Side of Morality: Prioritizing Sanctity Over Care Motivates Denial of Mind and Prejudice Toward Sexual Outgroups.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148 (2): 342–360. Negra, Diane, and Julia Leyda. 2020. “Querying ‘Karen’: The rise of the Angry White Woman.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24 (1): 350–357. Percy-Smith, Barry, and Hugh Matthews. 2001. “Tyrannical Spaces: Young People, Bullying and Urban Neighbourhoods.” Local Environment 6 (1): 49–63. Rempala, Kit, Marley Hornewer, and Sydney Samoska. 2020. “The Dark Side of Morality: Grayer than You Think?” AJOB Neuroscience 11 (4): 295–297. Scollon, Ron, and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London and New York: Routledge. Sifanou, Maria. 2019. “Im/politeness and In/Civility: A Neglected Relationship?” Journal of Pragmatics 147: 49–64. Slater, Joseph. 2016. Public Workers. Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900–1962. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Smith, Philip, Timothy Phillips, and Ryan King. 2010. Incivility: The Rude Stranger in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan, and Deidre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Vähämaa, Miika. 2013. “A Group Epistemology Is a Group Necessity: A Reply to Fallis and Mathiesen.” Social Epistemology 27 (1): 26–31. Varis, Piia, and Jan Blommaert. 2015. “Conviviality and Collectives on Social Media: Virality, Memes, and New Social Structures.” Multilingual Margins: A Journal of Multilingualism from the Periphery 2 (1): 31–45. Workman, Cliford I., Keith J. Yoder, and Jean Decety. 2020. “The Dark Side of Morality – Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence.” AJOB Neuroscience 11 (4): 269–284. Zappavigna, Michele. 2014. “Enacting Identity in Microblogging Through Ambient Afliation.” Discourse and Communication 8 (2): 209–228.

7

The physical-digital interface What does “ici” (“here”) mean in a written online discussion? Michel Marcoccia

1

Introduction

Participating in an online discussion involves participants experiencing two environments at the same time: the spatial environment in which they are physically present and the “virtual” environment built by the platform used for online discussion. It is therefore interesting to study the way in which participants in online discussions refer to their spatial locations and, in particular, to analyze the contrast between those who refer to their physical spatial locations and those who highlight their “virtual” presence in the shared digital discussion space. In this chapter, this phenomenon will be studied in a restrictive way, in analyzing one of its most visible manifestations: the use of the French spatial deictic expression “ici” (“here”) in messages posted in French-speaking discussion forums. A hundred occurrences of the term “ici” (“here”) will be analyzed, taken from messages posted in two discussion forums accessible on the French website Doctissimo (a medical information site), concerning veterinary medicine and vaccines against the coronavirus. The references of the deictic “ici” (“here”) will be identifed and the results lead to a comparative analysis of diferent modalities of discursive construction of space in these discussions. Our observations reveal a contrast between the cases where “ici” (“here”) refers to the physical space in which the sender of a message is located and the cases where this deictic refers to digital discussion space. This opposition can be analyzed as revealing the absence or presence of a feeling of shared space or even of belonging to a community. Moreover, this study will allow us to observe the diferent frontiers that the digital space designated by “ici” (“here”) can have, from “cyberspace” in general to a particular thread of discussion. Likewise, the use of “ici” (“here”) to designate physical space can contribute to various strategies of identity construction: from national (“ici = in France”) to individual (when “ici” is the expression of “me”).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-10

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Thus, this chapter shows how participants in a digital written discussion adapt their descriptions of spatial references to the constraints of online communication. This also shows the fexibility of French as a deictic language, and the importance of spatial references as mechanisms of identity construction. More theoretically, it confrms that, in the context of discourse analysis, space is more a discursive and performative realization than a contextual data. 2

Spatial deixis in digital communication

Digital technologies increase our communication capacity by providing new communication channels, but at the same time they create interaction contexts far removed from the model of face-to-face interaction. Digital media separate the place or time of message production from that of its reception. A consequence of this disjunction is to lead users to simultaneously experience two distinct environments: the physical environment in which one is actually present and the environment constituted by the medium. This experience of an environment, or of a digital media space, corresponds to what is called “telepresence,” that is to say the perception of an interaction space, materialized by a technical platform and constituted by the digital conversations that take place there. Thus, participation in an online discussion, in a discussion forum or a site for commenting on newspapers articles, implies that the participants experience two environments at the same time: the spatial environment in which they are physically present (at home, in their ofce, etc.) and the digital environment built by the platform used for the online discussion. As the experience of online discussion combines the separation of disjointed physical spaces and the construction of a shared digital space, one can consider that, in this situation, space is both what brings us together and what separates us (Beaude 2012: 17). In fact, from a theoretical point of view, this work amounts to questioning the notion of spatial deixis in a context of digital communication. The question is: from what reference will spatial deixis be constructed in digital discursive exchanges? Deictic expressions are usually defned as linguistic elements whose interpretation makes reference to properties of the extralinguistic context of the utterance in which they occur (Sidnell 2009: 114). More precisely, a deictic is an expression that refers to a referent whose identifcation is achieved through the identity of the speakers and the spatio-temporal context of its occurrence (Kleiber 1986: 19). Spatial deixis, like temporal deixis, corresponds to a principle of location particularly important in discursive exchanges because it serves to hold the participants to a specifc context from which the exchanges will

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take their meanings (Cairns 1991: 19). With a classic view of deixis, spatial deixis is considered more “basic” than temporal deixis (Lyons 1977: 669). In particular, for spatial deictics, “ici” (“here”) is generally considered a “transparent” deictic in the sense that its referent is unambiguous because it is an obligatory component of the situation of enunciation: the place where the one who produces the message is located (Kleiber 1986: 5). In fact, the digital communication situation makes the reference of this deictic more problematic. What is the place/space that serves as the frame of reference? Linguists agree that a deictic expression is a linguistic element whose interpretation is based on the properties of the extralinguistic context of the utterance in which it appears. But this defnition is problematic when looking at online communication situations. In an online discussion, what is the extra-linguistic context? The one that relates to the respective locations of the diferent speakers or the one that refers to the platform used for online communication, which will function as the framework for the exchanges? What is the situation that is taken as a frame of reference? The physical space of the users, if one considers that the production of discourse remains above all physically situated. The digital space, if one admits a kind of autonomy of the internet in relation to the physical world. Considering digital platforms as spaces is neither curious nor original. On the contrary, as shown by Casilli (2004) or Beaude (2012), the defnition of the Internet as a space is a kind of structuring metaphor which is manifested by a spatial vocabulary. One of the discourses structuring our representation of the Internet is undoubtedly that of space, the most indisputable indices of which are the terms used in any contemporary language to describe the activity of consulting data stored and transmitted on the internet network: “cyberspace,” “home,” “visita,” “besuchen,” “accueil,” “address,” “indirizzo,” “zugang,” “accès,” “hébergement,” “privacy,” etc. (Casilli 2004: 98). These few words evoke a narrative pattern underlying the imagery of digital platforms as spaces. Casilli (2004) also shows that this spatial connotation is the basis of an ethic of hospitality in “digital areas” and of the implementation of many hospitality rituals when a newcomer arrives in a space, for example in a discussion forum. These various hospitality rituals (welcoming newcomers, introducing them to the rules to follow, etc.) can be seen as activities through which an online collective tests its community dimension, traces the boundaries of its territory and indirectly establishes a discussion platform in an interaction space (Marcoccia 2009). From a pragmatic perspective, Yule (1996: 9) asserts that the most fundamental distinction made by deixis seems to be “near the speaker” and “far from the speaker.” Hence, there are both proximal terms (this, here, now) and distal terms (that, there, then). Thus, a fundamental distinction

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can be made between what is closed to or distant from the speaker. Proximal terms are normally understood in terms of the location of the speaker, which is the deictic center. Therefore, “here” and “now” are generally understood to refer to the speaker’s location and time. In fact, this distal/proximal opposition is not necessarily relevant for analyzing online discussion situations. Indeed, participants in an exchange in a discussion forum are physically distant, but close in the sense that they share the same discussion platform. In short, digital communication forces us to go beyond the classic defnitions of spatial deixis. Indeed, this situation is very far from the canonical situation from which speakers are used to interpreting deictics. According to Lyons (1977: 367), the canonical situation implies, among other properties, a shared physical context and temporal synchrony (“here” is also “now”). This communicative confguration is grounded in the origo, in the deictic center of a three-dimension coordinate system: ego, hic and nunc (“I,” “here” and “now”), where the speaker at the time of utterance serves as a referent and deictic anchorage for personal, spatial and temporal orientation. These three orientations, organized in an “egotic way” (Levinson 1983: 63), characterize the canonical case of deixis. However, online asynchronous discussion (for example in a discussion forum) absolutely does not correspond to this canonical situation: there is no stable and homogeneous “I,” “here” and “now.” The truth is that digital communication is not the only communication situation for which spatial deixis does not strictly refer to this “canonical situation” (Bazzanella 2019: 7). In fact, many recent works have shown that the deictic “here” has a much more complex functioning than that described in classical analyses, with spatial, non-spatial, temporal or textual uses (in this last case, the deictic refers to a place in a text). The uses of “ici” (“here”) are much more varied than those usually associated with it (Kleiber 2008, 2018). Furthermore, many studies highlight the phenomena of “deictic projection.” The spatial origin is often extended, using a deictic projection (Lyons 1977: 579), to peripheral cases of spatial deictics, such as a place, a city or a nation, an imaginary place, the body of the speaker, a visual path, the location of another person that serves as a point of reference. In these cases, the context plays an important role for the understanding of a spatial deictic outside the canonical situation (Bazzanella 2019: 7). In fact, the question of spatial deixis, in particular the difculties in interpreting deictics, generally arises when the interlocutors do not share the same physical context. The lack of a common physical context, such as in phone calls (as well as in digital, synchronous or asynchronous written interactions), can make comprehension difcult. With regard more particularly to spatial deixis, person-oriented deictics must be made explicit

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when using mobile phones. For example, “I’m here” – pronounced on a train using a cell phone – is quite impossible to interpret from the point of view of spatial deixis. A similar problem arises in videoconferencing communication situations (studied in Marcoccia 2011). Thus, since conversations take place in distinct (and often distant) spaces, what roles do these contexts play in the exchange? Marcoccia (2011) presents various phenomena highlighting what he calls “efects of site.” It shows that in some cases the spatial contexts can sometimes become the stake of the exchanges or constitute a factor of disturbance or even still be a determining element of the conversational activity. Very often, the speaker asks his interlocutor: “T’es où ?” (“Where are you?”). Since the communication situation in a discussion forum is therefore very far from the canonical situation for spatial deixis, it is interesting to analyze how participants in an online discussion adapt the description of the spatial context of their discussion to this particular situation. In particular, the challenge is for users to clearly formulate the spatial framework to which they refer in their discussions. The focus of our observation is therefore the contrast between those who refer to their physical spatial locations and those who highlight their presence in the shared digital discussion space. The question of space in digital communication has rarely been addressed from a linguistic perspective, in particular through the question of deixis. Two works can nevertheless be mentioned: the fairly old paper published by Holmes in 1995 and the research work carried out by Dostalek in 2020 to validate a Master’s thesis. In his paper, Holmes examines how participants in computer-mediated communication (CMC) adapt their descriptions of location and spatial relationships to the constraints of online conversations, with particular attention to the role of language in the creation and use of telepresence. This chapter analyzes deixis in messages produced on synchronous digital discussion platforms and shows that the participants use two systems of place of reference: the physical location and the location in the network. Physical location is used as a “conventional” reference but digital space is the privileged frame of reference from which spatial deixis is built. This work thus develops a refection on the fexibility of deictic language and on spatial reference as a resource for action. Our chapter is situated quite clearly in the perspective of Holmes’ paper (1995). We can also cite the Master’s Degree thesis by Dostalek (2020), which highlights the very limited use of spatial deixis in asynchronous discussion forums, given by the absence of a shared physical setting. It should be noted that the results of the study presented in this chapter do not confrm Dostalek’s observations.

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Corpus and methodology

This study consists of analyzing 100 occurrences of the term “ici” (“here”), taken from messages posted in two discussion forums on the Doctissimo site. Doctissimo is a French-speaking website dedicated to health and wellbeing. The site has one of the largest audiences in these areas and ofers access to various discussion forums. A survey conducted in 2007 by INSERM (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) describes the typical profle of Doctissimo readers as follows: a woman, young or middle-aged, with a high level of education, employed, living with a partner, with extensive use of the Internet and confronted with a health problem (personal or in her family). Thus, 80% of site visitors are women and have a rather high purchasing power. Doctissimo relies on these demographic data to defne its commercial strategy and derives its revenue from advertising aimed specifcally at this audience (Renahy et al. 2007). The site has more than 10 million visits per month and ofers access to various very popular discussion forums. In 2022, the Doctissimo forums have nearly 300 million messages from just over 700,000 subscribers. Our research method is based on four phases, starting from a phase of persistent observation to a phase of pragmatic-semantic analysis of the referents of the deictic expression “ici” (“here”). In each phase, the focus of attention was on: Phase 1. Choosing two forums (or sub-forums): “Animals/Veterinary medicine” and “Coronavirus/Vaccines.” These forums were chosen for their diversity and because they are very representative of the usual uses of forums in Doctissimo (mutual social support, self-disclosure, narrations, see Gauducheau and Marcoccia 2011). Phase 2. Extracting messages containing the term “ici” (“here”) (with the keyword search tool available on the Doctissimo forums platform. “Ici” (“here”) was chosen because it is arguably the most direct and universal example of spatial deixis (Diessel 1999: 38). Phase 3. Building a corpus of 100 occurrences of “ici” (“here”), by eliminating expressions that are not spatial deictics, such as “d’ici-là” (“by then”), or “ici” (“here”) to say “dans ce cas” (“in this case”), for example. Phase 4. Identifying the various references of the uses of “ici” (“here”) in the messages to carry out a comparative analysis of the diferent modalities of discursive construction of space in these discussions. The messages were collected at two diferent points in time: during the month of June 2021 and January 2022. The representativeness of the phenomena

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observed is not based on statistics but on the knowledge of the discussion forums by the researcher, who combines the methods of persistent observation (Herring 2004) and “small corpus” analysis (Danino 2018). 4

Results

4.1 What does “ici” mean?

The results of this analysis, which confrm those of Holmes (1995), reveal a contrast between the cases where “ici” (“here”) refers to the physical space in which the sender of a message is located and the cases where this deictic refers to the digital discussion space. In other words, there is a contrast between “ici/physical space” and “ici/digital space.” A detailed analysis of our corpus shows that “ici” (“here”) refers to fve types of spaces. a. The digital discussion space (51 messages / 100) b. The physical space in which the author of the message is located (35 messages / 100) c. The hypertextual space: “ici” (“here”) as a link to a document (12 messages / 100) d. The space of self: the ego, the person who sends the message (1 message / 100) e. The space in a document: a paragraph, a place in a text (1 message / 100) 4.2 “Ici” (“here”) refers to the digital discussion space

Most often, “ici” (“here”) designates the digital space, as in the example (1). (1)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) Bien sûr que non, personne n’est mauvais ici. Je suis sur Docti depuis sufsamment de temps pour avoir croisé de vraies pestes, de tous âges, d’ailleurs. Et faire la diférence. English version. Of course not, no one is bad here. I’ve been on Docti long enough to have come across real baddies, of all ages, by the way. And it makes a diference.

In our corpus, this kind of statement is very frequent; it shows that the feeling of presence in a shared digital space outweighs the feeling of being in a physical space separate from those of other forum users. This phenomenon is undoubtedly linked to the community dimension of the Doctissimo forums, which promotes a feeling of belonging to a group and therefore to a shared space.

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A comparison can be made with another corpus, for example, the comments of readers of the LeMonde.fr website. In these messages, which are comments posted by users in response to articles published in the digital edition of the French daily Le Monde, there is no occurrence of “ici” (“here”) which refers to the digital space. This result is consistent with the fact that a platform for commenting on press articles does not really create a feeling of belonging to a community of users. (Marcoccia 2018). Conversely, the “Blabla 18–25 ans” discussion forum on the French website Jeuxvideo.com (analyzed in Gauducheau and Marcoccia 2021) has a strong community dimension: it brings together young people aged 18 to 25 who share the same passion for video games and the same type of humor. In this forum, there are many messages containing the deictic “ici” (“here”) referring to the shared digital space, as in example (2). (2)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Blabla 18–25 ans” forum (Jeuxvideo.com) Le pire c’est le job “happiness manager,” je crois qu’il n’y a pas plus bullshit comme “travail,” y’en a ici? English version. The worst is the job “happiness manager,” I believe that there is no more bullshit job, is there any here?

The feeling of sharing the same space is however not only linked to the community dimension of an online collective but also to the architecture of the discussion platform, which favors or not the feeling of sharing a common space. For example, the OuiAreMakers website (analyzed in Marcoccia 2020), which allows makers to ofer tips to other DIY enthusiasts, undoubtly has a community dimension. But, unlike a discussion forum, message exchanges correspond to comments posted to evaluate posted tutorials. Thus, at the level of the interface, the platform does not strictly ofer a single space for discussion but many distinct spaces to post comments about various tutorials. So it is interesting to note that there is no occurrence of “ici = the digital space” in the messages posted on this platform. In the messages taken from the two Doctissimo forums, when “ici” (“here”) refers to the digital space, this space can have various boundaries: it can correspond to the platform as a whole (in 32 posts) as in example (3), or to the specifc section (in 19 posts) as in example (4). (3)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) N’ayant pas l’habitude de ce type de forum, je suis venu ici, car je suis un peu désemparé et j’ai l’impression de plus avoir ma vie d’avant depuis désormais 4 mois . . .

