Discourse - Langiage Online - (Whole Book) PDF

Language Online
In Language Online David Barton and Carmen Lee investigate the impact of
the online world on the study of language.
The effects of language use in the digital world can be seen in every aspect
of language study, and new ways of researching the field are needed. In this
book the authors look at language online from a variety of perspectives,
providing a solid theoretical grounding, an outline of key concepts, and
practical guidance on doing research.
Chapters cover topical issues including the relation between online
language and multilingualism, identity, education and multimodality, and
then conclude by looking at how to carry out research into online language
use. Throughout the book many examples are given, from a variety of digital
platforms, and a number of different languages, including Chinese and
English.
Written in a clear and accessible style, this is a vital read for anyone new
to studying online language and an essential textbook for undergraduates
and postgraduates working in the areas of new media, literacy and multi-
modality within language and linguistics courses.
David Barton is Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of

Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK and Director of the Lancaster
Literacy Research Centre.
Carmen Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Chinese

University of Hong Kong.
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Language Online
I n v e s t i g a t i n g D i g i t a l Te x t s
and Practices
David Barton
Carmen Lee
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 David Barton and Carmen Lee
The right of David Barton and Carmen Lee to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Barton, David, 1949– author.
Language Online : Investigating Digital Texts and Practices / David
Barton and Carmen Lee.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Communication—Technological innovations. 2. Language and
languages—Usage. 3. Human-computer interaction. 4. Technological
innovations—Social aspects. 5. Social media. I. Lee, Carman, author.
II. Title.
P96.T42B37 2013
418.00285—dc23 2012039540
ISBN: 978–0–415–52494–0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978–0–415–52495–7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–55230–8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon and Scala Sans

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon
CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES vii

PREFACE viii
1 Language in the digital world 1
2 Ten reasons why studying the online world is crucial for

understanding language 15
3 Acting in a textually mediated social world 23
4 Hello! Bonjour! Ciao! Hola! Guten Tag! Deploying linguistic

resources online 42
5 Taking up the affordances of multiple languages 55
6 ‘This is me’: Writing the self online 67
7 Stance-taking through language and image 86
8 ‘My English is so poor’: Talking about language online 107
9 Everyday learning online 124
10 Language online as new vernacular practices 137

VI CONTENTS
11 Language online and education 153
12 Researching language online 164
13 Flows of language online and offline 178
APPENDICES 184
BIBLIOGRAPHY 194
INDEX 205
FIGURES
2.1 Ten reasons why studying the online world is crucial for
understanding language 15
3.1 A Flickr photo page 37
7.1 Look at me in the eye 97
7.2 cjPanda’s photo page ‘handwritting’ 100
10.1 Abraham Lincoln with photo album 143
13.1 ‘4 UR Convenience’, a convenience store in London 180
13.2 Fitness centre in Hong Kong 181
PREFACE
Like any other academic endeavour, the study of language develops in hops
and jumps. Sometimes, it goes steadily forward with ideas developing in an
incremental manner. At other times, there are sudden bursts of activity and
movement in all directions, with steps backwards and sideways as well as
forwards. At these times when disciplines and sub-disciplines shift and
regroup, it is necessary to question existing ideas, to read outside one’s
discipline, to rethink, and to tear up existing lectures and notes.
The study of language has reached such a point, especially within sociolin-
guistics where researchers are challenging existing concepts and exploring
new ideas. People talk of ‘languaging’, of ‘translingualism’, of ‘superdiversity’,
with much of the interest coming from the study of multilingualism and
migration. This questioning and rethinking is going on elsewhere, such as in
the study of world languages and lingua francas, and in studies of multi-
modality. It affects all areas of language study, from socio-phonetics and
spelling through to semiotics and pragmatics. This all makes the study of
language at this point in time exciting, demanding and ultimately rewarding.
Our particular approach is to focus on the implications of the online
world for the study of language. This book is aimed at two distinct audi-
ences. First, for linguists it argues that understanding the online world is
essential for the study of language. Second, to social scientists studying and
researching the internet, it argues that an understanding of the role of
language is essential. In the book, we explore language online from a range
of perspectives. In brief, the first three chapters set the scene, providing a
strong theoretical framework and introducing key concepts that are needed
when examining language online. Then there is a set of chapters investigating
specific language issues and drawing on extensive data. They start from
PREFACE IX
studies of multilingualism, and then explore identity, stance, multimodality

and metalinguistics. This is followed by chapters concentrating on learning,
the significance of vernacular practices and implications for education.
Next, ways of researching texts and practices online are outlined and a final
chapter examines online-offline interaction.
Special features of the book include clear reasons for studying the online
world and explanations of a set of key concepts. It provides many detailed
authentic examples. Worked examples of analysing language and image are
provided and there are contrasting biographies demonstrating the role of
technology in people’s lives. Rather than extensive screen shots and other
illustrations, there is an accompanying page on the Routledge website which
contains a list of internet links to some of our data and examples.
The discussions and illustrations cover a wide selection of examples from
young people and adults with diverse linguistic backgrounds from various
parts of the word. We draw upon an extensive range of online platforms. As
befits a book about language, we provide examples from different languages,
in particular Chinese and English. These two languages provide different
affordances for people to draw upon, at all levels of language, especially, as
we will show, in terms of the written language.
Our aim has been to complete a book about language online that is
written in a clear and accessible manner. We are aware of the range of
possible readers of this book and have in mind the novice, student readers
as well as the experienced researcher in this developing field of the study of
language. The book was written across time zones in England and Hong
Kong. One particular rhythm of collaboration that has sped up the writing
of this book is the way in which, as co-authors, one of us could finish a
section in the evening and save our work on Dropbox. Meanwhile, the other
author would be waking up across time zones and could go through the
work and return it all in the same day. Our writing practices reflect the
affordances of the technologies available to us.
Many people have supported and encouraged this work and we are
pleased to acknowledge their varied contributions. First, we would like to
thank the many people who participated in the studies which are drawn
upon in this book and who patiently answered our questions and provided
us with data. At both Lancaster University and the Chinese University of
Hong Kong, we are pleased to acknowledge the many discussions and ideas
from colleagues, especially Julia Gillen, Mary Hamilton, Greg Myers, Uta
Papen, Diane Potts, Karin Tusting and Johnny Unger. We are grateful to
Claire Coulton, who read and commented on the whole manuscript, and to
Mary Hamilton, Diane Potts and Karin Tusting, who read parts of the
manuscript. We would also like to thank our research assistants in our Flickr
and Web 2.0 projects, especially Dennis Chau, Corah Chiu, Joey Li, Pierre
Lien, Kelvin Lui, and Xavier Tam. Colleagues at the conferences where
we have presented our work have provided invaluable questioning and
probing, especially at the Language in (New) Media conferences and at
Sociolinguistics Symposiums.
X PREFACE
We thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Department of
Linguistics at Lancaster University for financial support, which aided the
smooth completion of the book. Some of the studies reported in the book
were funded by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council General Research
Fund (Ref: 446309) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Direct Grant
for Research (Ref: 2010342).
We are grateful to Louisa Semlyen and Sophie Jaques at Routledge for
their constant support and encouragement.
David Barton, Lancaster
Carmen Lee, Hong Kong
1
L A N G U A G E I N T H E D I G I TA L W O R L D
• Contemporary change
• Approaches to language online: three key directions
• Some overarching issues when discussing language online
• Language online as texts and practices
CONTEMPORARY CHANGE
The idea that technological innovations can change life in a fundamental
way and that these changes reach into every aspect of life has been associated
with many innovations throughout history, including the development of the
printing press, newspapers, cameras, the postal service, radio and telephones.
It is becoming central in how we think about contemporary change in digital
technologies. This was well expressed by Marshall McLuhan more than 40
years ago in relation to television:
The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and

restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal
life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every
action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing –
you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government,
your relation to ‘the others’. And they’re changing dramatically.
McLuhan (1967: 8)
2 LANGUAGE IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
These changes identified by McLuhan continue apace with newer tech-

nologies. Now it is more accepted that all aspects of life, including everyday
activities, workplace practices and the world of learning, are transformed by
digital technologies. To give an example, practices of photography have been
largely digitized – digital cameras and online photo sharing have taken over
the place of film cameras and printed photo albums. Instead of sitting
together at home leafing through photos in an album, nowadays people are
more likely to share photos with friends and relatives on the internet either
on social networking sites such as Facebook or photo sharing sites. Another
example of contemporary changes is academic practices. As the authors have
experienced, academic writing has been reshaped in many ways with the rise
of new technologies. Very few people would handwrite a full manuscript of
a book before typing it out on the computer. Students have assumed handing
in an essay means handing in a typed, word-processed essay. At work, we
receive far more emails than handwritten notes or letters. Other interesting
examples of digitally transformed everyday activities include meetings,
reading, note-taking, form filling, booking trips, map reading and shopping.
Technology is part of people’s lived experiences across all contexts, ranging
from engaging in a plethora of social networking sites with friends, through
to studying and working or engaging in family life. In fact it is hard to find
an area of life that is unchanged. People have gradually taken digitally
transformed everyday activities for granted. This is often referred to as the
domestication of technology (as in Berker et al. 2005), a concept that captures
the process through which technologies are integrated into and mediate
people’s lives; while at the same time, technology users reappropriate
technologies to facilitate their everyday activities. This has all been happening
in a relatively short period of time and has become naturalized and unnoticed
by people in their lives. There are certainly many issues of access and
differences between people and groups of people. Nevertheless, technological
change is affecting people everywhere and transforming all domains of life.
These technology-related changes in life are embedded in broader social
changes. Contemporary life is changing in many ways which impact on
language and communicative practices. Technology is a central part of this
but it is just one among a set of interconnected factors. Lankshear and
Knobel (2011) have drawn attention to changes that are occurring in the
nature of institutions, media, the economy, and general processes of
globalization. Kress (2003) further identifies four simultaneous change
processes: changes in relations of social power, in the direction of abolishing
existing settled hierarchies and remaking new ones; changes in economic
structure, with writing taking on different roles in an economy in which
information is increasingly important; communicational changes, with a
shift from writing to image as the dominant mode, altering the logic of our
communicative practices; and changing technological affordances, with a
shift in media from page to screen (as in Snyder 1998). As we can see, it is
this combination of changes in different areas of life that contribute to
changes to our communicative practices and landscape.
LANGUAGE IN THE DIGITAL WORLD 3
It is important to make clear that technologies themselves do not auto-

matically introduce changes in life. In other words, new activities in life are
not technologically determined but technology itself is also part of broader
social changes. And different people would adopt technologies differently to
suit their own purposes in different contexts of use. Thus, in this book,
and in understanding the relationship between technology and life more
generally, our point of departure is what people do and how they draw upon
resources to make meanings in their everyday activities.
The centrality of language

Language has a pivotal role in these contemporary changes, which are first
and foremost transformations of meaning making and communication.
Language is essential in shaping changes in life and our lived experiences. At
the same time, it is affected and transformed by these changes. Many studies
of language have been based on a set of fairly stable concepts, which are now
rather strained as people’s lives go online. For instance, on a website which
combines images and words, basic concepts like text have to be redefined.
The core units of sociolinguistics such as variation, contact and community
need to be reassessed. Many researchers are aware that the central notions
of interaction like turn-taking and face-to-face work differently with online
data. Ideas of author and audience become even more complex. When to
refer to language as written or spoken is not clear-cut and the activities of
reading and writing are being redefined. This book is about understanding
this contemporary change and the central role of language in it. Part of the
book is also devoted to examining new data and methods in linguistic
research, and new views of language more generally with respect to online
spaces.
Starting from a view of language as situated practice, this book investi-
gates how people’s language use is changing as they participate in online
activity. Covering a broad selection of online environments, it examines both
online texts and people’s practices around them, both how they create and
how they use online texts. This book also focuses on specific language issues
including language choice, language and identity, stance-taking, multimodal
relations of language and image, and discourses of language and learning.
Overall, the book demonstrates the importance of situated language analysis
for understanding the dynamics of textually mediated online spaces. It shows
how people integrate online and offline practices. The approach taken in this
book focuses on how practices are located in the detail of people’s everyday
lives. For linguistics, it provides a theoretical framework of key concepts for
researching online spaces.
The book covers the broad array of digital platforms that people use,
examining sites where language is important in different ways and where the
writing spaces have distinct affordances. These include primarily the plat-
forms that we have researched and observed extensively such as Facebook,
Flickr, and instant messaging. To understand what these tools mean in
people’s everyday lives and language use, we explore their ‘technobiogra-

phies’. These are detailed life histories and narratives of people’s relations to
technologies, how technologies are part of their lived experiences across their
lives, and how such relations shape their language use online through
different phases and domains of life. We also move beyond these three key
platforms and draw on existing research from the emerging fields of digital
literacies and computer-mediated discourse, which covers: studies of
websites and discussion forums; mobile texting; blogging and micro-
blogging such as Twitter; wikis, online dictionaries and encyclopedias such
as Wikipedia; search engines such as Google; and multimedia sharing such
as YouTube.
This opening chapter introduces readers to the general approach taken by
this book to language, literacies, and the internet, focusing on what happens
to language and practices when they move online. The next section starts
with an overview of research that has been done on language online. Then
we turn to the specific approach we draw upon. This is a social practice view
of language and literacies with specific attention to writing done online,
which explores what happens to texts and practices when people participate
in online activities. The next chapter provides a set of 10 reasons why those
interested in language need to pay attention to the internet. These two
chapters are closely related to Chapter 3, which consists of an overview of
the key theoretical concepts adopted throughout the book.
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ONLINE: THREE KEY DIRECTIONS

New online media have generated much multidisciplinary interest in recent
years, from information science to media studies, psychology and sociology.
Two areas that place emphasis on writing activities online are linguistics and
digital literacies. Over the past two decades or so, works by linguists and
literacy theorists have developed two seemingly separate yet complementary
traditions of research, with their own sets of terminologies, theoretical
frameworks and methodologies. These bodies of work have introduced new
research methods, while at the same time reappropriating traditional theories
and concepts in response to the changing affordances of new media. This
section identifies and describes three key approaches to language online
within linguistics. Traditions from literacy studies will be outlined in a later
section.
(i) Structural features of computer-mediated communication

One of the earliest and perhaps most dominant traditions of language-
focused online research is the identification and description of linguistic
features and strategies that are not commonly found in other modes of
communication. A topic of great interest within this early tradition was to
compare language strategies in online media with existing modes of com-
munication. A key topic under this strand is whether text-based computer-
mediated communication (CMC) should be treated as speech or as writing,

or whether it is a hybrid of speech and writing (Herring 1996; Baron 2003).
Thus the starting point of CMC research was to draw upon the existing
concepts of linguistics to understand language online. In relation to this,
another direction attempted to describe CMC as a ‘new’ variety of language
that is characterized by features such as:
• acronyms and initialisms (e.g. GTG for ‘got to go’, LOL for ‘laugh out
loud’),
• word reductions (e.g. gd for ‘good’; hv for ‘have’),
• letter/number homophones (e.g. U for ‘you’ and 2 for ‘to’),
• stylized spelling (e.g. I’m soooooooooo happy!)
• emoticons (such as :-) and :( ),
• unconventional/stylized punctuation (e.g. ‘!!!!!!!!!!!!!’, ‘...................’).
As a result, many other labels have been given to describe the set of
peculiar discourse features identified in CMC such as emailism (Petrie 1999),
Netspeak (Crystal 2006), interactive written discourse (Ferrara et al. 1991),
and other publicly recognized terms such as e-language, chatspeak, textspeak,
cyber language, and internet slang, to name just a few. This body of work
however took a somewhat deterministic view that it was primarily the new
technological affordances that naturally foster new forms of language in
CMC. In the beginning, there was almost no discussion of the contextual and
social factors that might have also contributed to these linguistic features.
Large quantities of publicly available online data (e.g. IRC chat rooms) were
often randomly collected and analysed without considering their immediate
discursive and social contexts. Generalizations were made out of statistical
analyses of the distribution of different features in corpora. At this point,
corpus data were combined with discourse analysis. The umbrella term
‘computer-mediated discourse analysis’ (CMDA) also emerged to describe
discourse analytic approaches to CMC (Herring 2001). For example, Ko
(1996) compares structural features of a corpus of synchronous CMC data
collected from InterChange, an online educational platform, to existing
spoken and written corpora collected in offline contexts. Findings from this
body of work did offer important theoretical insights and opened up new
opportunities for language research. However, there was sometimes a ten-
dency to overgeneralize the findings from such studies, and to imply that there
are static and predictable conventions across all CMC language. In fact, in
real life what may be referred to as Netspeak features are not employed in all
types of CMC and all contexts of use. There are varieties across individual
users as well as across different online platforms.
(ii) Social variation of computer-mediated discourse

Written genres are not separable from their users and social contexts
(Hyland 2002). CMC researchers began to realize that CMC language is
shaped by various social factors and is situated in their specific contexts of

use (Herring 2002; Giltrow and Stein 2009). This direction of research
acknowledges that, on the one hand, regular similarities and differences
occur within and beyond one single mode of CMC; on the other hand, in
reality, users do not apply the same set of CMC features to all contexts; but
they constantly reappropriate their ways of writing in different modes of
CMC to suit different purposes. In view of this, studies of social variation in
CMC language began to emerge. There have been detailed discourse analyses
of particular types of CMC including blogging (Myers 2010a) and SMS
texting (Tagg 2012). A growing body of work focuses on language and
identity online, notably studies of gender differences in CMC (e.g. Herring
1996; Danet 1998), and how social identities are performed through adopt-
ing certain linguistic features and styles (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Nakamura
2002). Seeing social network sites as spaces for everyday storytelling, Page
(2011) takes a narrative approach to identity performance in social media
and examines how new narrative genres emerge as a result of people
reshaping traditional ones in new media. Following this socio-cultural trend,
another group of researchers has been investigating CMC features across
cultures and linguistic backgrounds. Instead of examining CMC from a
solely monolingual, usually English, perspective, a growing body of research
is interested in how speakers of various languages have adopted such new
forms of writing to different extents (e.g. chapters in Danet and Herring
2007). This tradition is often informed by pragmatics, sociolinguistics and,
especially, discourse analysis – areas of linguistics that begin to take into
account the effect of context and web users’ perceptions of what they do
online. While corpus-based analyses are still an important method in
researching CMC, researchers started to realize the importance of drawing
on online users’ perspectives through methods such as interviews (e.g.
Cherny 1999).
(iii) Language ideologies and metalanguage

A more recent strand of linguistic research takes a more critical approach to
new media language data. Much of this work draws upon concepts from
sociology and language ideology (for example Blommaert 1999). Studies
within this approach are not only interested in micro-level features of
language online, but also how ways of communication are shaped by social
ideologies, and how such ideologies are discursively constructed in new
media. This work has often developed on from discourse approaches to
language and traditional media such as newspapers, film and TV (as in
Johnson and Ensslin 2007). One recurring theme is how language is talked
about online or what is often referred to as metalanguage. Folk linguistic
theories about language in new media are often represented in mass media
(Thurlow 2007). Because this research direction is relatively recent,
researchers tend to be interested in Web 2.0 media, especially those involving
user-generated multimodal content, such as Flickr (Thurlow and Jaworski
2011) and YouTube (Chun and Walters 2011). One salient feature of this
approach to research is that some researchers deliberately take a critical gaze
and problematize their data in their discussion. An important issue of this
direction of research is how the researcher’s stance is expressed through their
specific analysis and interpretation of data. (See Chapter 7.) This line of
research has moved beyond seeing language as a tool of communication, but
is more concerned with understanding how language is represented, or
perhaps misrepresented, online and in society more broadly. Alongside these
approaches to the academic study of language online, the impact of new
media has always been at the centre of public discussion. A set of moral
panics come together when new media are discussed, including concerns
about ‘young people’. These techno-panics revolve around uncertainty and
worry about newness and constant change, along with fears about falling
standards of language and literacy. (These topics are pursued in more detail
in Thurlow 2007.)
We have identified these three key approaches to studying language
online. They can also be viewed as stages of development with each building
on the earlier approach. We are beginning to see a fourth phase where
traditional concepts of linguistics are jettisoned in favour of new framings
where concepts such as superdiversity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) and
supermobility reveal new insights into language online and contemporary
change. These will be explored in later chapters.
SOME OVERARCHING ISSUES WHEN DISCUSSING

LANGUAGE ONLINE
Problems of terminology
The notion ‘online’ itself is first explained here. In the book title, Language
Online, ‘online’ is used as a convenient term and a shorthand for all forms
of communication carried out on networked devices. Having said this, this
book does not assume a strict online-offline dichotomy. When we say online
and offline, we are referring to the different situational contexts where
communication takes place. We are not suggesting, however, that people’s
lives are either carried out online or offline, nor are we implying that the
online is replacing the offline. As will be seen throughout the book, many
contemporary social practices seamlessly intertwine online and offline
activities and they cannot be separated. As Wellman (2001: 18) points out
in his discussion of social networks,
[t]he cyberspace-physical space comparison is a false dichotomy. Many ties operate

in both cyberspace and physical space. [. . .] Computer mediated communications
supplements, arranges and amplifies in-person and telephone communications
rather than replacing them. The Internet provides ease and flexibility in who
communicates with whom, what means they use to communicate, what they
communicate, and when they communicate.
In this book, a range of terms and concepts are used to refer broadly to
the context, the tools, and the reading and writing activity associated with
the theme of language online. These terms are not without problems
themselves and one has to be cautious when interpreting them. In the context
of this book, they do serve as useful descriptors at different points of the
discussion.
• When we use the words ‘online’, ‘internet’, and ‘the web’, we are
referring to the broad context and domain where online communication
takes place.
• When we use ‘computer-mediated communication’, ‘digital media’,
‘digital communication’, ‘new media’, ‘new technologies’, or ‘digital
tools’, ‘sites’, and ‘platforms’, we are referring to the tools that people
use to carry out their online communication. In this respect, SMS texting
is also included in our study as a form of computer-mediated communi-
cation since a mobile phone is basically a portable computer and is
clearly a form of digital communication.
• When we say ‘digital literacies’, ‘new (media) literacies’, and ‘new
vernacular literacies’, we are broadly referring to the everyday reading
and writing activities online. The plural ‘literacies’ is preferred to capture
the fact that literacy is not skills-based but there are many different sorts
of literacy that people draw upon for different purposes.
• When we use the expressions ‘language online’, ‘online texts’, ‘writing
online’, and ‘computer-mediated discourse’, we are referring to the
linguistic processes and products resulting from online communication.
This is referred to by Crystal (2011) as linguistic ‘output’.
The question of the ‘new’

New technologies are no longer new and email and instant messaging are
referred to as old media when considered alongside Web 2.0 sites such as
Facebook, which itself is no longer new. The idea of communicating online
and participating in virtual activities was new in the 1990s, but a generation
of people are growing up taking digital media for granted. In the same way
as somewhere called New College may have been established in 1379, so
new technologies and new literacy studies are only new by name. Whilst
there is always a cutting edge, we can no longer speak of technological
advances in themselves as being new.
Rather than fixing on a particular new activity, the idea of constant
change is now more accepted. To draw on a linguistic concept, literacy and
what it means to be literate can be seen as deictic, that is, it points to a
current situation (Coiro et al. 2008: 5–7). However, it quickly goes out of
date. Any description of what people do online is situated in the present and
is likely to change. In the time it takes for a book to be published or a
university course to be completed, people’s practices have changed and the
book and the course have become out of date.
Nevertheless, it is worth identifying where there are continuations of

existing practices and where there are practices that can be regarded as new.
In our research we have observed that people’s online participation changes
over time. When first using a site, often people bring old practices with them,
that is, they do old things in new ways. So for example a person using a photo
site to share photos of family birthdays or weddings may initially see this as
the continuing of an offline practice. Over time this changes as they see the
new opportunities. And they participate in activities that are new for them,
so they may be aware that the photos are seen by a broader range of people.
When discussing ‘new’ language-related phenomena in CMC, Susan
Herring makes it clear that not all linguistic phenomena on Web 2.0 sites are
new. She provides a three-way distinction. She characterizes discourse prac-
tices in convergent media or what she refers to as convergent media computer-
mediated discourse (CMCMD) as follows:
phenomena familiar from older computer-mediated discourse (CMD) modes such

as email, chat, and discussion forums that appear to carry over into Web 2.0
environments with minimal differences; CMD phenomena that adapt to and are
reconfigured by Web 2.0 environments; and new or emergent phenomena that did
not exist—or if they did exist, did not rise to the level of public awareness—prior to
the era of Web 2.0.
(Herring, 2013a)
We return to the idea of newness when contrasting literacy studies from

literacies studies below.
The Web 1.0–Web 2.0 dichotomy

We are focusing primarily on Web 2.0, that is, web-based applications that
allow users to create and publish their own content online. Creators of
applications such as Facebook provide a strong framing with the layout and
affordances of their applications. Within these structures, the content which
users provide is relatively unregulated, although there can be forms of
moderation and conflicts over censorship. Weblogs and Twitter are common
examples of Web 2.0, where within a given framework people publish their
own texts to share with others. Further examples include Wikipedia and
other online encyclopedias and dictionaries that rely on user-generated data.
Another central idea of Web 2.0 is that of social networking, that is,
participating and collaborating in communities of users. Often this is
achieved in the form of people interacting by writing, but it also includes
uploading images and videos. Social network sites such as Facebook and
Twitter are platforms for people to interact with each other and connect
through the written word and other multimodal content. Users of these sites
often exchange views on their everyday interests and experiences, evaluating
and reacting to music they have heard, books they have read, and hotels and
restaurants they have visited.
Another important feature shared by Web 2.0 spaces is their commenting

systems. On YouTube, for instance, people interact through leaving com-
ments about one another’s uploaded content. Commenting is an important
act of positioning oneself and others, that is stance-taking, as will be
discussed in Chapter 7. Such activities are highly textually mediated (Barton
2001) and they all provide new affordances, that is possibilities and con-
straints, for people to act within. (See chapter 1 of Knobel and Lankshear
2007 for more discussion of the distinctive characteristics of Web 2.0
literacies.) In this book, Web 2.0 is not a label given to just a certain set of
sites, nor should it refer to sites that are developed at a certain point in
history. Rather, when we use the term Web 2.0, we are referring to particular
features of web site design such as self-generated content and interactivity
that tend to be more common in ‘newer’ media. We are also aware that older
sites are adopting Web 2.0 features and because of that there is no clear-cut
boundary between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
The concept of digital natives

The idea that young people are particularly adept at using new technologies
and can be characterized as ‘digital natives’ has been around for some time
(Prensky 2001). The idea is that they were brought up surrounded by digital
media and can be contrasted with ‘digital immigrants’, that is older people
who were brought up on print media and have had to move – or migrate –
to new technologies (Prensky 2001). This division may have been useful for
a while around the year 2000 when there was a generation of people not
involved with the internet and for a time researchers who had lived through
changes from print to screen were studying younger people who had been
brought up with new technologies. Much research on language and new
technologies is on young people’s – usually students’ – online activities and
often their uses of social media. It is important not to stereotype internet use
as consisting primarily of young people’s activities on social media sites. In
fact the idea of digital natives, and a digital divide, masks the variety of
knowledge and experience in young people (Hargittai 2010; Bennett et al.
2008), and older people alike. In addition there is no clear age for marking
a difference in people’s technology use. Rather, every year brings differences
in people’s familiarity with new media. It is better to think of this deictically,
as pointing to a particular situation and where there is constant change. That
is why this book takes a situated approach to language online. Studying
people’s technobiographies serves as a way of understanding the impact and
ongoing changes of language use online, which we are all part of.
The problem of moral panics