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(4)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) Je n’ai pas l’habitude de poster ici, je reste plutôt du côté chat. English version. I’m not used to posting here, I rather stay on the side of discussions on cats.

In these messages, what do users say about the digital spaces “ici” (“here”) refers to? When “ici” (“here”) refers to a particular section, it works in contrast to other sections and is often used in messages that indicate a posting error, as in example (5). (5)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) Tu n’as pas posté au bon endroit. Ici tu es sur le forum Médecine Vétérinaire, je te conseille plutôt de poster sur les forums psychologie ou famille. English version. You posted in the wrong place. Here you are on the Veterinary Medicine forum, I advise you to post on the psychology or family forums.

When “ici” (“here”) refers to the forum in general, it is generally associated with positive values: it is a space where one can fnd help (example 6), a space populated by people who “look like us” (example 7). (6)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) J’ai posé la question ici parce que mon véto est absent jusqu’à vendredi English version. I asked the question here because my vet is absent until Friday.

(7)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) En efet, on est plusieurs sensibles/hypersensibles ici. Perso, c’est aussi pour ça que je m’y retrouve. English version. Indeed, there are many of us who are sensitive/ hypersensitive here. Personally, that’s also why I am here.

The digital space is also a space regulated by various rules, for example those established by the website administrators (the Doctissimo charter).

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Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Ici il n’y a pas de médecin qui poste et même s’il y en avait un, il n’aurait pas le droit de te renseigner de par la charte de DOCTISSIMO. English version. Here there is no doctor who posts and even if there was one, he would not have the right to inform you by the charter of DOCTISSIMO.

It is also a space in which certain ways of communicating are privileged, for example the use of humor and irony. (9)

Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) Va falloir que tu te fasses au second degré docti. Vois-tu, ça s’installe insidieusement au fur et à mesure que l’on avance en ancienneté ici. English version. You will have to adapt to the second degree docti. You see, it grows insidiously as one advances in seniority here.

More rarely, there are criticisms, for example on the stupidity of the other participants. (10) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Ouh là !! apparemment il y en a certains ici qui passe trop de temps sur BFM TV. English version. Ooh !! Apparently there are some here who spend too much time on BFM TV. 4.3 “Ici” (“here”) refers to the physical space in which the author of the message is located

When “ici” (“here”) refers to the physical space in which the author of the message is located, this space can correspond to diferent levels, from the largest to the most restricted: country, region, city, workplace, home. Most often, there is in these messages a standard use of “ici” (“here”) in the sense that, implicitly, “ici” (“here”) is opposed or distinguished from an elsewhere (“over there”). Thus, “ici” (“here”) refers to a space which is opposed (in example 11), compared (in example 12), or simply distinguished for its particularities (example 13). (11) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo)

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Michel Marcoccia On stérilise les chattes par les fancs??? c’est courant comme façon de faire ? là je viens d’apprendre quelque chose, je n’ai jamais vu ni entendu que les vétos par ici opéraient de cette façon. English version. They sterilize cats by the fanks??? Is that a common way of doing things? I just learned something, I’ve never seen or heard that the vets around here operated this way.

(12) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Elle se demande toujours si elle peut travailler de la même manière que moi ici en France. English version. She always wonders if she can work the same way as me here in France. (13) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Ben il semblerait que peu d’écoles le respectent, en tout cas par ici. English version. Well it seems that few schools respect him, at least around here. In fact, the specifcity of the place in which the author of the message is located is generally put forward, in a positive (14), or negative way (15). (14) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) On en a souvent des hérissons par ici. C’est sympa. English version. We often have hedgehogs around here. It’s nice. (15) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) En fait j’ai très peur des véto ici pour ce qui est conditions d’hygiène. English version. In fact I’m very afraid of the vets here concerning hygienic conditions. In any case, when “ici” (“here”) refers to a physical space, the online discussion establishes a disjunction rather than a sharing of space. Moreover, “ici” (“here”) sometimes refers to the family home and we then observe the shift of a deictic which somewhat loses its spatial referent to become a substitute for the personal pronoun “nous” (“we”), as in example (16). (16) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Ici mon mari et moi avons eu le covid au mois d’aout. English version. Here my husband and I had the covid at August.

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4.4 “Ici” (“here”) refers to the hypertextual space

In some messages, “ici” becomes a “techno-word” (Paveau 2015), a term associated with a navigation function in the hypertext that constitutes the Internet network. Thus, the term “ici” is a hypertext link and appears as such (with the underlining and visual enrichment that characterizes it); it becomes an area on which the message reader can click to reach another document (the target document), as in the example (17). (17) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Moi j’ai perdu le gout complètement, mais j’ai pu me rétablir en cherchant à en savoir ici English version. I lost my taste completely, but I was able to recover by trying to fnd out here “Ici” refers to a space that the reader of the message is invited to explore. It is, paradoxically, a “here” which is “over there,” in another zone of the hypertext that the user can reach by clicking. This space is a manifestation of the phenomenon of delinearization (Paveau 2017: 117): the digital discourse is a delinearized discourse, that is to say a discourse which does not establish a linear reading and which is composed of elements which give it a “depth.” The delinearization of digital discourse relies on many digital discursive forms, for example hyperlinks, hashtags (preceded by #) and nickname (preceded by @), on Twitter, etc. From a semiotic point of view, “ici” functions as a “passing sign” (Bonaccorsi 2013: 130). The documents to which the user is directed when he clicks on “ici” can be of various kinds: websites (18), questionnaire (19), radio broadcast (20), sub-forum (21), attachment (such as an X-ray for example). (18) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Le mal continue ? Si non tu peux cliquer ici pour voir des solutions English version. The pain continues? If not you can click here to see solutions. (19) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) (Papa vivant avec le parent2 de votre/vos enfants, vous avez été ou êtes en télétravail, vous avez un ou plusieurs enfants âgés entre 0 et 10 ans). Cliquez ici pour accéder au questionnaire English version. (Dad living with the parent2 of your child(ren), you have been or are teleworking, you have one or more children aged between 0 and 10 years old). Click here to access the questionnaire

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(20) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Tu as toute l’émission ici: www.franceinter.fr/emi [ . . . ] -mars-2020 English version. You have the whole show here: www.franceinter.fr/ emi [ . . . ] -mars-2020 (21) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Animals/Veterinary medicine” forum (Doctissimo) Essaye plutôt ici http://forum.ados.fr/love/Amour/liste_sujet-1.htm English version. Try here http://forum.ados.fr/love/Amour/liste_sujet-1. htm (22) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Est qu’il y a qq1 ici pour me dire quelles sont les évolutions possible de ce qu’on voit sur radio ici ? RADIO ici English version. Is there anyone here to tell me what are the possible evolutions of what we see on X-ray here? X-ray here 4.5 “Ici” (“here”) refers to the space of self

The analysis of example (23) allows us to observe an even more important restriction of the scope of the deictic “ici” “here” which refers only to “I.” (23) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) Ici je suis enceinte de 10SA et ma sage femme est aussi enceinte a 4ou5mois de grossesse English version. Here I am 10 weeks pregnant and my midwife is also pregnant at 4 or 5 months of pregnancy. It is a retraction on the territory of the “me,” which corresponds to what Barbéris (1998: 30) calls “ego territoriality” where “ici” (“here”) corresponds to a purely individual appropriation of space. In fact, what counts here is not the physical presence of the speaker but the preeminence of his/ her personal point of view. 4.6 “Ici” (“here”) refers to a space in a document

Finally, “ici” (“here”) can be used to designate a space or a part of a document, for example a paragraph. This is a textual use of spatial deixis. (24) Excerpt from a message posted in the “Coronavirus/Vaccines against COVID-19” forum (Doctissimo) J’ai commencé à utiliser quelques méthodes qui fonctionné pour moi. C’est ici:

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1. Premièrement, les causes de vous êtes déprimée pendant de confnement sont le manque de routine et socialisation. English version. I started using a few methods that worked for me. It’s here: 1. First, the causes of you being depressed during confnement are lack of routine and socialization. The results of the analysis can be summarized in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1 What does “ici” mean? The digital discussion space (51 messages / 100)

Doctissimo (32 messages / 100) A sub-forum/a section (19 messages / 100)

The physical space in which the author of the message is located (35 messages / 100)

Place of residence – city, region (14 messages / 100) Country (14 messages / 100) Family home (4 messages / 100) Home – house/apartment (2 messages / 100) Workplace (1 message / 100)

The hypertextual space (12 messages / 100)

Websites (6 messages / 100) Another discussion forum (3 messages / 100) Questionnaire (1 message / 100) Radio show (1 message / 100) Attached document (X-Ray) (1 message / 100)

A space in the document (1 message / 100)

A paragraph (1 message / 100)

5

Discussion and conclusion

What conclusions can be drawn from these results? a) This work shows how participants in a digital written discussion adapt their descriptions of spatial references to the constraints of online communication. This also shows the fexibility of the deictic language. b) This work highlights the ability of the Internet to create “common space”: the Internet is a common space that we share on a global scale. Beaude (2012) speaks of “synchorization.” In the same way that synchronization is the constitution of a common time, “synchorization” is the construction of a common space. Synchorization (formed from the Greek chôra – existential space – and syn – which means common) is the process of creating a common space to be and to act (Beaude 2012).

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c) This work also shows the importance of spatial references as mechanisms of identity construction, for example by creating a sense of community belonging based on the sharing of a common space. In other words, as Scheglof (1972) has already shown, a place formulating expression (like “here”) can imply a membership analysis insofar as it establishes a certain type of relationship with others: exclusion or inclusion. As Yus (2011: 26) reminds, the use of a digital platform dedicated to discussion and the possibility of constituting an archive of these online discussions promotes the emergence of virtual communities and, correlatively, the feeling of sharing a common space. d) This also shows that when “ici” “here” refers to a physical space, this can have diferent sizes and contours, from the country (which could for example be compared to the countries of other Internet users) to the maximum tightening of the “here = me,” passing through the fgure of the family hearth. e) Thus, this work shows that the spatial deixis is not strictly linked to the objective position of the speaker but rather to his/her point of view, his/ her perspective and his/her subjectivity. f) Finally, in a more theoretical way, this work confrms that, within the framework of the analysis of discourse and interactions, space must be apprehended as a discursive and performative realization more than as a contextual data. Thus, spatial deixis must be defned from an interactional perspective, which challenges the defnition of space as a relatively transparent conceptual category (Levinson 1992).

References Barbéris, Jeanne-Marie. 1998. “Identité, ipséité dans la deixis spatiale: Ici et là, deux appréhensions concurrentes de l’espace ?” L’Information Grammaticale 77: 28–32. Bazzanella, Carla. 2019. “The Complex Process of Mis/Understanding Spatial Deixis in Face-to-Face Interaction.” Pragmática Sociocultural/Sociocultural Pragmatic 7: 1–18. Beaude, Boris. 2012. Internet. Changer l’espace, changer la société. Limoges: FYP éditions. Bonaccorsi, Julia. 2013. “Approches sémiologiques du web.” In Manuel d’analyse du web, edited by Christine Barats, 125–146. Paris: Armand Colin. Cairns, Barbara. 1991. “Spatial Deixis. The Use of Spatial Co-ordinates in Spoken Language.” Lund University, Department of Linguistics, Working Papers 38: 19–28. Casilli, Antonio A. 2004. “‘Posthumani nihil a me alienum puto’: Le discours de l’hospitalité dans la cyberculture.” Sociétés 83: 97–116.

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Danino, Charlotte. 2018. “Les Petits Corpus – Introduction.” Corpus. http://journals. openedition.org/corpus/3099. Diessel, Holger. 1999. Demonstratives: Form, Function and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Dostalek, Tomas. 2020. Reference and Deixis in Internet Forums. Thesis for Master’s Degree. Univerzita Pardubice, Czechia. Gauducheau, Nadia, and Michel Marcoccia. 2011. “Le soutien social dans les forums de discussion Internet: réalisations interactionnelles et contrat de communication.” In Psychologie sociale, communication et langage. De la conception aux applications, edited by Philippe Castel, Edith Salès-Wuillemin, and Marie-Françoise Lacassagne, 349–368. Bruxelles: De Boeck Editions. Gauducheau, Nadia, and Michel Marcoccia. 2021. “Aggressiveness on a French Discussion Forum for Youth: Analyzing the Participants’ Point of View.” In Analyzing Digital Discourse: Between Convergence and Controversy, edited by Marjut Johansson, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, and Jan Chovanec, 275–306. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. Herring, Susan C. 2004. “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Communities.” In Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, edited by Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray, 338–376. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Michael E. 1995. “Naming Virtual Space in Computer-Mediated Conversation.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 52 (2): 212–221. Kleiber, Georges. 1986. “Déictiques, Embrayeurs, ‘Token-Réfexives’, Symboles Indexicaux, etc.: comment les défnir ?” L’Information Grammaticale 30: 3–22. Kleiber, Georges. 2008. “Comment fonctionne ICI.” Cahiers Chronos 20: 113–145. Kleiber, Georges. 2018. “Ici en glanures.” Langue Française 197: 35–49. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 1992. “Primer for the Field Investigation of Spatial Description and Conception.” Pragmatics 2 (1): 5–47. Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcoccia, Michel. 2009. “L’hospitalité dans les communautés en ligne: l’exemple de l’accueil des “nouveaux” dans les forums de discussion.” In EPIQUE 2009, 5ème colloque de psychologie ergonomique, Nice – Maison du Séminaire, 28–30 septembre, edited by Béatrice Cahour, Françoise Anceaux, and Alain Giboin, 214–219. Paris: GRAPE. Marcoccia, Michel. 2011. “T’es où, maintenant?. Les espaces de la conversation visiophonique en ligne.” In Décrire la conversation en ligne: le face à face distanciel, edited by Christine Develotte, Richard Kern, and Marie-Noëlle Lamy, 95–115. Lyon: ENS Editions. Marcoccia, Michel. 2018. “Les commentaires d’articles nécrologiques en ligne publiés dans lemonde.fr: entre éloge funèbre, journalisme profane et polémique.” SEMEN 45: 87–114. Marcoccia, Michel. 2020. “Culture Maker, apprentissage coopératif et construction de la communauté. Analyse des échanges sur la plateforme numérique OuiAreMakers.” Interfaces numériques 9 (2). www.unilim.fr/interfaces-numeriques/4287.