Since the beginning of the internet there has been a strand of public criticism
associated with certain linguistic features that are often found in online
communication such as word reduction and stylized spelling commonly used
in texting. These public discourses, or moral panics, that are largely rein-
forced by mass media are centred on how the language adopted by young
people in their online communication may negatively affect their literacy
skills. Claims are made about how people are reading fewer books or have
lower reading abilities and concentration skills because of increasing use of
new media (e.g. Carr 2010). Labels have been given to what may seem to be
a genre of texting language such as ‘textese’ and ‘textspeak’. Indeed, such
techno-panics have existed for a long time throughout history when earlier
technologies such as radio, TV, and telegram writing style were invented, as
Crystal (2011) has pointed out. These claims tend to be unfounded opinions
based on brief observations and often contrast with scholarly research on
new media language discussed above. This has developed into growing
tension between academic and non-academic understandings of language
online.
Related to this is the problem of predictions about the influence of the
internet on language use. One prediction is that English will dominate the
internet. This might have been true for a short while in the 1990s but now
the internet and its users are becoming increasingly multilingual to the extent
that people who used to be labelled as monolinguals now inevitably engage
in certain kinds of translingual practices. (See Chapters 4 and 5.) Another
prediction is that ‘Netspeak’ features threaten standard English language.
However, as Crystal (2011) points out, only a small proportion of English
vocabulary has been modified for internet communication. Short forms
existed before the internet. Besides, the basic grammatical structure of the
language has not changed because of the internet. Academic studies have
begun to emerge as a reaction to these misconceptions. For example, Plester
and Wood’s (2009) research reveals a positive relationship between texting
and spelling abilities among British children.
LANGUAGE ONLINE AS TEXTS AND PRACTICES

The approach taken in this book is to combine the study of practices with
the analysis of texts in order to understand language online. Our particular
background and starting point is work in literacy studies investigating
language practices. The social practices which language is embedded in are
particularly salient when examining language online not least because of the
constant change, the constant learning and the fluidity of texts. A crucial part
of the context of texts online is locating them in the practices of their creation
and use. We move on to an overview of the approach of literacy studies as a
way into examining texts and practices online.
Literacy studies is an area of research which has come into being in the
past 30 years. It is a ‘mid-level’ socio-cultural theory of reading and writing
that starts out from what people do with written language in their lives. It
examines in detail people’s broader social practices, noting that many of
these involve texts of some sort, and that we live in a textually mediated
social world (see Chapter 3), where texts are part of the fabric of social life.
In this socio-cultural approach to written language, literacy is a social

activity and can best be described in terms of people’s literacy practices.
These practices are drawn upon in literacy events that are mediated by
written texts. The notion of literacy practices is central to literacy studies.
There are common patterns in using reading and writing in a particular
situation where people bring their cultural knowledge to an activity.
The other key concept is literacy event. The notion of literacy event and
the methodologies of literacy studies have their roots in the sociolinguistic
idea of speech events and the ethnographic approaches associated with Dell
Hymes (1962). For literacy studies this provides both a link to and a
divergence from the mainstream of sociolinguistic thought. Rather than
focusing on spoken language practices, literacy studies emphasizes the
materiality of written language, through the physicality of texts. An early
researcher in literacy studies, Shirley Brice Heath defines literacy events as
‘any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the
participants’ interactions and their interpretative processes’ (1982: 50).
Crucially, literacy events are about the interaction of the written and spoken,
as a literacy event can have talk around a text. To bring the two terms
together, literacy practices are the general cultural ways of utilizing literacy
that people draw upon in a literacy event. Examples of literacy events and
practices can be found throughout life, online and offline. For example,
going online to comment on a news story, to book a ticket, to play a game
or to arrange to meet a friend all involve negotiating written language and
are all literacy events. In deciding where and when to do these things, along
with what styles of language to draw upon, the participants draw upon their
literacy practices. (This social practice approach to literacy has been laid out
in more detail elsewhere, for example in Barton 2007.)
There are many ways of reading and writing, and not one set of literacy
practices. Where different practices cluster into coherent groups, it is very
useful to talk in terms of them as being different literacies. A literacy is a
stable, coherent, identifiable configuration of practices such as those asso-
ciated with specific workplaces. Historically, literacy studies has identified
different literacies being associated with different domains of life such as
education and work. These are different places in life where people act dif-
ferently and use language differently. However, especially when considering
life online, the reality is more fluid. And people may move seamlessly in and
out of different domains of activity.
In particular domains of activity, such as the home, or school, or work-
places, we see common patterns of activity and we may wish to contrast the
ways literacies are used in these different domains. Starting from particular
domains has been a useful way for then seeing how different domains inter-
act and overlap and how there is much hybridity and fusion. The borders,
transitions and the spaces between domains then become very salient.
Literacy studies often has the everyday as the starting point and enables a
discussion of the blurring of the domains of work, education and everyday
life.
The view of literacy as being part of social practices that are inferred from
events and mediated by texts requires a certain methodology. It is a method-
ology of attention to detail and it draws heavily on ethnographic approaches.
It involves the examination of particular events in order to understand
broader practices. Researchers integrate a variety of methods including
observation, interviews, the analysis of texts, the use of photography and
more. This is an ecological approach accepting that all activities are situated
and that people’s actions both affect and are affected by the environment
they are in. There is no simple causality and rather than talk of ‘effects’ of
technologies it discusses the affordances which technologies offer for action,
as pursued in Chapter 3. This provides a way of moving on from tech-
nological determinism when discussing change.
The range of studies, the developments of theory and methodology and
the links to practice over the past 20 years are evidence of the success of
literacy studies. (For an overview, see, for example, Baynham and Prinsloo
2009, who identify different generations of literacy research.) These studies
have been used to challenge deficit theories and myths about literacy. At the
same time, the approach offers a set of concepts, such as networks, brokers
and sponsors, which are useful in understanding the language-based dyna-
mics of interaction. The approach of literacy studies is close to data, but at
the same time it is theorizing by providing concepts and by linking to
broader theories.
Literacy can be a powerful lens for examining changing social practices.
This includes the impact of new technologies, since engagement with texts
of various kinds is central to life online. As stated elsewhere:
By examining the changing role of texts we uncover the central tensions of

contemporary change: new literacy practices offer exciting possibilities in terms of
access to knowledge, creativity and personal power; at the same time the textually
mediated social world provides a technology of power and control, and of
surveillance.
(Barton 2009: 39)
In relation to globalization, the examination of literacy practices provides

a way of tracing links between local and global practices and documenting
local forms of appropriation and resistance. It can also show the ways in
which new literacy practices are generated out of existing ones (Barton and
Hamilton 2012). This largely uncharted area needs the empirical work of
understanding people’s practices if we are to understand and have some
control over these competing possible futures.
In taking account of the online world, literacy studies has experienced a
‘digital turn’ (Mills 2010) and research is increasingly examining language
online and the associated ‘digital literacies’ (as in Gillen and Barton 2010).
To emphasize the online focus, some researchers identify the plural new
literacies and distinguish this newer literacies studies from the more
established literacy studies (as in Lankshear and Knobel 2011; Coiro et al.
2008). Literacies remain central as much of the internet is mediated by

literacy activities: it is written and it is read. Often activities involve writing
and reading, whereas the linguistic forms are closer to what has been thought
of as spoken language. There needs to be a rethinking of the relation between
written and spoken. Again it is deictic, and what is true today may not be in
the future with a shift towards using spoken instructions to phones and
computers, and where the talking may not be to real people or by real
people. We prefer to refer to language practices online and not highlight a
distinction between writing and speaking.
As shown earlier when discussing different approaches to researching
language online, analysing discourse has been central to this research. Studies
have followed a wide range of approaches of discourse analysis and critical
discourse analysis. One approach that explicitly locates the analysis of
discourse in activities is the mediated discourse analysis approach associated
with Ron Scollon and colleagues (Scollon 2001). The basic unit of analysis
is the mediated action, which is effectively the practice where the text is used.
Seeing practices as important for understanding context, Rodney Jones
argues that discourse analysts need to develop new ways of seeing social
interaction, ‘ways that encompass multiple modes and make use of multiple
methods, ways that begin not with texts but with people’s actions and
experiences around texts’ (Jones 2004: 31).
In other work moving beyond the text, Ruth Wodak and colleagues have
developed a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis
(Wodak and Meyer 2009) where the researchers collect texts to develop an
understanding of the context, as well as drawing upon their background
knowledge. A strand of work that aims to bring together discourse analysis
with ethnographic approaches is Androutsopoulos’ ‘discourse centred online
ethnography’ (DCOE) (2008). This approach has developed from his work
on German-based web environments. For example, one of his projects looks
into sociolinguistic styles and identity constructions on sites devoted to hip-
hop culture. In doing DCOE on these sites, Androutsopoulos starts with
systematic observation of the discourse of the sites, moving on to inter-
viewing internet actors to elicit insiders’ perspectives. When working with
both texts and practices, literacy studies tends to start from practices and
from this work identifies salient texts for analysis. Discourse analysis often
starts out from the texts and then uses empirical methods to provide further
information. Researchers are finding many ways to bring these approaches
together.
The centrality of language in online research is reinforced in the next
chapter, where we present 10 reasons why linguists and those who are
interested in the digital world should pay attention to language issues online.
2
TEN REASONS WHY STUDYING
THE ONLINE WORLD IS CRUCIAL
F O R U N D E R S TA N D I N G L A N G U A G E
1. The world is increasingly textually mediated and the web is an essential part
of this textual mediation.
2. Basic linguistic concepts are changing in meaning and a new set of concepts
is needed.
3. New multilingual encounters online shift the relations between languages.
4. Linguistic resources are drawn upon to assert new identities and to represent
the self in online spaces.
5. People combine semiotic resources in new ways and they invent new
relations between language and other modes of meaning making.
6. The internet provides spaces for reflection upon language and communication.
7. Language is central to the constant learning in online spaces.
8. Vernacular language practices are becoming more public and circulated more
widely.
9. Language is central to new forms of knowledge creation and new forms of
enquiry.
10. New methods for researching language are made possible.
Figure 2.1 Ten reasons why studying the online world is crucial for understand-
ing language
16 UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE
Linguists have long been interested in investigating language as either speech

or writing. As we have seen in Chapter 1, the internet and its related new
media have brought about changes to language and its use in unprecedented
ways. There are new forms of interaction and everyday activities are trans-
formed in a fast-moving semiotic landscape. New media provide different
relations of people and technologies, giving rise to new affordances. There
are new and emergent forms of mediation of language, with machines using
language, and there are even challenges to the basic distinction between
human and machine. Although language-focused online research has gradu-
ally gained currency, there remain many unexplored issues. To reinforce
the urgency of attending to this area of inquiry, this chapter provides 10
reasons why researchers and others need to take account of language online
(Figure 2.1). In presenting these reasons, we introduce a set of specific
language issues that arise in the online world, thus highlighting the key
features of the book. In this way the themes of the chapters are also outlined.
1. THE WORLD IS INCREASINGLY TEXTUALLY MEDIATED

AND THE WEB IS ESSENTIAL TO THIS TEXTUAL MEDIATION
There is a growing importance of writing in contemporary life. Written
language is crucial in the vernacular activities of everyday life. It is also
central in the learning endeavours of education. And it is fundamental in
most workplaces. Written language is woven into these activities, often
unnoticed. For instance, in all these areas, notes and records are kept of
activities; rules and regulations are followed; texts are used to communicate.
In this way, written language holds activities together. People’s activities in
all areas of social life, in everyday life, in education and in workplaces are
textually mediated (Barton 2001). Increasingly, new technologies are the
medium of this textual mediation. These technologies provide new and
distinct writing spaces, as illustrated in the next chapter. People explore the
affordances of these writing spaces and literate forms are being renegotiated.
There is an explosion of new genres and proto-genres, which are the
beginnings of future genres. The textually mediated nature of new media is
first elaborated in Chapter 3 and is further explored throughout the book.
Understanding writing activities online is crucial for discourse analysis and
the study of written language.
2. BASIC LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS ARE CHANGING IN

MEANING AND A NEW SET OF CONCEPTS IS NEEDED
For linguistics and the study of language more broadly, a set of stable con-
cepts that have been developed in the past few decades are now overturned.
The word ‘text’ is an example. First of all, texts can no longer be thought of
as relatively fixed and stable. They are more fluid with the changing affor-
dances of new media. In addition, they are becoming increasingly multi-
UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE 17
modal and interactive. Links between texts are complex online and
intertextuality is common in online texts as people draw upon and play with
other texts available on the web. New media have also introduced new
relations between the traditional notions of speech and writing. More hybrid
genres are identified on the web. As another example, established media
studies notions such as ‘audience’ also become more complex and the
concept of ‘author’ and ‘authorship’ is changed. The boundary between
author and reader is also fuzzy with the rise of self-generated content on the
web. Domains of language use are more fluid, as are notions of groups and
communities that are significant for language use. In these ways people are
responding to new affordances of language use. This provides challenges to
the existing understanding of fields of linguistics such as pragmatics,
morphology and grammar, and of the boundaries between them. At different
points of the book, we revisit some traditional notions of linguistics, such as
politeness, and explore how they fit it with new media data.
3. NEW MULTILINGUAL ENCOUNTERS ONLINE SHIFT

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN LANGUAGES
New multilingual encounters that were not possible before are common in
many online spaces. In this way the internet provides people with new
opportunities for language contact. Multilingual participants are able to
negotiate language choice and deploy their languages strategically. There are
also new spaces available for minority languages.
It is important for multilingualism research to investigate how people
participate in new multilingual encounters. Multilingual issues are pursued
in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4, ‘Hello! Bonjour! Ciao! Hola! Guten Tag!
Deploying linguistic resources online’, begins with the classic debate of
whether the internet fosters the use of English only or multilingualism. The
chapter then discusses the rich array of linguistic resources that online parti-
cipants draw upon for their online writing. In particular, we demonstrate
how multilingual online participants negotiate language choice. Language
choice is an important lens for understanding language use more generally
and it is often where we can see more general language issues most clearly.
We show that such multilingual encounters are common in many online
spaces including instant messaging, Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. In
Chapter 5, ‘Taking up the affordances of multiple languages’, we begin with
a discussion of how people take up the action possibilities of different
linguistic resources when participating in the online world. It presents a set
of ecological factors affecting people’s language choice; these also apply to
language use online more broadly. Chapter 5 broadens existing understand-
ing of multilingualism and discusses new issues related to multilingual
encounters online. For example, people who used to be considered mono-
linguals now inevitably come across and work with different languages when
participating in online spaces. Although we do not cover it in detail, there
are dramatic changes in the translation of languages that affect what one can
know of something originally written in an unknown language. Translation
is now often an activity undertaken by machines and then checked by people.
It is becoming increasingly possible for translations to be instantly available.
In online communication we can also see how people use and standardize
minority languages, and forms which were earlier only available in spoken
language are increasingly being written down. These are all important
translingual practices introduced and reinforced on the internet, an issue
dealt with in Chapter 5.
4. LINGUISTIC RESOURCES ARE DRAWN UPON TO ASSERT

NEW IDENTITIES AND TO REPRESENT THE SELF IN
ONLINE SPACES
How people talk about and represent themselves in the online world is an
important issue for language and identity research. This is dealt with
throughout the book, especially in Chapter 6, “This is me”: Writing the self
online’. In the chapter, we first provide an overview of ways in which online
participants represent themselves through language in new media. We
introduce the concept of people’s techno-linguistic biography, people’s
technology-related lives where language plays a central role. This is used as
a major source of research data and provides a method for researching
language and identity online. It is also an important means for understanding
the relationship between people’s lived experiences with technology and their
language use online. We argue that language choice is one of the most salient
practices for identity performance. We show how participants on various
online platforms represent the self through particular ways of choosing
language and deploying their linguistic resources such as different scripts. In
particular, we discuss how writing in multiple languages in the same space
can widen participation, thus allowing people to negotiate between their
more local and more global identities.
5. PEOPLE COMBINE SEMIOTIC RESOURCES IN NEW WAYS

AND THEY INVENT NEW RELATIONS BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND
OTHER MODES OF MEANING MAKING
People draw upon available semiotic resources to make meaning and to
assert their relationships to the meanings expressed. In particular, people
combine images and other visual resources with the written word online.
There are new relations of language and image developing. Image is not
replacing language; but we are seeing new ways of these modes working
together in powerful ways. The intertwining of language and image has also
drawn renewed interest in the developing field of linguistic landscape
research (Shohamy and Gorter 2009; Shohamy et al. 2010). Looking
into instances of multimodality in online media broadens methods and
approaches of linguistic landscape research, which can be moved from

outdoors in the public sphere of city streets to public spaces online.
Multimodality is a crucial concept and it is first introduced in Chapter 3.
We concentrate on language and image as two powerful forms of meaning
which are often used together. Making meaning through multimodal means
is a way of positioning the self and others. These issues are pursued in detail
in Chapter 7, ‘Stance-taking through language and image’, where multi-
modality is investigated as one of the resources for stance-taking. Stance
refers to the positions people take and express through particular forms of
language and other resources. Various stance-takers, resources, and objects
can be identified in different writing spaces online. We focus on image here
from the dimensions of the image producer, the image and the viewer. The
concept of stance is used to draw attention to the positioning of the
researcher in online research. Worked examples of analysing multimodal
texts from the dimensions of the image producer, the image, and the viewer,
and the researcher are also provided in the chapter.
6. THE INTERNET PROVIDES SPACES FOR REFLECTION UPON

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION
With new ways of participation and dialogue, people can be more reflexive;
they can be more aware of language and more tolerant of language varieties.
They are also more playful and creative with language, exhibiting meta-
linguistic awareness. This creativity relates to the internet being a space for
language change. Reflection and discussion about language lead to develop-
ment of the affordances of language and how people can draw upon them
to act in the world. This is important for studies of reflexivity and language
awareness and is pursued in Chapter 8, ‘“My English is so poor”: Talking
about language online’. Here we move to the metalinguistic level and con-
sider how people actually talk about language in relation to their online
participation. Drawing upon examples from participatory web spaces such
as Flickr and YouTube, we show the ways in which Web 2.0 sites provide a
platform for people to publicly reflect upon and discuss language-related
topics through self-generated writing, such as personal profiles and com-
ments, thus revealing their vernacular theories of learning, which is pursued
in Chapter 9.
Understanding how language works online is also important so that
linguists can contribute to public discussions of the social significance of
new media, providing alternatives to deficit theories, challenging moral
panics about language, and getting beyond technological determinism. This
can help people develop a critical awareness of how to use online spaces
effectively.
7. LANGUAGE IS CENTRAL TO THE CONSTANT LEARNING

IN ONLINE SPACES
Participating in rapidly changing online activities involves constant learning,
much of which is informal. People learn in new and different ways; they
reflect on their learning and they undertake intentional projects of learning.
Chapter 9, ‘Everyday learning online’, shows how online spaces are impor-
tant sites of learning of all sorts, especially languages. It starts with con-
ceptualizing ways of learning online and how people draw upon and develop
language practices. We focus on a particularly powerful way of informal
learning online – deliberate learning. Starting with theories of adult learning,
the chapter moves on to examples from Flickr to show how key aspects of
these theories, which were developed before the existence of the internet,
nevertheless apply to learning in new media. The chapter points to the
importance of participation in learning and the role of other people and
networks in supporting learning. It then links up with a set of issues around
reflexivity, identity and discourses of learning that have been raised in other
chapters. The chapter also shows how informal language learning takes
place in various online spaces. Later, in Chapter 11, ‘Language online and
education’, we briefly provide an overview of the educational implications
of vernacular theories of learning. Two practical issues are covered in this
chapter: first, we make recommendations as to how educators, and language
teachers in particular, can utilize the internet and digital technologies as
pedagogical tools; and second, we briefly outline how new technologies
change educational practices more broadly.
8. VERNACULAR PRACTICES ARE BECOMING MORE PUBLIC

AND CIRCULATED MORE WIDELY
Understanding everyday, or ‘vernacular’, practices has been important for
literacies research. Reading and writing activities in everyday life involve
different types of literacy practices and serve a wide range of purposes. While
many of these activities, such as filling out tax forms or paying utility bills,
are carried out in response to external demands, much of the reading and
writing that people do, and the ways in which they do them, are not imposed
externally; for example, activities like reading novels and magazines, writing
down recipes, shopping lists, keeping in touch with friends are often done
voluntarily. And it is important for language and literacy researchers to note
how many of these writing activities are now carried out and transformed
online. These issues are pursued in Chapter 10, ‘Language online as new
vernacular practices’.
Chapter 10 revisits the concept of vernacular literacies and examines
general changes in literacy practices that have been taking place in the past
20 years. The chapter starts with a specific vernacular practice, popular
photography, providing a brief history and examining how it has been
transformed by new media, specifically photo-sharing sites such as Flickr.
Further examples from Facebook and elsewhere are drawn upon to illustrate
new characteristics of vernacular literacies in Web 2.0 spaces. We show how

they are now more valued as people participate in more global spaces.
9. LANGUAGE IS CENTRAL TO NEW FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE

CREATION AND NEW FORMS OF ENQUIRY
Language has often been construed as being the vehicle of communication,
where communication is thought to be the passive sending of messages as
fixed objects and where there is a unidirectional idea of influence of sender
on audience. The field of media studies started out with this unidirectional
idea of influence, and the notions of audience that were used came from
theatre and TV. And this view still existed in early Web 1.0 views of online
communication. However, it is crucial to have a more active view of com-
munication when examining how people are creating new forms of know-
ledge and new forms of enquiry online, in everyday activities as well as in
activities such as cloud computing, citizen science and citizen journalism. By
naming, sorting, classifying and categorizing in different ways, people are
using language to create new knowledge. Language is central to knowledge
creation and knowledge organization as well as to communication. These
two aspects of language come together in the act of communication and it is
important to focus on the meaning making aspects of language online.
Also central to such new forms of inquiry is the increasingly superdiverse
nature of communication practices and the social world as a result of
globalization and flows of people, objects and ideas around the world. An
important indication of language being more diversified is multilingualism
online, which is dealt with in Chapters 4 and 5. At the same time, language
features that used to be confined to the online world have made their way to
offline contexts. Chapter 13, ‘Flows of language online and offline’, con-
siders how globalization presents new relationships between the online and
the offline.
10. NEW METHODS FOR RESEARCHING LANGUAGE ARE

MADE POSSIBLE
Investigating texts and practices online provides new possibilities for
linguistic research methodology. Crucially the internet provides large
amounts of freely available textual data. New links across areas of linguistics
are possible, such as discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Studies of texts
and practices as discourse analysis can be combined with detailed ethno-
graphic approaches. New links across disciplines are possible as the
approaches of language and literacy studies complement other socio-cul-
tural, technical and sociological approaches and media studies. People’s
active participation means auto-ethnographic approaches can be incorpo-
rated into the range of research tools available to investigate language online.
This is pursued in Chapter 12, ‘Researching language online’, which pro-
vides an overview of major methods of researching online texts. The chapter
covers both traditional methods (including observation and interview) and

newer methods (such as auto-ethnography and techno-biography) adopted
in the research on IM, Flickr, and Facebook that we have covered in the
book. Other important methodological issues are discussed, including the
ways in which we combine texts and practices in our research approach,
developing a responsive methodology, the researcher’s roles in online
research, and challenges of carrying out research on the internet.
To sum up, this book brings together ideas and concepts related to
language online, examining both theory and methodology. Theoretically, it
investigates a set of specific language issues arising from online media. These
include new multilingual practices, how multiple identities are performed
through textual means, linguistic acts of stance-taking, how online users talk
about their language use, as well as discourses of learning. It also provides
new understanding of the vernacular and how new textual practices emerge
as a result of everyday uses of new media. Methodologically, the book pro-
vides empirical data and case studies that present new ways of understanding
texts and practices online. As well as using examples from other scholars’
work, we draw upon authentic examples from our own research on different
sites in the past decade.
The next chapter provides explanations of key concepts that need to be
introduced and clarified when discussing language online. These are terms
that are potentially confusing by being used differently in other works or left
undefined. It describes four key online sites in terms of their writing spaces
and affordances. They are Facebook, Flickr, IM, and YouTube, and they will
be used as the main examples throughout the book.
3
A C T I N G I N A T E X T U A L LY
M E D I AT E D S O C I A L W O R L D
• Practices
• Writing in a textually mediated social world
• Affordances
• Multimodality
• Stance
• Affinities and other groupings
• Globalization
• Writing spaces online
– Flickr
– Facebook
– YouTube
– Instant messaging
In this chapter, we introduce a set of seven key concepts that are brought to
the fore when considering how people use language online. First, the concept
of practices reflects our fundamental orientation to language as meaningful
activity. Texts are central to language and literacy practices and people act
within a textually mediated social world utilizing the writing spaces available.
In online writing spaces, people perceive and draw upon the affordances in
order to act according to particular purposes. Language exists as one set of
24 ACTING IN A MEDIATED SOCIAL WORLD
resources people utilize to create meaning in a multimodal manner. A promi-

nent aspect of how people make meaning online is expressing stance towards
what they are saying, including views about language. When using language
people act in relation to other groups and communities in many ways,
including the affinity groups in which they participate. Finally, globalization
provides an important context for understanding language online. At the end
of the chapter, we introduce the key online sites and tools, which we draw
upon for examples to facilitate our discussion throughout the book.
PRACTICES
Everyday life is infused with reading and writing. Planning a holiday, for
instance, is a common activity for many people, one which can involve a
great deal of language, both written and spoken. This includes spoken
language such as when discussing with others where to go and when to go.
This talking is often around texts, online and offline, and there can be much
reading of guides and timetables. Planning a holiday is a recognizable social
practice and many aspects of it, such as checking train or flight timetables
and booking tickets, can be seen as literacy practices. These are literacy
practices because there are common patterns in using reading and writing in
the context of planning a holiday. People bring in their cultural knowledge
to this activity. In other domains of life there are also identifiable social
practices where literacy is important. In the domain of education, for
example, activities such as writing an assignment or preparing a presentation
involve a wide range of literacy practices. Similarly, in the domain of work,
whether it is a doctor or a claims clerk, most people’s work day involves
using reading and writing. Even in seemingly less text-based jobs, such as
cleaners and security guards, people often have to keep records of their
activities; they follow written instructions and they deal with written issues
of health and safety, as well as records of their pay.
Literacy practices has been a key concept for researchers of literacy
studies. The concept encompasses the practical ways of utilizing reading and
writing but crucially it also includes the meanings that underlie practices.
The notion of practices is important in that it is both empirical and close to
data and at the same time it invokes a theory and helps link activities to
broader concepts. Literacy practices are made up of specific activities and at
the same time are part of broader social processes, as in the examples above.
Here we start from the more general notion of social practices and view
literacy practices as being the social practices associated with the written
word. Literacy practices may be supportive of other aims, as with the
example of travelling. Elsewhere the literacy is central to the activity, as with
an assignment where the outcome is a written text, and this can be seen as a
certain sort of literacy practice: text-making practices. The field of literacy
studies has been important in documenting literacy practices in various
domains of life. Researching practices highlights certain methodologies, and
within literacy studies detailed qualitative approaches have been invaluable.
ACTING IN A MEDIATED SOCIAL WORLD 25
Social practices such as planning a holiday are being transformed as many

areas of life are moving online. The associated language and literacy
practices are part of this transformation, so the actual booking of tickets and
searching for places to stay involve online literacy practices, such as filling
out a hotel booking form on a hotel website, or comparing across different
websites for the lowest fares. This is also true of the other examples above,
that writing practices such as an assignment or keeping workplace records
have a strong online component. Social practices are changing, and this is
achieved through the new reading and writing activities that constitute the
practices.
Practices is not a simple word and it is not a lightly chosen word. It is the
key concept that underlies literacy studies and makes language and literacy
studies what it is. The concept provides the route map for thinking about
topics as diverse as the role of agency, and the significance of the body,
objects and texts. It clarifies the relations of action and discourse. When
language is viewed as a set of practices, it provides the framing for locating
a theory of language in a theory of life. On the one hand, language activity
can be seen as a set of practices, and literacy practices in particular have been
studied extensively. At the same time, practices is a key concept elsewhere
across the social sciences. We can see human life as made up of social
practices. That is the reason why we emphasize people’s lived experiences
and everyday relations to technologies, or what is referred to as techno-
biographies, when researching language use online (see Chapter 6).
These are all issues that become particularly salient when considering
language online, which in reality is about practices online. The term helps us
locate literacy studies in broader philosophical traditions and therefore link
up with other socio-cultural research. Such ‘practice theory’ has its roots in
the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and is pursued in contemporary philo-
sophical enquiry such as Reckwitz (2002) and Schatzki (2012). As different
new media get used people gradually develop agreed ways of utilizing such
media. These agreed ways, or what Gershon (2010) refers to as ‘idioms of
practice’, are developed through interacting with others on the web. And as
a medium gets used by different groups of people, different sets of idioms of
practices can be created to define these groups, as discussed below in relation
to communities of practice. The broader social links to practices will be a
thread throughout the book.
WRITING IN A TEXTUALLY MEDIATED SOCIAL WORLD