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8

Spatial deixis within political discourse on Twitter Ana Pano Alamán

1

Introduction

Social media have become public arenas where political leaders worldwide announce an agreement, launch a slogan or justify a decision, while being in diferent locations. Such discourses are more and more condensed and fragmented (Pano Alamán 2019), since they are usually produced and accessed through smartphones and, thus, “consumed” on the go, in the here and now that encourages immediate reactions. Within the narrow spaces of mobile screens and social media spatial constraints, content originated in the physical setting of a public speech or in a previous talk or text published on traditional media, constantly overlaps, challenging the notion of context (Parini 2014), the coding of messages, and the meant interpretation inferencing processes (Yus 2011, 2021), which are strictly connected to the persuasive strategies adopted by political leaders. In this regard, spatial deictics play an essential role. While space deixis has been investigated on political speeches (Gelabert 2006; Khalifa 2018) and on Twitter interaction (Yuan et al. 2013), less attention has been paid to it in political discourse on social media. Most of the works that have addressed deixis in political language are focused on the personal pronominal system and try to analyse how diferent pronominal representations refect power schemes, political alliances, and antagonisms. However, in order to understand the deixis of political language in all its richness, personal, spatial, and temporal deixis should be included in the analysis (Zupnik 1994; Chilton 2004; Ivanova 2016). In this chapter, I address spatial deixis within the convergence of physical and virtual places in Spanish political discourse on Twitter. Through a corpus-based analysis, and adopting a cyberpragmatic approach (Yus 2011), the aim of this study is to contribute to our understanding of the notion of place in political discourse on social media. The chapter begins with an overview of theoretical issues connected to the notion of place in social media, and to spatial deixis in Spanish, followed by a description of DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-11

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the methodology and the data, a discussion of the main results, and the fnal conclusions. Since this is an exploratory study, fndings are considered as a testing ground for further inquiry. 2

Theoretical framework

Social networking sites are means of transmission from which the political message travels rapidly to other media thanks, among other things, to the possibility of copying and redistributing content in a few seconds. Political actors take advantage of this megaphone to justify a decision, announce an agreement or launch a slogan without the intermediation of traditional journalism (Mancera Rueda and Pano Alamán 2013; Gallardo and Enguix 2016). Moreover, since the articulation of democratic analogical processes, such as parliamentary debates or electoral campaigns, undergo digital communication processes, the political discourse is gradually displaced (Kaufmann and Jeandesboz 2016). Indeed, political communication is increasingly characterized by the dramaturgy of online statements and the primacy of live events. Social media and mobile communication urge political actors to relate what happens in their immediate here and now or to react without delay, through a retweet or a like, to another message. The time of writing and reading is concentrated in the minutes and seconds in which we connect to the Net, and the production and the reception of content take place on the interfaces of mobile devices, designed for a rapid and discontinuous reading (Yus 2021). Thus, the political message adapts itself to the imperatives of digital media adopting a pildorized form (Slimovich 2016: 118) by means of condensation and fragmentation. Tweets are characterized by fragmentation when they show information in small portions and in diferent modes, breaking the communicative fow. Likewise, fragments of discourses are extrapolated from diferent contexts and then juxtaposed in the space of the tweet, multiplying the discursive paths and challenging the textual coherence and cohesion. Hashtags, mentions, emojis, or videos turn the text into a pretext to introduce complementary or diferent messages within a single tweet. Also, the political discourse fts into the brief space of a tweet through strategies of textual condensation, such as ellipsis. The space of a tweet is partly determined by the 280-character limit and by the small screens on which it is usually read, therefore messages usually seek the synthesis and efectiveness of headlines and slogans (Pano Alamán 2019) aiming at lasting and obtaining positive reactions in the microblog. Compressing and, simultaneously, splitting the political message through hashtags or emojis, for instance, seem to respond to the urgency with which technology, especially mobile technology, calls upon the quick reaction to the message. According to

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this, Twitter challenges the very notion of textual space. In addition, the study of place in political discourse on Twitter asks for a broader analysis not only of the internal space of the message, where content may be organized in diferent blocks, but also of the external physical place, where the speaker situates him or herself while “speaking” on Twitter, considering the complex connection between digital technologies and physical space. According to Yus (2021), even though mobile phones, and digital communication at a large, seem to liberate us from the tyranny of place, smartphone locative apps and location-based services or locative media tie us to physical places in a pervasive way (see also Coyne 2010). Though, people connect daily to social networks, without needing a delimited physical space to foster interaction. Indeed, “the use of smartphones with ‘always-on’ internet connection has increased the challenge for the management of interactions, intended interpretations, mutuality of information and eventual interpretations” (Yus 2021: 159–160), regardless of our physical location. Terms such as connected presence (Licoppe 2004), which refers to the feeling of constant social availability at any moment or place, or hybrid space, help understand the convergence between physical location and digital information. Hybrid space is “built by the connection of mobility and communication and materialized by social networks developed simultaneously in physical and digital spaces” (de Souza e Silva 2006: 266). Nowadays, we navigate multiple places (hybrid spaces) simultaneously: the physical one, the place we are thinking of, and social networks as virtual spaces (Georgalou 2015). For instance, spatio-temporal topics on Twitter can be determined on the basis of an activity, a geographical location, and time (Yuan et al. 2013). They do not refer only to certain locations, but also to the users’ experiences at the time and place referred to. Thus, data provided on that place is reconsidered or altered due to user’s comments and tags, which spread a layer of particular information over the objective qualities of the place in question. In fact, “social media updates are connected with something that the user is doing in a specifc moment or place, or either something that is happening to her, which is generally posted while the event is happening” (Piepers et al. 2021: 105). Moreover, while addressing a spatial-temporal topic, the user assigns positive or negative properties to that event, to the location where it takes place, and also to her frst-hand experience of that place. On the other hand, as Yus states (2021: 162), “users document, archive, and display their experience and mobility within space revealing aspects of their identity to others.” These practices are connected to the concept spatial self, which concerns the presentation of the self based on geographic traces of one’s physical activity and the conceptualization of a location as a modality of self-presentation. In this sense, places and identities are closely connected.

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2.1 Spatial deixis in Spanish

The language of place and space has been intensively studied in relation to grammatical characteristics, cross-linguistic variation, and cognition (see Enfeld and San Roque 2017; Maldonado 2021). Research in this feld has revealed a range of expressive resources available for talking about places. Scheglof (1972: 96) suggested, among others, place names (London); words for settings (bus stop); demonstratives (there, here), or gestures (pointing to places). However, the notion of place is fexible, since people refer to a place selecting their words for specifc communicative ends in particular contexts. The speaker “calibrates his or her formulation appropriately with respect to the addressee’s knowledge and to the common ground established between interlocutors” (Enfeld and San Roque 2017: 585). In the classical view, there are three types of deictic modalities: (a) deixis ad oculos, which refers to tangible and observable things in the world; (b) anaphor, which relates elements in the linguistic context; and (c) deixis am phantasma, which depicts abstract or imaginary entities that belong to mental or fctional representations (Bühler 1982 [1934]). The three most basic deictic forms operate as indices of person or entities (demonstratives, pronouns, and deictic adjectives), indices of location (adverbs), and indices of motion (verbs) (Richardson 1996). This study focuses on indices of location. In Peninsular Spanish, the variety of spatial deictic forms is subject to various factors (de Cock 2018). First, the ternary opposition aquí (“here”), ahí (“there”), allí (“over there”) is considered locative; it has been described as distance-oriented, but it is also related to the distinction between proximity to the speaker, proximity to the hearer and negative proximity (NGLE 2009: 1313). Second, the binary opposition between aquí “here” and allí/allá “there” represents a proximal-distal distinction that Gómez Sánchez and Jungbluth (2015: 248) describe as “[foregrounding] the extension of spaces.” Aquí pertains to the space of the speaker; ahí and allí involve instead the space of the hearer, while allá may designate a space for a third person, which would exclude both speaker and hearer. However, scholars have suggested that a binary system may be a better representation of the Spanish deictic system (Eguren 1999; Maldonado 2013; NGLE 2009; Alves Stradioto and Maldonado 2018; de Cock 2018). According to this view, aquí is proximal or “inclusive,” allí/allá are distal, while ahí would belong to an indeterminate space that covers a wide variety of functions (Sedano 1996; Alves Stradioto 2017) and may overlap with aquí and allí (Alves Stradioto and Maldonado 2018; Maldonado 2021). Moreover, even though aquí is proximal, it involves enough distance to have more objective representations, such as presenting entities

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that can be pointed out or even to impose distance and abstract limits (de Cock 2018; Maldonado 2021). In contrast, distal markers like allí or allá may designate not only distance but also exclusion. Thus, beyond their proximal or distance semantic nature, these deictic forms may also “signal the speaker’s subjective (perceptual, mental, emotional) relationship with some referent both in text and extralinguistic environments” (Maldonado 2021: 62). In the analysis of spatial deictics, one must take into account the subjective dimension of positioning for the choice of a specifc adverb in a given situation (de Cock 2018). Indeed, spatial deictics “constitute instructions for the hearer to see an object/event according to the speaker’s view” and contain “relative amount of information that the speaker presumes the hearer to have with respect to the referent” (Maldonado 2021: 62–63). From this perspective, the proximal form aquí and the distal one allí are of high focus, while ahí designates medium focus, even though they involve further specifcations regarding degrees of subjectivity and accessibility. Also, the choice of the spatial deictic adverb is defned by the speaker’s conceptualization of the distance and his/her taking into account the recipient (Enfeld et al. 2007; de Cock 2018). In other words, “certain linguistic forms have direct pragmatic interpretation depending on parameters of the speech situation, rather than a stable semantic value. Specifcally, their interpretation is contextually anchored to the identity of the speaker and addressee, their locations, and the time of the utterance” (Yang 2011: 128). The meaning of deictics is therefore a joint construction in interaction (Hanks 2005); they encode a viewpoint in such a way that the speaker and hearer establish joint attention toward some entity either in the extralinguistic context or discourse (Maldonado 2021: 55). For instance, when the speaker refers to a space related to him/herself in a situation where (part of) the origo and the speech situation coincide, he/she usually employs aquí. But, spatial deictic such as allí or allá generally rely on contextual cues and may be followed by specifc space descriptions, “which allow narrowing down the interpretation of the spatial deictic adverb” (de Cock 2018: 69). 2.2 Deixis in political discourse

According to Gelabert (2006), the iconic load of the physical spaces in which politics takes place gives deictic expressions a fundamental role in political discourse. Deixis has been studied in political communication, “ranging from personal to political, from persuasive to manipulative,” considering “both the context of production and the speaker’s intentions” (Adetunji 2006: 181). Previous research in this feld (Zupnik 1994; Blas Arroyo 2000; Chilton 2004; Gelabert 2004; Maalej 2013; Hamdaoui

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2015; Ivanova 2016, among others) has focused on the study of personal references and their role to defne speaker’s position towards the public. In the Spanish-speaking world, analyses are devoted to the use of person deixis, as “the ambiguous use of pronominal deixis is especially relevant in political language” (Blas Arroyo 2000: 4). They also explore the role of frst-person plural deictic pronouns (Vázquez Laslop 2019), which have an important persuasive function “since they have the potential to encode group memberships and identifcations” (Zupnik 1994: 340). As for the spatial dimension, Ivanova’s (2016) study shows that the strategic use of deictic spatial references and their collocation patterns aim at constructing a special rhetorical space. In particular, her analysis of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s discourse shows a quantitative prevalence of the proximal deictic (aquí) items over the distal ones (allí/allá). These appeal to the addressee’s working memory. Bachelet creates a shared mental space with her audience, in which the speaker and the addressee are co-present at a given point in time and in space (see Yang 2011). Listeners of Bachelet’s speech may decode the deictic references using not only the situational context, but also the shared episodic long-term memory (Cornish 2011). Proximization seems to be a typical phenomenon within political discourse, since the predominant inclusiveness in a leader’s speech constitutes a strategy for construing a rhetorical space aimed at involving the broadest audience possible (Ivanova 2016). But, as mentioned, spatial deictics meaning is contextually anchored to the identity of the speaker and the addressee, their location, and the time of the utterance (Yang 2011). For instance, Khalifa’s (2018) analysis of three speeches by the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, highlights a diferent use of proximal or distal deictics according to the diferent contexts and countries from which the speeches are delivered. Trump employs distal deixis speaking from the United States, in order to locate people and entities distant from him; instead, while being in Saudi Arabia, he employs spatial deictics that indicate closeness (here), trying “to bring everything and every entity closer to his audience to direct them get a vision like his own vision” (Khalifa 2018: 64). Also, in his study of spatial deixis forms adopted in 10 speeches available on YouTube about the general budget of 2017 fnancial year by Jordanian Parliament representatives, Al-Khalidy (2019) shows that the MPs used more proximal expressions pointing to referents that were close to them at the parliament, but they also employed distal expressions that signalled futuristic issues. These analyses demonstrate that distance along the spatial axis in political discourse is not only geographical, but rather political, cultural and/or emotional (Chilton 2004; Hart 2015).

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Method and data

The present study aims at exploring the role that space and place have in the Spanish political discourse on Twitter, flling the gap in research about spatial deixis on social media and in political discourse. It aims at determining whether and how spatial deictics adverbs are employed by Spanish political leaders in the microblog and identifying their pragmatic meaning in this context. The analysis, which takes into account the concepts of hybrid space and spatial self, is based on a cyberpragmatic approach, a cognitive pragmatics study of Internet-mediated communication that provides the basis to the analysis of how information is produced and interpreted within the Internet environment and how users access contextual information in this context. According to this view, context plays a major role both in the production and interpretation of information in digital environments. The researcher may assume that in this context, “the ‘addresser users’ have communicative intentions and devise their utterances with the expectation that these intentions will end up being relevant to the other users and that their utterances will be interpreted correctly” (Yus 2011: 14). Therefore, the former code their utterances and provide an adequate amount of contextual information to guide his/her addressee users towards the intended interpretation through inferential strategies. Cyberpragmatics helps explore the quality of the user’s access to contextual information, the amount of information acquired, the preferred interpretation, the cognitive efects derived, and the mental efort involved in obtaining these efects. The analysis, which is corpus-based and qualitative, has been carried out with the corpus management software Sketch Engine, using the wordlist and the KWIC functions. The corpus is made up of 5,604 tweets, which were automatically collected through ExportComments, a software that allows extracting tweets through “profle” extraction system. The profles selected are those of the political leaders of Spanish parties which have a major number of representatives in the Parliament: @sanchezcastejon (Pedro Sánchez Castejón), Prime Minister and leader of the Partido Socialista (PSOE); @pablocasado_, Pablo Casado Blanco, the former leader of the Partido Popular (PP); @Santi_ABASCAL, Santiago Abascal Conde, leader of VOX; and @ionebelarra, Ione Belarra Urteaga, current leader of Podemos. The tweets were published from September 15th, 2020, to February 15th 2022. Data were annotated and compiled automatically with Sketch Engine. Although time-consuming, a manual search of relevant tweets in Twitter’s database allowed for better monitoring of the data by excluding irrelevant content and duplicates. The criteria followed for the annotation and the analysis are closely linked to the research objectives, fnding the most frequent

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deictic expressions and place references employed by these users, as well as the situational context of the interaction, which has been described in previous research on Spanish politics discourse on Twitter (Mancera Rueda and Pano Alamán 2013; Pano Alamán and Mancera Rueda 2014). Data collected may also provide a rich context not only for the analysis of deictics and place references, but also for Twitter multimodal afordances, such as hashtags and emojis; however, space constraints only allow for a brief comment on the tendencies of these two afordances. 4

Results and discussion

In the frst place, prototypical spatial deictics in Peninsular Spanish (aquí, allí/allá, ahí) have been extracted from the corpus. Figure 8.1 shows the number of occurrences in each profle. The most employed adverb is aquí. Particularly noteworthy is its preponderant use by the leader of Podemos (65 occurrences), followed at a certain distance by the leaders of the PSOE (29), VOX (22), and PP (18). On the other hand, the diference in terms of occurrences with respect to the deictic of distance allí and its variant allá, and the middle distance ahí, is signifcant. In all cases, these adverbs show a greater presence in Belarra’s tweets, except for allí, which has 8 occurrences in Abascal’s messages. Also, it is worth noting the 2 occurrences of allende “from there” in her tweets, being a less frequent formula in contemporary Spanish (NGLE 2009: 1320).

Figure 8.1 Spatial deictic adverbs. Number of occurrences in the corpus.

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These results confrm previous evidence on the predominant use of the proximal deictic with respect to other spatial deictics in political discourse (Ivanova 2016; Al-Khalidy 2019), when it is used to indicate the place where the speaker is at that moment, and at the same time to show closeness towards those who are in that same place. From a qualitative point of view, we see that in most messages of the corpus it generally refers to the place where the political leader is located. For instance, in Figure 8.2, Sánchez, president of the Spanish government and leader of the PSOE, inserts aquí in reference to the La Paz Hospital in Madrid, where one of the vaccines against Covid-19 is being developed. The linguistic context provides adequate information about this specifc place and what is done here.

Figure 8.2 President Sanchez’s use of aquí (here).

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The initial utterance: “He podido conocer la importante labor que realizan” (“I have been able to learn about the important work that they carry out”), and the four photographs embedded in the tweet, where the addressee user sees Sánchez speaking with experts, invites him/her to infer that the government is personally and closely following the research on the vaccine. Also, the locative information provided by the app visible at the bottom of the message (Twitter Web App) certifes that the tweet has been published while Sánchez visits the Research Unit of the Hospital. Thus, the president locates himself in a hybrid space, a physical building in Madrid, and a virtual one, from which he “speaks” to his imagined audience (Marwick and boyd 2010). The cognitive efects produced by the use of the proximal aquí in (1) are similar in the following examples:

Figure 8.3 President Sanchez’s use of aquí (here) in his visit to Argentina.

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In Figure 8.3 the deictic refers to Argentina, the country in which Sánchez is located when the message is published, as can be seen thanks to the information provided by the locative app at the bottom of the message, and the explicit mention to the “Embajada de España en Argentina” (“Embassy of Spain in Argentina”). Through the deictic, Sánchez makes explicit reference to the Spaniards who reside in Argentina. The contextual cues provided in the message by words such as “viaje” (“trip”), which denotes movement, and the utterance “compartiendo un rato” (“sharing for a while”), allow the reader of the tweet to infer that he has arrived at this place with the objective, among others, of paying visit to these people. The photographs, which document his meeting with the ambassador and the representatives of Spaniards residing in this country, and the implicit (persuasive) meanings of “compartiendo” (“sharing”) and “nuestros mejores embajadores” (“our best ambassadors”) signal not only his physical proximity with these people, but also his emotional proximity with this community. See also the “relación que nos une a ambos países” (“relationship that unites us to both countries”), which aims at proving that residents in Spain and residents in Argentina are part of a single community, that there is no distance between these two communities. Again, he shows that he can move in a hybrid space made up of a physical place and the microblog, where distance between him and other people –those who meet at the embassy and those whom he reaches through a tweet – are close. The proximal deictic adverb co-appears frequently in the messages with the utterance “estamos” (“we are”) that politicians employ in the frst person plural with an inclusive meaning. In Figure 8.4, the formula invites the reader to infer that Belarra, leader of Podemos and minister in the Spanish government, speaks mostly on behalf of the institution she represents. The video embedded in the message provides evidence of her being physically located at some place in the city that she mentions, Sevilla. However, the place is not explicitly indicated as in Figure 8.2 and Figure 8.3; only the reference to the city and to the “Administraciones públicas” (“Public Administrations”) allows the reader of the tweet to access this information and presume two possible options: that she is either at the headquarters of the central government delegation in Andalusia or at the headquarters of the regional government, the Junta de Andalucía. The app provides no data about the location. Thus, in this case, the speaker seems to give lesser importance to the physical place while she assigns aquí a more subjective meaning. The contextual cues provided suggest that she is inviting her interlocutors in Andalusia, and her followers on Twitter, to think of a mental space close to women who work in the care services. The intended

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Figure 8.4 Belarra’s use of aquí (here).

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meaning of the message is that the government places itself on the side of these women, thanks to the agreement she is physically signing in Seville. In the following messages (Figures 8.5 and 8.6), respectively published in the profles of Casado (PP) and Abascal (VOX), the proximal deictic refers to physical and mental spaces, which are close to those who stay with them at the same place or who have a common political ground with them. It also allows politicians to navigate the hybrid space (physical-virtual) that they share with the recipients of the message:

Figure 8.5 Casado’s use of aquí (here).

As can be seen in Figure 8.5, the former leader of the PP, mentions the toponyms Catalonia, Spain, and Europe, which refer not only to geographical places, but also to places that may activate in the addressee user different (political, cultural, social) meanings. In the same sentence, he uses

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Figure 8.6 Abascal’s use of aquí (here).

aquí, which is seemingly connected to Catalonia, even though the reference to other toponyms nearby may produce ambiguity. The cues provided by the utterance “Mi compromiso con Cataluña” (“My commitment to Catalonia”) let the reader conclude that the deictic does refer to this region. It is interesting to note that in this tweet here does not function as a physical anchor to a place but is related to a geographical and political territory in which “algunos han creado un problema” (“some have created a problem”), and where others (Spain and Europe) do not see a problem. Casado makes an implicit reference here to the so-called “Catalan crisis” provoked by the referendum held in 2017 for the region’s independence. The choice of the proximal deictic leads the addressee to assume that he is physically located in this territory. Indeed, the message does not contain

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verbal content that allows the physical place from which he speaks to be clearly identifed. Only the video embedded in the message let the addressee access this information, when he/she sees Casado speaking at the Cercle de Economía located in Barcelona, therefore, in Catalonia. As in Figure 8.5, the leader of the PP employs the deictic to signal a subjective (mental and emotional) relationship with a referent in the extralinguistic environment, that is, Catalonia, situating himself on the side of those for whom that territory is not a problem and far from those who have created a problem in the region. At the same time, if there is a problem, he stands with those who seek a solution (see “El PP quiere ser parte de la solución”; “The PP wants be part of the solution”). In this case, the deictic points to the connection between the physical space in which the leader positions himself and the mental space – a certain idea of Catalonia – that he supposedly shares with his interlocutors in Barcelona and with those who read the tweet within their timeline and have a common political ground with this political leader. The leader of VOX clearly indicates where he is, using the hashtag #León (Figure 8.6). The name of this city in Castilla y León relates to the deictic here in the utterance “Hemos venido aquí” (“We have come here”), which contains a verb of movement, that guides the addressee user to interpret the physical proximity of Abascal to this location. It should be noted, however, that from a pronominal point of view he uses the frstperson plural (we) with a typical inclusive meaning in this context, that stands for the political group he leads. He associates the deictic with León and the co-referents “España vacía” (“empty Spain”) and “provincias olvidadas” (“forgotten provinces”), which in this case seem to indicate both geographical places and subjective spaces that Abascal intends to put back on the national map, as it may be inferred from the metaphor “levantar la bandera” (“raise the fag”) and the emoji with the Spanish fag. Moreover, the video embedded not only provides proof that the leader of that party is physically in that city, but through pictures of monuments and people of these places, he also elaborates on the emotional closeness with their inhabitants. These elements and the knowledge that he and his followers share about the regional electoral campaign held at that moment in Castilla y León put the readers’ attention on the proximity between this leader and people residing in this part of Spain. These are space references related to a certain vision of the world that the speaker seeks to share with his ideological ingroup in the microblog. From this perspective, here contains information that the speaker presumes the hearer to have with respect to the referent. As mentioned, aquí may also convey a sense of distance. In this case, the deictic establishes a kind of limit between those who are here and those who are not here, either physically or subjectively. The adverb generally

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refers to an inclusive area that, however, in other contexts can show distance from certain entities (de Cock 2018). This meaning is frequent in the tweets of the four profles; but, they are mostly employed by the right-wing leaders Casado and Abascal. In Figure 8.7, for example, aquí leads the addressee user to interpret that Casado speaks of Spain as a place where, contrary to what happens in countries like Italy, the government has not presented the recovery plan that will help face the social and economic crisis caused by the pandemic. In Figure 8.8, the reader infers that aquí, which appears twice, is referred

Figure 8.7 Casados’s use of aquí (here).

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Figure 8.8 Abascal’s use of aquí (here).

to Spain as opposed to the United States. He compares two diferent places with the aim of attacking the double standards of his political opponents (the so-called “izquierda progre,” “progressive left”), for whom the assault to the Capitol in January 2021 “les parece mal” (“seems bad”). Thanks to the contextual cue provided by the proximal deictic and to the explicit association between “here” and the Spanish “Congreso” (“Congress”) and “here” and the “Generalidad” (government of Catalonia), Abascal invites his followers to compare three apparently similar events and infer that in Spain, which is physically and mentally closer to the potential recipient, the left does not care about situations that could turn out to be more serious. In this way, he establishes a net distance, an abstract limit, between what happens in this country and in other countries, as well as between his party, which may be ideologically situated at the extreme right and is worried about the perilous events happening “here,” and the left, who, according to his view, does not care about these resembling events. This tweet does not contain photographs or videos, but it opens a “thread,” a space in the microblog which allows the user to publish diferent messages that are thematically connected, thus expanding further on the same topic. In Casado’s tweet, a video is embedded where we see the leader of the PP on television. His words are flled in two spaces that converge on the same tweet.

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Regarding aquí, it is worth noting too that it frequently has an anaphoric meaning. Bühler (1982 [1934]) used the term anaphora to describe the deictic pointing reference to parts of discourse. In the corpus, the adverb has a predominantly anaphoric function in all the profles, even though it is prevalent in the tweets by Sánchez and Belarra. The deictic usually points to an interview, an article or a video which are available through a link or embedded in the message. See, for instance, the link inserted in Figure 8.9 to a live program on Spanish television (RTVE) in which Sánchez is interviewed, or the text published in elDiario.es, embedded in Figure 8.10. In the frst example, aquí appears in a common cataphoric formula used on Twitter: “Podéis seguirlo en directo aquí” (“You can follow it live here”). In the second one, the deictic points to an interview with a member of Podemos, that Belarra synthetically anticipates. It is interesting to note here the use of the emoji of the fnger pointing down, which serves as a pointer and contributes to the cohesion and progression in the fragmented message. As pointed out in Pano Alamán (2019), Spanish political parties insert numerous emojis at the top and the bottom space of the messages, with different pragmatic functions: designing place, modalization (intensifcation),

Figure 8.9 President Sánchez’s use of aquí (here).

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Figure 8.10 Belarra’s use of aquí (here) and the pointing down emoji.

semiotic complement of a picture. They also present a high degree of conventionalization, since they help to access, through a hand, a facial expression or a fag, implicit verbal content contained in the message. In the corpus analysed in this chapter, the pointing fnger is frequently used with a cataphoric function to guide the readers towards content situated ‘outside’ the microblog; thus, it is interpreted as a signal to anaphorically available contextual information.

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Distal deictic adverbs like allí and allá present scarce occurrences in the corpus (see Figure 8.1). The medium distance ahí is also very infrequent in all the profles. From these data, it is possible to afrm that in the microblog political leaders prefer to use the proximal deictic. As mentioned, according to a binary system of the Spanish deictic system, allí/allá designate not only distance but also exclusion, while ahí belongs to an indeterminate space that may overlap with here and there (Alves Stradioto and Maldonado 2018). Finally, as aquí, they signal the speaker’s subjective relationship with some referent both in text and in extralinguistic contexts, but, contrary to the proximal deictic, these leave room “for a more subjective representation of the way speakers relate to the referred object” (Maldonado 2021: 56). In the corpus, the few occurrences of allí seem to indicate a geographical place, a city or a country, which is distant from the physical place where the politician speaks, but close from an emotional subjective space. For instance, in Figure 8.11, the message reproduces the words that Sánchez, as president of the government, says while he is physically in the Congress of Deputies during a control session. Thanks, in particular, to the embedded video and the locative data inserted at the bottom of the video, the reader of the message places the speaker, and his words, in the context of this institutional place. Being said at the parliament and published on the Twitter profle, the message is situated in a hybrid physical-virtual space. The deictic allí (“there”), which is placed at the end of a relatively long message, refers anaphorically in the text to the cities mentioned at the beginning: Ceuta and Melilla. The deictic indicates the physical distance between the he, who is in Madrid (Congress) and these places, which in the mind of the addressee activates a series of presuppositions. Knowledge shared between the reader of the tweet and the president about what happens in these two cities located outside the Peninsula concerning immigration and security leads the recipient to interpret the deictic in various ways. The use of allí in this context may be risky, since it may be perceived as a remote place, a distant space that the government does not reach. Precisely, the message contains contextual cues that guide the recipient to a diferent interpretation: that the government will be close to these cities (“deben saber que cuentan con el apoyo,” “they must know that they have the support”) and, above all, that it guarantees the safety of “quienes viven allí” (“those who live there”). Although the semantic value of the deictic is prototypically of distance, in this context it means proximity within a shared emotional space. Through the strategic use of this adverb, Sánchez, speaking as president of the government and being physically in the congress, highlights the closeness of the institution to those places and the people who inhabit them, attacking also the opposition, whose standpoint towards this topic would be not clearly defned. In other cases, allí indicates both a physical and subjective place. The politician connects specifc places with his/her memories appealing to the

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Figure 8.11 President Sánchez’s use of allí (over there).

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Figure 8.12 Casado’s use of allí (over there).

audience’s emotions on Twitter. In the message above (Figure 8.12), the former leader of the PP mentions diferent places in his message: The region of Cantabria and the city of Santander published as hashtags (#Cantabria, #Santander), and a hospital in that same city that the deictic refers to. In this case, the deictic indicates both the hospital, a physical place in the city of Santander, and the distant subjective (emotional) space in which the politician situates some members of his family who worked in that hospital, a place he claims to know well. He builds a bridge between his family, his personal experience, and the institution; by extension, he includes the city and the region in the same space. The use of allí immediately evokes a distant subjective space connected to the hospital. However, the memoirs associated to that place are not explicitly shared with the recipients of the tweet. Instead, the message invites to infer that there is an implicit

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aquí (“here”) pointing to the city in which Casado is physically located at the moment where the tweet is published. The utterance “me reúno” (“I meet”) and the embedded pictures help access two possible interpretations of the speaker’s spatial self: through the explicit distal adverb, he invites the addressee to join him in a subjective space made of memories of his family working in a hospital in Santander; through the multimodal elements and the verb reunir (to meet), he provides an adequate amount of contextual information to the same addressee towards the intended interpretation of a physically and mentally closeness of the political leader to this city. From this perspective, he focuses on two spaces that overlap. The messages published in Abascal’s profle present similar functions. However, in Figure 8.13 this element acquires another meaning, being the only case in the corpus.

Figure 8.13 Abascal’s use of allí (over there).

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The adverb allí refers to other platforms on the Net. These are the profles that the leader of VOX calls “plataformas de redes sociales alternativas” (“alternative social network platforms”). The deictic points in this case to a virtual space distant and even alternative or opposed to the virtual space of his Twitter profle. From this place, he addresses the message directly to his followers on Twitter, inviting them to “follow him,” also in a metaphorical sense of movement, to other places accessible through the links provided. At the same time, he designates a place where it is possible to meet and gather with people who share the same ideological and political position. The links and the pictures show that this “new” place in the Net is concrete and ready to take in those who are ideologically close to him. But the utterance “No podrán silenciarnos” (“They won’t be able to silence us!”) at the end of the message adds another implicit meaning to these virtual places. The common knowledge shared by this politician with most of his voters concerning the diffculties for this party to publish messages that may be tagged as hate speech in the main social networks, such as Twitter, guides the reader to infer that those other networks are places that guarantee free speech. As for the deictic ahí, this is an intermediate space that may overlap with aquí and allí. Generally, in the corpus it refers to a physical place where an event takes place, or where something with positive or negative consequences occurs. In the frst case, when the tweet is published the speaker may be located far from this place or nearby. In these contexts, the deictic is employed to express desire to be in that place (Figure 8.14) or support for those who are placed there (Figure 8.15). The linguistic context, the multimodal elements (poster, photographs, mentions) and the shared knowledge between sender and recipient, who are in the virtual space of the microblog, make it possible to capture the possible intended meanings of this element: the physical distance, which can be relative; and the emotional proximity between the political leader and the people who stay physically in the places the medium distance deictic signals. See in Figure 8.14 how Belarra addresses her fellow party members in the Balearic Islands expressing her desire to be close to them, joining the event organized there by the party from the distance. In Figure 8.15, Sánchez is physically located somewhere in La Palma in a press conference about the disaster caused by the eruption of a volcano on that island, as the video embedded in the tweet and the locative app at the bottom explicitly indicate (“Comparecencia desde La Palma,” “Appearance from La Palma”). However, the use of ahí leads to the inference that he is at a certain distance from the volcano, the area the deictic seems to refer to. Also, the presence of the deictic within the utterance “ahí va a estar el Ejecutivo central” (“the government will be there”) invites the addressee to focus on the near future emotional nearness manifested by the government he represents in the form of support and aid to the island, its citizens and its institutions.

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Figure 8.14 Belarra’s use of ahí (there).

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Figure 8.15 President Sánchez’s use of ahí (there).

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Regarding allá, it is worth noting that the distance deictic is used in all the cases in the adverbial phrase más allá (“far beyond”), indicating the overcoming of a space that constitutes a limit. In Figure 8.16, Belarra applauds the Energetic project of his party in the Balearic Islands for going beyond the mere dimension of words and for moving on to concrete facts. In Figure 8.17, Abascal shares with his audience on Twitter an article in order to criticize the fact that the president of the government and his not

Figure 8.16 Belarra’s use of más allá (far beyond).

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Figure 8.17 Abascal’s use of más allá (far beyond).

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very well-defned allies (“Sánchez y compañía,” “Sánchez and company”) exceed the limits in the management of immigration issues. The statement that opens the tweet mentioning the borders (“fronteras”) and the phrase “van más allá” (“they go beyond”) invite to conclude that, from his perspective, the government does not respect the national borders. 4.1 Other spatial adverbs

The automated extraction of the adverbs present in the corpus allows us to observe that the four leaders use similar spatial adverbs to position themselves, physically and subjectively, generally with respect to a place where an event occurs or a political issue. Figure 8.18 shows the main adverbs used by each leader and the occurrences they present in the corpus. We see that, in general, the tweets contain few spatial adverbs. Those who use them mostly are Sánchez, Casado and Belarra, while they have a scarcer presence in Abascal’s tweets. There is a predominant use of atrás (“behind”), especially in Sánchez (44 occurrences), who uses it six times in the formula “no dejar a nadie atrás” (“leave no one behind”), and fve times in the hashtag #NiUnPasoAtrás; Casado (27 occurrences) and Belarra (20) use it in their messages employing the frst formula too. Another adverb used by all political leaders, although with diferent frequency, is cerca (“close,” 44 occurrences in total), whose meaning is like that of junto (“beside” or “together”), which is less frequent (13) and even

Figure 8.18 Spatial adverbs. N. of occurrences in the corpus.

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absent in Casado’s messages. Follow the complementary antonyms dentrofuera (“inside-outside”) and encima-debajo (“above-below”). Finally, only Casado and Abascal resort to adverbs denoting a virtual or face-to-face context: online (3 occurrences) and telemáticamente (“telematically,” 2) in Casado; and online (1) and presencialmente (“in person,” 1) in Abascal. In the case of atrás, the adverb denotes generally in the tweets “being behind someone or something,” and, in particular, “turning the back to someone or something.” The fact that this adverb often appears in political statements in which it is declared that no one will be left behind guides the addressee user to interpret the meaning of this adverb as being inclusive or exclusive depending on who leaves behind whom. For instance, see the following tweets published in the profles of Sánchez and Casado, who use the adverb speaking from the shared physical place they occupy in the parliament and from the virtual space of their profles. While in Figure 8.19, Sánchez promises that the government’s agenda does not turn its back on anyone during the crisis, in Figure 8.20, Casado, who stands before his interlocutor in the congress, takes up the same words to accuse the president precisely of leaving behind the citizens (“ha dejado atrás a millones de personas”). Thus, the intended including-excluding meaning of this spatial adverb in the hybrid space of the parliamentary (antagonist) discourse and the microblog, is highly dependent on the context. Sánchez and Belarra use delante (“in front of” or “ahead,” with 19 and 10 occurrences, respectively), more than the other two political leaders. Contrary to atrás, delante indicates placing oneself before something or someone. In their messages, it predominantly refers to an abstract space before them in which action must be taken to improve the future of the country; indeed, it appears in utterances such as “tener trabajo por delante” (“to have work ahead”). The contextual cues in the messages and the shared knowledge between these representatives of the government and their imagined audience in the microblog help make inferences about the idea of a future place where positive changes for society are within reach. In other cases, the adverb may refer instead to a specifc physical place or space. In Figure 8.21, Abascal uses the adverb to signal exactly where those he considers guilty of having tried to attack him at a rally organized by VOX in Catalonia in February 2021 should be placed. “Los culpables tendrán que explicarlo delante de un juez” (“The ofenders will have to explain it in front of a judge”) leaves no room for doubt that the place he refers to is that of a court. However, the extreme synthesis (i.e., textual condensation) of the message requires a great cognitive efort on the part of the addressee user to capture the implicit meanings related to the facts that he blames before its imagined audience on Twitter. See the hashtag #15metros (“#15meters”), which alludes to the distance that would have

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Figure 8.19 President Sánchez’s use of atrás (behind).