The notion of texts is central to the study of language, and most social
practices involve language in some way. We need to be clear what we mean
by text, as the term is used in quite different ways in different disciplines. To
some, especially in media studies or literature, a text can be a film, a novel,
a TV programme or a newspaper article. To the linguist, a text can be any
coherent piece of language under discussion. It usually refers to written
language. Spoken language becomes a text by being transcribed. As with
other terms, like ‘practice’ and ‘discourse’, the term can vary in scale. A
single word headline can be a text, a paragraph can be a text, a chapter can
be a text and a whole book can be a text. Texts are situated in time and
space. Texts are created and can be written in many ways. They have been
sprayed on to walls, or are published in newspapers, or written in diaries.
Texts are then used; they are read and acted on or responded to.
Text is often treated as a product of language. It has the idea of stability
and fixedness. A text can act as a fixed point in an interaction and can be a
starting point for analysis. By acting as a reference point, texts such as a
letter, a novel or a newspaper can then move across events, changing in
function and value. They come from somewhere and they move on to
somewhere else.
As people’s social practices have moved online, many texts in our con-
temporary life have also moved online, and in doing so they take on different
properties. First, the materiality of text has changed. A letter, a novel and a
newspaper exist on a page or a piece of paper. When they move online they
are located on a screen. This shift from page to screen has been examined
extensively (as in Snyder 1998). One difference is the relationship between
texts. A simple Twitter post on a screen is a short text. It is located within a
set of messages or tweets earlier and later. At the same time, it is located
within a page of other writing. A tweet on a page may be an original post of
the author or it can be a reposting of a tweet (a ‘retweet’) written by another
member of Twitter. These relationships between texts are particular to
Twitter and on other sites such as Facebook, weblogs or Wikipedia, there
will be different relationships between texts.
Texts are central to the online world. This shift to a digital world means
that texts and text-making are more pervasive in all domains of life. The
everyday activities mentioned at the beginning of the chapter such as
planning a holiday or writing an assignment are all highly textually medi-
ated. The online world is constantly being written, be it in the form of single-
authored websites, collaboratively written wikis, or just a short comment on
a social network site. By writing, people leave records everywhere and create
information that other people can use, that informs search engines, and that
is the saleable product of companies like Google and Facebook. Google has
indeed become the largest language corpus in the world. Both online and
offline texts are located in a world of other texts. Part of their meaning
comes from their intertextual links, their links to earlier texts, and this is
stronger and more dense in the online world.
Online texts are no longer stable, acting as fixed reference points. Rather,
they are more fluid than print-based texts and there is constant change. And
many people can contribute to this change. Newspapers are a good example
of the difference between the physical offline world and the equivalent
virtual online news sites. The physical daily newspaper has a fresh new
edition every day, but it is fixed for the day and one can keep a physical
archive of a daily newspaper. Online a separate daily edition does not really
exist and news stories online can be constantly updated and changed second
by second in the form of Twitter feeds. Users can also add comments at any
point.
Another way in which texts are no longer fixed is that readers have more
control over a text in the online world. For a book, say a novel, the original
author of the content decides how we read it, with a clear table of contents
assuming the linear order of different parts of the book; for a website,
although the site designer may decide how we will view a site, the user has
relatively higher control over their reading path. For some sites, users may
even have some control over layout, and they can change their minds about
it. This leads to different users seeing a text quite differently, which is
something they may or may not be aware of.
The underlying assumption about these changes in the nature of text is
that most social practices contain elements of language and literacy and that
we live in a textually mediated social world, where texts are part of the glue
of social life. Texts are central to social interaction and much spoken lan-
guage is performed in the context of and taking account of written language.
Language and literacy are at the heart of much of current social change
because it is language and literacy that structure knowledge and enable
communication. This is especially true when examining the contemporary
online world. More language and more interactions are mediated and the
web of links between them is greater.
To understand language in this textually mediated world there are some
useful concepts for examining the dynamics of language use. First, texts are
always situated. They are in spaces that provide the possibilities and
constraints of what can be written, and what is likely to be written. In the
physical world, the pages of a newspaper, a novel and a diary all provide
different possibilities for writing. And of course not all physical writing is on
pages: some is on clothes and some is on scrolls, and there are different sorts
of pages with different dynamics, so a newspaper page works differently
from the pages of a novel. Online the spaces will have different constraints
and possibilities, as we will see in the next section.
AFFORDANCES
Affordances are the possibilities and constraints for action that people
selectively perceive in any situation. Perceived affordances become the
context for action. To understand the significance of this term, it is important
to stress that its origins lie in an ecological approach to perception. This
emphasizes that people do not focus on the intrinsic properties of an object;
rather, they perceive what is of value to them in a particular situation when
they have particular purposes (Gibson 1977, 1986). When it comes to per-
ceiving action possibilities in online spaces, this means more than providing
a list of the features originally intended by the designers. There is a long
history of the mismatch between designers’ original expectations and the
ways people bend technologies to their own purposes. The mobile phone is
an often-cited example, where it was originally designed for business uses as
a portable talking device, with no expectation that it would be used largely

for other purposes such as photo-taking and texting. As another example,
Facebook was first introduced as a means for university students to develop
social networks and that is still an important use. However, its uses are much
more diverse and nowadays many schools and universities have adopted
Facebook as a learning platform, even though it was never designed as an
educational tool. Screen-based affordances are often compared to those of
paper. While there are speculations about the computer replacing paper-
based materials, Sellen and Harper (2003) pointed out in The Myth of the
Paperless Office that at that time the use of paper was actually on the rise
and computerized office work still relied heavily on paper. This is due to
some of the unique affordances of paper that the computer screen cannot
offer, which people still value in their day-to-day activities.
Since affordances are not pre-determined, there is a limit to the usefulness
of trying to list the ‘properties’ of a technology. A smart phone has certain
properties, such as internet connectivity and software installation. But the
uses it is then put to by people cannot be read off from these properties. Any
list of uses is provisional and changing. Ultimately what is important are the
actual uses which are made of it. This is where a social practice approach is
significant in identifying what people actually do, and how they make sense
of their environment. It is another aspect of an ecological approach that the
environment is not a given and it is not fixed. Rather, people both create and
are created by their environment. In this way affordances are socially
constructed and change as people act upon their environment. Affordances
affect what can be done easily and what can be done conventionally with a
resource. Creativity is in part seeing new affordances and going beyond
existing possibilities. Affordances are emergent, and new possibilities are
created through human creativity. So, for example, on Facebook the
structure of the software creates likely activities and likely pathways, but
human ingenuity leads to the wide range of uses it is put to.
The whole environment provides resources to be drawn upon as
affordances. Practices take place in a world full of objects and technologies.
Different modes, such as speech, writing, layout and images, can be drawn
upon, as can different devices, such as touch screens and keyboards, and
different platforms, such as Wikipedia, Facebook and Tumblr. As we will
demonstrate, different languages can also be perceived as meaning-making
resources offering different action possibilities. Languages differ in what you
can do easily with them, and this is true of all levels of language. Taken
together, the structures of the online world provide a remarkably rich set of
affordances for people to act within. In the context of language online, new
language and literacy practices emerge as a result of people perceiving and
taking up new affordances on the internet.
The concept of affordances has been taken up in the study of multi-
modality by Kress (2004), and by scholars of digital literacies, such as Jones
and Hafner (2012), as a way of describing how people draw on new possi-
bilities. What a literacy studies approach in particular offers is an insider’s
perspective of people’s actual practices in response to what they perceive of

as the possibilities and constraints in particular situations. In terms of
methodology, if we are to understand why and how online users use
language in a particular way, it is important to first consider what they think
about what is available online, and what they make of what they do. This
needs to be understood against ethnographic insights, and is not determined
by the media alone. It is clear throughout our research that people from
similar backgrounds who share the same linguistic resources may take up the
affordances of resources in different ways according to their situated
purposes. As we show in Chapter 5, multilingual online users often see ways
in which a certain language affords more expressive powers than others in
different situations.
The internet is not limitless and that is why looking at affordances is
essential. Affordances work closely with the concept of design. The
metaphor of a ‘blank sheet’ is relevant, as in some senses a platform such as
a blog is like a sheet of paper, as boyd (2006) has pointed out, and it can be
put to many uses: it can be used as a diary, a story, a work of fiction or a
newspaper, utilizing specific genres. But it differs from a blank sheet in that,
like all websites, a blog site is highly structured, in that bloggers are required
to write within a template that has been pre-designed by the site designer.
This structuring means that blog posts are always arranged in reverse
chronological order, for instance, and that there are not many options as to
where on the site one can write the blog post or post a comment. It is the
ways in which people can act within the affordances of designed spaces that
create different possibilities for writing. That way, a site such as a blog is not
one coherent genre. It is a designed space with many potential uses. Political
blogs, travel blogs and book review blogs may develop specific genres, but
a blog itself is not a genre: it is not a form of language – rather it is a space
for language.
MULTIMODALITY
In understanding language online, we are also trying to understand how
different modes work together to form coherent and meaningful online texts.
Modes, which are also known as communicative modes or semiotic modes,
broadly refer to systems or resources that people draw upon for meaning
making. These include spoken language, written language, image, sound,
gesture, etc. In our everyday lives, multimodal texts, especially those that
combine the verbal with the visual, are ubiquitous. Multimodal practices are
not new and have been an essential meaning-making strategy throughout the
history of written language. In print-based materials such as magazines,
newspapers, and advertisements, the design of the visual often shapes how
viewers interpret the verbal, and vice versa. These visual effects may involve
specific decisions about the use of colours, font size, and typeface of the
words (so that a text printed in bookman old style, for instance, may
appear more serious and formal than one in Comic sans ms). In school
textbooks, pictures and diagrams are often used to complement written

descriptions. The layout of different items on a page is also designed for
meaning to be taken in particular ways.
With traditional printing, the reader has little control over layout or fonts.
However, when it comes to multimodality on the computer screen, it is
relatively easy for anyone to produce multimodal texts. Users can mix
together language, images and videos and have a great deal of control over
colour, layout and font. Websites are not just web pages with content from
different modes of representation; hyperlinks are often added to words and
images to create intertextual links across multiple multimodal web pages. In
text-based interactive computer-mediated communication such as email and
instant messaging, because of the lack of physical and contextual cues,
emoticons are often attached to utterances to mark the writer’s intention and
tone. For example, writing ‘I love my job :-)’ with a smiling emoticon is likely
to evoke a more positive interpretation than writing ‘I love my job! :-(’ which
may be intended to convey the opposite. What is crucial here is that because
affordances of semiotic modes are perceived, as we have discussed, when
combined in different ways, they can offer many meanings to different
viewers, and thus action possibilities. This is evident on the photo-sharing
site Flickr, where the same photo may on the one hand receive comments that
are closely related to what is shown in the image; on the other hand, some
comments may point to the photographic technique behind the scene, or just
the photographer.
Multimodal texts in many print-based media (and even websites) are
relatively static and are created by a single author. In Web 2.0 spaces, by
contrast, multimodal content can be co-created and constantly edited by
multiple users. The convergence of writing spaces in new social media pre-
sents new opportunities for easy creation, posting, and sharing of multi-
modal texts such as sharing a video from YouTube with a self-generated
written description posted on Facebook. Despite these multimodal possi-
bilities, as we show throughout the book, the written word still plays a
central role in meaning making on these new sites. On Flickr, for example,
images are often surrounded by titles, descriptions, and tags, thus forming a
cross-modal cohesion throughout the page. People also talk around a
photograph through written comments. As we show in Chapter 7, these
opinions are shaped by particular ways of seeing multimodal resources.
Because the creator of a text is making decisions about layout, choice of
images and other modes it may be useful to describe the online writer as a
designer. Although the layout of different writing spaces is often predeter-
mined by the site designer, when reading through a web page, different
viewers can have different starting points. On a YouTube page, we may
decide to watch the video first, while others may want to read the comments
first. In pursuing these different reading paths, people take different mean-
ings from the text.
STANCE
Stance has been a very useful concept in linguistics, bringing together a wide
range of work that has been concerned with understanding how utterances’
meanings are expressed and how speakers (or writers) address their audi-
ence. Stance can be broadly defined as a position taken by a speaker in
relation to what is said and to whom the utterance is directed. Linguistic
studies of stance range from examining the grammar and lexis of utterances
through to critical discourse analysis of stances embedded in political
speeches, for instance. At a micro-level, a speaker’s stance can be understood
by looking into specific linguistic features such as the choice of verbs and
sentence structures. For example, the clause ‘I think’ is often used to
introduce a statement in which an opinion is embedded. This is not a random
choice. When one says ‘I think I know what I am doing’, the speaker is
expressing a certain degree of certainty, which could have been weakened by
introducing the statement with ‘I guess’. Cognitive verbs such as ‘think’ and
‘know’ are thus a key marker of what is called epistemic stances, stances that
assert certainties, beliefs, and knowledge. For an illustration of this, see
Myers’ analysis (2010b) of how cognitive verbs are used on blogs. Epistemic
stance can be contrasted with affective stance where speakers express their
attitudes and feelings about what they utter, as in ‘I love the way this chapter
is written!’ (See chapter 1 in Jaffe 2009 for a more detailed overview of the
area.)
We see stance as a central concept that frames our understanding of how
opinions are expressed in online media. Many Web 2.0 sites and social media
are stance-rich environments. The perceived affordances of the writing
spaces encourage the production, sharing, discussion, and evaluation of
public opinions through textual means. YouTube is an excellent example of
a platform that is rich in stance and acts of stance-taking. The video posters
may express their opinions on a certain topic through speech in their videos;
at the same time, viewers can evaluate the videos by giving them ‘likes’ or
‘dislikes’, or by leaving written comments. Commenting is indeed a key site
of stance-taking in many popular Web 2.0 sites including Flickr and
Facebook. On these sites, stance is not taken by one single speaker or writer,
but is constantly created and renegotiated collaboratively by a networked
public. Another salient feature of stance in new media is that, unlike tradi-
tional communicative contexts such as a face-to-face conversation where
either speech or writing becomes a sole resource of stance-taking, multi-
modal stance-taking is made possible in many global online sites. On Flickr,
people may focus on a particular genre of photos (e.g. black and white self-
portraits) with written tags such as ‘me’ to present a particular sense of self
to their target viewers. Multilingual users may choose to switch between
languages. All these are practices and resources of stance-taking that were
certainly not common in the pre-Web 2.0 era. Thus, at a broader level,
understanding acts of stance-taking is crucial in understanding how identities
are constructed in new online spaces. It also becomes clear that stance-taking
is not just a linguistic act but a situated practice that should be understood
in the context of communication. In Chapter 7, we illustrate these features
of stance further with worked examples from various writing spaces online.
AFFINITIES AND OTHER GROUPINGS

Language is made and remade in relations between people. This takes place
at the micro level of two people interacting and at the macro level of whole
communities. There are many sorts of groupings of people and they are
important in maintaining language, shaping language practices and in
language change. People use language to interact with each other and specific
forms of language develop, such as the adjacency pairs of question and
answer in conversations and the part initiation, response and evaluation
(IRE) of a typical classroom interaction between teachers and students. It is
through interaction with other people that language changes and develops,
and genres and styles solidify, break up and reform.
Seeing people acting within groups, small and large, has been founda-
tional for the development of sociolinguistics. At the more macro level, one
such grouping is the notion of ‘speech community’. This concept is widely
used to understand linguistic variation. Speech communities are seen as
stable entities, with people sharing particular norms of language use; there
are strong notions of membership, and density of the networks between
people are measured in terms of language use. Language differences within
speech communities can index relations of gender, class and other social
factors. And when people act within these speech communities, they act
within a particular socially constructed discourse, a particular way of using
language, together with a repertoire of genres and styles, which is generally
recognized. A discourse community is another enduring concept. Academic
discourse, for instance, exists because there are generally accepted ways of
using language by the people who use it. These people, in other words, are
members of a specific discourse community. A discourse community is a
group of people having shared texts and practices, whether it is a group of
university students writing assignments or the readers of a teenage magazine.
A further grouping, that of people acting within a ‘community of prac-
tice’, has been taken up enthusiastically in the study of language. Coming
from socio-cultural theory and the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger
(Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), the notion of community of practice
has been well articulated. It is defined as a grouping of people sharing three
characteristics: there has to be mutual engagement between people; they
need to be involved in a joint enterprise; and they need to draw upon a
shared repertoire. People can have different forms of participation in such
groupings. Wenger’s work set out from a fairly stable workplace team where
people have a common endeavour. It has since been applied much more
broadly, including to educational sites, as well as to management learning in
workplaces. To bring language use into this, for a community of practice to
develop people have to be working with each other and have a common goal
and they develop shared ways of interacting, including specific ways of using
language. This can be seen, for instance, in work by Eckert (1999) on com-
munities of practice and a study by Mendoza-Denton (2008), who examines
whether the language dynamics of youth gangs can be analysed more
fruitfully as speech communities or as communities of practice. More
generally, see Swales (1998) on the usefulness and limitations of thinking in
terms of discourse communities and the notion of ‘community’.
Like other areas of language study, the field of literacy studies has seen
people as located in physical communities, as in Barton and Hamilton
(1998). Alongside this, literacy studies early on talked of people being
located in networks of support. Researchers have examined the ways in
which people support (or hinder) each other as language brokers, mentors,
mediators and scribes. Often there is reciprocity in these relations. (See
Baynham and Prinsloo 2009.) Looking more broadly, the language of such
dyadic – or two-person – relations have been studied across linguistics,
ranging from child language research of adult and child through to studies
of service encounters, doctor-patient interactions and other unequal
encounters. Other relationships between people have included interviews
and interrogations. There are in fact all sorts of networks and groups, as
diverse as a sports team, a family, neighbours, an academic department, or
a class, each with different dynamics. TV audiences and the readers of a
novel or a newspaper have certain bonds and affiliations but may never meet
or interact with each other. All these diverse groupings have implications for
language use.
Turning to learning and education, it is common to gather in groups to
learn, whether it is voluntary or enforced. People come together in class-
rooms and colleges. They learn from other people and they learn in groups.
These concepts, such as communities of practice, have been important in
relation to learning, and a coherent theory of learning as changing partici-
pation in practices is outlined in Wenger (1998). Questions are raised about
when they become ‘learning communities’ and whether and how classrooms
can become communities of practice. At the same time the reciprocal
relations studied by literacy studies have also been identified as significant
for learning.
Once we turn to the internet, we see some of these same groupings and
forms of participation, and the same queries and cautions arise. We also see
other forms of participation and people participating in other groupings.
James Gee (2004) pointed out that the dynamics of young people interacting
through video gaming could not be simply regarded as participating in
communities of practice because in a community of practice membership is
relatively static and is defined by a specific set of requirements; rather, he
analysed them as ‘affinity groups’, grouping which people joined because of
a specific interest and moved easily in and out of such groupings. See Gee
and Hayes (2011) for more detail on affinity groups and Gee (2005) on
comparisons with the notion of communities of practice. Some of these
issues are pursued in Chapter 9 in relation to learning online.
There are other groupings on the internet that can be identified as having
some of the characteristics of communities of practice, but it is a new
situation. Often they are more fluid. The internet supports many sorts of
relationships and forms of interaction, including affinity groups, but going
beyond them. People can be interacting without physical presence and
without clear or rigid roles. They can be participating with anonymity, using
invented identities, and with new notions of audience. All of these factors
can lead to different and new forms of participation. Additionally, as we
have already made clear, it is not really possible to separate online and offline
activity and people may have existing strong offline bonds in any online site.
People may be contributing to common endeavours such as giving tags
collaboratively or contributing to ratings without being aware of their
participation. At the micro level there are different sorts of encounters, and
interactions like commenting on a blog or website are likely to be different
linguistically from well-studied phenomena of turn-taking. We should be
looking for new groupings of people and accept that there are many ways of
interacting with new media offering new possibilities. For our purposes, we
need to be aware of different forms of participation and different purposes
when theorizing language-related issues online.
GLOBALIZATION
With a focus on language online we see technological change as being a
central part of this but it is important to realize that it is one among a set of
interconnected factors which are transforming many aspects of contem-
porary life. Interacting with technological change there are political and
economic changes, contributing to general processes of globalization.
All these changes impact on language and communicative practices. The
relationship between language and globalization has been widely discussed
by linguists (including Crystal 1997; Wright 2004; Phillipson 2004;
Canagarajah 2007; Blommaert 2010). The term ‘globalization’ itself is
complex and is used in different ways across different disciplines. Within the
study of language there are two different aspects that are focused on: one is
based on the homogenizing aspects of the internet, where it is seen as
creating uniformity in language use. The other one, which we have seen in
our data, is a culturally and linguistically diversified one, which allows space
for different cultures and languages to develop simultaneously. In this way
people want to be part of the global world without giving up their existing
local identities.
Clarifying the relation between the local and the global has always been
important for understanding language and literacy practices (as in Baynham
and Prinsloo 2009, for example) and in relation to education (as in Barton
1994a; Block and Cameron 2002). When discussing language the relation
between the global and the local is probably best understood in terms of
glocalization. Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou (2007) utilize this concept
in their study of online language use in Greece, where they define glocaliza-
tion as ‘a dynamic negotiation between the global and the local, with the
local appropriating elements of the global that it finds useful, at the same
time employing strategies to retain its identity’ (143). To date, much
attention has been on local appropriation of the global, as when global hip-
hop culture is localized through local languages. This is best seen as a two-
way process: it is not just how the global affects the local, but how the local
shapes the global. Global language practices are localized, and at the same
time local practices are becoming globalized. In our research on language
online, we are seeing both and in particular how people are using the local
to write the global. Within literacy studies, drawing on concepts from Actor
Network Theory, it is possible to identify literacy practices that act as
‘localizing moves’ and others that act as ‘globalizing connects’ (Barton and
Hamilton 2005: 31). In a sense all interaction is local. In our data we see
how people deploy multiple languages to project both local and global
identities.
An important aspect of globalization is the way in which the social world
is speeding up. There have always been flows of people, objects, and ideas
around the world, but the patterns of activity have changed significantly.
The physical flows of people from place to place include migration, tourism
and travel for work. The flows of objects take place through trade and
commercial networks, whilst information and knowledge flow through mass
media and the internet. Language has a role in all these and they are all aided
by the internet. At the same time, languages themselves flow around
the world. There are many new opportunities for interaction and for the
development of new genres and styles. Many aspects of this mobility are
being studied by sociologists (such as Urry 2007), but less attention has been
paid to the flow of languages. We see this ‘supermobility’ as capturing the
flows and fluidity of language.
One aspect of this movement, coming from studies of migration, is the
‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007) seen in the movement of people. Migrants
have many different reasons for travelling and have varying backgrounds in
terms of religion, language and ethnicity. They have a variety of life histories
and they also travel to and from many different countries. As Vertovec
(2010: 83) explains,
more people are now moving from more places, through more places, to more
places . . . today newer, smaller, transient, more socially stratified, less organised
and more legally differentiated immigrant groups comprise global migration flows
. . .. Super-diversity is a term intended to capture a level and kind of complexity
surpassing anything many migrant-receiving countries have previously experienced.
Existing concepts of multilingualism such as ‘speech community’ cannot

capture this diversity. Linguists (such as Blommaert and Rampton 2011) are
taking up the concept of superdiversity to rethink the concepts and terms
of sociolinguistics, primarily in the study of multilingualism but also in
other areas. Much of the rest of this book is about language online in a
supermobile and superdiverse world and we pursue issues of globalization