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Figure 8.20 Casado’s use of atrás (behind).

Figure 8.21 Abascal’s use of delante (in front of).

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mediated between the political leader and his alleged aggressors. The hypertext space of the hashtag allows the reader to search for other messages associated with it and go back to the initial tweet in which Abascal explains what happened. As for cerca (“close”) and lejos (“far away”), we observe some diferences between the leaders. The frst adverb is frequent in Sánchez’s tweets, as in Figure 8.22, in which he speaks being situated – as the video and the

Figure 8.22 President Sánchez’s use of cerca (close).

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locative data explicitly indicate – in the congress of the PSOE in Castilla y León. He presents himself with a double role: general secretary of this party and representative of the State. The adverb points out that the State must be with the citizenry. It designates, then, a subjective emotional space which is close to the citizens. However, the physical place from which he speaks to the public of the congress, the expression “vivan donde vivan” (“wherever they live”), and the periphrasis “debemos descentralizar las instituciones” (“we must decentralize the institutions”) activate a series of implicatures in the mind of the addressee user in the microblog. Thanks to the audience’s knowledge about, among other things, the imminent elections in Castilla y León, they can grasp the more restricted, political, and electoral sense of “being close” to the citizens of that region. In Figure 8.23, Abascal establishes a proximity between the PP and the PSOE due to the similarity of their political agendas, an argument he employs to attack Casado. In this case, it is possible to interpret the meaning of the adverb as “ideologically close”; see also the statement “voluntad de gobernar juntos” (“will to rule together”). The strategy serves to point out that the PP is moving away and distancing from its voters. As in this tweet, these adverbs serve in most cases to accuse the political adversary or the government of adopting decisions harmful for the citizens or dissociating from their needs. Indeed, the use of lejos in Figure 8.24 serves Casado to place the government distant from what he considers the “real” Spain, a mental space that he shares with his followers in the microblog and his potential voters. Regarding dentro-fuera (“inside-outside”), a similar political use is observed in all the tweets in which they appear, particularly in those

Figure 8.23 Abascal’s use of cerca (close).

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Figure 8.24 Casado’s use of lejos (far away).

of Casado. It is worth noting too that in some cases they are employed together with an inclusive meaning, especially in the messages published by Abascal and Belarra. For example, in Figure 8.25, Belarra refers simultaneously to two spaces (“dentro y fuera de nuestras fronteras,” “inside and outside our borders”) that the reader of the tweet interprets in an allembracing sense, alluding here to the organizations that work for peace both in Spain and abroad. The expression is vague because it does not provide enough information about the organizations and where they work exactly, but the use of the two adverbs referring to border in the context of what she calls “compleja situación en Ucrania” (“complex situation in

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Figure 8.25 Belarra’s use of dentro-fuera (inside-outside).

Ukraine”) evokes in the reader a geographical space referring to Spain and Europe, and an emotional space that may be associated to those territories in the world where these organizations work for peace and dialogue. 4.2 Multimodal spatial deictics

We have seen in some cases that the political leaders use diferent multimodal elements and typical social media afordances to refer to a physical place, an institution, an event or an element of the text, with an anaphoric value. Indeed, the results show that multimodality (pictures and videos embedded, mentions, or locative information automatically displayed on the message) has an important role in these tweets since it points to specifc spatial references in this hybrid space. It is worth mentioning the role of hashtags in these tweets. As it is well-known, the hashtag was established in an early phase of CMC as a channel marker in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to signal specifc channels where people could gather and chat (Heyd and Puschmann 2017). Like in IRC, in Twitter the hashtag generates a thematic discursive space where a “conversation” or a delayed discussion

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thread takes place (Mancera Rueda and Pano Alamán 2015). From a relevance-theoretic perspective, Scott (2015: 8) states that hashtags are devices that add “a layer of activation to certain contextual assumptions . . . guiding the reader’s inferential processes” (see Parini and Yus, this volume). Accordingly, including a hashtag associated with a place name like in some of the messages analysed in this study supports the process of inference in terms of explicit and implicit meaning related to the place the speaker is physically located and the place he/she has in mind and shares with his/her addressees on Twitter. Place hashtags associated with cities and regions in Spain are frequent in the messages of Casado and Abascal. They are connected to the recent electoral campaign in Castilla y León (#Ávila, #León, #Zamora), to party rallies (#Tortosa, #SanSebastiandelosReyes), and visits to specifc communities and interest groups (#Jumilla, #Santander). The hashtags allow them not only to signal their position, but also to place the tweet within a thread that other users may insert in their tweets to comment on an electoral event taking place in that city, highlight the toponym within the verbal text to focus on this specifc place, and even catch the attention of the Twitter users who reside in it. This afordance, which Zappavigna associates with the concept of searchable talk (2015), also appears in the formula #CMin (Council of Ministers), in Belarra’s tweets, to collocate her words within this institutional context. Hashtags with a similar meaning are #sesióndecontrol (15 occurrences) or #cumbredemadrid. Finally, it is worth mentioning the use of ☟ and ☛ which, as stated before, appear in many tweets pointing to a text, a link, or a video. Generally, they coappear with the adverb aquí which has an anaphoric function and invites the reader “to work out the intended meaning of the text next to which the emoji is placed” (Yus 2021: 60). 5

Conclusions

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a broader understanding of spatial and place reference in the Spanish political discourse on Twitter. The corpus-based analysis carried out corroborates previous fndings on the predominant use of the prototypical proximal deictic aquí (“here”) in Spanish political discourse (Gelabert 2004; Ivanova 2016). The intended pragmatic function of this adverb in the tweets of the corpus is that of signalling the physical place where the leader is located, but also, mainly, to highlight his/her subjective (mental, emotional, ideological) proximity with that place and its inhabitants. Occurrences of aquí are primarily interpreted as ostensive deixis with a referential function, related to a pointing gesture. They establish the link between the physical interaction situation and the utterance, placing it in a prominent position. We

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observe that by means of aquí, these politicians not only indicate explicitly or implicitly the place where they are physically located at the moment of publishing the tweet or afterwards, but they also take advantage of the prototypical semantic value of proximity of the deictic to show their closeness or their support towards certain communities, with the intention of creating a shared mental space with the imagined audience, in particular, with their own followers and with the members of the ingroup. This is particular manifest in the case of electoral tweets. The photographs and videos embedded in most of the tweets strengthen the objectives of creating a certain solidarity between the politician who is physically located here and those who are in that same place, as well as building a bridge with his followers or with other users in the virtual here. In fact, these multimodal elements, and the microblog afordances, such as the mention or the hashtag, contribute to a greater extent to produce certain cognitive efects in the tweet recipient. The reader interprets here as a multiple space that not only refers to an institution or a city, which can be recognized through images in some cases, but also to a sense of place (Öztürk 2014) that the politician aims to share with those who are part of the same imagined community. The proximal deictic also emphasizes the relationships between the supporters of that leader, which are constructed upon the words and symbols that explicitly co-appear with the spatial reference in the tweet (see, for instance, the fag emoji). The less frequent use of the distal markers allí and allá in these messages may suggest that political leaders avoid expressing distance in the context of the microblog. The distal as well as the medium distance deictic ahí approach the leader and his/her followers around certain issues of the political agenda like immigration policies, the pandemic and economic crisis, the Catalan crisis, a natural disaster, among others, both emotionally and ideologically. They allow them to share this subjective space with the members of their ingroup on Twitter, depending largely on the role they assume in each context: president of the government and minister in the cases of Sánchez and Belarra; and leaders of the opposition to the government, as well as principal speakers in electoral campaigning events, like Casado and Abascal. In this case, one may assume that the condensation and fragmentation of contents (Pano Alamán 2019) and the complex multimodal context of the platform (Parini 2014) favour the risk that referents to distant places or spaces go unnoticed or be misunderstood. Indeed, whereas aquí mainly relies on physical presence documented throughout videos, photographs, and hashtags, as well as emojis with an anaphoric function, other deictic adverbs need more contextual cues for the spatial referent to be correctly identifed and understood. In addition, they fulfl presentative, directive, and referential functions, as well as mobile meanings (de Cock 2018) that deserve further exploration in the study of place on social media.

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Gómez Sánchez, María Elena, and Konstanze Jungbluth. 2015. “European Spanish.” In Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, edited by Konstanze Jungbluth and Federica Da Milano, 240–257. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hamdaoui, Mariem. 2015. “The Persuasive Power of Person Deixis in Political Discourse: The Pronoun ‘We’ in Obama’s Speeches about the 2007–2009 Financial Crises as an Example.” Proceedings European Conference on Arts and Humanities, 99–111. Brighton: Thistle Brighton. Hanks, William. 2005. “Explorations in the Deictic Field.” Current Anthropology 46 (2): 191–220. Hart, Christopher. 2015. “Discourse.” In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Eva Dabrowska and Dagmar Divjak, 322–345. Boston: Mouton De Gruyter. Heyd, Theresa, and Cornelius Puschmann. 2017. “Hashtagging and Functional Shift: Adaptation and Appropriation of the #.” Journal of Pragmatics 116: 51–63. Ivanova, Anna. 2016. “Deixis and its Role in Defning Rhetorical Space.” Revista Signos 49 (92): 329–349. Kaufmann, Mareile, and Julien Jeandesboz. 2016. “Politics and ‘the Digital’: From Singularity to Specifcity.” European Journal of Social Theory 20 (3): 309–328. Khalifa, Reham. 2018. “A Deictic Analysis of the Political Discourse of Some of Donald Trump’s Presidential Speeches.” Sahifatul-Alsun 34: 41–71. Licoppe, Christian. 2004. “‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 22: 135–156. Maalej, Zouheir. 2013. “Framing and Manipulation of Person Deixis in Hosni Mubarak’s Last Three Speeches: A Cognitive-pragmatic Approach.” Pragmatics 23 (4): 633–659. Maldonado, Ricardo. 2013. “Niveles de subjetividad en la deixis. El caso de aquí y acá.” Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y flología 1 (2): 285–326. Maldonado, Ricardo. 2021. “Deixis in Spanish Research.” In The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics, Foundations and Interfaces, edited by Dale A. Koike and Julio César Félix-Brasdefer, 55–72. New York: Routledge. Mancera Rueda, Ana, and Ana Pano Alamán. 2013. El discurso político en Twitter. Anthropos: Barcelona. Mancera Rueda, Ana, and Ana Pano Alamán. 2015. “Valores sintáctico – discursivos de las etiquetas en Twitter.” Círculo de Lingüística aplicada a la Comunicación 64: 58–83. Marwick, Alice E., and Danah boyd. 2010. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media and Society 13 (1): 114–133. Öztürk, Maya N. 2014. Corporeality: Emergent Consciousness within its Spatial Dimensions. Leiden: Brill. Pano Alamán, Ana. 2019. “Condensación y fragmentación del discurso político en Twitter.” In Mutaciones discursivas en el siglo XXI: la política en los medios y las redes, edited by Nel·lo Pellisser and Joan M. Oleaque, 75–92. Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch. Pano Alamán, Ana, and Ana Mancera Rueda. 2014. “La ‘conversación’ en Twitter: las unidades discursivas y el uso de marcadores interactivos en los intercambios con parlamentarios españoles en la red social.” Estudios de Lingüística del español 35 (1): 234–268.

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Parini, Alejandro. 2014. “La problematización del contexto en la comunicación en línea.” In Lenguaje, discurso e interacción en los espacios virtuales, edited by Alejandro Parini and Mabel Giammatteo, 145–165. Mendoza: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Piepers, Joske, Maria van de Groep, Hans van Halteren, and Helen de Hoop. 2021. “‘Amsterdam, You’re Raining!’ First-hand Experience in Tweets with Spatiotemporal Addressees.” Journal of Pragmatics 176: 97–109. Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. 2009. Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Richardson, Bill. 1996. “Spanish Spatial Deictic Features: Indices of Entities, Location and Movement.” International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 34 (3): 215–231. Scheglof, Emanuel A. 1972. “Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place.” In Studies in Social Interaction, edited by David Sudnow, 75–119. New York: Free Press. Scott, Kate. 2015. “The Pragmatics of Hashtags: Inference and Conversational Style on Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 81: 8–20. Sedano, Mercedes. 1996. “Las posibilidades de ahí como elemento central del sistema locativo.” In Actas del X Congreso Internacional de la ALFAL, 103–108. México DF: UNAM. Slimovich, Ana. 2016. “La digitalización de la política y la vuelta de lo televisivo. El caso de los candidatos argentinos en Facebook.” Revista de comunicación 15: 111–127. Vázquez Laslop, Ma Eugenia. 2019. Tú y yo en los debates de candidatos a la Presidencia en México (1994–2012): un estudio de deixis política. México DF: El Colegio de México. Yang, Youwen. 2011. “A Cognitive Interpretation of Discourse Deixis.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 1 (2): 128–135. Yuan, Quan, Gao Cong, Zongyang Ma, Aixin Sun, and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann. 2013. “Who, Where, When and What: Discover Spatio – Temporal Topics for Twitter Users.” In KDD 13 Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference, 605–613. New York: ACM. Yus, Francisco. 2011. Ciberpragmatics. Internet – Mediated Communication in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Yus, Francisco. 2021. Smartphone Communication. London: Routledge. Zappavigna, Michele. 2015. “Searchable Talk: The Linguistic Functions of Hashtags.” Social Semiotics 25: 274–291. Zupnik, Jael-Janette. 1994. “A Pragmatic Analysis of the Use of Person Deixis in Political Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 21: 339–383.

9

The role of location information sharing in e-service encounters on Mercado Libre* María Elena Placencia and Hebe Powell

1

Introduction and aims

The rise of modern communications technologies has altered our relationship with space and location. The incredible interconnectivity enabled by these technologies has shrunk geographical space and allows us to remain in contact even when on the move. What is more, these technologies ofer a new kind of space – virtual space – in which people can be more or less immersed: from involvement in chatrooms or social media platforms like Twitter, to engaging in various forms of constructed realities via online games like Roblox or Minecraft. The possibilities this technology ofers for commerce are, of course, immense: they allow retailers to access huge numbers of potential clients while doing away with the need for expensive premises from which to sell their goods. However, e-commerce, which provides the overall context for the present study, is a relatively new phenomenon if one considers that while ARPANET, the precursor to our modern internet began in 1969 (Featherly 2021), and the frst mobile phone was marketed by Motorola in 1983 (Goodwin 24 August 2021), it is only in 1994 that the frst fully online sales transaction was completed (Fessenden 30 November 2015). Since then, online shopping has gone from strength to strength, with the number of digital buyers rising from 1.4 billion in 2014 to 2.14 billion in 2021 alone (Coppola 13 October 2021). In Latin America, there are currently an estimated 300 million digital buyers and the Argentinabased company, Mercado Libre (ML), the focus of our study, is the leading e-commerce site, with Amazon currently in second place: in 2021 ML had 139.5 million active users, up 5% from the year before (Chevalier 29 September 2021). The way in which the physical and virtual worlds are converging to form a new hybrid space (Yus 2021) is the subject of much scholarly discussion. As the case of e-commerce shows, the hybrid space made possible by technology is not actually created by it but rather by the communication

DOI: 10.4324/9781003335535-12

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networks it enables. De Souza e Silva (2013) aptly conveys this idea when she says that hybrid space is “built by the connection of mobility and communication and materialised by social networks developed simultaneously in physical and digital spaces” (pp. 265–266). In other words, as discussed by Frith (2015: 47) the virtual element opens new opportunities in the physical here and now, complementing it and adding to it rather than being in opposition to it. E-commerce itself sits on the borderline between the physical and virtual worlds: you may be able to order and pay for items from your home over the internet; however, if you are buying physical goods, they need to be delivered and thus location matters. In addition, statistics show that physical stores are still important in retail – even post-pandemic – for a variety of reasons: e.g., customers’ need to see items before buying, the value of in-person interaction to the quality of customer service, and the fact that footfall in physical stores actually increases online sales (Pezzini 9 February 2021). This being the case, we would expect digital buyers and sellers to be very location-aware despite the virtual space in which they are completing their transactions. How online buyers orient to ofine location is something we explore in the present study in the context of ML e-service encounters. ML is currently the largest platform for e-commerce in Latin America, selling a wide range of products and services. Of-line location information is embedded in the setup of the company: it has sites in multiple countries (e.g., ML Argentina, ML Mexico, etc.) and within each site, users can choose an administrative area (e.g., a province) to buy or sell products. This location information enables users to gain some initial orientation before entering into transactions and, as we shall see, many users go on to share further, more detailed location information. One of ML’s distinctive features is that it ofers users a publicly available space – a message board – for buyers to ask questions and receive responses from sellers about a given product, giving rise to e-service encounters. This space plays host to a variety of transaction-focused interactions such as negotiating the price of items for sale or proposing a bartering exchange, and, in addition, despite the eminently virtual context of ML, it is also where seller/buyer of-line location information is shared. Such information, as we will show (Section 4) can have an impact on the development of interactions and the success of a transaction; it also has the potential to transform the e-service encounter into a hybrid encounter. For example, we found that the ability to see a given product before buying it still matters to some ML users. Related to the previous discussion, although the ML platform is not a locative medium in the traditional sense associated with applications such as Foursquare, for instance (as we explain in Section 2), ML users do

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share of-line locations, and this does, in fact, constitute a breach of ML’s norms of interaction (see Section 3). We would argue that almost because it is against site policy, the occurrence of location sharing among buyers and sellers is an indication of underlying strategies beyond simply ofering information. Building on work on (mobile) telephony location talk (e.g., Scheglof 1972; de Souza e Silva 2013; Laursen and Szymanski 2013) (see Section 2), and technology-mediated communication more widely (e.g., Colbert 1991; Frith 2015), in this chapter we explore the role of location information sharing in ML interactions, based on corpora obtained from ML Argentina, ML Ecuador and ML Mexico. The specifc research questions that we seek to address are the following: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

How frequently is location shared on ML? Where in the conversation is location shared? Are buyers or sellers more likely to initiate location sharing/ negotiation? Why do ML users share location? How do ML users share location?

As far as we know, this is the frst study of location sharing in an e-commerce context. The chapter is organised as follows: in Section 2, we provide the background to our study, looking at previous work on location sharing (2.1), and how the ML app works in terms of this feature (2.2). We then describe the methodology and corpus employed (Section 3) before presenting and discussing the fndings of our study (Section 4). 2

Background

2.1 Location sharing

With the improvements in smartphone technology enabling quite accurate pinpointing of location, location sharing has become an increasingly common feature in many apps. Many platforms such as Instagram and Facebook allow users to tag photos with location information while others, like Snapchat and Foursquare use live location updates. The sharing of current location information in the virtual world enriches our physical environment, as discussed by de Souza e Silva (2013): the hybrid space created allows users access to information that might otherwise be hidden or diffcult to obtain, via for instance, the tips and recommendations that people attach to particular locations. A further purpose to location sharing is, of course, as a tool for coordinating our social lives (Humphreys 2008; Sutko and de Souza e Silva 2011), yet there are also more emotional reasons for

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the practice such as creating a sense of community (Cheng and Guo 2015) and as a vehicle for self-presentation (Schwartz and Halegoua 2015). Tang et al. (2010) discuss the diferent motivations behind location sharing, dividing them into purpose-driven and social-driven (p. 85). According to their defnitions, the essential diference between the two motivations concerns whether or not sharing is strictly necessary in the context of a given interaction: location information is essential to organising a social function (i.e., it is purpose-driven sharing) while including location data when updating one’s Facebook status is done purely because the user thinks people might be interested (i.e., it is social-driven as it is largely about self-presentation) (pp. 87–88). The key feature of this latter motivation is that it is about maintaining or gaining social capital (Ellison et al. 2007) and its aim might be described as emotional rather than functional. Of course, defning users’ motivations is not a precise science. As Tang et al. (2010) say, the distinction between purpose- and social-driven location sharing is fuid, depending on a variety of factors, most importantly the audience with whom the information is shared. The authors discuss this specifcally in terms of the size and type of audience, contrasting how oneto-one sharing is generally more purpose-driven than one-to-many sharing. To illustrate this, on one hand, one-to-one location sharing apps such as Glympse allow a parent and their child to share location information for the purpose of so called okayness checking (Iachello et al. 2005) and on the other, platforms such as Facebook, which (depending on privacy settings) allow users to share information with the general public such that the disclosure of location becomes something of an exercise in showing of. In the frst example, the sole purpose of Glympse is to share location; however, where location sharing is more than an optional extra, the division between social – and purpose – driven motivations is harder to defne and indeed the two can overlap. Several studies have looked at user patterns of location sharing on a variety of social networks, including Dodgeball (Humphreys 2007); Facebook (Bertel 2016); and Foursquare (Licoppe 2014). These applications are rather diferent to ML, in that while these apps enable location sharing as part of their functionality, location sharing associated with user ID is not enabled through ML software.1 However, there are still some important fndings in these studies that have relevance to our present work. Of particular importance is the extent to which users do or do not fnd location sharing useful and how comfortable they are in engaging in this activity. This is discussed by Bertel (2016) in his work on Facebook in which the author looked at location sharing on the platform among a group of Danish youths. The author conducted interviews with 31 users between the ages of 16 and 21 and discovered that location sharing, or “checking in” is relatively rare, describing it as: “a contested practice

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that is often met with reluctance and reservation” (p. 163). The reasons behind this seem to be connected to the peripheral nature of the location sharing function in Facebook meaning that while people could see it might be useful, they did not really know in what way. This uncertainty about the purpose of location sharing on Facebook seemed to feed into the rather negative perception that it was about showing of or that it showed desperation to be noticed (p. 168). Interestingly, one fnding was that users tended to share more when with a group of friends, as one user explained: “it is cool to be with other people all the time” (p. 172). Unfortunately, given the other perceptions about the practice of checking in, the social capital users might seek to gain by engaging in this practice would seem to be undermined. Also, of interest here is the way in which purpose driven location disclosure can come to have social functions. This was studied by Licoppe (2014) in the case of the social networking platform Foursquare. Unlike on Facebook, location sharing is the primary function of Foursquare and the app ofers users various incentives – in the form of a kind of gamifcation – to give location notifcations as often as possible. In this context, the author describes how users of this app interpret location checks as invitations. Linguistically, these location checks do not have the form of explicit invitations, which have been categorised as directives (see, e.g., García 2007, 2008), that is, speech acts in which the speaker’s aim is to make the hearer do something (Searle 1976), with formulations such as want (quiero que vengas “I want you to come”) or obligation (tienes que venir “you have to come”) statements (García 2008: 276). Instead, they are presented as factual statements: “X is at the Y café,” for example. According to interviews with users conducted by Licoppe (2014), followers and, particularly, friends of individual X would interpret this checking in as an implicit invitation to meet at café Y. However, the invitations in Licoppe’s (2014) study require careful management and there can occur what amounts to pragmatic failure (Thomas 1983) where users overestimate the strength of the invitation. Licoppe’s (2014) interviewees tell of one acquaintance who tends to turn up anywhere that a location notifcation is posted; indeed, they take bets on how long it will take him to appear. This points to the privacy issues inherent in location sharing – a topic that has been given signifcant consideration (Consolvo et al. 2005; Iachello et al. 2005; Kim 2016) – and may well feed into the discomfort some users in Bertel’s (2016) Danish Facebook corpus felt about disclosing their location: the sense of “why would anyone want to know” discovered among these Danish youths (p.  167) may have its foundations in a sense that their privacy is being violated by broadcasting their location. As Licoppe (2014) study shows, location disclosure can be abused.

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Considering the two studies in the previous section, it seems increasingly apparent that not only does location sharing have pragmatic meaning but that it also involves issues of a social contract: we hope those with whom we share our location will not abuse the information. In a virtual context, users’ locations are not necessarily apparent; thus, location disclosure becomes strategic with users having to consider the interpretation and consequences of sharing. At the heart of this technological revolution, of course, is the mobile phone. Releasing communication from a fxed infrastructure, the physical location of callers becomes an unknown and a worthy topic of conversation. Even before phones became mobile, however, location talk in telephone conversations was a topic of study. One of the earliest studies of location talk is that of Scheglof (1972) examining the use of location talk – so-called locational formulations – in landline conversations. Scheglof argues that conversationalists have a choice of locational formulations and chose the correct ones according to where the conversationalists are, who they are, and the topic of conversation; that is, attention is given to: “where we know we are,” “who we know we are,” and “what we are doing at this point in the conversation” (p. 115). The formulation for where a person lives, for instance, could be a set of geographic coordinates, an address, or “home,” and the correct choice of term would depend on the conversation. Thus, location is not an external context for conversation but rather a resource speakers can use to achieve a variety of conversational ends including social and interactional tasks dependent on the situation and mutual context of speakers (Scheglof 1972; Psathas 1991). For instance, it has been shown that location talk allows speakers to orient to one another’s availability and activities (see, e.g., Colbert 1991; Arminen 2006), and to establish mutual context between speakers (Laurier 2001); it has also been argued, it can cement personal relationships and make callers’ accountable for their actions (Green 2002). In the absence of studies concerning text-based location talk on mobile devices, we shall briefy discuss some of those dealing with the analysis of mobile phone conversations. Such conversations might be expected to contain more immediate references to location precisely due to the fact that the callers cannot necessarily know one another’s location; this could be termed the “I’m on the train” phenomenon (Laurier 2001: 487). Laurier discusses the question of why people share information about their locations in mobile phone calls through the analysis of calls between a group of four nomadic workers. The author discusses how these workers use location for operational reasons: to coordinate their work time and for more social reasons, such as establishing a mutual context or group membership among physically disconnected interlocutors.

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In other work, Weilenmann (2003) examined the conversations recorded by a Swedish teenager between herself and members of her family and friendship groups. The author found that the question “what are you doing” (p. 1590) was not only one of the most frequent conversational openings, but also that it was often answered with a location. In this way the location talk observed in this study revolved around establishing availability and indeed getting out of conversations, based on the convenience of certain locations for holding a conversation; and for coordinating future activities with location given as an indication of how easily and quickly people could get together. Focusing on the realisation of location talk, Laursen and Szymanski (2013) looked at location talk in the openings of a corpus containing 93 mobile phone conversations from the United States (50) and Denmark (43). The authors looked separately at caller and callee initiated location talk fnding that the where-are-you enquiry was used by both groups while callers had an additional strategy involving the status of the callee: “are you still at X location?” Callees on the other hand were the only group that voluntarily reported their location status. Marrying together the felds of mobile telephone location talk and appenabled location services, Weilenmann and Leuchovious (2004) examined the question of why, at the time of study, the uptake of location-based services, such as location tracking, had failed to meet expectations. The answer they suggest lies in a mismatch between the way these services report location – as geographical points on a map, street names, or coordinates – and the ways in which location is disclosed in natural conversation – using terms that are meaningful to those involved in the conversation like “home” or “where we met last time.” We are still far from the point where the technology behind location-based services could understand the meaning of diferent locations to the people using these services; however, the authors suggest that more account could be taken of how interlocutors actively negotiate locations. For example, in many tracking services, users are often unaware that they are being searched for; thus, in future, app designers could include more collaborative features. 2.2 Mercado Libre and location sharing

The ML application does not enable location sharing in the same way as social media platforms do; in other words, it is not a locative medium in the same sense as Facebook, Foursquare or the other apps discussed previously. However, it ofers users a message board through which buyers can communicate with sellers before committing to a purchase. Concerning location sharing, the rules of the site are that users should make their purchases frst after which point location details are provided in order to enable product delivery (as many of the sellers in our corpus explain). This seems to be a common

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feature of similar buying and selling apps: Vinted and eBay, for example, also discourage the exchange of personal details and these only become available after purchase. As the policies of these sites explain, this is necessary to protect user privacy; it is also, undoubtedly, to inhibit users from completing transactions outside the app and avoiding fees. Thus, on ML, users are not expected to volunteer specifc location information within the message board space; yet they do. In this case, we should logically conclude that disclosing location can have meaning beyond mere practicalities. Indeed, questions of strategy and negotiation seem very relevant here, and it is precisely this that our study aims to address, as previously indicated. ML also difers from the apps mentioned in the previous discussion in that, whereas these apps allow users simply to disclose location as bland factual statements, users on ML can post about location employing a variety of locational formulations, not only giving information about their own locations but also requesting or inviting others to share theirs. The sort of text-based online communication occurring on ML message boards sits somewhere between oral and written communication (Herring 2007), not too dissimilar to the kind of communication found in social media contexts, characterised by brevity and immediacy, among other features (see, e.g., Yus 2011). In this way, ML location talk is likely to share features with the mobile phone conversations studied, with some important diferences. Foremost of these is that, unlike face-to-face or telephone interactions, these online conversations occasionally comprise only a single turn as they may come to an abrupt end when one party simply fails to respond. This phenomenon where interlocutor contributions are entirely ignored is partly due to the non-simultaneity of this type of online communication and also down to the fact that interlocutors are not co-present and thus, there are no social consequences to non-response (for a discussion in another online context, see Placencia et al. 2016). Another consequence of the non-simultaneity of ML interactions is that posts-conversational turns are often quite lengthy with users cramming what, in oral communication, would be multiple turns into a single post (Powell and Placencia 2020). In addition, unlike in the aforementioned work on location talk (Section 2.1), the users on ML are unlikely to be known to one another in a personal capacity. Both this and the potential for non-response may impact the development of conversations and thus where location sharing occurs in the interaction as well as the types and variety of location formulations used. 3

Methodology and corpus employed

ML ofers users the opportunity to buy and sell a wide variety of items. There are country-specifc sites, as mentioned in Section 1, and each

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site is organised into domains selling similar products or services. The data for this work was gathered from three country platforms: Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina. The Mexican and Ecuadorian data were gathered from the mobile phones and bicycles domains and involved largely second-hand products, while the Argentine data was gathered from the toys domain where, almost exclusively, new items were sold. This gave us fve sub-corpuses: Mexican bicycles (MexB); Mexican mobiles (MexM); Ecuadorian bicycles (EcB); Ecuadorian mobiles (EcM); and Argentine toys (ArgT). The Ecuadorian and Mexican data were initially gathered for a contrastive study on bargaining ofers and refusals (see, e.g., Placencia 2019), and the Argentine data, to look at rapport management in requests (Powell and Placencia 2020). These data were collected in 2018 over several months. The bicycles and mobile phones domains were chosen in that they were products extensively sold on ML-Ecuador and ML-Mexico, facilitating a random selection of the two products on the two platforms from which the interactions were extracted (for details, see Placencia 2019). With respect to the Argentine data, the toys domain was selected as it appeared to generate a large number of buyer questions; thus, it represented a large data pool from which to generate a corpus through a random selection of products (for details, see Powell and Placencia 2020). The full corpus examined contained 546 conversations of which only 81 involved location talk: 9 from MexB; 11 from MexM; 11 from EcB; 5 from EcM; and 45 from ArgT. These are the exchanges that comprise the corpus of the present study. Posts are public but for the purposes of protecting user privacy, all names, nicknames and other personal identifers have been removed. This complies with the ethical principles laid out in the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) ethical guidelines (https://aoir.org/ethics/). 4

Results and discussion

A frst observation is that location is mentioned very little in the corpus as a whole, as remarked in the previous section, occurring only in 81 instances or 14.8% of the total of the exchanges examined. The Argentine toys sub-corpus contained most location disclosure, with 55% of all posts including a mention of either the buyer’s or seller’s location. The lowest amount of location disclosure occurred in the Mexican mobiles sub-corpus where only 7% of posts contained a location. In the Ecuadorian bikes and mobiles and Mexican bikes sub-corpora the percentage of posts including location mentions were 21%, 24%, and 20%, respectively. Other characteristics of the sub-corpora include the types of sellers on each. The Argentine corpus, in particular, seemed dominated by private

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enterprises, a fact that can be determined due to their frequent inclusion in their posts of references to physical premises. For example, in one post from the Argentine corpus, the seller gives the address of nuestro local “our shop.” Other sellers described themselves in various ways that identifed their commercial status, for example, one called themselves tu tienda Online en Lavalle “your online shop in Lavalle (street name)”; others signed of their posts with clearly commercial names such as juguetes Alxxxxx “Alxxxxx toys”; or called themselves an SRL,2 the equivalent of a “plc.” This sort of reference does not appear in either the Ecuadorian or Mexican corpuses with sellers mentioning the locations of their home or places of work suggesting that they are private individuals, selling on their own possessions second-hand. This distinction may have given rise to other diferences between the Argentine corpus and the Ecuadorian and Mexican corpuses. One example is that whereas bartering sequences were not uncommon in both the Ecuadorian and Mexican corpora, there were none in the Argentine corpus. This probably refects a perception among buyers that prices displayed by commercial outlets are non-negotiable while those presented by private individuals may be more amenable to negotiation. The inclusion of bartering sequences in the Mexican and Ecuadorian corpora is undoubtedly one reason the conversations in these data sets tended to be longer: they contained more turns than those in the Argentine corpus. In fact, in the Argentine corpus, only 4% of conversations involved more than two turns: the Mexican and Ecuadorian corpora contained a far higher percentage of longer conversations (more than two turns): MexB (78%); MexM (81%): EcB (45%); EcM (60%). In the following sections, we look at the place in the conversation where location talk occurs (4.1); who initiates such talk – buyers or sellers (4.2); the purposes of location information sharing (4.3), and fnally, the kinds of formulations ML users employ in location talk (4.4). 4.1 Place of location talk in the conversation

Existing studies of communication using landline and mobile phones suggest that location talk is most frequent in conversational openings (Scheglof 1972; Weilenmann 2003; Laursen and Szymanski 2013). As discussed in the previous section, conversations in our corpus were of varying length. Occasionally (i.e., two instances) they comprised a single turn where a buyer posted a question which received no response, but more often, as we will see, they extended to two turns – a buyer-seller, question-response pair – turns and even longer. Concerning the place of location talk, certain purposes behind it would bring it to the beginning of the conversation: for instance, some buyers

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were keen to see products before committing to purchase, as in (1) (turn 01) (Y donde se puede ver? ‘And where can I see it?’). (1)

MexB5 (B=buyer; S=seller) 01B: Saludos, cuanto es lo menos? Y donde se puede ver? Gracias . . . “Greetings, how much is the least? And where can I see it? Thanks . . .” 02S: La tengo en toluca, puedes checarla y ya negociamos. La puedo traer al df la prox semana para que la cheques “I have it in Toluca, you can check it and then we can negotiate. I can bring it to df (distrito federal ‘federal district’) next week for you to check it.”