and superdiversity in several chapters.
WRITING SPACES ONLINE

With these seven key concepts that characterize language online in mind, we
now turn to the spaces online where these features are manifested. We want
to call these spaces ‘writing spaces’, as they are spaces that provide the
possibilities and constraints of what can be written, and what is likely to be
written. We are particularly interested in writing spaces because no matter
how multimodal online texts are, the written word is still central to all forms
of online interaction and content creation. YouTube, for instance, is essen-
tially a video-sharing site but most forms of participation are mediated by
written language, from video titles and descriptions through to searching and
user comments. In the following, we provide an overview of the writing
spaces on the four main sites drawn upon in the book: Flickr, Facebook,
YouTube, and instant messaging.
Flickr
Flickr is a popular photo-sharing site which allows people to upload, display
and share photos. First launched in 2004, it has over 50 million active users
and over 6 billion photos have been posted as of August 2011 (Flickr Blog
2011). Although photographs are often perceived as the central element of
Flickr, members of Flickr frequently interact through various writing spaces,
such as giving titles, captions, and tags (or keywords) for their photos, as
well as commenting on one another’s photos. These writing spaces form a
cross-modal cohesive tie between the photo posted and the words around it.
Flickr is basically a public space (though users can control privacy of their
photos) and it is a global online platform, so its users vary geographically,
culturally and linguistically. Our research on Flickr has focused primarily on
the interaction between the photo posted and the writing around it, that is,
the titles, descriptions, tags, and comments. These can be seen in Figure 3.1.
Here we offer more details of Flickr to illustrate the differences between
possible writing spaces, and because readers may be less familiar with Flickr
than with the other sites.
To describe how the participants in our research used the writing spaces
mentioned above, first the people we studied all used titles, though they did
not give a title to every picture. Many titles were similar to the titles of novels
or paintings; they might be explanatory or descriptive, such as names of
people and places, on the road, teatime or class of 79. Many were playful.
Often they were intertextual to other photos or to the wider world, such as
drawing on popular culture with song titles, such as ‘Wandering eyes’,
‘Singing in the rain’ and ‘Common people’.
The captions, or what Flickr calls descriptions, can be of any length.
Usually they provided further information about the picture and the person’s
Figure 3.1 A Flickr photo page
relation to it. Tags provide another space for writing and originally appeared
as a vertical list on the right-hand side of the screen but is now set out as left-
to-right text. They are categorizations provided for individual photos and
they were used extensively by the participants in our study. These ranged
from conventional classifications – beach, summer, blue, door bell – shared
by other people through to innovative, idiosyncratic ones, such as disappear,
heartbroken, desire. Some would require insider knowledge and would only
be recognizable to other Flickr users, such as the tag 365 or 365Days, mean-
ing that the photo has been uploaded as part of a common photo project
where the person is taking one photograph a day for a year. We discuss this
activity later on. Other people used tags to write poems and to provide
idiosyncratic comments on their photos. The names for tags result in
taxonomies created by people, often referred to as ‘folksonomies’. It is worth
noting that whilst some of the categories which people used as tags were
taxonomic, sometimes they seemed just to be adding descriptions of parti-
cular photos without making general categories or linking to their other
photos or those of other people.
Profiles are the next writing space we examined. In a separate screen
Flickr users can write what they want, and people used it in many different
ways, varying in how much they put in. Often they wrote a short paragraph
or mini biographies about themselves such as where they come from, what
cameras and lenses they use, and their passion for photography.
Finally, the comments area is the most interactive writing space on Flickr.
The comments, which appear beneath the photos with the most recent ones
at the bottom, were commonly evaluative – usually positive, as in amazing
shot of an amazing view. Some comments may be questions about the
photos, such as where the photo was taken or what the person in the photo
was doing. Others were less clear, as in Hey baaaaby! Don’t hate me! =). It
was in the comments space that people were most likely to use emoticons,
abbreviations and creative punctuation. Sometimes people would respond to
comments and this might gradually develop into an interactive ‘conversa-
tion’ between the photographer and their contacts, some of whom they
already know in their offline lives. As such, Flickr has become a space for
socializing and maintaining friendships. Throughout the book, data from
Flickr will be used as examples illustrating themes such as multilingualism
(Chapters 4 and 5), stance-taking (Chapter 7), metalinguistic discourses
(Chapter 8) and informal learning (Chapter 9).
Facebook
Facebook was first launched in 2004 in the US. Originally started as a site
to facilitate communication among college students in Harvard, it then
spread globally and rapidly. As of April 2012, it has over 900 million active
users from different parts of the world (Hachman 2012). Although still
popular among college students, it is reported that it is most popular among
people aged between 26 and 34 (Burbary 2011). Like many other social
network sites, Facebook is structured around user profiles (now called
timelines). The layout and functions of the site have been modified and
redesigned many times over the years. However, its major spaces for writing
are still available. A key writing space that we have investigated into exten-
sively is status updates (or simply called posts now), which was originally
designed as a space for micro-blogging like Twitter. Micro-blogging refers to
the writing of short messages on the web designed for self-reporting about
what one is doing, thinking, or feeling at any moment. This can be
performed on stand-alone micro-blogging platforms like Twitter or on social
network sites such as Facebook.
The status updates feature on Facebook is similar to that of Twitter in that
it works mainly with a prompt (What’s on your mind?) and a text box
(Publisher box) that appear at the top of a user’s homepage and personal
profile. Lee (2011) notes that Facebook participants use status updates to
achieve a wide range of discourse functions, from expressing opinions (e.g.
Ariel thinks that no news is good news) to reporting moods and other feelings
(e.g. Amy is in a good mood). Status updates were once entirely text-based
with an imposed word limit of just 420 characters. Since late 2011, their limit
has been increased to 5,000 characters, and more multimodal content is
allowed to be attached to the status updates, such as photos and videos.
Facebook exhibits a collocation of online spaces where a number of

traditional synchronous and asynchronous forms of CMC interaction take
place in one space. In addition to posting status updates, there is a comment-
ing feature that sometimes acts as a site for mini discussion forums. People
can share photos and create photo albums; but photo sharing works quite
differently from that on Flickr due to their different perceived affordances.
On Facebook, photos are often shared with a known audience, while on
Flickr, photos can be showcased to a much wider and global audience, who
may be strangers. Friends can also communicate privately through Facebook’s
private email or its chat function. Facebook is one of the best representatives
of convergence culture. Users can easily connect to external sites, for example
a newspaper article, by clicking the ‘LIKE’ button. This immediately creates
intertextual links between texts and resources available online. Examples
from Facebook will be used throughout the book to illustrate various issues
of language online, such as multilingual and translation practices (Chapters
4 and 5) and ways of performing identities through textual means (Chapter
6). A case study is also discussed in Chapter 10 to illustrate how status
updates are situated in a pregnant woman’s lived experiences.
YouTube
The third site of interest is the video-sharing site, YouTube. Established in
2005, the site has gained immense popularity with over 800 million visits to
the site per month and 72 hours of videos being uploaded every minute
(YouTube 2012). It is often seen as a social network site rather than a site
for only uploading videos (Burgess and Green 2009). This is due to the
unique relationships developed between video uploaders and their viewers,
which did not exist before YouTube. These relationships are often developed
through multimodal means. A key type of videos that best demonstrates this
specific feature of YouTube is video blogs (vlogs) or first-person vlogs. These
videos feature the vlogger facing the camera and talking about their first-
person experiences. Seeing their viewers and subscribers as their social
capital, vloggers tend to perform playful identities in order to attract more
viewers and subscribers. For example, the effect of humour and irony is often
created through adding written annotations that contradict with what is said
in the video (Lien 2012).
Although primarily a video-based site, YouTube is rich in writing spaces.
In addition to subtitles and annotations, which can be easily added to the
video screen using YouTube’s built-in video editor, commenting is the key
interactive writing space on the site. YouTube comments appear below the
video. As with the videos, comments can also be rated by users (vote up or
vote down). Throughout the book, we show how commenting on YouTube
serves as a site for promoting translingual practices (Chapter 5) and meta-
discourses about language and the learning of it (Chapters 8 and 9).
Instant messaging (IM)

IM is defined as an ‘Internet-based synchronous text chat, with point-to-
point communication between users on the same system. A window is
dedicated to the conversation, with messages scrolling upward and eventu-
ally out of view as the conversation ensues’ (Grinter and Palen 2002: 21).
With its increasing popularity, especially with enhanced IM technologies on
mobile devices, IM has become a major part of people’s everyday lives. Many
people use IM to stay in touch with friends on a daily basis for a range of
purposes, such as talking about homework, setting up weekend events, inter-
acting with colleagues in the office (America Online 2005; Nardi et al.
2000). Although multimedia features are available, IM is largely used as a
text-based communication tool. Such everyday use and exchange of text
messages foster the development of IM as a social practice associated with
sets of values that influence people to use texts in specific ways. Although
largely text-based, IM is also used in conjunction with other forms of
communication, such as video chat (or what is often referred to as VoIP), for
example Skype.
The reason we include IM here is that while it is not typically labelled as
a Web 2.0 site, it shares many of the characteristics of Web 2.0. First, it
is interactive; second, it is rich in self-generated text; third, it supports
multimodal messages; fourth, it generates new forms of creativity as well as
new learning opportunities, as we will show in later chapters. In our dis-
cussion of multilingual practices online in Chapter 4 and identity perform-
ance in Chapter 6, we will discuss examples of IM chat logs collected from
a group of bilingual college students in Hong Kong, where one of the authors
is based. We also show how IM is a crucial platform in many people’s
technology-related lives, and an important site for many of our informants
to establish and transform their linguistic practices online.
These platforms are chosen as the key sites of discussion in this book for
various reasons. First, we are active users of these sites, which means we can
draw upon our insider knowledge when researching them. Second, these are
some of the most popular computer-mediated spaces that comprise different
modes of meaning making and different dynamics of interaction. For
example, Flickr and YouTube are based on the visual and include a great deal
of interaction with strangers, while on Facebook and IM people tend to
communicate with friends they already know in the offline world. Third,
these sites represent different eras of online activities – IM is considered as
an older form of synchronous CMC that has been transformed from time to
time, while Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are typical examples of Web 2.0
sites. Fourth, while much research has been about young people’s and
students’ uses of social media, Flickr and YouTube have a broader age profile
of users and wider functions than social networking. While focusing on these
four key sites, in the course of our discussion, we also look into other sites
partly for the sake of comparison; but at the same time, we want to acknow-
ledge the interrelation between text-making practices that people draw upon
when participating on different sites in different areas of their lives. In the

next chapter, we begin our discussion of language online by exploring the
rich array of linguistic resources that online participants can deploy in
multilingual encounters in the global internet.
4
HELLO! BONJOUR! CIAO! HOLA!
G U T E N TA G !
Deploying linguistic resources online
• English and other languages online: an overview

• Deploying multilingual resources in online writing spaces
– Code-switching practices on instant messaging (IM)
– Multilingual practices on Flickr
– Language choice in micro-blogging
– Languages on YouTube
ENGLISH AND OTHER LANGUAGES ONLINE: AN OVERVIEW

More than 80 percent of the content posted on the Internet is in English [. . .] Whether
we consider English a “killer language” or not, whether we regard its spread as benign
globalization or linguistic imperialism, its expansive reach is undeniable and, for the time
being, unstoppable.
(Fishman 1998: 26)
Not only does it [the web] offer a home to all linguistic styles within a language; it offers
a home to all languages.
(Crystal 2006: 229)
DEPLOYING LINGUISTIC RESOURCES ONLINE 43
Back in the 1990s, a number of scholars predicted that English, having

achieved global status (Crystal 1997), would remain to be the dominant
language on the internet, as shown in Fishman’s observation above. For one
thing, the internet started and first became popular in the United States,
where English is the primary language. This early dominance of English
online is also supported by statistics from surveys and media reports. For
example, in 1998, over 80 per cent of internet content was written in English
(Fishman 1998). The 1990s was the time when our society was largely
shaped by discourses of the ‘hyperglobalizers’ (Held and McGrew 2001),
who believed that globalization would lead to the homogenization of the
world. In view of these beliefs, concerns were expressed as to whether the
growth of the internet in the US would result in English linguistic imperial-
ism (Phillipson 1992), that ‘the dominance of English is asserted and main-
tained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and
cultural inequalities between English and other languages’ (47). This
discussion also extended to the public sphere, especially in the form of news
reports and editorials, as Specter’s (1996) comment in his New York Times
article suggests:
[I]f you want to take full advantage of the Internet there is only one real way to do it:
learn English.
(1)
While English may continue to be the common language for intercultural

communication, recent years have seen rapid changes to the distribution
between English and other languages online. Daniel Dor (2004: 99) argues
that with changing economic relations between nations, ‘[t]he Net is going
to be a predominantly non-English-language medium’. This seems to be
happening. In 2012, English web content dropped from 80 per cent in 1998
to 55 per cent (W3techs.com 2012). And according to Internet World Stats
(2010), about 73 per cent of internet users in the world have a first language
other than English and the proportion is continuing to grow. The survey also
shows that among these other languages, Chinese and Spanish are the two
most popular user languages on the internet. Although the methodology
adopted by such public surveys are questionable as they only count one
language per user, a growing number of academic studies also emerge to
support the presence of multiple languages online and multilingual internet
users. The publication of the volume The Multilingual Internet (Danet and
Herring 2007) marks a significant transitional phase in linguistic research on
computer-mediated communication. The book covers studies of a wide range
of languages and geographical locations. A number of studies focus on the
co-existence of English and other languages, and how internet users often
write in languages which are normally restricted to spoken contexts. For
instance, Warschauer et al. (2007) demonstrate the extensive use of roman-
ized Arabic in informal email and chat messages in Egypt; Lee (2007a,b)
examines creative forms of written Cantonese in Hong Kong-based instant
44 DEPLOYING LINGUISTIC RESOURCES ONLINE
messages; and Androutsopoulos (2007) discusses code-switching in German-

based Persian and Greek diasporic discussion forums. Since then multilin-
gualism or mixed language writing on the internet has also become a key
research direction in the field of digital discourse (Sebba et al. 2012). This
emerging area provides important evidence that the global spread of the
internet gives rise to not only English but other major languages like Chinese
and Spanish, and, for different reasons, smaller languages such as Catalan
(Block 2004). With the advent of social media and Web 2.0 technologies, we
expect that self-generated content in social media such as YouTube and
Flickr to further encourage and reinforce multilingual writing online. Even
David Crystal, who once acknowledged the global status of English in his
book English as a Global Language (1997), began to question his earlier
conclusion and has suggested that the web indeed ‘offers a home to all
languages’ (Crystal 2006: 320). This chapter and the next chapter together
explore what people do with multiple linguistic resources on the internet and
how working with multiple languages has become an important literacy
practice online for all web users.
DEPLOYING MULTILINGUAL RESOURCES IN ONLINE

WRITING SPACES
The background discussed in the previous section seems to suggest that both
the user and the content of the web are becoming more linguistically diverse
than before. What then happens to literacy practices if the web and its users
are multilingual? To answer this question, one needs to move beyond the old
question of whether the web leads to linguistic imperialism or pluralism. In
the age of Web 2.0, new online media are easy to get started on and ordinary
web users have unprecedented power of choice and creativity, which is quite
different from traditional web sites in the so-called Web 1.0 generation,
where the choice of website language lies with a single web author. Because
of this changing nature of authorship in new web spaces, it seems reasonable
to look into the actual social activities and practices surrounding such
multilingual writing online, so as to understand better how and what people
write online and what they do with their texts. (See Lexander 2012, who
provides a model for understanding multilingual SMS as literacy practices.)
In the subsections that follow, we present cases of people’s experiences with
multiple languages on four different web spaces: Flickr, instant messaging,
Facebook, and YouTube. Most of these are a result of our research projects,
while at times we bring in examples from other scholars’ work. The dis-
cussion starts with issues related to language choice; we then gradually
introduce other new multilingual practices online. We take a broad view of
multilingualism in this book. When referring to people as multilingual, we
mean they have more than one language to draw upon or that they switch
between two or more languages in their everyday lives; when we use the term
multilingual practices, we are referring to a subset of literacy practices that
involve people doing things with two or more languages.
Multilingual practices on Flickr

In the study of Flickr the focus has been on the ways in which people
creatively deploy multiple linguistic resources when interacting with one
another in globalized networks, and how new multilingual practices shed
light on current understanding of vernacular literacies (which is followed up
in Chapter 10). We first examined the photostreams of 100 Flickr users who
were members of a major English language-based group, FlickrCentral. The
writing spaces in these 100 photostreams initially show that Flickr is a
linguistically diverse space, as shown in the following observations:
• In addition to English, 10 other languages were identified: Chinese,

Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, French, Tagalog, Arabic, Dutch,
and Russian.
• English, Chinese and Spanish were the most common written languages
used by these people, which coincidentally are the three most common
languages online, as suggested by the statistics we presented earlier.
• 65 per cent of the people we surveyed come from a country where
English is not spoken as a primary language.
• Languages other than English were found on 49 per cent of the sites, of
which 4 per cent contained more than two foreign languages. Seventy-
five per cent of the users had their profile in only English; a further 12
per cent had a bilingual profile including English. A small number of
them (7 per cent) had it in a language other than English.
Although these figures may keep changing over time as Flickr gets used
by different groups of people, they do allow us to view Flickr as a multi-
lingual environment. We were also struck by the high degree of multilingual
writing found on the photo pages we observed. For a more in-depth view of
the production and use of these texts, we turned to a different group of Flickr
users and selected active users who have written in at least two languages on
their sites, Chinese and English or Spanish and English. (See Chapter 12 for
details about the methodology adopted in this study.) In the following, we
provide a more detailed discussion of multilingual practices involving dif-
ferent writing spaces on Flickr.
Multilingual writing practices on Flickr can start with a person’s screen-
name and profile. Screen-names are nicknames people create to identify
themselves in online spaces. For the Spanish participants, most had screen-
names that related to their real names in some way, such as Caroline being
called Carolink, whilst others had completely invented names. Several had
part of their first name along with an invented part – presumably their first
names had already been taken. For the Chinese participants, many of them
have the additional resource of two standard writing systems to draw upon,
the traditional Chinese characters (used in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan)
and the simplified characters (used in mainland China). Two of the Hong
Kong participants had bilingual and biscriptal screen-names. One of them,
tiong ( ), had the Chinese characters for his nickname ‘little tiong’ in
brackets. In some bilingual screen-names, the two languages express rather
different contents. In Kristie , Kristie is the user’s English first name,
and the Chinese words literally translate as ‘Jing the Nomad’, in which Jing
is her Chinese first name. Other bilingual screennames reflect the user’s
current location. One of our mainland Chinese informants called herself
Looloo@ , which means the user ‘Looloo’ is currently in Beijing (@ ).
As can be seen, online nicknames are often used as initial identity markers.
Combining different languages and scripts in a screen-name is a key strategy
that allows users to visually display who they are to others.
On their profile pages, many users included a bilingual biography or they
code-switched when introducing themselves. Some bilingual profiles are
sentence-for-sentence literal translations, while some other people used
different languages to convey different kinds of content. For example, the
profile of Looloo@ , who later changed her name to LoolooImage, was
predominantly in English, providing details about her cameras, interests, and
personal philosophy; however, the Chinese version is much briefer and reads
‘a 22-year-old Beijinger, loves traveling and photography. More information
can be found on my Sina blog’. Where they used two languages, they tended
to put the Chinese or Spanish first, with English below, as with our Spanish
participants Carolink and Erick C. These practices may change over time, as
we later noticed that Erick C’s profile was only in Spanish.
Another writing space on Flickr where multilingualism is central is photo
titles and descriptions. Our Chinese informant, Tinn Tian’s site is a good
example illustrating how multilingual resources are carefully deployed in
titles and descriptions. Tinn Tian is a student from mainland China and has
limited knowledge of English. Over half of his photos were described in
Chinese only. Although, according to him, English is not a language he
would use in everyday life, some of his other photos had either English only
or Chinese-English bilingual descriptions, such as the title ‘ Popcorn’.
Some of the English captions are partial translations of the original Chinese
description such as as ‘shell’ instead of ‘parrot shell’ as specified in the
Chinese title. Another case of bilingual writing is where a Chinese title is
annotated with a longer explanation in English. For example, one of his
photos features a local dish called Maoxuewang, and he chose to describe
the dish in English:
Maoxuewang, a dish of boiled blood curd and other stuff with another name:
Duck Blood in Chili Sauce.
The Chinese characters express only the name of the dish, while the
English caption gives further details about the ingredients. In this case,
English is used as a medium for translating local cultures to the non-Chinese-
speaking world. We return to this example in Chapter 7.
Tagging is another important writing space where multilingualism is
displayed on Flickr. All the Spanish users in our study had tags in more than
one language, and some used several languages. For example, Marta had tags
in mainly Spanish and Catalan, but also ones in English and a few French
ones, such as when tagging a photo with playa, platje, beach and plage.
Similarly, Carolink used Spanish, English and French. She said:
I try to fit all the tags both in English (universalism) and in Spanish (my immediate
Flickr public) and, since I know a little French, I put the French word when I
remember it.
(Carolink)
Almost half of the Chinese sites in our study had tags in Chinese characters.
For example, on cjPanda’s site, approximately 45 per cent of her tags were
written in Chinese, and about 16 per cent of the Chinese tags were also tagged
with their English equivalents or translations; for example, one photo was
tagged in English ‘umbrella’, in simplified Chinese character ‘ ’ and in
romanized form ‘shan’. In some cases, even if a photo was described in English
only, its tags were likely to be in both English and Chinese. For instance, a
Hong Kong participant, HKmPUA, showed a photo of McDonald’s in Sai
Kung (a district in Hong Kong). The caption for this photo is in English only:
‘I’m lovin’ it, McDonalds in Saikung’. However, when tagging the location of
this photo, both traditional and simplified Chinese characters were included
in addition to the English ones: ‘Saikung, (traditional Chinese),
(simplified Chinese), Hong Kong, ’. Tagging in different languages is, on
the one hand, an act of speaking to different audiences; on the other hand, this
is also a way of enhancing Flickr’s search engine, that the photo would show
up when the search keyword is in either Chinese or English. This not only
ensures that his photos can get more ‘views’, it also shows that HKmPUA, like
many Flickr users, sees himself as belonging to an affinity group of active and
global Flickr members who want to maximize their participation as much as
possible through multilingual writing.
An even more interactive multilingual writing space is the comments
section underneath the uploaded photo. As one of our Chinese participants,
sating, pointed out:
I like Flickr because commenters on Flickr, especially my own contacts, all make
comments in an objective and polite manner. If my photo does not receive any
comments, that shows it isn’t a popular one. But that’s alright. I enjoy such an
authentic and harmonious atmosphere.
(sating)
Although the user can control who can make comments on their photos,
the people in our study generally welcome comments from any Flickr mem-
bers regardless of the language used. This implies that they are likely to
receive comments in languages that they are not familiar with. When
responding to comments in different languages, many users wrote their
replies according to the languages used by the comment posters; if they did
not know the language concerned, they would respond in English, as illu-
strated by the comments on one of Carolink’s photo pages:
fr1zz: and where did the tattooed folks went to – set to private?
carolink: Sorry, fr1zz. . .what do you mean?
fr1zz: weird, the newest images you just posted, for a while they
disappeared
. . .this image:
[a small photo embedded]
carolink: I was trying to maintain some “logical” order, and I erased them
to upload them again. . .Well, there they are. The girl just was
there playing with the wind, and happy to pose!
fr1zz: thanks. a beautiful girl. :)
...
Migue A. Yuste: Mucho tiempo sin verte, me gusta el gesto de esta mujer.
Translation: I haven’t seen you for a while, I like this woman’s
gesture.
carolink: Gracias port u visita, Miguel A. Aqui seguimos, poco mas o
menos :) Translation: Thanks for your visit, Miguel A. We’re still
here, more or less :)
In this chain of messages, Carolink writes to fr1zz, a German speaker, in

English but switches to Spanish when responding to Miguel A. Yuste’s
comment. Similarly our Chinese informants also adapt their responses to the
language used by their commenters. Multilingual encounters on Flickr are
quite different from those found on IM in that on Flickr, users often find
themselves speaking to an unknown group of people, who they may have
never met in their offline lives. In IM, by contrast, it is rare to find people
chatting with different audiences in different languages in a single con-
versation. By accommodating their language choice to different audiences,
Flickr members we have studied would actively present themselves as global
citizens through their constant switches between languages and selecting the
most suitable form of language for their intended viewer (see subsection
‘Who the intended viewer is’ below), even though not all of these languages
are used in their offline lives. We also observe that when interacting with
people from all over the world speaking different languages, Flickr members
generally see strategically deploying language as a crucial practice in becom-
ing a legitimate Flickr member and in their relationship with other Flickr
members. Further details of the multilingual aspects of this study can be
found in Lee and Barton (2011).
Code-switching practices on instant messaging (IM)

As already introduced in Chapter 4, IM is largely used as a text-based
communication tool. Such everyday use and exchange of text messages foster
the development of IM as a social practice associated with sets of values that
influence people to use texts in specific ways. In a study of the text-making

practices of MSN Messenger (or what is now called Windows Live
Messenger) in Hong Kong, one of the authors, Carmen, looked at how a
group of bilingual university students deployed their range of linguistic
resources available to them. IM was reported to be the most popular online
activity in Hong Kong (comScore 2009). The multilingual background of
Hong Kong people opens up an interesting area of research, particularly in
terms of people’s choices of language and use of writing systems online.
Cantonese is the main spoken language in Hong Kong and people are
brought up learning to read and write Mandarin Chinese. Most educated
people such as the participants in the study can also read, speak, and write
English.
The participants in the study used IM almost every day, mostly at home,
after school. Their chat partners were mainly friends or other people with
whom they often interacted in face-to-face contexts such as family and
relatives. Within such a social practice, in which texts play a central role,
these chat participants gradually developed specific ways of using texts
within IM. First, the participants drew upon a number of linguistic resources
in their IM chat. Five categories of linguistic resources available to Hong
Kong IM users can be identified:
(i) standard English;

(ii) standard written Chinese;
(iii) Cantonese in characters;
(iv) Romanized Cantonese; and
(v) morpheme-by-morpheme literal translation.
The first two types, standard English and Chinese, are the standard
written varieties that are commonly used in offline contexts and are the
written varieties taught in school. Cantonese, which is the students’ primary
spoken language, has never been standardized as a written language. The
study found that these IM users have created interesting and innovative ways
of representing Cantonese in their IM chat, including borrowing characters
from standard written Chinese, spelling out Cantonese words as Romanized
words, or even using English transliteration (types iii to v above).
An interesting example of transliteration is the phrase ‘sky and land
lessons’, which was used in the IM data. It is a common phrase among
university students to mean a long period of spare time between a lecture in
the morning and another one in late afternoon. It is a literal translation of the
Cantonese expression . What is particularly intriguing in this data is not
just the wide ranging and creative forms of linguistic resources, but how and
why these codes are deployed differently for different purposes by different
IM users. The study noted that not all of these forms of language were drawn
upon in any given chat session. Sometimes the participants would use one
code only while at other times they would mix linguistic codes. And there
seems to be no fixed pattern in using or choosing such codes.
The following example chat log (Extract 4.1), provided by one of the
student participants, Snow, illustrates how these language resources are
carefully and strategically deployed in IM. At the time of the research, Snow
was a postgraduate student in linguistics. Like most people in Hong Kong,
Cantonese is her first language. Being educated in English too, Snow can
read and write in both standard written Chinese and English. The extract is
taken from one of her chat sessions with her friend Shu, a Hong Konger who
was also educated in English and at the time was studying in Germany. Here
they are talking about the different McDonalds they have been in around the
world. Their primary language in the chat session is written Cantonese, but
note their insertion of English words from time to time:
Extract 4.1: An IM chat session between Snow and Shu
1. Shu: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Yeah, I haven’t been there [McDonald’s] for a while.)
2. Snow: o freiburg m ..........

(Hey I don’t remember seeing a McDonald’s in Freiburg when I was there.)
3. Snow: london d ..........

(I also remember there were many kinds of salad in the McDonald’s in London
. . .)
4. Shu: ~
(Yeah, but they don’t do set meals.)
5. Snow: only muffin .......... 1 euro, ..........

(Oh yeah, and once I ordered a muffin [in Freiburg], and it was 1 euro, seems
quite reasonable really.)
In addition to Cantonese written in characters, Snow draws upon other

linguistic codes in this extract. Several words that have Chinese equivalents
are written as English words (‘freiberg’, ‘london’, and ‘only’, ‘muffin’, and
‘euro’). Another use of different codes is in turn 2, where the letter o is
combined with to form o which means the locative preposition at. Turn
3 exhibits the use of Romanized Cantonese: The letter d is used to represent
the Cantonese classifier (similar to the meaning of ‘some’ in English),
which is an exact homophone of the letter d. In turn 2, ‘m ’ refers to
McDonalds, which is composed of the initial letter of McDonalds, followed
by the Chinese suffix which generally means a shop. These instances of
code-switching may be completely incomprehensible to non-IM users or to
those who are not used to the practice of code-switching. Nonetheless, it is
exactly such complex deployment of linguistic resources that characterizes
linguistic practices in IM among multilingual users.
Using spoken Cantonese-English code-switching has long been a common

linguistic practice among educated Hong Kong people. Throughout history,
Cantonese-English code-switching has been confined to spoken contexts.
However, mixed language writing is not encouraged in school or other
official situations. The strong presence of mixed language writing in the
above extract shows that IM has provided a conversation-like platform, a
specific kind of writing space, for students to freely express themselves in any
linguistic form of their own choice. However, in the above excerpt, Snow
does not automatically transfer her code-switching practice in speech to her
IM writing. The way Snow writes in this excerpt seems to suggest a rather
different case of code-switching compared with switching in everyday talk.
For example, the research noted that the insertion of ‘only’ in turn 5 was
rather unusual because adverbs are rarely said in English in a Cantonese-
English mixed language utterance. This was taken up in a face-to-face
interview, where Snow explained specifically her code-switching practice in
turn 5:
Interviewer: Here [referring to turn 5], you write “ only muffin”

Would you talk like that?
Snow: Oh no, never! That sounds awful. How can I say that [in speech]?
Interviewer: Why not?
Snow: Ok, I would say ‘muffin’ in English. But I wouldn’t say ‘only’ when I
talk [in mixed code]. I wrote ‘only’ [in the message] because it was
difficult to type ‘ ’ [Chinese equivalent for ‘only’] but ‘only’ was
easy to type.
Apart from the fact that Snow considers some code-switching practices
unacceptable in an offline context, as in ‘That sounds awful’, her case
demonstrates clearly that code-switching is indeed a situated practice.
Inputting Chinese characters involves rather complicated decoding processes
and requires extra effort to learn and type. Indeed a number of other
participants expressed similar concerns, thus preventing them from chatting
in Chinese. Because of certain technical constraints imposed by Chinese
inputting methods, in this particular chat session, Snow deliberately replaces
‘ ’ (the Cantonese expression for only) with its English equivalent ‘only’,
even though she usually expresses this word in Cantonese in other contexts
of communication. These creative linguistic practices are not commonly
found in people’s offline speech or writing. Snow’s case certainly illustrates
multilingual online users’ abilities to reappropriate their linguistic resources
and practices for different situations of use. Further details of this study can
be found in Lee (2007a).
Language choice in micro-blogging

Posting short messages on a regular basis, or micro-blogging, on social
network sites has gradually become a key social practice. As of April 2010,
over 100 million user accounts had been created on Twitter (The Economic
Times 2010), attracting people from all over the world, including many parts
of Asia and Europe (Semiocast 2010). Like other global websites, in addition
to English, many languages are found on Twitter. However, at the time of
Honeycutt and Herring’s (2009) study Twitter was still a largely English-
based platform. Part of their study collected samples of tweets posted at four
time periods of a day, covering major time zones. Although over 13 lan-
guages (including Japanese and Spanish) were recorded over these four
periods, English was still the dominant language in all these four periods
(ranging from over 35 per cent to as high as 68 per cent). However, what is
not included in Honeycutt and Herring’s study is who posted these tweets.
As we will demonstrate in the next chapter, who the poster is shapes
practices in significant ways.
Micro-blogging on Facebook seems to provide a different picture of
multilingual practices. The status updates feature on Facebook is similar to
that of Twitter in that it works mainly with a prompt (What’s on your mind?)
and a text box (Publisher box) that appear at the top of a user’s homepage
and personal profile (wall). Status updates have also become a major writing
space on Facebook. Another study collected two sets of status updates from
a group of Hong Kong Facebook users before and after Facebook changed
the prompt and compared their communicative functions and languages
used. This study found that language choice in Facebook status updates was
very much influenced by the question in the status prompt, which Facebook
changed several times. In late 2007, the prompt was ‘What are you doing
right now?’, and users had to begin the post with their first name and then
the verb is appeared automatically (e.g., ‘Carmen is writing’). Later, however,
Facebook removed the ‘is’ to offer greater flexibility; in March 2009, the
prompt was also changed to ‘What’s on your mind?’, which seems to have
led to some changing practices in language choice. Comparing the two
samples of status updates, it was found that the use of Chinese increased
significantly from 34 per cent to about 58 per cent, while English posts
dropped from about 60 per cent to just under 40 per cent. More mixed code
messages were also identified in the more recent corpus, such as:
Peggy: status msg ? (‘Why has my status message

disappeared?’).
Kate: Congratulations, my dear fd~
(Tai Po Waterfront Park is so beautiful ~~~ Congratulations, my dear
friend~)
The status update authors were interviewed regarding their linguistic

practices on Facebook. Among Chinese, English, and mixed code, it was
almost impossible for the participants to single out any of these resources in
their linguistic repertoire when writing their status messages. A number of
participants referred to the expressiveness of their language resources, sug-
gesting that Chinese allows them to freely express themselves on Facebook.
The changing design of the status update’s function, the availability of

Facebook in various languages, as well as the easier processing of and access
to non-roman writing systems on the web are all important factors that
contribute to the increasing use of languages other than English on Facebook.
All this echoes findings about the reduced use of English on Twitter
(Semiocast 2010). Similar to language choice on other platforms, the language
used to write status updates on Facebook is also very much embedded in the
immediate context of communication as well as in people’s lives. Ariel, for
example, is one of the few bilingual Hong Kong participants who writes
almost all of her posts in English only. Ariel’s tendency of writing in English
on Facebook has to be explained in conjunction to her lived experience. Ever
since she graduated from university in Hong Kong, Ariel has been away from
her hometown intermittently to further her studies in different countries
including Australia, France, and Belgium. Many of her contacts on Facebook
are friends she has met from different parts of the world, with whom Ariel
communicates in English only. Factors such as expressiveness of language and
target audience will be discussed in the next chapter.
One might also expect that the dominant practice of Cantonese-English
code-switching on IM would be carried over to Facebook. However,
contrary to what was found on IM, the proportion of mixed code status
updates is extremely small in the data in the Facebook study (less than 10
per cent in either corpus). This may be explained by the synchronicity of
different forms of CMC. Status updating, unlike IM, is essentially an
asynchronous, i.e. delayed mode of communication, like email and online
forums. Since instant replies are not expected, bilingual users do not feel the
need to speed up their interaction by mixing languages as strongly as they
do in face-to-face talk or online chatting. Although we have already pointed
out that linguistic practices online are not technologically determined, the
changing multilingual practices on Facebook seem to suggest that language
use online is still more or less shaped by the changing design of the platforms.
Further details of this study can be found in Lee (2011).
Languages on YouTube
Over the years, many YouTube users have perceived the affordances of
commenting as a platform for critical debates and discussions, not only on
the video per se, but on other topics arising from the original discussion.
YouTube, being a major Web 2.0 site, attracts users from all over the world,
who also bring with them their own linguistic practices and repertoires in
their videos and written comments. As of July 2011, the YouTube interface
is available in 34 languages, suggesting its global reach. Many YouTubers
also make use of the video sharing possibility on YouTube to ‘teach the
world’ languages that they speak. One Canadian YouTuber carlosdouh
became a celebrity after he posted his first video in his Learning Cantonese
with Carlosdouh series, in each of which he introduces a new Cantonese
expression using both English and Cantonese. Researchers have started to
pay attention to the presence of non-English languages on YouTube, despite

the limited published scholarly work on the subject.
This global video sharing site also offers potentials for second language
education (see Chapter 11). Phil Benson (2010), for example, carried out an
interesting case study of one YouTube video in which a secondary schoolgirl
from Hong Kong called Ruby criticized the spoken English of an invigilator
in a public examination. Benson’s data included video responses (mostly
remixes and parodies) to Ruby’s original post as well as a corpus of com-
ments. He noted a range of translingual practices, including Cantonese-
English code switching, especially when other YouTubers discuss the English
used in Ruby’s video. (We return to this video in Chapter 8.) In another study
of informal language learning on YouTube, Benson and Chan (2011)
analysed a corpus of comments made on three English-subtitled versions (or
fan-subbing) of the Beijing Olympics theme song. These comments, in
addition to the presence of multiple languages, exhibit significant evidence
of language teaching and learning discourses among the commenters. This
body of research usefully points out how social media can serve as important
platforms for critical discussions, language learning, and cultural exchanges
across borders.
This chapter started with the traditional debate of whether the global
internet reinforces the global status of English or gives rise to linguistic
pluralism. Although both seem to be happening at the same time, there is
evidence that the web and its users are increasingly multilingual. With exam-
ples from four online platforms, this chapter demonstrates ways in which
new media provide important writing spaces for web users to creatively
deploy their multilingual resources for different purposes. This is a result of
taking up not only the affordances of the sites, but also the affordances of
languages, which is the theme of the next chapter.
5
TA K I N G U P T H E A F F O R D A N C E S
O F M U LT I P L E L A N G U A G E S
• Taking up affordances of multiple languages

• New multilingual encounters and translingual practices online
– Translating content online
– Using language in a mobile world
– Maintaining minority languages online
TAKING UP AFFORDANCES OF MULTIPLE LANGUAGES

Throughout the book, we take a situated approach in understanding lan-
guage online. The argument in the previous chapter thus also goes beyond
the debate over whether the internet leads to linguistic imperialism or
pluralism; in fact, the evidence from our research shows both are happening,
but for different reasons. A more revealing approach is to observe people’s
actual practices and how they perceive and take up affordances of what is
made available to them in different episodes of technology use, and this is
what we pursue in this chapter. Towards the end of the chapter, we outline
a number of new multilingual encounters and translingual practices that
have become salient in the global online world.
The case studies and examples discussed in Chapter 4 demonstrate that
online users know very well how to deploy their linguistic resources in
56 TAKING UP THE AFFORDANCES OF MULTIPLE LANGUAGES
different contexts for different purposes and to different people. This is a

result of taking up and acting upon the affordances of different languages.
And in working out what different languages can or cannot do, online
participants take into consideration a number of ecological factors. These
are primarily: who the user is, who the intended viewer is, what is posted,
and how the medium is used. These then effectively become four aspects of
language and literacy practices to focus on when studying not just multi-
lingual practices, but the important factors that shape all sorts of linguistic
practices in online spaces and how changes in practices regularly take place.
Who the user is

The immediate factor that shapes language choice online is who the user is
or what we call the situated language ecology of individual users. This
ecology includes the individual’s geographical, educational, linguistic, social,
and cultural backgrounds. For example, our Chinese participants for the
Flickr project come from a range of Chinese-speaking regions including
Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, where they speak different
varieties of Chinese but may share similar writing systems. Our Spanish
informants live in different parts of Spain, in Argentina, and in Mexico and
may have different levels of access to the internet. People in these different
communities may have different levels of exposure to English, thus having
different attitudes towards their linguistic resources. In the interviews, these
bilingual Flickr users agreed that English is the ‘universal’ language, which
they would use to communicate with people who do not speak their local
languages. There are many instances where people also consider the expres-
siveness of a certain language. For example, one of our Spanish participants,
Saski, has used the English word ‘breathe’ because he found the word more
‘evocative than the Spanish term “respirar”’. In this case, English is preferred
as it is shorter and more phonetically appealing than the Spanish equivalent.
There are parallel examples where people prefer a Spanish or Chinese term
rather than an English one. Likewise, on IM, the bilingual Hong Kong
participants would prefer to code-switch as that is how they speak with their
friends in their offline lives.
Who the intended viewer is

As with any writing activity, web users often consider who is going to view
the written content they create. There are three main groups of intended
audience or viewers in online spaces: the general ‘unknown’ audience on the
web (especially on Flickr and YouTube ); ‘friends’ who are listed as contacts
(especially on Flickr and Facebook), and friends in ‘real’ life (especially on
instant messaging). The Flickr participants usually select their language
according to what language the primary target audience speaks. Our general
observation of the various sites reveal that, even though language choice
varies in different instances, there is a tendency that people would write in
TAKING UP THE AFFORDANCES OF MULTIPLE LANGUAGES 57
their shared language if they know each other in real life; English, not
surprisingly, is often used to an unknown audience, or to someone who only
speaks English. Bilingual writing may appear in either of the two main
forms, as described by Sebba (2012): it can be a literal translation from one
language to another, that is ‘parallel’ bilingual texts targeting monolingual
audiences; or it can be as ‘complementary’ bilingual texts containing dif-
ferent information, which only bilingual people can fully understand. An
example of complementary bilingual texts is when Flickr users write a photo
title in one language, and the photo description in another. Elsewhere, we
have noted examples where people provide partial translation of what they
have said in their profiles.
On IM and Facebook, it is relatively easy to accommodate to the ‘reader’,
that is, to use a language that the target reader understands, as most contacts
are known to the writer. But in more public networks such as Flickr and
YouTube, how do web users find out what language another user speaks if
they have never met in the offline world? One Hong Kong Flickr user,
contradiction, told us that looking at the language they use in captions, titles,
and comments can provide some clues of the linguistic backgrounds of
other Flickr members. As they get to know what language their intended
audience speaks, users switch between languages accordingly. For example,
Loolooimage received an English comment from dans. Later on, from
dans’ photo site, Loolooimage found out that dans came from Taiwan.
Loolooimage then wrote back in Chinese which began like this ‘dans, I know
you are from Taiwan, so let me respond in Chinese.’ dans then also wrote
back in Chinese in their subsequent exchanges. Some of the Spanish
speakers, such as Madelena Pestana, checked people’s profile to work out
what was ‘the author’s mother tongue’. This is in many ways a new form of
multilingual practice that some people had never encountered in the pre-
internet era. What is happening in this example is how people frequently
engage in some practices of linguistic negotiation in the form of publicly
available conversations (e.g. commenting on Flickr or YouTube). At other
times, people may want their comments to reach a wider audience in addi-
tion to the specific commenter and so they would write in English instead of
the local language that they share with their commenters. These examples
also suggest that the practice of code choice keeps changing as people’s
relationships with their intended audience change. These multilingual
practices are markers of identity as well. Multilingual Flickr participants
choose their language not only according to who they are, but who they
want to be to others. (See Chapter 6 for more on identity performance
online.) This factor of considering intended audience often co-occurs with
the previous factor, as they both constitute the meaning of identities in online
spaces, i.e. who you are and who you are to others.
What is posted
The subject matter of what is posted also shapes language choice online. On
IM, the Hong Kong chat participants would prefer to write in Cantonese or
code-switch when chatting about in-depth and complex topics that can only
be vividly expressed through their most familiar language. On Flickr, we
notice that photos that denote a particular culture tend to be described bilin-
gually and tend to trigger multilingual comments. Bilingual Flickr participants
are willing to switch to English if the photos are of general interest such as
music and other popular global cultures. However, when it comes to photos
that express local cultures or refer to the photo posters’ families, they would
use languages that are closely associated with those local cultures. Saski said:
When I post thinking about someone, a close friend or a known follower, I tend to
post in Spanish. . .. If I tag in Spanish, it has to be for a local (or personal, e.g.
‘torollo’) non-translatable term.
However, there are instances where the local culture in an image is

annotated in great detail in English. For example, zfz0123^_^ displays an
image of the Chinese character ‘ ’, which means ‘good fortune’. It is also a
common Chinese new year greeting. Underneath the image, she provides a
detailed explanation for people who do not read Chinese as follows:
Nowaday, “ ” in chinese means “fortunate”. . . but when you come to visit a

traditional chinese family in the spring festival, you will notice that this “ ” is
written in another style which has a big difference with the one we use everyday. so
do you know why chinese write “ ” in this way? what’s it mean?
(zfz0123^_^)
zfz0123^_^ told us that is ‘a character with rich culture’, so she would

like the photo to reach as many people as possible. With such a mixture of
intended audiences, the best way to reach them is to provide descriptions in
both Chinese and English. With the English description, she would be able
to introduce this word to the rest of the world who may not understand
Chinese language and culture. She added:
I tried my best to share all these information i found with all my flickr friends who
might have interests in that. However, of course, only the friends who know both
language will enjoy the most.
(zfz0123^_^)
Another example of multilingual practices is where SMeaLLum from

Argentina has provided the words of a tango in Spanish under a picture. He
has also included a note in English linking to his personal English translation
and to another link explaining that the song is written in Lunfardo, a non-
standard Spanish dialect used in Argentinian tangos.
How the medium is used

Language choice is tied in closely with the perceived affordances and action
possibilities of the medium. How a site is used is not predetermined but is
based on different purposes for different communicative situations. For the
IM participants, the site is primarily used as an informal and social com-
munication technology. Such an informal, personal, and sometimes private
environment allows users to decide what languages to use and how they use
them. This can be illustrated through a range of non-standard and creative
varieties of language, including both spoken and written forms. An example
in point is the use of mixed language, as shown in the previous chapter. At
other times, student IM users may stretch the affordances of IM and use IM
as a learning tool. One informant told us that she once chatted with her
classmate entirely in English in order to practise English writing for her
A-level examinations. And a few other participants also shared similar
experiences of practising English writing on IM with their peers. These
different ways of seeing the functions of the same medium are important in
deciding what linguistic resources to draw on in online writing.
To our Flickr participants, Flickr is not just an online photo album. As
Flickr gets used more, many new purposes and functions emerge. Some
Flickr participants aim to have their photos viewed by as many people as
possible. To achieve this, it is important to deploy their languages strategi-
cally to maximize the accessibility of their photo sites. This is why English,
the perceived global language, still plays such an important role here. But
apart from increasing their popularity among the global Flickr world, these
multilingual users also want to attract their fellow Chinese or Spanish
speakers to view their sites. There has been a growth in the number of
localized Flickr groups such as the Heart of Taiwan group, which is
primarily a Chinese language group. Similarly there are some Spanish sites
that are Spanish only; these link up Spanish speakers in Spain, in Latin
America and those living throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This also
shows how people who come from the same background but do not live in
the same country can now use Flickr as a diasporic forum to interact with
one another. However, for some Flickr users, their activities are not primarily
around language, but they prioritize their photographs. Our Hong Kong
informant tiong ( ) decided not to choose any particular language for
Flickr and humorously made an explicit bilingual statement about this in his
profile:
my english is so . . .. . . poor !
so, i take photos. . .
........ (‘sigh. . .my Chinese isn’t good either!’)
(‘so I should better take photos’)
Although claiming that he has not mastered Chinese or English, the fact
that the English text is placed above the Chinese writing indexes his code
preference, that language serves the function of marking his identities.

English seems to be the language that tiong ( ) prefers to display on his
profile page and the language that he expects the world to see first on his
Flickr site. This humorous comment, which can only be fully understood by
people who are bilingual in Chinese and English, shows that the use of the
two languages is not necessarily to translate from one language to the other.
The above factors show that language choice online is not primarily
related to the user’s familiarity with their linguistic resources or their every-
day exposure to a particular language. Someone who is fluent or educated
in English may not necessarily use more English than someone who only
knows a few English words; likewise, someone who knows little English can
participate actively. For example, cjPanda from mainland China told us that
she did not have to use English in her out-of-school life, but she was willing
to describe her Flickr photos in simple English, which she described as ‘very
ABC’ and ‘no longer than 8 letters’. When it comes to describing photos that
convey complex ideas, she would switch back to Chinese. In contrast,
HKmPUA, who is an English-educated Hong Konger, often includes Chinese
tags for his photos alongside the English ones. All these, together with the
examples discussed before, show the ways in which new digital media have
provided a new platform for new multilingual encounters to take place.
People who may or may not be multilinguals in their offline lives have
become used to working across different languages in order to participate as
global members of the web.
NEW MULTILINGUAL ENCOUNTERS AND TRANSLINGUAL

PRACTICES ONLINE
The central idea of this chapter is that new media offer new possibilities for
multilingual interaction. On the web, anyone (including people who see
themselves as monolinguals) can experience or do things with different
languages. The multilingual internet has gone beyond the question of which
language dominates the internet or how users code-switch. It is now a
question of how people act differently as they take up new possibilities
offered by the different languages on the web. To cite a few examples of
changing multilingual practices: Many people have developed a habit of
using online translators to maximize their access to online information, or
even have a view about how reliable or terrible online translators are; people
teach and learn languages on YouTube and engage in discussions about
languages by leaving written comments online; in a Flickr or YouTube
comment chain, it is not uncommon to find people participating in multiple
conversation topics written in different dialects and languages. These new
multilingual encounters online are part of people’s translingual practices
(Pennycook 2008; Blackledge and Creese 2009).
This idea of translingual practices focuses more on communicative prac-
tices across different groups and communities of people rather than within
a specific speech community defined primarily by the geographical locations
of speakers. It is also concerned with the process of working with different

languages rather than the product of it. In some cases, translingual inter-
action does not necessarily involve more than one language. A relevant
example is cited in Davies (2007) – on a Flickr photo page, a photo shows
an American user, Saffron, wearing a ‘throw’ (as written in the photo
description) given to her by her grandmother. A Norwegian Flickr user,
Astrid, comes across this photo page and asks Saffron what the word ‘throw’
means in her photo description. Saffron then explains:
Hi astrid, yep like a small blanket i guess . . . a pashmina is also used as a wrap and
a chunky scarf. this is about a metre and a half long knitted wrap. i guess my
grandmother would call this a shawl. I would think a poncho refers to material with
a hole in the centre so you slide it on rather than wrap it. aaah such confusion.
The whole communication is delivered in English only. From the view of

learning, this translingual interaction is packed with discourses of language
learning and can be seen as a ‘mini-English lesson’ (Benson and Chik 2010:
68). In other words, translingual practices can be understood as the ways in
which groups and communities of people experience and do things that
involve more than one language. Web users with different linguistic and
cultural backgrounds discussing languages online has become an increas-
ingly common practice, especially on sites that facilitate public commenting
such as Flickr and YouTube. These are just some of the new practices that
we never found ourselves doing before the age of digital media. In the follow-
ing subsections, we present some key issues related to new multilingual and
translingual experiences online that require more extensive research.
Translating content online

Administrators and developers of many new sites have become aware of
their global market, and have translated their site interfaces into multiple
languages. Flickr, for example, is available in 10 languages to date. This may
partly be a result of constant negotiation between the web users and the web
developers. Flickr was available in English only when it first launched, which
generated a great deal of debate regarding how this would hinder partici-
pation and accessibility of the site; many members thus requested that the
site should have been available in more languages. Flickr developers seemed
to have responded to these views by translating the site interface into
several other languages, including Chinese, Korean, Italian and a number of
European languages. We also come across translation-related groups on
Flickr. There is a group called ‘Translate Me’, whose purpose is described by
the group administrator as follows:
This group is for anyone who is curious about linguistics. Have you photographed
something written in a foreingn [sic] language and wondered what it meant? Are you
bilingual or multilingual? Then this is the group for you. Lets post photos in all
alnguages [sic] and invite each other’s translations!
[. . .]
Discussions should please include talk of ambiguities and friendly critiques of

existing translations.
Apparently, web users are given increasing amount of power to take

charge of their language choice, with the dominance of self-generated
content. This, however, does not mean that all languages are welcome.
Wikipedia is one example providing evidence that Web 2.0 sites are still
relatively controlled by web administrators who still favour well-known
languages. If we want to propose a new language for Wikipedia, we have to
ensure that the language proposed:
has a sufficient number of living native speakers to form a viable community and
audience. (Wikisource wikis are allowed in languages with no native speakers,
although these should be on a wiki for the modern form of the language if possible.)
[. . .]
If the proposal is for an artificial language such as Esperanto, it must have a

reasonable degree of recognition as determined by discussion (this requirement is
being discussed by the language subcommittee).
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy)
The above information is an extract of the ‘Language proposal policy’ on

Meta-Wiki, a sub-part of Wikipedia that discusses anything related to the
development of Wikipedia. This policy is drafted by Wikipedia’s Language
Committee who are in charge of language issues of the site. The fact that this
proposal seems to ignore smaller languages has generated some debate on
the ‘Discuss’ page. Many commenters draw upon their own understanding
of ‘big’ and ‘small’ languages when discussing this seemingly ‘unfair’ policy.
For example, one user Rickyrab points out: ‘Why is English given special
treatment with a “simple” wiki? Why not allow “simple” language wikis in
languages other than English?’. Another user ( ) is also
sceptical of the policy by using his knowledge of the relationship between
standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. He commented: ‘any Arab can
understand the Egyptian dialet [sic] and any Egyptian can understand the
standard arabic. the standard arabic wikipedia is a general wiki for all of
Arabs, and there is no need for other wikipedias.’
Advances in free online translators have also presented new translingual
practices and change the way people engage in translation activities in
society. As a result of media convergence, online translators can be incor-
porated into social network sites. For example, Facebook now allows users
to view foreign language posts in their native language. Facebook has added
the link ‘See Translation’ underneath a post that is not written in the user’s
native language so that the user can click through to see a translation powered
by Microsoft Bing. But the best-known online translator to date is possibly
Google Translate. According to its original creator Franz Josef Och (2005),
Google Translate does not adopt a grammar rule analysis in their translation
method, but a statistical machine translation method. This means that
instead of teaching the machine some basic grammatical rules such as word
order of the target language, the translation results are based on analysing
bilingual text corpora (e.g. frequency of certain strings of words that appear
together in a sentence). This also means that the programme only gives the
translation that is more frequently occurring in the corpora, which is
believed to be a more accurate and reliable method of machine translation.
Indeed, many of our Flickr participants told us that their English writing on
Flickr is a result of Google Translate. While being as reliable as it can,
statistical translation can still cause mistakes, sometimes even creating some
humorous effects. A classic example that has been widely circulated on the
web is when a Chinese sign ‘ ’ (Please wait behind the one-
meter line) is translated into ‘Please wait outside rice-flour noodle’. This is
because without the pre-modifier (one) in Chinese is more commonly
known to mean ‘rice noodle’. The result is believed to be generated by either
Google Translate or Babel Fish, another popular online translator. This
example is discussed in greater detail in Language Log, a blog maintained
by an American linguist.
While machine translation of some languages may still be far from
reliable, what is known as ‘cloud translation’ seems to be a good (and cheap)
solution to the problem. The idea of cloud translation is to involve ordinary
web users in the translation of web content, thus gradually teaching the
web their native language. The ‘translations’ application on Facebook is
an example of collaborative translation on the web. It is an application
that users can add to their Facebook profile page. Once the ‘translations’
application is added to a profile, the user can then join the ‘community of
translators’ and become a translator of any language of their own choice.
Translations of any content on Facebook can be submitted to the community
of translators, who will then review and approve of the translations through
a voting system. The original aim of the application is to make Facebook
available to everyone regardless of language and ethnicity. All these raise
interesting questions as to whether users really benefit from such forms of
multilingual affordance. Lenihan (2011) argues that the Facebook transla-
tions application is perhaps just one of their marketing strategies, for a
number of reasons. First, its translation page interface is available in English
only; second, translations can only be submitted via the US English site;
third, Facebook administrators can only receive and answer feedback/
questions in English. This reminds us of the way Flickr greets us in a new
language every time we log on, from English, Chinese, to smaller languages
such as Mäori, an indigenous language in New Zealand spoken by just a few
thousand people. Certainly, how social network sites discursively construct
their global image through multilingual translations, whether artificial or
natural, would be one of the key future research directions in understanding

web-based linguistic practices.
Maintaining minority languages online

While concerns are expressed over the possible decline or death of minority
languages due to the dominance of English, globalization may in fact help
minority languages to regain their status. Although larger languages, especi-
ally English, still enjoy higher status than smaller languages on the web, a
great deal of research has provided evidence that the web also provides a
space to maintain minority languages in the form of writing (Paolillo 2007).
A successful case is the presence of Assyrian in English-based CMC, reported
in McClure (2001). Assyrian is spoken by a small minority group in the
Middle East. When participating in English-based chat rooms and news-
groups, McClure found that Assyrian participants would write their greet-
ings and closings in Assyrian. Code-switching to Assyrian is also noted when
the participants discuss issues related to their ethnicity. This not only helps
maintain the language, but writing in a local language online is also clearly
an act of self-positioning so as to strengthen their Assyrian identity.
Written languages that are no longer used in offline lives have become
more visible in online platforms. For example, in their study of language
choice online in Egypt, Warschauer et al. (2007) discovered a new written
form of romanized colloquial Egyptian Arabic. In Egypt, classical Arabic is
the language having high prestige and is widely used in books, newspapers,
speeches and other formal contexts. Colloquial Arabic, by contrast, is used
in informal spoken situations only, and it rarely exists in writing. Warschauer
et al. (2007) surveyed and interviewed a group of young professionals in
Cairo regarding their language choice in formal and informal online
contexts. Their findings suggest that colloquial Arabic, which used to have
very limited use in offline contexts, is used extensively online, alongside
English.
An emerging direction for future research is how small languages are also
represented discursively, metalinguistically, and ideologically in new social
media such as YouTube and Facebook. Horner and Krummes (2011) present
a case study of the representations of Luxembourgish on YouTube. The status
of Luxembourgish is similar to that of colloquial Egyptian Arabic in that
Luxembourgish is mostly used for spoken communication in Luxembourg.
However, with the rise of the internet, written Luxembourgish is gradually
gaining importance, at least in online contexts. Horner and Krummes have
looked into the written comments made on some Luxembourgish language
lessons on YouTube. A major topic that commenters often discuss is the status
and categorization of Luxembourgish as a language. In doing so, the com-
menters also employ a number of strategies including code-switching and
articulating their historically rooted linguistic ideologies. These ideologies are
sometimes conflicted, due to the geographically and perhaps culturally diverse
background of the commenters. It is worth noting that in the study of Flickr
that within the relatively small number of people studied, there were spontane-
ous references to, and examples of, Catalan and Basque, as well as Asturian,
a minority language of northern Spain, and Lunfardo, a non-standard South
American Spanish dialect used for the lyrics of tangos.
Using language in a mobile world