Indeed, in seven of the nine instances of buyers asking for a location in order to see a product, regardless of overall conversation length, the location request occurred in the buyer’s initial turn. It is interesting to note, however, that where conversations extended beyond two turns location talk was not confned to the opening stage of the conversation (the frst two turns) but rather tended to come later, after other aspects of the buying-selling negotiation had been dealt with. Example (2) illustrates such an instance, with location talk relegated to the end of the conversation (turns 07 and 08). (2)

MexB2 01B:

Hola aún vendes la bici? saludos. “Hi are you still selling the bike? greetings.”

02S:

Si aun la tengo “Yes I still have it”

03B:

3500 es lo menos? Una rebaja. “3500 is the lowest? A discount.”

04S:

Cuanto ofreces “How much are you ofering”

05B: 06S: 07B:

3100 OK En dónde sería la entrega? “Where would the delivery be?” donde eres? “Where are you?”3

08S:

In this conversation, the buyer frst secures the deal (turns 01–06) and then moves on to the logistical aspect of getting their product (turn 07), which

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involves a physical handover. This tendency to leave location talk to the end of the conversation perhaps speaks to the priorities of ML users: securing the best deal. It also highlights that while coordinating activities is clearly the purpose behind this location talk, as in the conversations studied by other authors (see, e.g., Weilenmann 2003; Laursen and Szymanski 2013), the other purposes cited by these authors, such as checking the callee’s availability to talk are not an issue in ML exchanges – this, in particular, is possibly assumed. Thus, location negotiation moves to the end of the conversation. 4.2

Location talk initiators

As can be seen from examples (1) and (2), buyers often initiated location talk. Indeed, this was the most common course of events: location-related talk was initiated by buyers in 67 (83%) of the 81 conversations in the corpus. Sellers initiated location talk in the rest of the conversations, as in (3) (turn 02). (3)

ArgT18 01B:

Hola! Tenés stock de la cars? “Hi! Do you have the cars one in stock?”

02S: Por el momento tenemos stock Podes retirar de Lunes a viernes de 9:30hs a 17:30hs o los sábados de 9:30hs a 13hs por nuestro local de villa urquiza. Estamos cerca de Av. Congreso y Galvan. Sino te lo podemos enviar. El envio a capital te sale 120 pesos. Una vez que ofertas, seleccionas la opción que “retiras por domicilio del vendedor,” te llega un mensaje con todos nuestros datos y coordinamos la entrega. “At the moment we have stock. You can pick up from Monday to Friday from 9:30 to 17:30 hrs or Saturdays from 9:30 to 13hrs at our shop in villa urquiza. We are close to Congreso Av. and Galvan. Otherwise we can deliver. Delivery to the capital will cost you 120 pesos. Once you make an ofer, select the option ‘pick up from the vendor’s address’, a message will arrive with all our information and we can coordinate the delivery.” As we can see, the seller in (3) provides location information (. . . nuestro local de villa urquiza. Estamos cerca de . . . ‘ . . . our shop in villa urquiza. We are close to . . .’) when replying to the buyer’s question about whether the product required is available for purchase. We can say that this is unsolicited location information; it constitutes a strategy employed by the seller that could perhaps be seen as encouraging purchases – an invitation to buy – and therefore in the interests of both the seller’s company and ML. Private individuals, in contrast, wary of divulging personal information, would be

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less inclined to volunteer such information until the point where it would be deemed necessary to further the transaction in hand, as in (4) (turn 08). (4)

EcM4 01B: Un Samsung j7 nuevo 02S: 03B: 04S: 05B: 06S: 07B: 08S: 09B: 10S:

11B: 12S:

“A new Samsung j7” Con diferencia a mi favor “With the diference in my favour” cuanto amigo “how much friend” El equipo es nuevo de paquete? “Is the device like new from the packet” si amigo “yes friend” Si es que es nuevo de paquete seria unos 60 “If it’s like new from the packet it’ll be about 60” 50 no te parece y l[o] hacemos hoy mismo “what do you think about 50 and we do it today” Y de que parte eres? “And which area are you in?” estoy por la Magdalena “I’m around Magdalena” Bueno yo trabajo en Villafora, pero ahorita estoy en mi domicilio en Sangolqui “Well I work in Villafora, but right now I’m at home in Sangolqui” mañana estaría bien entonces “tomorrow would be good then” ok me escribes mañana y nos ponemos de acuerdo “ok write to me tomorrow and we can come to an agreement”

To compare like with like, (4) is also an example of seller-initiated location talk and shows location being used as a strategy to facilitate a transaction. In contrast to the previous example, however, here the seller appears to be a private individual – the mention of where the seller works suggests they are not a professional vendor. In this example, the barter exchange is negotiated frst: the buyer suggests an exchange (turn 01), but the seller wants money in addition (turn 02), and it is only after negotiating the buyer’s counterofer (turns 03–07) that the seller makes a request for the buyer’s location (turn 08). Perhaps the seller wishes to close the deal before the buyer loses interest

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or wants to test the seriousness of the buyer’s intentions, but the efect is to bring the negotiation to an apparently successful conclusion. It is interesting to note that most of the seller-initiated location talk occurred in the ArgT sub-corpus. This may well refect the fact that, as explained in Section 4, sellers in the Argentine sub-corpus tended to be private commercial enterprises with physical shops as well as their online presence whereas those in the Mexican and Ecuadorian corpora appeared to be private individuals. 4.3 Purposes of location sharing

Turning to why users share location on ML, it would seem that they are mostly concerned with negotiating when and where items can be exchanged, something similar to what has been described by other authors considering social location sharing as coordinating availability and activities (Colbert 1991; Arminen 2006; Licoppe 2014). In total, we found 32 instances of arranging to exchange or pick up goods within the conversations examined. Other purposes were very much connected to the transactional nature of the conversations studied, particularly cost: calculating delivery charges (24 instances); or issues of trust: wishing to see items before buying (9 instances). More unusual purposes did appear, including invitations to buy (seven instances), as exemplifed in (3), used exclusively by sellers in the Argentine corpus, and, for instance, formulating location as a way to make an item seem more desirable. This last purpose is exemplifed in (5) where the product’s location of origin seems to be presented as one of its selling points. (5)

EcB11 01B: Tal vez le interesa hacer un cambio con una cámara de fotos CANON SX400 IS, completamente nueva traída de USA. “Perhaps you’d be interested in a swap for a CANON SX400 IS camera totally new from the USA.” 02S: No amigo gracias “No thanks my friend”

Results are summarised in Table 9.1. Table 9.1 Purposes of location talk Purpose

Frequency

Arranging pick up or exchange Request delivery cost Request to see item Invitation to buy Other

32 24 9 7 9

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4.4 Location formulations employed

The present study found that ML users employ three main types of location formulation: a) reporting on their personal, or b) geographical location (4.4.1); and c) requesting location information (Section 4.4.2). These are similar to the formulations used by the mobile phone callers and callees in Laursen and Szymanski’s (2013) study, specifcally their “where-I-am” and “where-are-you” formulations. In addition, ML users also sometimes employed a formulation that could be termed a “transit intention” (Section 4.4.3), similar to Laursen and Szymanski’s (2013) “transit status” formulation. Subsequently, we consider the formulations most frequently employed to initiate location talk and discuss features of their linguistic realization. 4.4.1

“Where I am”: the personal and geographical location reports

One of the most common location formulations used in the corpus – with 28 instances – is the personal location report, explicitly indicating current location using a form of the verb estar (“to be”), or more implicitly using ser (“to be”) where, the more literal interpretation is that the speaker originates from the location stated.4 In (6), soy de oran (turn 01) might be interpreted more literally as “I am from Oran”; however, as in this example, the inclusion of accompanying inquiries – here concerning shipping costs – served to clarify the import of statements concerning this buyer’s origin. This type of formulation is what Laursen and Szymanski (2013) called the “where-I-am” personal report, as opposed to a purely geographical location report (see examples in the following sections). One diference with their fndings, however, is that, whereas in their study only callees tended to give this kind of report, in the present work, both buyers, as in (6) (turn 01), and sellers, as in (7) (turn 02) did so. (6)

ArgT32 01B:

(7)

hola soy de oran (salta) cuanto sale el envio “Hello I’m from oran (salta) how much is delivery” [One subsequent turn in which seller gives relevant information]

ArgT26 01B:

Hola tenes stock ? “Hello do you have stock?”

02S:

Hola!! ¿Cómo estás?, tenemos en stock. Estamos sobre la calle Lavalle, cerca de la estación de subte Pasteur de la linea B, de Lunes a Viernes de 10 a 12.30 hs o de 13.30 a 18hs y los sábados de 10 a 12.30 hs. Enviamos a todo el pais, consulte costos

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y medios de envio. Saludos cordiales. OPORTUNIDADES-VIP – Tu Tienda Online en Lavalle. “Hello!! How are you? We have stock. We’re on Lavalle rd, near Pasteur underground station, line B, from Monday to Friday 10 to 12:30 or 13:30 to !8:00 hrs and Saturdays from 10 to 12:30 hrs. We deliver all over the country, consult the costs and means of delivery. Best regards. VIP-OPPORTUNITIES – Your online shop in Lavalle.” Laursen and Szymanski (2013) noted that while callers’ reports could often be interpreted as the reason for the call, callees’ location reports could be interpreted as a way to bring conversations to a close: locations were mentioned when the call was inconvenient, something also noted by Weilenmann (2003). Considering buyers as the callers and sellers as the callees, there are certain parallels here: as can be appreciated from (7), as for Laursen and Szymanski’s (2013) callers, reporting their location was often the reason why ML buyers posted a question to a seller on the message board. For sellers, the non-simultaneity of the ML message board means that personal availability issues are not a consideration in the same way as for mobile phone callees: unlike calls, message board posts need not be answered immediately. This said, sellers, like the one in (7), certainly did appear to use these location reports to demonstrate their availability in the sense of preparedness for business, and to encourage sales. The geographical location report (19 instances) involved the statement of geographical information, as before, but without any attempt to personalise the information, as in (8) (turn 05). (8)

MexM11 [four previous turns discussing the item on sale] 05B: Cuanto el envío económico a C.P. 89510? No manejas Mercadoenvíos verdad? “How much is budget delivery to Zip 89510? You don’t do Mercadoenvíos right?” 06S: No lo manejo, yo generalmente los mando x Estafeta y esta en 350 el envio. Claro que te llega en 2 a 3 dias maximo. El economico es por correos 60 pesos pero no garantizo q llegue en buen estado la caja “No I don’t, generally I send things by Estafeta and its 350 for delivery. Of course, it will arrive in 2 or 3 days maximum. The budget is by post 60 pesos but I can’t guarantee the package will arrive in good condition.”

In the previous example, the buyer wishes to know how much it costs to deliver a package to “C.P. 89510” (turn 01); this is probably the buyer’s

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location, but it is not stated as such. Unlike in the location reports in (6) and (7), the buyer does not indicate their personal connection to the postcode given: they demonstrate no place attachment (Altman and Low 1992), that is, they give the location stated no symbolic or emotional meaning. Thus, this type of formulation is qualitatively diferent from the location reports in (6) and (7): although it achieves a similar function, the geographical report is purely task focused (Fant 1995), whereas the reports in (6) and (7) display person focus too. Interestingly, the geographical report was exclusively used to request delivery costs, where the buyer and seller were not intending to meet. This lack of any possible future encounters between interlocutors makes interpersonal elements of the interaction far less important and this may explain the choice of formulation. 4.4.2

Where are you: Question formulations with and without a candidate location

Many location negotiations were initiated with questions, particularly those using dónde (“where”) to pin down a user’s location either to inspect or pick up products (16 instances). In example (9), a user wishes to see a product before buying and asks where they can do this. (9)

MexM5 01B: Saludos, cuanto es lo menos? Y donde se puede ver? Gracias . . . “Greetings, what’s the lowest? And where can it be seen? Thanks . . .” 02S: La tengo en toluca, puedes checarla y ya negociamos. La puedo traer al df la prox semana para que la cheques. “I have it in toluca, you can check it and then we negotiate. I can bring it to df [federal district] next week for you to check it.”

Other open questions using cómo (“how”) and cuándo (“when”) in requests to see items also elicited locations (three instances). Occasionally users would use a closed question in which they suggested a particular meeting place or candidate location (Laursen and Szymanski 2013), as in (10), turn 03 (nine instances). (10) MexB7 [two previous turns discussing price] 03B:

Sí me interesa, habría la posibilidad de que entregues en la terminal de observatorio, ya que soy de Toluca. “Yes I’m interested, is there the possibility of bringing it to the observatorio terminal as I’m from Toluca.”

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227

Hola, solo entrego en metro Impulsora, línea B, lo siento no sé si sea original o no solo solo sé que tiene más de 40 años, gracias, saludos. “Hello, I only deliver to Impulsora underground, line B, sorry I don’t know if its original or not I only know it’s more than 40 years old, thanks, regards.” [2 subsequent turns]

These formulations again have parallels in mobile phone conversations. Questions with and without a candidate location (i.e., open and closed formulations, respectively) were common in Laursen and Szymanski’s (2013) corpus where they appeared to elicit specifc locations or transit status (see 4.4.3). Unsurprisingly then, this formulation was also common in our corpus as users often needed to coordinate pick up or exchange of goods as in (10) where a buyer wishes to make an exchange at a location convenient to themselves and suggests a particular metro terminus. It was also common for buyers to include candidate locations when asking about the possibility of delivery as in (11). (11) ArgT2 01B:

4.4.3

Hola como estas ??? Haces envios a neuquen capital?? “Hello how are you??? Do you do deliveries to neuquen capital??” [one subsequent turn in which seller gives relevant information]

Transit intention

Although not particularly common (8 instances), users would sometimes mention location in terms of a transit intention, as in (12), turn 05: . . . voy a estar en Quito del 16 al 20 “I’m going to be in Quito from 16 to 20.” (12) EcB6 [Four previous turns negotiating price] 05B: Amigo, esa sería mi última oferta no tengo más. Del envío no se preocupe porque voy a estar en Quito del 16 al 20. Me avisa si hacemos negocio o no. Saludos “Friend, this will be my last ofer I have no more. You don’t have to worry about delivery as I’m going to be in Quito from 16 to 20. Let me know if we can do a deal or not. Regards.” [Seven subsequent turns containing further negotiation] Instances of this type are similar to Laursen and Szymanski’s (2013) transit status formulations, where caller/ees would make reference, for instance, to how they were “nearly there” (p.  322), refecting how the

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calls in their study often involved coordinating meetings between callers. This kind of location talk was also noted in Laurier’s (2001) work as part of what amounts to rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000]) in that it seemed to revolve around group solidarity among itinerant workers. In our corpus, users also talked about their transit status; however, due to the lack of simultaneity of communication on ML – hours may pass between conversational turns – they did so in terms of future intentions to be at or pass-through certain locations. As (12) shows, this may be a strategy that serves two purposes: frstly, and most obviously, to coordinate activities but, secondly, it could also be seen as having a solidarity generating function as it appears to be an attempt by the buyer to sweeten the deal – the seller need not worry about the burden of organising delivery of the bike. This consideration could be extended to other location talk in the corpus examined. In a context where sharing location is discouraged, the volunteering of this information could be interpreted as having various rapport management functions. Volunteering personal information of this nature shows a degree of trust, and perhaps because it brings the virtual transaction into the physical world it is possibly an attempt to show a high level of commitment to the deal in hand; in other words, one could argue that, to some extent, location talk constitutes a strategy aimed at enhancing interpersonal relationships. 5

Conclusions

This work constitutes a frst look at the role of location talk in an e-commerce setting, specifcally ML, in three diferent Spanish-speaking countries: Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina. Results suggest that buyers rather than sellers are more likely to initiate location talk, and this was not simply due to the fact that, in this setting, buyers begin all conversations by posting their questions to sellers and thus had more opportunity to do so. In general, location talk occurred late in exchanges after other elements of the transaction had been negotiated, that is, when either party – buyers or sellers – might reasonably be expected to begin location talk for the purposes of, say, the pickup or exchange of goods. The location talk on ML had a great deal in common with that observed in mobile phone conversations, particularly in that much of it was functional, revolving around the need to coordinate availability and activities: arranging to view, exchange or pick up items, and organising deliveries. Similarly, the range of location formulations used on ML were much like those found in mobile conversations mostly comprising where-I-am reports or where-are-you requests. There were some diferences, however, and these were connected to the context we are studying. For example, many sellers gave impersonal

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geographical location reports when asking about delivery costs. These reports, simple statements of post codes or town names, lacked any sense of personal identifcation with place, and, in terms of the interpersonal dimension of the interaction, are qualitatively very diferent from whereI-am reports. This and other observations concerning how location talk may demonstrate trust and commitment among ML users leads to a fnal thought that, as Laurier (2001) noted with her itinerant workers, location is a way of generating common context (p. 495) and a sense of group membership (p. 499) to assist good interpersonal relations between physically distant interactants, bringing location talk into a rapport management framework (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000]). This deserves further investigation. Notes * This publication was fnanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and by the Consejería de Economía, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad, Junta de Andalucía, within the framework of the Andalucía ERDF Operational Program 2014–2020. Specifc Objective 1.2.3. “Promotion and generation of frontier knowledge and knowledge oriented to the challenges of society, development of emerging technologies.” This is within the framework of the research project reference UPO-1380703. Percentage of co-fnancing FEDER 80%. 1. See, e.g.: “Mercado Libre compras online.” Available at: https://apps.apple. com/mx/app/mercado-libre-compras-online/id463624852. Accessed: 25 April 2022. ML sellers do share their location (generally, city or province where they are based), under the topic “Information about the seller”; for example, the seller may appear as Ubicado en Quito (Pichincha) (‘Located in Quito (Pichincha)’), but no specifc details are provided. 2. Sociedad de responsabilidades limitadas “Society with limited responsibilities.” 3. We interpreted [de]Donde eres “where are you from” in this example as containing a typo error, with the author intending to ask where the buyer is located (Dónde estás “where are you”). Asking “Where are you from?” would not necessarily elicit the desired information. 4. This and other examples where buyers indicate where they come from (with ser) rather than where they are (with estar), constitute implicit ways of reporting on their current location. Accompanying inquiries such as the question on shipping costs in (6) serve to clarify the import of statements about a person’s origin as location reports.