We are living in an increasingly mobile world, both physically and virtually.
Flows of people, knowledge, ideas and objects are all speeding up, leading
to new interactions between people and new forms of learning online and
offline. Language becomes an important vehicle that can support, direct,
impede and channel these flows. One major linguistic phenomenon
mobilities have introduced is the increasing use of local languages among
diasporic community in web-based communication, leading to a truly
multilingual internet. The Assyrian study by McClure mentioned above is a
good example of this. Assyrian speakers spread around the world as they do
not have their own nation state. In the US, many Assyrians have their
families in Iraq, Australia, Canada, and other countries. However, with
internet forums and newsgroups, Assyrian communities around the world
are able to assert their ethnic identity through written Assyrian, thus allow-
ing them to form a global community regardless of geographical locations.
We have also seen how Flickr as a globalized network now serves as a
platform for diasporic communities. On Flickr, there are photo ‘groups’
devoted to a particular culture, country, or language. People from around
the world sharing the same background would create specific groups that
belong to their own local language or culture, and interact on these sites
using their home language. For example, the group * Flickr en Español is a
group with descriptions and discussion topics written in Spanish only.
This helps unite Spanish speakers who live in different countries, from Spain
to Argentina. A similar story is found in Androutsopoulos (2013) on
German dialects on YouTube. Although YouTube is commonly viewed as a
global platform, it also gives rise to local activities, such as discussing local
dialects among German speakers. As an initial observation of the situation,
Androutsopoulos notes that a great deal of videos on YouTube are tagged
with German dialect-related key words such as Bairisch (‘Bavarian’),
Alemannisch (‘Alemannic’), or Berlinerisch (‘Berlin city dialect’). These
dialects are not only present in these videos but also become the theme of
these videos and viewers’ comments on them. This study will be further
discussed in terms of metalanguage in Chapter 8.
Apart from interacting through global websites like Flickr and YouTube,
there exist a large number of more localized diasporic websites, ‘websites
that are produced and consumed by members of diasporic communities’
(Androutsopoulos 2007: 341). Androutsopoulos (2007) examines the extent
to which German-based Greek and Persian migrants preserve their home
languages or switch to German when participating in two German-based
diasporic web forums. For example, extensive use of Persian is found in the
Persian forum, regardless of the topics of discussion. Instances of code-

switching are also present in the Greek forum. Evidence from this study has
shown that home languages have not only regained dominance on these
forums, but have also been transformed, mainly in the aspect of Romanized
writing. Similar observations of code-switching, which we will not describe
in further detail here, are found in Sebba’s (2007) research on English-
Caribbean creole in the comedian Ali G’s websites and Jaworska’s (2011)
study of German and Polish diasporic forums based in the UK. Certainly,
these are only some of the examples showing how deploying multiple lin-
guistic resources gives rise to new forms of participation on the web.
Multilingual practices online enable people to participate locally and
globally, so as to assert new kinds of identity, a topic that is further pursued
in the next chapter.
6
‘THIS IS ME’
Writing the self online
• Identity and language online

• A techno-biographic approach to language and identity
• Constructing glocal identities in public online spaces
• A textually mediated self in a changing world
IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE ONLINE

A Frenchwoman living in Paris has a photo on Flickr of herself smiling into
the camera and holding a handwritten sign saying ‘23 year’. The photo is
entitled ‘Happy birthday to me’ in English with a short description below in
French explaining that today is her 23rd birthday, ‘et voila aujourd’hui j’ai
23 ans’. A man wearing an England football t-shirt has a similar photo where
he is holding a cake with one lit candle in the middle. There are similar
photos by many other Flickr photographers from around the world. The
title, ‘Happy birthday to me’, is playing around with the first line of what is
probably the most well known everyday song in the world. What is unusual
in these examples is how these photos and descriptions draw attention to
the self and are shared with the rest of the world. This particular practice
has probably only been carried out since the affordances of shared digital
68 WRITING THE SELF ONLINE
photography have made it possible. This is what Crandall (2007) refers to

as ‘presentational’ culture, where people constantly pay attention to how to
present themselves. And such ‘self-centredness’ has been identified as a key
aspect of the online world.
New digital media offer new opportunities for people to document and
display their everyday lives in the form of writing and other modes. Aspects
of life are often shared to different kinds of audience, though not always
publicly. Often people share information online in a ‘publicly private’
manner, that is, where the identity of the content poster is revealed but the
access to the content posted is relatively controlled. Others may do the
opposite by exhibiting ‘privately public’ behaviour, posting publicly available
content without letting others know who the poster is (Lange 2007). These
disparate new practices have changed the ways people think about
themselves. Thus, identity online is not just about who we are, but also who
we want to be to others, and how others see us. Issues of identity manage-
ment are central to online research.
An important point about the notion of identity is that it is multi-faceted
and fluid. First of all, in any given context of social interaction, there may
be one or more aspects of our identity that we may or may not want to
express or reveal. Some aspects of identity are relatively static and not easy
to change, such as age, gender, and nationality; some may be defined by
social domains and relationships with others such as being a friend, a family
member, a student, or by occupations such as a doctor, a worker, etc. Other
parts of the self may be more dynamic and can change over time, such as
hobbies, interests and social networks. The plural ‘identities’ thus seems a
more appropriate term. Second, these properties of the self are not predeter-
mined and fixed categories, but are open to transformation and changes.
Such changes may be a result of different contexts of interaction, or to whom
we wish to assert our identities. Identities are thus sometimes understood as
masks that can be worn and taken off in different contexts of social
interaction (as in Goffman 1959). This chapter focuses on the relationship
between these different senses of the self and how language functions as a
crucial form of cultural capital in asserting identities.
The above conceptualization of identity provides a backdrop for under-
standing the dynamics of self-representation online. As text-based computer-
mediated interaction supports limited physical contextual cues, there is much
room for people to construct and perform different features of identities
(Turkle 1995; Baym 2010), primarily through linguistic means. A number of
previous studies already show how online participants may adopt non-
standard typographical features or a particular form of spelling to signal
themselves as part of a sub-culture, while others may switch to a language
not normally used in face-to-face communication to highlight their local
identity. All these are strategies people use online to write themselves ‘into
being’ (boyd 2007), so as to carefully manage their impression to others
whom they cannot see face-to-face. Linguistic performance of identity is
evident in all forms of CMC. For example, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was
WRITING THE SELF ONLINE 69
an early form of synchronous online chat that has been studied extensively.
When people meet for the first time on IRC, the conventional practice is to
introduce themselves by constructing a message in the format of A/S/L
(Age/Sex/Location, e.g. 18/F/UK). There is, however, no guarantee that every
participant would accurately disclose their personal particulars, especially
their real names and age. A person in IRC may be ‘18 years old one day and
60 years old the next. Even temporary gender changes are possible, enabling
one to experience being a member of the opposite sex’ (Bechar-Israeli 1995).
One salient practice in some public online spaces is giving oneself a
nickname or screen-name, which can be quite different from one’s real name
used in offline life. An obvious reason for doing so is that people do not
already know each other and there may be safety issues if authentic infor-
mation is given. Nonetheless, not displaying all aspects of their offline
identities does not necessarily mean that people want to deceive others; the
anonymous nature of text-based IRC often gives rise to creativity and play-
fulness. Playful and carefully designed nicknames (or ‘nicks’ in IRC terms)
are an important means to catch other participants’ eyes so as to initiate a
new conversation. This is because associative meaning is embedded in a nick-
name such that it often signals some sense of the self (e.g. Blondie suggesting
the user’s hair colour). While nicknames in off-screen life are often given by
others, nicknames online are invented by oneself as an ‘extension of the self’
(Bechar-Israeli 1995). The practice of not using real names is not necessarily
about creating a fake identity for the virtual world. Rather, it is a way for
people to ‘explore their potential by “trying on” different kinds of identities’
(Jones and Hafner 2012: 79). The practice of creating nicknames or screen-
names varies across online platforms and also changes over time. On Flickr,
for instance, more people are willing to give themselves screen-names that
signal all or part of their real name. As discussed earlier, some Flickr users
creatively mix languages in their screen-names to present themselves as a
more global person and to speak to a wider range of audience. Elsewhere,
for example on LinkedIn and Facebook, people are more likely to participate
as someone who is closer to their ‘offline’ self, and real names are expected.
In many existing studies of language and identity online, features of
identity are often quantified, for example, by measuring the average length
of messages, counting certain micro-linguistic and grammatical features such
as the use of personal pronouns. Gender is one well-explored area of lan-
guage and identity research within the CMC literature (such as work by
Susan Herring and colleagues). For example, it was found that in asyn-
chronous CMC such as discussion forums, male participants tend to use
more impersonal expressions (e.g. It is clear that. . .) and write longer
messages than females, who are believed to express more personal feelings
by using the first-person plural I. Of course, generalizations as such have to
be handled cautiously. While these features may provide a snapshot of how
identities are represented through the structure of a message, a more mean-
ingful study of online identity performance should take into account why
such features of language exist by observing authentic interactional contexts
as well as the message producer’s insider perspective. This is also the

approach that we would like to take in this chapter. In the context of mobile
phone texting (or SMS), Caroline Tagg (2012: 189) shows how gendered
identity in text messages is performed through playful and ‘repeated
performances of brevity, non-standardness, and a speech-like informality’.
These discourse features seem to confirm earlier findings in structural
analyses of English-based CMC such as those reported in David Crystal’s
description of ‘Netspeak’. Nonetheless, Tagg further argues that such
descriptive features need to be understood in the context of interaction,
through analysing how texters co-construct and act out their identities. In
more multicultural and diasporic settings, online participants may index
their identities through multiple language switching.
This chapter presents examples of identity performance in writing spaces
and writing activities in various online media. It looks into ways in which
identities are performed online in terms of the broader deployment of linguis-
tic resources as well as discourse styles through the lens of situated literacies.
Methodologically, a techno-biographic approach is adopted, which allows us
to draw upon new media users’ lived experience and their relationship with
technologies through their life histories.
A TECHNO-BIOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE AND

IDENTITY
People do not need to be IT professionals to master new technologies.
Nowadays, anyone can live by technologies. Within higher education,
academics spend a great deal of time on the computer. We word-process
most of our writing; our lectures and research talks are based on PowerPoint
slides and other digitized materials; email is a key channel of communication
with students and colleagues; our courses are facilitated by web-based course
tools such as Moodle and WebCT; we do much of our bibliographic search
on Google Scholar and even read e-journals and e-books more often than
printed materials. Of course, this particular book that you are reading now
would not have become possible without digital technologies – the authors
live in different parts of the world, so much of our work discussion is carried
out via email and online video conferencing. Files are shared over Dropbox;
we edit each other’s drafts using the ‘track changes’ and commenting features
on MS Word. These ways of writing, or literacy practices, constitute what
we call our technology-related life as academics. In other areas of our life,
we may be related to a different set of technologies.
People’s relationship with technologies often started with acquiring the
technical knowledge required to use the computer, such as switching on a
machine and logging on to an operating system, using a mouse, double-
clicking, opening a browser to surf the net, or even learning to send our first
email. Now, using technologies means something more than just using a set
of skills – for one thing, most technologies have been domesticated, meaning
that they are embedded in our day-to-day activities and the environments in
which technologies are used (Berker et al. 2005; Silverstone and Haddon
1996). With smart phones and other mobile devices, we are always on and
that certainly blurs the boundary between our so-called online and offline
lives, and between our public and private personae.
The situated approach to language online taken in this book involves
understanding both texts and their associated practices. It is also through
studying details of people’s everyday relationship with technology that we
have been able to closely examine the practices associated with language use
and production in online contexts. New media users take up the affordances
of the media that they engage in according to their purposes in a particular
situation of use. Every single technology user is unique. People develop their
own set of practices in response to what they think technologies can do for
them in their lives. Studies in different countries have demonstrated the
significance of focusing on how exactly technology is experienced by internet
users throughout their lives – from childhood through to adulthood. For
example, Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher (2004) studied the culture-specific
literate activities, or what they call literacies of technology, in the United
States through the literacy histories of 20 informants. These literacies are
defined as social practices embedded in people’s larger cultural ecology. And
this ecology is shaped by a number of interrelated factors that affect different
ways of using and experiencing technology. Cynthia Carter Ching and Linda
Vigdor (2005: 3) added that ‘technology experiences are . . . imbued with
meaning by the motivations, social interactions, and contexts surrounding
technology tools and practices’. A life history approach implies that technolo-
gies are not just about ‘kids’ or ‘teenagers’ as many previous studies have
focused on. After years of experience with technologies, many adults possess
their own histories of technology use, in which phases and changes are noted.
In an innovative study of the ‘digital histories’ of a group of teachers in
the UK, Lynda Graham (2008) looks into the relationship between how the
teachers first learned about technologies and the ways in which they
incorporate technologies into their teaching practices now. This body of
work has provided a solid foundation for our understanding of how lan-
guage use online relates to people’s everyday experiences with technologies.
One meaningful way of carrying out such studies is through a techno-
biographic approach. A techno-biography, in short, is a life story in relation
to technologies. The notion itself is apparently inspired by the traditional
narrative approach to interviews, where an interviewee tells a story about
certain significant events in life. Techno-biographic interviews are highly
reflexive in nature. The focus is on the participant’s encounters with tech-
nology at different times and locations throughout their life histories. In her
major work on women’s technology-related lives, Helen Kennedy (2003)
defined techno-biographies as participants’ accounts of everyday relation-
ships with technology. Ching and Vigdor’s work further refines the notion
and considers a techno-biography as participants’ encounters with tech-
nology ‘at various times and in various locations throughout their histories’
(Ching and Vigdor 2005: 4).
In a techno-biographic interview, questions for the participants may range

from their past experiences with technology, their current uses of technology,
to their anticipated future of technology use. How people feel about what
they do with technologies is also crucial in understanding possible changes
in their practices. The following is a list of the key areas and questions that
can be covered in a techno-biographic interview.
Current practices: What are the sites you use most often, and what are the ones
you have contributed to?
Participation: Have you commented on news or products? Voted on the quality
of service? Submitted a review or a wiki entry? Uploaded pictures or videos for
comment?
A day in the life: Think of yesterday, what technologies did you first deal with when
you woke up? How did it continue during the day?
Life history: When did you first use a mouse? Send a text message? Search
Wikipedia? Start using Facebook?
Transitions: Did you change your practices of keeping people’s addresses,
arranging to meet friends, using maps, etc.?
Domains of life: Are there differences in your everyday life, your student life, and
in any work life? Other domains, such as religion, sports, politics.
Cross-generational comparisons: Differences across generations, parents, grand-
parents, children; differences across cultures, friends from other countries;
gender differences, prohibitions.
We notice from the limited existing research on techno-biography that

interviews have often been seen as the only source of techno-biographic data.
Despite its methodological merits, the traditional techno-biographic approach
seems one-dimensional, often overly reliant on participants’ own recounts.
Researchers may remain rather passive and uninformed when it comes to the
participants’ situated instances of technology use. In our ongoing research on
various online platforms, we have identified other forms of techno-biography.
New social media provide ample opportunities and ways for online users to
write about themselves, thus allowing them to create and constantly update
their own auto-biographies. Such sites allow users to retell their life stories
through textual means, thus expanding the scope of techno-biographies. Here
are a few examples:
• Creating an online profile: In late 2011, Facebook launched a new

profile layout called Timeline, which has the slogan: ‘Tell your life story
with a new kind of profile’. This rightly illustrates the auto-biographical
affordances of profiles on social network sites. Many popular Web 2.0
spaces such as Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are structured as a
collection of user profiles. A profile is a sketch of the basic information
about someone. For example, on a Facebook user profile, information

can range from demographic details such as name, location, date of
birth, education to one’s personal philosophy and favourite movies. The
information uploaded immediately becomes part of Facebook’s search
database, allowing one to be searched for by friends and other acquain-
tances. These profiles are not only an entry point to social networking,
but also a key writing space to explicitly express our sense of self.
• Continuous status updating: Another popular form of expressing the self
online is writing short messages about our lives, especially feelings and
activities, in social media. Many of these short messages, such as status
updates on Facebook, are written in the form of short narratives serving
a wide range of discourse functions. (See also Lee 2011.) An interesting
example that we often find among university students’ status updates is
counting down the number of words left to be written for an essay.
• Visual representation: In addition to the written word, another impor-
tant form of linguistic representation of techno-biography is visual
images, especially photographs. On Flickr, photos can be organized into
thematic sets. The names given to these sets or albums can serve as a way
of telling others one’s life history too. Through photography, people can
express their favourites and interests, document important events, share
interesting places that they have visited and so on. Photos uploaded can
be annotated with meaningful titles and tags. On different sites, photos
may serve different purposes and express different areas of life. (See
Mendelson and Papacharissi 2011 on Facebook photo sharing among
college students.)
There are certainly many other ways through which people can share their
life stories with others online. These three areas we have listed above,
together with in-depth interviews where online participants talk about their
technology-related life, then, constitute a rich and comprehensive techno-
biography. In our work, techno-biographic interviews were accompanied by
a pre-interview survey, close observation of participants’ profiles and what
they wrote on their sites, as well as screen-recordings. This comprehensive
set of data allows us to better understand how identities are performed dif-
ferently through language in different areas of one’s technology-related life.
Focusing on language, this chapter discusses one part of a techno-biog-
raphy, techno-linguistic biography. In various areas of linguistics, including
language acquisition and sociolinguistics, language biographies, that is parti-
cipants’ own account of their life stories where language has a central role,
have been used as a method of eliciting insiders’ perspectives of how lan-
guage is acquired or used. (See, for example, Busch et al. 2006; Pavlenko
2007.) Our projects studied language online using a similar approach. The
techno-linguistic biographies were explored through the following aspects:
key phases in a technology-related life, online-offline linguistic repertoires,
home-school online experiences, roles to play in life, and people’s perceived
knowledge of languages.
These themes emerged from a broader study of Hong Kong university

students’ Web 2.0 writing activities. The project aimed to understand
participants’ new media writing practices and the possible changes in such
practices throughout their lives. While general demographic information
about the students was identified in an initial online questionnaire survey,
the core data came from detailed techno-biographic-style interviews with 20
participants. Each interview involved a screen recording session, where a
student participant was asked to go online for about half an hour with their
screen activities recorded using screen-recording software. This was followed
by a 30–50-minute interview, centred on pre-determined themes as well as
new topics that emerged as the researchers went through the screen-record-
ing with the participant. These student participants shared a similar set of
linguistic resources. That is, they speak Cantonese as their primary language
in everyday life, while having knowledge of standard written Chinese, a
standard written variety taught in school and used in institutional contexts.
Written Cantonese may also be used for informal purposes. English is used
as a second language, and mixing Chinese and English in utterances is a
prevalent linguistic practice in Hong Kong. In addition to these resources,
some participants reported to know an additional Chinese dialect or foreign
language. In the following, we briefly describe and discuss the techno-
linguistic life stories of two university students in Hong Kong.
Tony’s techno-linguistic biography
Tony was a third-year undergraduate student majoring in English Language

Education at a university in Hong Kong. In other words, he was training to be a
teacher of English for speakers of other languages. He reported to have about 10
years of computing experience and was a regular user of email, IM, Facebook,
forums, and blogs.
Tracing his life history, in the beginning, it was his elder brother who introduced
him to the internet world – playing games online with strangers from other parts
of the world. That was when he was about 9 or 10 years old. He said he was too
little to have his own computer account. So his elder brother helped him sign up
at an online game site. He recalled that all the instructions and interface of the
games that he used to play were written in English only. The language was too
complicated for him then, he said, but he could work out how the games were
played by trial and error. Still, Tony wanted to interact with overseas gamers who
he had never met. So he decided to use simple English phrases such as ‘good’ or
‘good game’ to socialize with other gamers.
Getting to his senior high school years, he started chatting with friends quite
frequently on IM (MSN Messenger). That was also the time when Tony started to
take up the social affordances of Chinese messages, as they sounded friendlier
and could more accurately represent himself. He explained:
I can think faster in Chinese so I can form a sentence easily . . . If I write in

English (online) I have to check my grammar.
When chatting in MSN, I use Chinese most of the time . . . Most of my friends
speak Cantonese . . . We know each other very well . . . Communicating in
Cantonese with them is more accurate than in English . . . I can say what I
want to say in Cantonese . . . and there are ‘fashionable’ words in Cantonese
that can’t be captured in English
Different senses of the Chinese language were mentioned in Tony’s techno-

linguistic biography. From time to time, he would visit and post in mainland
Chinese-based online discussion forums, on which most participants interacted
in Mandarin Chinese, who were not used to mixing languages in their everyday
communication as HongKongers would. However, Tony explained:
I am a Chinese too . . . Chinese is my mother tongue [. . .] When I participate

in Chinese-based forums, most people use Chinese . . . If you switch to English,
that shows you are a Hong Kong person . . . I am not saying that I am special
. . . but using English may offend the mainland Chinese forum participants.
Here, Chinese is seen as the language that ‘validates’ his Chinese identity. But at
the same time he was well aware of his Hong Kong identity too, with a rather
different historical and political background, thus a different range of linguistic
resources to draw upon. This is how Tony projects his perceived national identity
online, which is only one of the many aspects of identity that he performed online
through language choice.
Tony’s techno-linguistic life also revolved around his student identity. In the
interviews, he often referred to his major subject, and how his language choice
was affected by his identity as an English language major. Tony gave me this
anecdote that made reference to his involvement in a student society and how that
affects his attitudes towards online language choice:
I used to be the chairperson of the EngEd [English Education] society. I once

wrote a formal email to my cabinet members. One of them then wrote back
a long email in English. I was so angry. The official language of the student
society was Chinese, while English was just a supplementary language. I am
sure he knew the policy and he also knew that I understood Chinese . . . why
write back in English? I even had to look words up in a dictionary! I was
offended!
From time to time, Tony explicitly restated his preferred language online:
Although my major subject is English Language Education, my friends know

that I prefer Chinese (when communicating online).
However, it seemed that this preference for Chinese was restricted mainly to
private and interpersonal communication. Tony, as a pre-service teacher, kept in
touch with the students in his teaching practice school on Facebook. For this
particular group of audience, Tony signed up for a new Facebook account where
he calls himself ‘Teaching Tony’.
I started this teacher Facebook account towards the end of my teaching

practice. I was worried that if my students discovered my ‘real’ Facebook
account, I had to reshape my identity for them.
When asked what he meant by reshaping his identity, Tony explained:
When interacting with students online, I always use English. Otherwise, I

can’t establish my image [as an English language teacher].
Compared to his other Facebook account, Tony posted less regularly on this
teacher site. He also took on a more academic discourse style and he would only
share posts that are of interest to his students, such as a link to an online English
dictionary, posts about the progress of his teaching and grading work, etc. He
wrote almost all the posts in English, because the target readers were students
and his colleagues from the school where he did his teaching practice. He said it
would have been inappropriate to use Chinese there because as an English
teacher, he had to stick to this medium of instruction in order to encourage
students to write to him in English too.
Doing his best to maintain his image as a school teacher, Tony was very
conscious of privacy issues and his level of self-exposure on his teacher Facebook
wall. On his teacher Facebook, he tended to shift to a more formal, non-
interpersonal style of writing:
When I leave a comment on my colleague’s Facebook page, I know that some

of his students may be able to see it . . . so I pretend to sound serious and
formal . . . so that our students would think that we are talking about
something constructive . . . I take time to polish and edit [my comments]
As of early 2012, Tony has already graduated and teaches English at a local
secondary school. He is still working hard to maintain and juggle between these
different aspects of his public and private senses of self through linguistic means.
His teacher Facebook account still has fewer, but more polished English posts
addressing a group of student ‘friends’; his other account still remains an
expressive and affective site where he interacts with his ‘real’ friends in his non-
teaching life.
Yan’s Techno-linguistic Biography
Yan was a second-year History major. She was born in mainland China and moved
to Hong Kong with her parents when she was around 10. Before arriving in Hong
Kong, Yan spoke mostly Hakka, a southern Chinese dialect, at home with her
parents and school friends, though also knew Cantonese. Ever since she moved
to Hong Kong, she and her family all switched to Cantonese even at home. Yan
specifically told us how surprised she was about the ‘sudden’ switch of language
at home.
Her first memory of computer use was computer gaming around 2003. She
remembered this year vividly because it was the year when the SARS pandemic
attacked Hong Kong. Schools were suspended for months. She had to stay at
home most of the time so playing games on the computer seemed to be the best
activity to kill time. Her first real ‘online’ experience was actually a school
assignment in which she was asked to send five emails to her Chinese teacher as
a kind of self-reflection task. Since then, she started communicating with teachers
and friends regularly via email, in standard written Chinese. She used to be an
active blogger. On her blog, she wrote longer pieces of narratives, reflecting upon
life and so on. At the same time, her younger sister introduced her to the world of
IM by signing her up on ICQ, which used to be the most popular IM programme
in Hong Kong before MSN took over. IM, according to Yan, was reserved for
private and interpersonal interaction with close friends and family. On IM,
she would still insist on writing in standard Chinese, even if her chat partners
wrote in English. Now as a university student, she felt that she used IM less often
than when she was a secondary school student. Facebook has become a major
social network site on which she frequently posts her feelings and everyday
activities.
She considered Chinese, mostly standard written Chinese, mixed with
Cantonese writing, as her main written language on all these platforms. She said
this was partly due to her mainland Chinese background, but the major reason
behind her preference for Chinese was that she had very little exposure to English
ever since she started university. As her major subjects are taught in Mandarin
Chinese, she did not see the need to use English regularly. Yan also affectively
attached herself to Chinese. She insisted that on her blog, she had to write in
Standard Written Chinese. She explained:
I usually blog about in-depth feelings and I want to use a serious language
to express myself.
Despite her personal attachment to Chinese, Yan felt that she had to brush up her
English for more practical reasons. She had never had any proper English
education before she arrived in Hong Kong, where she received formal English
lessons in school. She had always felt that she was lagging behind. This had not
bothered her too much until one time she failed to answer questions at a
scholarship interview where she was required to speak English throughout. Since
then, she thought she should better equip herself. One thing that she thought
would help was to listen to English songs regularly on YouTube. Yan saw that as a
good way of exposing herself to the English language. At other times, Chinese still
remained as her primary language online. Yan’s knowledge of Hakka dialect also
gave rise to creativity in her texting activities. From time to time, she would write
and receive text messages written in Hakka with her friends back home in
mainland China. However, Hakka itself is not a written language (at least there is
no standardized written form). So Yan and her friends playfully invented a system
for Hakka by using similar sounding characters in standard Chinese. At first she
found some of those ‘stylized’ Hakka messages sent by her friends incompre-
hensible, but she gradually enjoyed the process of exchanging and decoding them.
The stories of Tony and Yan clearly demonstrate that technologies play
rather different roles in different people’s life histories. One thing that
technology users do share in common is that everyone deploys their language
resources according to the changing meanings of technologies in different
stages of their life. There are also other important factors that enable us to
characterize a techno-linguistic biography. These factors allow us to under-
stand how people’s relations with technologies change their language prac-
tices and attitudes towards language online. In the following, we describe in
detail five important themes that characterize people’s techno-linguistic
biographies: key phrases of technology use, home-school experience with
technologies, online-offline linguistic resources, extension of offline identity,
and people’s attitudes towards language online.
Key phases of technology use

In the 20 techno-linguistic biographies, the participants tended to narrate
their relationship with technologies chronologically and could identify
major turning points in their technology-related lives. These include how
they first got started, how they explored and developed their online linguistic
practices, and what technologies mean to them now.
• First encounter: The first phase of one’s techno-linguistic life is also the
first phase of one’s broader techno-biography. Our first linguistic
experiences online involve a great deal of reading and writing activities,
such as trying to understand how a software is installed by reading
instructions on the screen, sending our first email or text message, and
for some of these young participants in our projects, their first comput-
ing experience could be related to a piece of homework for a computer
class. Technology mentors, people who first introduce us to technolo-
gies, also play a crucial role in this first phase. As we have seen in the
above cases, Tony’s elder brother introduced him to the world of online
gaming, where English was the dominant language, and Yan wrote her
first email in Chinese because her Chinese language teacher told her to
do so.
• Exploration: This is the phase in life where the computer is regularly
used but not seen as essential. This is also the time when we start
learning to develop our online linguistic practices according to needs and
purposes. For the group of university students (who were born in late
80s or early 90s), this exploration phase started in primary or secondary
school years. CMC was used mostly for entertainment and interpersonal
chat with friends.
• ‘Taken-for-grantedness’ of technologies: The third main phase is con-
cerned with the participants’ current practices online and how they
imagine what the future of digital life would be like. In this phase,
technologies are perceived as indispensible and are indeed taken for
granted. These attitudes are reflected in the following comments:
I don’t know how to kill time if there’s no Facebook.