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Index

Abidin, C. 70, 72, 89n1 Abowd, G.D. 213 Abril, G. 51 Abuchaem, R. 15 Adetunji, A. 173 afliation, ambient 98, 125 afordance 1, 23; interface 28; social 42 Agnew, J. 2, 10, 13, 34 Aguirre, A.C. 97 Airbnb 16 Akhmatova, A. 88 Alba Zollo, S. 122, 130, 137, 144, 146–147 Albelda Marco, M. 105 algorithm 73, 89 Al-Khalidy, H.O. 174, 177 Altman, I. 226 Alves Stradioto, S. 172, 188 anaphora 186 Andrews, G.J. 148 Androutsopoulos, J. 13, 48, 97, 124 Angouri, J. 125, 129 Anon 71–72 Antoci, A. 124 Appadurai, A. 14 apps, locative 171 Arminen, I. 215, 223 Ashby Plant, E. 136 attitude, afective 18 Bailey, J. 144 Baker, P. 95, 99–100 Bakhtin, M. 52 Bal, M. 51 Bannister, J. 123 Bar, F. 9 Barbéris, J.-M. 164

Barton, D. 99 Bauman, Z. 3, 14, 16 Baumann, K. 9 Baym, N. 10, 12 Bazzanella, C. 155 Beaude, B. 153–154, 165 Bednarek, M. 122, 129 Bertel, T.F. 213–214 Bhandari, A. 4 Biocca, F. 15 Blas Arroyo, J.L. 173–174 Blommaert, J. 2, 10, 14, 49, 53, 59–60, 96, 121, 123–125 body shaming 130 Bonaccorsi, J. 163 Bondi, L. 122, 125, 137 Bonifazi, G. 72 Bonilla, Y. 98, 125 Bonotti, M. 123 Bou-Franch, P. 4, 13, 97–98, 105, 107, 112, 114, 129–130 boyd, D. 178 Braun, V. 95, 100, 102 Briz, A. 105 Brown, P. 122, 130–131, 140–141 Brown, S. 70 Buchanan, E. 38, 99 Bucholtz, M. 133, 143 Bühler, K. 172, 186 Burkell, J. 144 Cairns, B. 154 Caldwell, B. 9 Calhoun, C. 121, 123 Cantamutto, L. 104, 113 Caracciolo, M. 37 Carranza, I. 4, 50, 53, 59, 60, 64n1

234

Index

Carrick, H. 81 Casilli, A.A. 154 Castells, M. 9, 14 Cecchini, S. 72 Chauvin, P. 157 checking, okayness 213 check-ins 21, 23 Chen, M. 213 Chen, S. 148 Cheng, Z. 213 Chevalier, S. 210 Chilton, P. 169, 173–174 Christmann, G. 13 chronotope 49, 52–53, 60 Chun, E. 13 Clarke, V. 95, 100, 102 Colbert, M. 212, 215, 223 Collins, J. 53 component, phatic 18 Cong, G. 169, 171 Consolvo, S. 213–214 constraint, contextual 23 contact, perpetual 19 context: ambient 39; co-located 37; situational 3, 22–28; sociocultural 3, 14–17, 28; sociomental 3, 17–22, 28 contiguity: image-referent 24; user-audience 24 conviviality 125 Coppola, D. 210 co-presence, mediated social 20 Cornish, F. 174 Corradini, E. 72 Courage, C. 1, 9 Covid pandemic 106–107 Coyne, R. 1, 171 Crespo-Fernández, E. 104–106, 114 Cresswell, T. 1, 35, 37, 47, 49 Crompton, R. 69 Culpeper, J. 122, 129, 137–139, 142–143, 147 Curry, M.R. 10 Danino, C. 158 Davidson, J. 122, 125, 137 Davies, S.C. 97 de Certeau, M. 35, 38, 41 Decety, J. 122, 169–209 de Cock, B. 172–173, 184, 187, 206 de Freitas, C.A. 124

de Hoop, H. 171 deixis, spatial 153, 169 Delfno, A. 124 de Souza e Silva, A. 1, 9, 20, 36–37, 63, 96–97, 171, 211–212 Diessel, H. 157 discourse, emotion laden 129 Dobs, A. 137 Dodge, M. 10, 37 Dostalek, T. 156 Dufy, B.E. 41, 44 Duguid, A. 99 Dux, J. 33, 42 Dynel, M. 139 efect: afective 18, 24; scalar 49 Eguren, L. 172 Ellison, N.B. 213 emoji 131 emotes 42 emotion: mediated 18; talk 129 encounters, e-service 210–232 Enfeld, N.J. 101, 172–173 Enguix, S. 170 entextualisation 4, 16, 28 Esposito, E. 122, 130, 137, 144, 146–147 Evans, L. 22, 36, 42 experience 16; embodied 13, 25; shareable 17 fabrication, ethical 38 Fant, L. 226 Farman, J. 13 Farrelly, G.E. 20 Fazel, M. 20 Featherly, K. 210 Fernández-Amaya, L. 4, 129 Fessenden, M. 210 Fetzer, A. 13 Fisk, N. 71 focalization 51 formulation, locational 215 Fortunati, L. 18 Foursquare 36, 214 Fowler, B. 116 Frith, J. 1, 96, 211–212 Gahnmi, M.R. 121 Galende, E. 15 Gallardo Paúls, B. 170

Index Ganga, L. 15 Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. 4, 13, 95, 99, 115, 121–123, 126, 129–130, 136–137, 143–145, 147 García, C. 214 Garfnkel, S. 44 Garretson, O. 33 Gauducheau, N. 157, 159 Gee, J.P. 50, 95–96, 98, 100, 121, 125–126 Gelabert, J. 169, 173, 205 Genette, G. 51 Georgakopoulou, A. 12, 96–97, 103, 106, 109, 115 Georgalou, M. 171 Giaxoglou, K. 97–98, 104–105, 107–108, 113, 115 Giddens, A. 11, 47 Giford, R. 106 Giuliani, L. 72 globalization 47–48, 63; cultural 53 Gofman, E. 15, 121, 123–124 Gómez Sánchez, M.E. 172 Goodwin, R. 210 Gordon, E. 9, 63 Graham, J. 123 Granato, L. 10 Green, N. 215 Greenspan, R. 121 Guo, T. 213 Habbo Hotel 10, 15 Haberland, H. 97 Haidt, J. 107, 114, 122–123, 128–129, 132, 134 Halegoua, G.R. 21–22, 25, 36, 39–32, 213 Hall, K. 133, 143 Hall, K.G. 74 Hamdaoui, M. 173 Hamilton, W.A. 33 Hanks, W. 173 Hardley, J. 12 Hart, C. 174 Harvey, D. 35 hashtag 205 Hern, A. 89n1 Herring, S. 158, 217 Heyd 96–97, 204 Hjorth, L. 37, 39–40

Holmes, M.E. 156, 158 Hong, J.I. 213 Honkanen, M. 96–97 Hope, A.D. 82 Hornewer, M. 136 Humphreys, L. 4, 22, 36, 212–213 Hunston, S. 100 Iachello, G. 213 identity, social 121–151 Ilbury, C. 81 impoliteness 129 Indran, N. 70 intensifcation 105 interaction, polylogal 130 interactivity trigger 25 Ivanova, A. 169, 174, 177, 205 Iveson, K. 124 Jacquemet, M. 49 Jaworski, A. 16, 96 Jeandesboz, J. 170 Ji, P. 70 John, N.A. 11 Jones, R.H. 96, 121, 123 Joseph, J. 122, 124 Jungbluth, K. 172 Karduni, A. 88 Kaufmann, M. 170 Kaye, D.B.V. 66 Keightley, E. 44 Kerne, A. 33 Khalifa, R. 169, 174 Kim, H.-S. 214 King, J. 75 King, R. 123 Kitchin, R. 10, 37 Kleiber, G. 153–155 Klugman, M. 66 Kluitenberg, E. 9 Koliska, M. 20 Kunming, L. 2, 10 LaMarca, A. 214 Lampe, C. 213 Langton, K. 66 Lasén, A. 20 Laurier, E. 215, 228–229 Laursen, D. 212, 216, 219, 221, 224–227

235

236

Index

Lawrence, A.L. 100 Lefebvre, H. 2, 10, 34 Leppänen, S. 49, 64 Lesieur, S. 157 Leuchovious, P. 216 Levinson, S. 101, 122, 130–131, 140–141, 155, 166 Leyda, J. 143 Liao, T. 22 Licoppe, C. 19, 96–97, 171, 213–214, 223 Lin, J. 213 Liu, C. 24 live-streaming 33–46 Livingstone, D.N. 34 locale 2, 10, 13, 16 location 2, 10, 13; formulation 224; sharing, purpose-driven 213; sharing, social-driven 213; talk 216 Locher, M. 129 Lorenzo-Dus, N. 13 Low, S.M. 226 Lower, A. 217 Lyons, J. 154–155 Ma, Z. 169, 171 Maalej, Z. 173 Mackenzie, S.A. 68, 72 Magnenat-Thalmann, N. 169, 171 Maldonado, R. 101, 172–173, 188 Maly, I. 124 Mancera Rueda, A. 105, 176, 205 Many, I. 2 Marcoccia, M. 4, 154, 156–157, 159 Markham, A. 38, 99 Marlow, M. 128 Marwick, A.E. 178 Mascheroni, G. 19 mashups, cultural 12 Massey, D. 2, 10 Matthews, H. 125, 148 Matthews, T. 214 McGlashan, M. 98, 104–106, 113–114 media: event 39; locative 171 merging 38–39 Miller, V. 18 Milroy, L. 50 modernity, liquid 14 Monroe, A.E. 122, 136, 145 Moon, G.P. 25

morality 121–151 Moulinou, I. 106 Negra, D. 143 network 14; afnity 490; loose social 50 Ng, R. 70 Nichols, D. 4, 68, 72, 81 Nieborg, D.B. 41, 44 Norum, R. 16 obituary, collective 116 Ohlheiser, A. 89n1 Oldenburg, R. 33 On, T. 71 online-ofine nexus 2, 10, 121–151 Östman, J.-O. 99 O’Sullivan, a. 123 Özkul, D. 19–21, 36 Page, R. 12, 99, 106 Paglieri, F. 124 Palomino-Manjón, P. 95, 98, 112 Panebianco, F. 124 Pano Alamán, A. 5, 105, 169–170, 176, 186, 205–206 Parini, A. 3, 4, 10, 13, 15, 169, 206 Parizot, I. 157 parochialisation 22 Partington, A. 99 Paul, K. 70 Paulus, T.M. 100 Paveau, M.-A. 163 Percy-Smith, B. 125, 148 Perng, S.-Y. 37 Pezzini, G. 211 Phillips, T. 123 physical place 1 Piepers, J. 171 Pink, S. 37, 39–40 place: attachment 106, 226; character of 22; frst-order 49, 52; narrated 35; reference 101–103; represented 53; second-order 52; sense of 2, 10, 13, 20, 206 placemaking 1, 25, 35–36, 43; collaborative 11; platform 41, 44 Placencia, M.E. 5, 217–218 Plant, E.A. 122, 145 platformization 41 Poell, T. 41, 44 Polson, E. 16

Index Pomerantz, A. 103–104 positioning, afective 104 Powell, H. 5, 217–218 Powledge, P. 214 practice, spatial 34–35 presence: connected 19, 171; social 20 Procházka, O. 2, 10 prosumption 17 Psathas, G. 215 Puschmann, C. 204 Radic, L. 74 reel 71 reference, deictic 100 Regan, P. 144 relationship, documentation of 23 Rempala, K. 136 Renahy, E. 157 re-placeing 36 representation, spaces of 34 Richardson, B. 172 Richardson, I. 12 Ring, L. 2, 10 Roberts, J. 20 Rodriguez, A. 66 Romm, T. 72 Rosa, J. 98, 125 Sabatini, F. 124 Sadeh, N. 213 Saker, M. 22, 36, 43 Samoska, S. 136 San Roque, L. 101, 172–173 Sauda, E. 88 scales, sociolinguistic 48 Scannell, L. 106 Schäfer, M.S. 70, 72, 89n1 Scheglof, E. 166, 172, 212, 215, 219 Schrock, A. 9 Schwartz, R. 21–23, 36, 213 Scolllon, R. 96, 123 Scolllon, S.W. 96, 123 Scott, K. 11, 205 Searle, J. 100, 214 Sedano, M. 172 self, spatial 21, 25, 36, 171, 191 selfe 24–25 shadowbanning 68 Shiraishi, K. 68 Sidnell, J. 153 Siewiorek, D.P. 213

237

Sifanou, M. 95, 99, 115, 129 Silverstein, M. 59 Slater, J. 143 Slembrouck, S. 53 Slimovich, A. 170 Smith, I.E. 213–214 Smith, M.M. 122, 125, 137 Smith, P. 123 society, liquid 14 Sonvilla-Weiss, S. 12 space: affinity 50, 95–20; hybrid 9, 13, 36, 171, 210–211; perceived 34; public 121–151; representations of 34; semiotic social 96; shareable 11; shared mental 174; tyrannical 125 spectacle 48 Spencer-Oatey, H. 228–229 Sperber, D. 138 Steeves, V. 144 Stefanone, M.A. 21 Steinfeld, C. 213 Stokes, B. 9 story, small 106 Sun, A. 169, 171 Szabla, M. 2, 10 Szymanski, M.H. 212, 216, 219, 221, 224–227 Tabert, J. 214 tag 26–27 talk: emotional 129; searchable 205 Tang, K.P. 213 Taylor, C. 99 Taylor, T.L. 15, 39 telepresence 153 Themistocleus, C. 116 Thomas, J. 214 Thurlow, C. 16, 96 Tifany, K. 74 TikTok 66–91 Timberg, C. 72 time compression 62 Tuan, Y.-F. 35 Twitch 33, 37–38 Twitter 95–20, 169–209 Unger, J.W. 99 Urry, J. 35 Ursino, D. 72

238

Index

Vähämaa, M. 125 van de Groep, M. 171 van Es, K. 39 van Halteren, H. 171 Varis, P. 123, 125 Vázquez Laslop, M.E. 174 Vela Delfa, C. 104, 113 velocity 62 Vera, V. 15 Verschueren, J. 99 Vincent, J. 18–19 Virgili, L. 72 Walters, K. 13 Wang, S.S. 21 Warner, M. 13 Wayfaring 37–38, 44 WeChat 23 Weilenmann, A. 216, 219, 221, 225 Wellman, B. 14 Wessel, G. 88 Westinen, A. 49, 64 Whitehouse, B. 70

wikispace 11 Wikström, P. 66 Wilson, D. 138 Wise, A.F. 100 Workman, C.I. 122, 136 Xie, C. 97 Yang, Y. 173–174 Yoder, K.J. 122, 136 YouTube 50–51 Yuan, Q. 169, 171 Yule, G. 154 Yus, F. 1, 4, 10, 12, 15, 17–18, 21–25, 27, 96–97, 106, 114, 166, 169–161, 175, 205, 210, 217 Zappavigna, M. 98–99, 125, 205 Zech, S.T. 123 Zeng, J. 70, 72, 89n1 Zienkowski, J. 99 Zupnik, J.-J. 173–174