(Mick)
Telephone talks seem weird now. I text or MSN if I want to arrange to meet my
friends.
(Mark)
Without the internet, it would be hard to look up information for my assignments!

(Carrie)
Home-school experience with technologies

The second theme is the relationship between home use and school-based
use of technologies. Both Tony and Yan frequently referred to their experi-
ences at home and in school when telling their technology-related life stories.
When they first got started, their language use online was very much shaped
by what their brother/sister did at home. At the same time, homework and
school projects were often mentioned in relation to their early techno-
linguistic lives:
I wrote my first email to my Economics teacher when I was in Secondary Four. One
day I chatted with her on icq. We talked about songs. I promised her to send her some
great songs that I had heard. So I got her email address and attached a few songs in
the mail that I sent her. It was a very rough email with not much editing done in terms
of content and language because at that time I didn’t mean to share words with her
but merely songs. I enjoyed writing to her afterwards and I started bombarding her
email account with lots of informal letters. I just loved writing to her.
(Yan)
Such early home-school experiences not only introduced the participants

to technologies but also changed their attitudes towards the affordances of
such media, as well as their awareness of online genres. The new media
platforms that they often used at home for interpersonal purposes such as
IM did not always match with their technology experiences in school, which
were often assessed by teachers.
Online-offline linguistic resources

The third feature that shapes participants’ techno-linguistic biographies is the
language resources used in offline language activities. For example, we saw
that Yan’s interesting Hakka background broadens the resources she could
draw upon in mobile phone texting. It is thus useful to find out what
language(s) research participants would prefer to use in different offline
situations such as: reading a newspaper, reading a novel, writing a formal letter,
writing post-it notes, form filling, talking to family at home, etc. The aim was
to find out how the language they used in other contexts may carry over to
online ones, like whether they would read English news online, and the
language they would use to write email, blogs, text messages, Facebook status
updates, and keyword searches in Google Scholar when they look up info for
assignments. Such data offer a snapshot of the relationship between the online
and the offline language practices in the participants’ technology related lives.
Extension of offline identity

In the techno-linguistic biographies that we have studied, the student parti-
cipants often juxtaposed their language use online with the roles that they play
in different areas of life, such as a student of a certain subject area, a friend, a
family member, a speaker of a certain language, etc. Tony’s case illustrates how
he manages his student and teacher identities on his two Facebook accounts
through specific language choice. English allows Tony to assert a professional
identity and to appear as a proficient English user to his student ‘friends’.
Writing in a serious style and proofreading his English carefully in his teacher
Facebook account is how Tony performs ‘facework’ on Facebook (West and
Trester, forthcoming), a way to avoid any face-threatening act caused by
grammatical errors. In his ordinary Facebook account, by contrast, writing in
Chinese and code-switching expresses positive politeness, thus indexing
himself as a friendly classmate and a close friend. A similar story is told by
another participant, Mark. In the following excerpt, Mark explains how
English means different things in different online platforms:
I would leave Facebook comments in English because most of my Facebook friends

are also English majors like me . . . because we are used to communicating in
English. But at the same time, it is also because I am an English major that I want
to avoid using English in public forums . . . People may judge me if I make mistakes.
(Mark)
Mark’s language choice online demonstrates his ambivalent feelings

towards his identity as an English major. When among his fellow English
majors, he was happy to foreground his English major identity by main-
taining the use of English where occasional ‘errors’ are tolerated; at other
times, he would recognize his possible insufficient English knowledge, which
may not fit in well with his self-concept of an English student. Mark’s
perception about his English is also situated within the larger context of
public moral panics about university students’ ‘falling’ linguistic standards
in Hong Kong and beyond. Because of this, Mark decided to avoid using
English altogether when participating in public online forums. This is
nonetheless a good piece of evidence showing how people manage their
impression through language online.
Another aspect of identity that is often projected through language online
is people’s national identity. In the project, many participants stressed their
ethnicity or place of origin when explaining their language choice, as in
Tony’s comment here:
I am a Chinese too . . . I want to use my mother tongue.

(Tony)
Tony explicitly expresses his Chineseness when talking about his

participation in Chinese-based online forums. In Yan’s techno-biography, her
playful Hakka text messages serve to mark her unique linguistic background
as not just an average Hong Kong person, but one who also has a root in
southern China. These examples also suggest the deconstruction of the
traditional separation of online identities and offline identities. As we have
seen, identities are fluid and the so-called online world is yet another domain
where people perform their identities.
Attitudes towards language online

Finally, people’s life histories with technologies are largely shaped by their
perceptions and attitudes towards languages. Identity is also ‘the social
positioning of self and other’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 586). In the techno-
linguistic biographies that we studied, some participants reveal their linguistic
and cultural identities through aligning themselves with certain groups of
speakers. For example, when Tony talked about his participation in Chinese-
based online forums, he identified himself as a Chinese national who was
expected to write in Chinese, while being aware that he would have used
some English as a Hong Konger. Such conscious positioning and reposition-
ing are helpful in revealing the participant’s stance towards different
languages (see Chapter 7).
Another key factor shaping or causing changes in the participants’ techno-
linguistic lives is related to the user’s perceived knowledge of a certain
language. In Yan’s story above, we learned that her preference for Chinese
was due to her limited exposure to English. A similar remark was also made
by another participant, Helen:
I never write an entire blog entry in English, as my English isn’t good . . . I came
from a Chinese-medium school, you know.
(Helen)
Helen explained her choice of a certain language in terms of some kind of

self-deprecatory comments about the languages they know (‘my English
isn’t good’). Nonetheless, Helen pointed out that this was also due to her
lack of exposure to English in her secondary education. This shows how past
experience is useful in understanding people’s current practices. Such meta-
linguistic discourses are quite commonly expressed among the university
students that we studied. In fact, we have observed that these self-evaluations
of language are equally prevalent in the writing produced by users of public
online platforms such as Flickr and YouTube. Talking about knowledge of a
certain language not only helps declare one’s linguistic identity, this also
seems to have become a salient practice in many forms of online partici-
pation (see Chapter 8).
CONSTRUCTING GLOCAL IDENTITIES IN PUBLIC ONLINE SPACES

So far the discussion of identities online revolves around online interaction
at a more private level (e.g. Facebook, email, and IM among close friends).
When it comes to identity performance on public platforms such as Flickr, a
different scene is observed. The key difference lies in their different target
audience groups. On Facebook, users know and can control who reads what
on their profiles and the audience (‘friends’) is often known to the user. On
Flickr, however, audience is often ‘imagined’. Like many social network sites,
there exist ample opportunities to write about the self on Flickr – from
textual means to visual. One of the all-time most popular tags on Flickr is
indeed the first-person pronoun ‘me’. We notice that pictures tagged with
‘me’ or even ‘this is me’ are not only photos of self-portraits (which can
include a part of oneself like an eye), but they could be photos capturing
other senses of the self. We have also seen pictures of birthday cakes tagged
with ‘me’. In addition, ‘me’ sometimes serves the purpose of authenticating
the photo and asserts the authority of the photographer (i.e. this picture was
taken by me, not anyone else).
Chapters 4 and 5 have already shown how multilingual practices are
salient in public Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and YouTube. Flickr members
often negotiate their language choice by taking into account the kind of
identity they wish to project to an imagined audience. Although this language-
identity relationship may also be found in other forms of CMC such as
diasporic websites and email (Warschauer 2002; Androutsopoulos 2006), a
stronger sense of global self is frequently articulated on Flickr. Our Spanish
informant Carolink said she had never participated in a global network like
Flickr before, and yet she had gradually identified herself as a bilingual global
citizen. She said that participating in Spanish only is ‘too limited for these
Internet times. I do not leave Spanish, but I try to use English when I can.’
This aspect is underlined by the fact that several people who do not need to
use English in other areas of life are also ready to interact with other members
in English.
However, the quote from Carolink contains the other aspect of the rela-
tionship between language and globalization, where she says ‘I do not leave
Spanish’. This sense leads to heterogeneity of culture. In other words, instead
of seeing the web as a culturally and linguistically unified space, a truly
globalized community should be a dynamic and diversified one, which allows
space for different cultures and languages to develop simultaneously. People
want to be part of the global world without giving up their existing identities.
This can be seen in that both Chinese and Spanish are in themselves lingua
francas across a range of countries. Some Spanish users certainly identified
the broader Spanish-speaking world as an important audience for them.
Similarly our mainland Chinese informant, sating, associated her global Flickr
identity with Chinese rather than with English. She explained:
If Flickr is a global website, as a Chinese, why must I use English, a language that I
am not good at? Besides, most of my photos reflect the reality of China. So Chinese
has to be the most suitable tool of communication.
(sating)
sating’s view challenges the globally recognized status of English as the

lingua franca on the internet. Whichever sense of the global is taken, sating’s
self-reflection about her Chineseness and her discourse of resistance to
English reveal a strong awareness of her local identity on Flickr. Such a
marker of local identity is useful in that it can attract Chinese-speaking Flickr
users within China and beyond, and it helps promote her cultural and
linguistic backgrounds to the international Flickr community.
The tension between the local and global is also expressed by way of
bilingual screen-names. For example, Kristie ’s explanation for her
bilingual screen-name reveals a close relationship between her language
choice and her sense of local:
I want a wider group of people to know me. Not that the Chinese won’t know me if
I call myself just Kristie but if I attached a more ‘graphic’ Chinese word (that’s how
I always see the language), we can connect quicker and better. The name also says
alot about who I am in my whole darn life.
(Kristie )
This further confirms that English on Flickr does not necessarily reflect
users’ competence in the language, nor does it automatically reveal one’s
ethnicity. Language choice on Flickr, we argue, is closely related to the extent
to which participants intend to project themselves as global or local members
of Flickr.
The negotiation between global and local languages and identities on
Flickr is best understood in terms of glocalization. Participating as a glocal
person is an important way for multilingual Flickr members to maximize the

accessibility of their sites, as where they explain their local culture to the
world. Writing multilingually is utilized as one of the essential literacy
practices for people to project glocal identities online. A Chinese Flickr user
cjPanda’s profile page is a clear instantiation of her shift from a global to a
glocal participant. Her profile was originally written only in English; but as
she made contact with more Chinese people, she decided to spend a summer
translating her profile and other English texts on her site into Chinese.
Similarly, the Spanish Flickr users make strategic decisions about when to
write in Spanish (or Catalan) and when to use English.
Here we see the two-way relationship of glocalization, the ‘mutually inter-
dependent processes by which globalization- deepens- localization- deepens-
globalization and so on’ (Urry 2003: 84). However, to date, much emphasis
has been on local appropriation of the global, as when an international
coffee company adapts their cafes to particular countries and cultures, and
as when global hip-hop culture is localized through local languages (e.g.
Alim and Pennycook 2009; Androutsopoulos 2009). However, in our study
of multilingual practices on Flickr, we are seeing more of the opposite: people
using the local to write the global, while striking a balance between their
local and global netizenships.
A TEXTUALLY MEDIATED SELF IN A CHANGING WORLD

The dynamics presented by new media enable people to constantly display,
construct, perform, shape and reshape different senses of the self online
through linguistic means. This is illustrated in the examples discussed in this
chapter. Here, we end the chapter by summarizing some of our observations
about the relationship between language, life, and identity online:
(i) Writing online is writing oneself into being. In other words, whenever we
write a post, make a comment on another person’s post, upload an image,
create a profile, we are also constructing an auto-biography, a narrative
of who we are and what kind of person we want others to see us. These
writing practices may project new identities, or enable us to extend our
offline selves. As our identities travel between on and off the screen, we
are blurring the traditional boundary between the online and the offline.
(ii) When we participate in new online media, we are not just behaving as
one single self. We are networked individuals (Wellman 2001; Raine and
Wellman 2012), a part of a community in which people are connected
to one another. Thus, when we write about ourselves online, we write
for different groups of people. This target audience may be expected (for
example people we already know) or imagined (as with any public web
users whom we have never met). Thus, the way we manage our impres-
sion may change over time according to different kinds of audience.
(iii) For multilingual online participants, the research reported here has shown
how switching between languages is a salient practice in performing
identities in public web spaces.
(iv) A techno-biographic approach helps us understand transitions and

changes of practices in experienced technology users’ lives. A focus on
past experience reveals how older practices shape newer ones. It also
enables us to understand experienced online users’ changing attitudes
towards the language they use online. Two important factors that shape
changes are the perceived affordances of the medium in use and the
perceived affordances of different languages, that is, what identity work
that we think a language can or cannot do for us.
(v) Paying attention to self-presentation online is a process of exploring and
discovering new aspects of the self. On Flickr, for example, some
participate in a project called 365, where people upload a photo a day
for a year. Many people also provide quite detailed descriptions around
these photos. These multimodal self-presentation acts online may be
interpreted as new ways of learning in the contemporary world, which
we will discuss in Chapter 9.
(vi) Last, the social practice angle of literacy taken in this book allows us to
situate online literacy practices within a participant’s cultural and
linguistic ecology, believing that ways with technologies and languages
are embedded in individuals’ lived experiences, which may change at
different points in time. As such, young online users, though sharing
similar online activities, are certainly not a homogeneous digital natives
generation. Every individual has a unique technology-related life, reveal-
ing how different aspects of identity are developed over time.
7
S TA N C E - TA K I N G T H R O U G H
LANGUAGE AND IMAGE
• Expressing stance in online writing spaces

• Stance-taking and photo sharing online
• Flickr as a stance-rich environment
• Two case studies of multimodal stance-taking on Flickr
• Taking into account the researcher’s stance
• Stance-taking as a powerful tool for analysing language online
EXPRESSING STANCE IN ONLINE WRITING SPACES

Writing spaces in new digital media not only offer opportunities for
multilingual texts and self-representation, they also serve as new domains
for people to express their opinions and attitudes on many topics, alongside
traditional modes of communication such as face-to-face talk and written
texts. Whether someone is posting a status update on Facebook, giving a
caption to an image uploaded on Flickr, blogging, or leaving a comment on
YouTube, they frequently articulate their opinions, feelings or attitudes
towards something or someone. Here are two examples from a university
student’s Facebook status update:
Ariel loves her new bed and her refurnished room! yoho ^_^
Ariel knows writing is re-writing.
STANCE-TAKING THROUGH LANGUAGE AND IMAGE 87
The first statement expresses how Ariel feels about her refurbished bed-
room. This is marked by the use of a particular emotive verb ‘loves’. The
interjection ‘yoho’ and an emoticon ‘^_^’ probably indicate her excitement
and joy. In the second statement, Ariel, who was then taking creative writing
courses at the time of updating her status, reflects upon what she knows
about the process of writing through the use of the cognitive verb ‘know’. In
both statements Ariel is doing more than just making a statement about the
world; in one she is expressing her feelings, in the other she is expressing her
relationship to what is expressed in the statement. In other words she is
expressing her stance towards what she is talking about. Ariel’s opinion
statements are constructed through the act of stance-taking (Du Bois 2007;
Jaffe 2009). The first statement is an example of affective stance signalling
feelings of the speaker, while her second example illustrates her epistemic
stance, signalling her knowledge and belief towards her statement.
Stance has become an important concept within linguistics as it brings
together a wide range of research on how utterances’ meanings are expressed
and how speakers (or writers) address their audience. Stance, in short, refers
to the position people take in relation to oneself, to what is said, and to other
people or objects. (See the more detailed definition in Chapter 3.) Stance
is marked through particular forms of language but also through other
resources for meaning making. In any given stance statement, there are three
major components – the person expressing the stance, the topic being
discussed and the resources being drawn upon. In the above status updates,
Ariel is the stance-taker, the person who takes a position; ‘her new bed and
her refurnished room’ and ‘writing’ would be her stance objects, that is, what
her stance relates to; the verbs, ‘yoho’, and ‘^_^’ are her stance resources,
particular word choices and style through which her stance is expressed. As
a Chinese-English bilingual, Ariel also has additional linguistic resources that
allow her to express different stances. The fact that her status updates are
written in English is also an act of self-positioning. Stance-taking is, however,
an interactive and intersubjective act. This means that a stance statement is
often directed to and interpreted by a particular audience. How the speaker
and the hearer (or reader and writer) understand the stance statement may
then shape further stance utterances in the interaction. Therefore, to the
elements of stance-taker, stance object, and stance resources, we add a fourth
component, the addressee, who may be the reader or the hearer in any
stance-taking situation.
Stance-taking has become a key discursive act in online interaction. Not
only does it signal the stance-takers’ opinions, through careful choice of
vocabulary and other resources, some may also want to assert a unique sense
of self in order to stand out in a larger community of stance-takers. In other
words, stance is also a public act. This is particularly true in public online
spaces such as YouTube and blogs. Blogs, for example, are sites where
opinions are expressed frequently and often explicitly through specific word
choice and are therefore a good place to examine stance. Greg Myers (2010b)
carried out a corpus analysis of the most frequently occurring linguistic stance
88 STANCE-TAKING THROUGH LANGUAGE AND IMAGE
markers in five public discussion blogs. He found that common linguistic

strategies for stance-marking are cognitive verbs (e.g. I think, I guess, I know),
stance adverbs (really, actually), and conversational particles (ooh, hey). As
Myers points out, such stance markers should not be taken in a straight-
forward manner as a signal of one’s own opinions; often, they serve the
additional purpose of relating to other people or their comments, as in one of
the examples quoted in his article:
Mcmama, I think the point isn’t that the curiosity itself is racist.
(Bitch PhD)
The expression ‘I think’ does not serve to claim any knowledge, but to
clarify that another commenter Mcmama has misinterpreted the original
post. In addition, disagreeing indirectly can serve as a device to signal polite-
ness and to avoid any possible threat to Mcmama’s self image, or face.
Politeness has been an important aspect of online communication, discussed
in Herring (1994). In the earlier days of computer-mediated communication,
rules of ‘netiquette’ were proposed to govern people’s online behaviour. One
such rule is that people should not write their messages in ALL CAPS, which
is considered as shouting and an example of flaming behaviour, i.e. offensive
and aggressive language, often directed to a specific person (see Moor et al.
2010 on flaming on YouTube). Messages that flame certainly violate linguis-
tic politeness, which makes use of linguistic devices to play down possible
face threats to the addressee. Bitch PhD’s indirect disagreement in the above
example makes use of negative politeness strategy, which aims to reduce any
possible imposition on Mcmama. This example also illustrates an important
point about stance-taking: stance is not just about how an individual marks
their stance, but also about what communicative acts one wants to achieve
by doing so, and how stance-marking facilitates interaction within a larger
context, such as a community of bloggers.
What we have dealt with so far suggests that stance-taking online is
largely a monomodal linguistic act. In addition to the written word, many
Web 2.0 media provide built-in features that invite people to express
opinions publicly through multimodal means. A common feature shared by
Web 2.0 sites is a system of rating posts and comments by way of clicking a
button or a link. YouTube provides thumbs up and thumbs down buttons
for people to rate the videos and comments that they like or dislike. On
Flickr, members can add others’ photos as ‘favorites’ and the more ‘faves’
one gets, the more ‘interesting’ the photo is. Facebook also introduced the
famous ‘Like’ button to allow users to ‘give positive feedback and connect
with things you care about’ (Facebook 2012). Items that can be ‘liked’
include status updates, photos, links, fans pages, and sponsors’ adverts.
Users can also ‘like’ webpages from outside Facebook so that they will be
shared on their Facebook newsfeed. These intended uses of the Like button,
however, have been constantly reinterpreted by users. The following are
some of the pragmatic functions of Facebook ‘Like’ that we have observed:
• to express positive stance (i.e. literally like something) but not want to
leave a written comment;
• to express interest in the post or the content of it;
• to show support to the content poster;
• to agree or align with the stance of the status poster;
• to answer ‘yes’ to a question raised in the post;
• to indicate that the post has been read.
These different uses once again show that language alone (i.e. the word
‘like’) does not immediately signal stances. The action of clicking the ‘like’
button is packed with various social meanings and pragmatic functions. Take
personal video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube as a further example of multimodal
stance-taking: the content in a video, presented through motion and speech,
always signals the stance of the vloggers, who align themselves with certain
kinds of knowledge, attitude, or emotion. At the same time, the vloggers may
also draw on written language and give the video a title, subtitles, annota-
tions, tags and some additional information. In personal vlogs, for example,
quite often the additional written information creates a humorous effect to
attract viewers. And to some, humour serves to attract more subscribers to
their channels. The more humorous their vlogs appear, the more likely their
videos get viewed and their channels subscribed to. Humour, in this way,
is seen as vloggers’ social capital in their YouTube participation (Lien
2012). The ‘comments’ feature allows YouTubers to jointly produce their
stance on various aspects of the video uploaded. Some may align with the
vlogger’s stance, while others may take an opposing stance. Sometimes these
comments may directly refer to the content of the video uploaded; at other
times the commenters may shift topics and initiate new discussion topics
among themselves. YouTubers come from all parts of the world, possessing
a wide range of multilingual resources. Some may choose to comment in a
language that the original vlogger does not know. Such acts of multimodal-
multilingual stance-taking are usually self-generated at the beginning and
later become collaborative. They are a salient form of vernacular practice
that new digital media have made possible. It is such dynamic, cross-modal,
interactive forms of stance-taking that we highlight in this chapter.
We first describe different types of stance online. We use Flickr as our
primary site of interest. It is a particularly suitable site for understanding
stance-taking online because, while its primary focus is photographs, a great
deal of written opinion is expressed around the photo uploaded. We then
discuss stance-taking on two Flickr photo pages as case studies illustrating
multimodal and multilingual stance-taking in new online spaces. We end the
chapter by discussing how stance-taking provides a useful analytical tool for
understanding language and meta-language online.
STANCE-TAKING AND PHOTO SHARING ONLINE

There are many approaches through which we can study stance-taking but
using stance to understand language in new media is a very recent research
direction. In addition to Myers’ work on blogging, which we have discussed
in the previous section, many scholars have been interested in a specific
perspective of stance. For example, Walton and Jaffe (2011) and Chun and
Walters (2011) deal with the issue of race in digital discourse. Walton and
Jaffe (2011) discuss how ideologies of race and class are articulated through
humour by the author and commenters of the blog Stuff White People Like.
Also looking at race, Chun and Walters (2011) analyse discourse of
Orientalisms on YouTube. We shall return to this line of research in a later
part of this chapter. These previous studies have made an important point
about stance-taking, that is, stance is not always explicitly asserted. It needs
to be inferred and interpreted in relation to a number of contextual factors.
A multidimensional approach to stance-taking is thus essential when
studying what stance means to the stance-taker and the recipient. In line with
our broader work on language and literacy practices online, our approach
to stance-taking is grounded in a combination of linguistic analysis and
ethnographic insights. Our aim here is not to start with a particular form of
stance or stance marker, but to provide an overview of some major types of
stance we have observed. When interpreting how stance-taking works, we
situate the stance utterance in the immediate situation of use. In the case of
Flickr, any act of stance-taking is situated in a photo page that we see as
cohesive texts situated within the larger context of a user profile and the
broader Flickr site. In our analysis, we focus on how different semiotic
modes (images and words) and writing spaces (title, description, tags,
comments, sets and groups) work together in an act of stance-taking. Stance-
taking is interactive in nature, meaning that a stance-taker always relates to
others when a stance is expressed. In view of this, we take into account the
dynamic relationship between the stance-takers, their stance resources and
the stance objects towards which a stance is expressed.
Stance-takers: On Flickr, two broad categories of stance-takers can be
identified – the photographer and the viewer. There are many kinds of viewer
and we see ourselves, the researchers, as a particular type of viewer too. In
many cases, it is hardly possible to determine who exactly the photographer
is due to Flickr’s open-endedness or what is referred to as complex footing
(Goffman 1981; Thurlow and Jaworski 2011), referring to the different
possible participation roles that are made possible on the site. The person
who posted the photo may or may not be the one who took it; likewise, the
person posing in a photograph may or may not be the photo poster. There
may be clues to this elsewhere on the page, for instance in the tags. For the
sake of analysis, we focus only on photo pages where the photographer is
also the content poster and the site owner. That is one of the reasons why
having direct contact with the site owner is crucial in understanding lan-
guage online. A second type of stance-taker is the viewer. Anyone online can
view Flickr and they might do so for a wide range of purposes. They can be
other Flickr members who express their stance in the form of comments and
tags. Note that the photographer may leave comments on his/her own
photos too. Thus, a stance-taker may take on multiple roles. A particular
type of viewer is the researcher-analyst – that is us. We as researchers bring
in our own reading paths, world views and all kinds of background know-
ledge to serve our specific purposes when interpreting the stance taken by
our research participants. It is important that we make our own stance
explicit while writing about our observations, so as to acknowledge that our
analysis shown here offers only one of the many possible interpretations of
the data.
Stance resources: On Flickr, the act of posting something onto Flickr itself
is already an act of stance-taking. The image itself can be edited in a way
that it indexes a certain kind of position of the stance-taker; for multilingual
participants, the languages that they choose to express their stance is a key
stance marker. As we discussed in Chapter 5, the decision to include or
exclude a language in any situation is certainly an act of positioning and
expression of identity.
Stance objects: People on Flickr not only express their views on images
and photography. In our study, people also talk about themselves and others,
or events related to the content of the photo; some may discuss features on
Flickr; and interestingly, many also express their attitudes towards
languages. (This will be pursued in Chapter 8.) Stance-takers may also opt
to project their sense of self through a particular style of writing, such as
taking on an ‘expert’ voice when talking about photography, or the inclusion
of a local slang term when interacting with people who speak the same
language. These styles and tones are all available for Flickr users to draw on
as stance resources.
With these key elements in the stance-taking process in mind, the analysts
can ask themselves questions pertaining to these elements. In Appendix 1,
we provide a framework that has guided us through our stance analysis on
Flickr. This guideline not only allows us to better understand stance from the
perspectives of the photographer, viewer, and researcher, it also goes beyond
the immediate context of stance-taking. The basic unit of our stance analysis
on Flickr is a photo page. Several sets of questions can be asked in an analysis
of stance on a multimodal web page such as a Flickr photo page. These
questions aim to facilitate our observation of acts and markers of stance on
one photo page from three dimensions: the photographer, the viewer, and the
researcher. There is also a ‘broadening out’ phase which aims to elicit
information that may not be readily available in the text in question. For
example, we can look for intertextual clues by observing other photos
uploaded in the users’ photo streams. We can also study their profile pages
to find out more about their lives and so on. Note that this framework is not
designed exclusively for the study of Flickr; all studies of stance-taking
involving multimodal online texts can easily modify this list of questions as
a basic framework of analysis.
FLICKR AS A STANCE-RICH ENVIRONMENT

Flickr can be referred to as a ‘stance-rich’ online environment (Jones et al.
2011). The site provides users with a number of optional writing spaces and
affordances that encourage opinions and knowledge sharing, through which
different types of stance are expressed. To start with, any act of adding
something to these writing spaces is an act of stance-taking. One may decide
to give their photo a title or leave the space blank, while others may prefer
to take full advantage of these writing spaces to say something about any
stance object. With this broader framework in mind, in our Flickr research
project we carried out a case study of the stance-taking of 10 Flickr users’
sites. To facilitate this analysis, we deliberately selected users who frequently
gave titles, descriptions, and tags to their uploaded content. These 10 users
also received comments from others from time to time. Our first task was to
identify the common kinds of stance that were often expressed by these
Flickr users, as discussed below.
Epistemic stance
Expressing epistemic stance is the stating of facts, knowledge, or beliefs
towards certain stance objects. Acts of epistemic stance marking are easy to
spot in various writing spaces on Flickr. We have seen people asserting
knowledge of what is shown in their photos through providing detailed
information about it. The following example, also discussed in Chapter 4,
comes from the photo page of Tinn Tian, a Chinese participant. Underneath
his photo, which displays a famous dish of duck blood curd, Tinn Tian
writes:
Maoxuewang, a dish of boiled blood curd and other stuff with another name: Duck
Blood in Chili Sauce
The main title, which gives just the name of the dish, is written in Chinese
only. In English, by contrast, he writes more about the actual ingredients of
the dish. Through indicating his insider knowledge with these epistemic
utterances, Tinn Tian relates to the global audience on Flickr who may have
never come across this dish before. Quite often people gave Wikipedia-like
descriptions (and sometimes direct quotes from Wikipedia), such as:
The bridge of Dee was built following a bequest of £20,000 by Bishop William
Elphonstone who died in 1514. The bridge was completed by Bishop Gavin Dunbar.
It was nearly all rebuilt 1718–23, and in 1841 was widened from 14 to 26 feet under
the direction of Aberdeen City Architect John Smith. Until 1832, it was the only
access to the city from the south. The bridge still features the original 16th-century
piers, coats of arms and passing places.
(meinx)
Some Flickr users, whether they are professionals or have just taken up
photography, often position themselves as photographers by way of listing
their gear such as cameras and lenses on their profile pages and even tagging
the photo with details of the camera used (e.g. Canon600D, 50mm); others
would see Flickr as a space for learning more about photography (as
developed in Chapter 9) and thus they would clearly mark their (lack of)
photographic knowledge, often explicitly with ‘I know. . .’, as shown in the
following examples taken from the Flickr sites of Kristie and DG:
All I knew was a lot of people took pictures of this, so I did the same thing~
(Kristie)
I know that I still have a lot to learn so I try to absorb the knowledge as much as I
can.
(DG)
Flickr users’ passion for photography is also indexed through other

means. Many would include their folk theories or philosophy about
photography in their profiles:
Some people shout. Some people cry. Some people write, fight, drink, do drugs,
listen to music, talk to people, crash their cars and so on. For me, shooting photos
is my way of dealing with things.
(EricC)
the most important thing of taking photography is your HEART, not what kind of
equipment you use
(Looloo)
These personal philosophies are asserted at a high degree of certainty of

their opinions, using affirmative statements of what is true or not true, which
clearly mark their epistemic stance. However, these expressions also carry
their feelings and attitudes towards photography, which are markers of their
affective stance. Because of their enthusiasm for photography, many users
would regard their uploaded content as intellectual property, thus explicitly
claiming ownership or authorship of their uploaded content by including a
disclaimer type comment, as in Looloo’s profile:
I appreciate all the comments/faves, BUT don’t use my photos without my

permission, thanks!
The imperative sentence “don’t use my photos without my permission”

not only allows Looloo to claim authorship of her photos, but also implicitly
asserts the fact that she takes her hobby seriously. In addition to photo
sharing, the high degree of interaction between users makes Flickr a largely
social space (see also Barton and Lee 2012). Such social interaction is often
manifested through the act of commenting. We have observed that many

comments on Flickr do not directly relate to the content of the photo. People
may also take the commenting space as a space for interpersonal interaction,
so as to make new friends. Because of this, users would claim their identities
through various forms of stance marking, such as tagging self-portraits with
the pronoun ‘me’ as a way of positioning the self, thus letting others know
who they are and how others should see them. Other signs of self-positioning
are more explicitly expressed as comments:
Yes I am from China. . .Chinese is my mother tongue

(cjPanda)
By telling others where she comes from and what language she speaks,
cjPanda can position herself within a linguistic and cultural group that is
situated in the much broader and global Flickr community. Language is
indeed a common stance object on Flickr. From time to time, we find many
examples of users’ assertion of their knowledge or level of proficiency of
English (e.g. ‘English is not my first language’), a topic that we will pursue
further in Chapter 8.
A number of other stance statements are made to comment on the stance
taken by others, which we can refer to as ‘meta-stance’. For example:
I hope my viewers focus on my photos instead of the titles and descriptions.

(sating)
Here, sating conveys what she expects of her viewers, that her viewers
should relate their stance to her uploaded photos, not the verbal descriptions
around them. At the same time, doing so allows her to reposition her
viewers’ stance, thus guiding their reading path through her photo pages.
Affective stance
Another broad category of stance, affective stance, is concerned with
expressions of the stance-taker’s personal feelings, attitudes or judgements
towards a stance object. Affective stances are often evaluative and other
studies may refer to this type of stance as ‘assessment’ or ‘appraisal’. On
Flickr, commenters, including the actual content posters, often express their
views on a photo uploaded, on photography, and even on their participation
in Flickr generally. Many comments by others are marked by affective verbs
such as ‘I like Flickr because. . .’ or evaluative adjectives such as ‘beautiful
capture’ and ‘interesting shot’. Some comments are directed to what is
shown in the photo, such as ‘This is ironical [referring to what is said on a
sign]’. Many are more specific remarks on the photographic techniques used:
‘Wow, great composition and DOF [depth of field].’ Or: ‘Excellent lighting
and really superb bokeh’. [Bokeh is an effect in photography that emphasizes
blurry or out-of-focus areas in an image.] Such comments are interesting in
that, while praising their stance objects, i.e. the photos, these comments also
serve as a way of asserting the commenters’ knowledge of photography.
These examples are thus also implicitly epistemic in nature. According to
Du Bois (2007), evaluation is also an act of positioning and alignment,
either with the self or others. While assessing specific aspects of the photos,
these commenters are also asserting their authority and insider professional
knowledge of photography. In fact, many statements that we have come
across convey multiple stance types. There is not always a clear-cut boundary
between epistemic and affective stances, especially when people talk about
themselves:
I am odd, plus a little crazy

(Looloo)
I live in Taipei and enjoy taking pictures as my favorite hobby.

(JadeCastle)
The first example is the description of Looloo’s photo where she describes
16 random things about herself. In terms of linguistic form, this is an
affirmative statement asserting Looloo’s personality. But describing herself
as ‘odd’ and ‘crazy’ is also a way of expressing her attitudes towards her own
personality. Similarly, on Jadecastle’s profile page, he states the fact that
photography is his hobby, and that it is something that he enjoys doing, thus
also expressing his emotion towards this hobby. Epistemic and affective
stances co-exist in these utterances.
We have mentioned in the previous section that language is a common
stance object in some epistemic stance statements, where the writer asserts
their knowledge of a particular language. A point to note is that these
statements, although epistemic in form, functionally express an attitude
towards people’s linguistic preference on Flickr. Let us return to an example
that we saw in Chapter 5:
My English is so . . .. . .poor ! so, I take photos. . .

! (sigh. . .my Chinese isn’t good either!)
(I should better take photos.)
(Tiong)
Structurally, these few simple statements are just Tiong’s own assertion of
his ‘poor’ proficiency level of Chinese and English, and we need to
understand both languages to understand what he is saying here. But why
did he want to write this on his profile page? We can then infer that these
statements act as his affective stance-taking towards languages and how one
should participate in Flickr. This was supported by an online interview with
him, in which he stresses that on Flickr photography should be the main
subject matter, not the written word. (See Chapter 8 for a detailed discussion
of how people talk about language online.) These examples from Flickr
clearly show that the act of stance-taking serves multiple purposes, and that
the same statement can express multiple stance types.
Another issue that we have noticed is that commenters on Flickr
frequently exercise positive politeness when they convey their attitudes and
evaluation towards others. There is often more praise than criticism towards
a photo. In our data, we have found many conversational sequences contain-
ing the compliment-acceptance adjacency pair (e.g. ‘Nice shot!’ followed by
‘thank you’). While antagonism and hostility in comments are common in
many social network sites such as YouTube (see Lange 2007), so far we have
not seen any abusive language in our particular Flickr data. (Occasionally
there are swear words but they are employed humorously and playfully.)
One possible explanation is that, to Flickr users, Flickr is not just a photo
sharing site, but also a site to develop interpersonal relationships. Thus,
expressing stance towards others and their photos is a way to widen partici-
pation and build solidarity with other users. So far we have focused largely
on stance-taking by way of the written word. Through case studies of two
Flickr pages in the following subsection, we illustrate how words and images
can be combined to do the job of positioning the self and others.
TWO CASE STUDIES OF MULTIMODAL STANCE-TAKING

ON FLICKR
In Chapter 3, we showed how a photo page on Flickr can be treated as a
cohesive piece of text, where words and images work together to make
meanings. Here we provide two case studies that illustrate this; the first is an
example of how a page is a cohesive piece of text and the second goes into
more detail and considers stances from the perspectives of the viewers and
the researchers.
Case 1: ‘Look at me in the eye’

Figure 7.1 is a photo uploaded to Flickr by Nadiobolis, one of the Spanish
speakers who participated in our research. We first came across it when
analysing her most recent Flickr pages.
David’s reading path

When I clicked through to this Flickr page, my reading path started with a
quick look at the image. I immediately liked it and wanted to find out more
about it. I looked up to the title and down to the description, trying to piece
together what it meant. Then I had a quick look at the first comments before
looking at the information on the right as to when the photo was taken and
down to the tags, which gave more information about where it was taken. I
am familiar with using Flickr and I am also used to scanning sites quickly
when I am doing my research; sometimes I look mainly at the words and
hardly notice the image, but here I returned to the image and scrutinized it
carefully.
Figure 7.1 Look at me in the eye
Carmen’s reading path

I started with the sculpture in the image, which I found eye-catching as the
sculpture occupied the centre of the page. Then from the setting shown in
the blurry background, I realized that the photo was taken in a museum.
From the image, I moved down to read the title ‘look at me in the eye. . .’.
Out of habit, I scrolled down and browsed through the comments. After
that, I moved up again to read the photo description and then the tags to
find out where exactly the photo was taken.
The image
The image is a portrait, a common ‘three-quarter view’ of a head within the
genre of portraits. It is a portrait of a sculpture, an image of an image of a
person. The staring eyes are central to the composition, with the right eye
literally in the centre of the image. They are staring ahead, not quite at the
viewer. The image seems carefully composed, with converging lines in the
background framing the head. There is more to say about the image itself,
but first how is it set in a Flickr page and given meaning by the language
around it?
The language
Here, the photographer Nadiobolis has provided a title ‘look at me in the
eye. . .’ and a description, which appears as a caption below the photo in a
smaller font. It consists of two lines ‘. . .and tell me what you think of me’,
which continues the title. The line below is ‘Egyptian sculpture at The Met,
NYC’. The right-hand vertical panel gives further information. The photo is
part of a set named ‘nw yrk 2007’ containing 58 photos. Below this are the
tags she has given to the photo, including ‘The Met’, ‘Metropolitan’,
‘museum’, ‘museo’.
Cross-modal coherence
Examining the page for its internal structure, the way it works as a web page,
there are several ways in which the layout, image and words make it a
coherent, and hence meaningful, multimodal page. First, there is cross-modal
cohesion, that is the image and the words are tied in closely to each other.
The title mentions ‘eye’ and draws attention to a central aspect of the image.
The words are as if spoken by the sculpture. (This type of persona-taking
practice is quite common in online spaces, such as when someone sets up a
Facebook account or a blog for a pet and then speaks from its perspective.)
Second, the description section describes the sculpture as Egyptian and
locates it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This information
is repeated in the tags and the photo has been placed in a set of New York
photos. Further cohesion is provided by the continuing of the title in the
description: ‘look at me in the eye. . .and tell me what you think of me’.
Intertextual links
The title of the image makes an intertextual link and echoes the title of a
song, ‘Look me in the eyes’, recorded by the Jonas Brothers and others. Song
lyrics are commonly used by Flickr users as part of a global music culture.
Using the song title, and her other lexical choices, tell us about the particular
sort of imagined audience she is constructing, and this is a central part of her
stance as a multilingual cosmopolitan Flickr user. Nevertheless understand-
ing does not depend on knowing the intertextual link. What is in the head
of the author can be very different from how the viewer interprets it.
Other voices
The page at this point consists of a fairly tight frame provided by Flickr and
with content added by the user. It then becomes a space for interaction: other
people can add comments below the image, notes on parts of the photo and
additional tags. The screen shot as it is displayed on a computer screen shows
two comments. Someone added the first comment, saying ‘nice perspective
with somebody in the back :) ’. Then the photographer, Nadiobolis,
responded ‘Thanks Edyta!! Yeah! Those kinds of things make a picture
special unexpectedly. . .I thought the same when I saw it :) ’. There are then
further comments. The first comment made by someone else relates directly
to the image and draws attention to a hitherto unmentioned aspect of the
photo, a figure in the background. Nadiobolis asserts that she too had seen
the figure by saying that she had not noticed the figure until she had looked
at the photo she had taken.
Further interpretation
The page also provides interpersonal information, about both the parti-
cipants within the page and the relation between author and viewer, and
Nadiobolis tells, or reveals, some things about herself and her stance towards
the image. She is someone who was in New York in 2007 and she went
to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She uses a familiar name for the
museum, the Met, and feels it worth telling us it was an Egyptian sculpture.
She knows Spanish and provides tags in English and Spanish. She likes the
image, and calls it ‘special’ and she knows the commenter, as she refers to
her as ‘Edyta’ [a woman’s name]. All this information on the page guides the
interpretation the viewer makes.
Moving outwards
A further layer of meaning is provided if we dig a little deeper. The page, as
a text, is embedded in a larger text, Nadiobolis’ whole Flickr photo stream,
and as a user she is also part of a larger network of Flickr users from all parts
of the world. In fact, it is embedded more broadly in the whole Flickr site
and the web itself – there are at least 40 possible click-through links visible
on this screen, without including those on drop-down menus. We also know
from examination of her site that she is from Latin America. The ‘nw yrk’
set looks like a vacation trip to New York. The photo looks carefully
composed and the eyes of the sculpture must have been striking.
Case 2: ‘Handwritting’
For the second case study we present a Flickr page by a Chinese Flickr user,
cjPanda, showing the ways in which stance-taking is not only a linguistic act,
but also a multimodal one. In presenting the case, we shift perspectives from
time to time, showing how our researchers’ stance leads to our different
interpretations of the photo page from each other.
About cjPanda
From her profile and photo stream, we found out that cjPanda is a female
Chinese Flickr user, currently living in Shanghai. She studied product design
at university when she started using Flickr, and now she is a freelance
illustrator. Her interests in drawing and design are clearly reflected in the
photos she uploads. The majority are photos of her own drawings and
doodles. Her passion for art and design is also revealed in the most popular
tags on her site – ‘drawings’ and ‘photoshop’, as well as in the groups she
joins such as ‘Moleskine’, ‘Design Addicts’, ‘5 minute doodle’, etc. These
activities on Flickr enable us to understand her overall identity positioning
– that she wants to tell the world she is interested in art. Many visitors to her
site often pay attention not to the quality of her photos, but to the drawings
shown in them. In a way, cjPanda uses Flickr as a site of engagement (Jones
2005) for her and designers in other parts of the world to meet and discuss
their works. At a more local level, many of her contacts are also mainland
Figure 7.2 cjPanda’s photo page ‘handwriting’
Chinese people sharing a similar cultural and linguistic background (i.e.

using Mandarin as their main language).
Carmen’s reading path

My attention was first drawn to the written words around the photo. What
actually caught my eye first was the unconventional spelling in the title ‘hand-
writting’, and then I moved on to the tags. I noticed that in addition to
‘handwritting’, there was also a second tag added by another Flickr member,
possibly aiming to correct the spelling. I did not view the picture and the
handwriting from an aesthetic angle. My reading of the image was guided and
constructed by my familiarity with Chinese writing and calligraphy (which I
took for granted as something ‘ordinary’). My research interest in tagging was
one of the reasons why my eyes were drawn to the tags and their spelling. My
ability to recognize the Chinese characters shown in the photo also allowed
me to search for the original poem on Google. This act took me outside the
context of the photo page itself and broadened my understanding of the image.
David’s reading path

I noticed that the image was some Chinese writing. Then I looked down at
the title noticing that it said handwriting with double t, and wondered if it
was deliberate. Looking across to the right, I saw the image was in a set
called ‘some stuffs called Chinese culture’ which is not standard English so
assumed cjPanda was a second language speaker. I then looked further down
and noticed two tags, one with correct spelling and one with the double t. I
then moved back to the left-hand side and read the description. I read down
through the comments. Then I left the page and clicked through to some of
her other photos.
cjPanda’s and her viewers’ stance

From cjPanda’s perspective, the decision and the act of uploading the photo,
along with giving the photo a title and a description already indexes her own
stance – her intention to offer further information about the Chinese
handwriting in the photo. By pointing out that the handwriting is ‘not my
handwriting’, cjPanda explicitly acknowledges the work of others, shifting
the viewer’s attention to another Flickr member, Lullaby, who actually wrote
these characters when he was six. This also immediately invites the viewers
to take account of a third person in the meaning-making process.
The title and description also guide and shape viewers’ evaluative stances
towards the significance of the main image (‘It isn’t my handwritting’). The
stance initiated by cjPanda and her writing around the image also triggered
a series of comments from others:
1. Niniel: oh god, when he was 6!!!!great :D

2. girls slayer: could he writ my name its nice
3. isolano: Are you not from China?
4. cjPanda: yep Nini, but his English handwritting is. . .ohh sorry I can’t
talk behind his back,heheh;-)
isolano: Yes I am from China but nowadays we young Chinese don’t like
practicing penmanship a lot, I suppose it’s a nationwide art, not expert
only!=]
5. cjPanda: slayer, I think I am able to do this. . .do you have a Chinese
name?
6. Shuke, the Pilot: sad I can’t go back to 6.
7. woolloomooloo: beautiful! i love calligraphy. . . ^-^
8. Rayparnova: nice texture !
9. alex.vu:
(Translation: This is beautiful handwriting!)
Altogether there are nine comments posted by cjPanda’s contacts and

cjPanda herself. Most of the commenters speak a language other than
English. For example, Niniel from Chile writes in Spanish, and isolano is
from Portugal. Shuke and alex.vu are from mainland China and share the
same language and writing system with cjPanda. Rayparnova, from Spain,
is multilingual and writes in English, French and Spanish on his site. But
here, for this particular photo, almost all of them communicate in English.
This already is an act of stance – they write in English to claim their identity
as global Flickr members.
To analyse the comments in terms of stance in greater detail, we find a
few typical expressions of affective stance on Flickr. Typically, commenters
direct their evaluation towards the quality of the photograph, but here we
see evaluative stances towards the topics of handwriting, calligraphy and the
ability to write this at a young age – but not to the quality of the photograph.
So the comments ‘Great, beautiful, and nice’ are all initiated by and align
with cjPanda’s title and description, which focus on the handwriting itself.
What is also interesting is people’s stance towards Chinese culture and

cjPanda’s Chinese cultural identity, which are evident in comments 3 and 4:
Comment 3: isolano: Are you not from China?

Comment 4 – [. . .] isolano: Yes I am from China but nowadays we
young Chinese don’t like practicing penmanship a lot I suppose it’s a
nationwide art, not expert only
cjPanda’s response is initially epistemic – both ‘I am from China’ and ‘we

young Chinese’ are used to align herself with isolano’s question. Moreover,
the second part of her response is an act of repositioning and aligning herself
to the younger generation of Chinese people, who may hold a different
attitude towards traditional Chinese culture such as calligraphy. This
comment also forms a cohesive tie to one of her photo sets called ‘some stuffs
called national culture’, which seems to be a way of distancing herself from
being an insider member of that culture. Later, in response to girlslayer’s
comment, ‘could he write my name’, cjPanda replies: ‘I think I am able to do
this’ (comment 5). Here, she immediately claims her knowledge of Chinese
calligraphy again. This provides a nice example of how Flickr members
constantly switch between their local and global selves – cjPanda, on the one
hand, positions herself as a Chinese person generally; on the other hand, she
wants to participate as a global person too. This is achieved by introducing
a national culture, which she thinks may be of global interest.
Carmen’s researcher’s stance

Being Chinese myself, I could read what was written in the image. It did not
strike me as a particularly beautiful piece of calligraphy. I was interested in
the spelling instead. This can be explained by my role as a Chinese-English
bilingual and my own understanding of the learning process of spelling. My
own experience of learning English and evaluating others’ English have
allowed me to develop sensitivity to spelling accuracy, which is the reason
why I focused on the spelling first. In short, in my analysis of this multi-
lingual and multimodal page, I positioned myself as a Chinese person, thus
aligning with cjPanda’s culture. However, being a Chinese person in Hong
Kong, I was also aware of our differences (e.g. that we speak different
Chinese languages and use different writing systems).
David’s researcher’s stance

I could not read the Chinese in the image and I felt that I did not understand
what the picture was about. The description says it was done when the writer
was six years old. I wondered if it was childish writing and whether all
Chinese readers would know that it wasn’t adult-like. It looked fine to me.
Based on what I know about writing systems, I thought about the fact that
Chinese writing is more likely to be treated as calligraphy than English
writing.
TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THE RESEARCHER’S STANCE

One of the central arguments of this chapter is that, in any study of language
online (and indeed any research), the researcher inevitably takes a certain
stance or point of view in the process of analysis. The researcher is always
standing somewhere, and there is no neutral point to stand from where the
phenomenon can be viewed. This is partly based on our background
knowledge and our purposes as researchers. In this way the research findings
and discussion are influenced by the researchers’ stance and how they
position and align themselves in relation to the research site and the
participants. For instance, when interpreting our Flickr data, we constantly
found ourselves alternating between at least three roles. Sometimes we are
ordinary viewers or visitors of a Flickr page; at other times, we are highly
aware of our role as the researcher-analysts who have made direct contact
with some of these participants. We are also active Flickr users who partici-
pate in common activities on Flickr just like many of our participants. We
see ourselves as insiders who are familiar with ways of participating in Flickr
and the affordances in it. Some of our informants have become our Flickr
friends. Making these roles explicit not only informs our readers what leads
to our current understanding of stance, doing so also guides our readers
through their own stance-taking as they interpret our analysis and dis-
cussion.
Our sharing of multiple roles in the research does not mean that as the
two authors, we share the same stance towards our data. To begin with, we
took rather different reading paths when reading cjPanda’s photo page. We
had different starting points, which were shaped by our prior knowledge of
the photographers’ images, our knowledge of the languages concerned, etc.
David started his reading of the page with the Chinese writing in the image,
while Carmen focused first on the spelling of the title. David wondered if the
unconventional spelling was deliberate, while Carmen interpreted it against
her second language learning background. Carmen’s Chinese background
also allowed her to interpret the content of the image (the Chinese char-
acters) and what is said in the comments against her insights of Chinese
culture. Our reading paths are also guided by the features or affordances of
the text. This partially explains our different starting points. What is more
crucial in shaping our different ways of interpreting a multimodal Flickr text,
however, is our researcher’s position and stance, which includes a complex
nexus of factors such as our prior knowledge of the site and the language
used there that shaped our reading and interpretation of the multimodal
data. The important methodological point is that researchers need to make
their stance towards the research as explicit as possible.
STANCE-TAKING AS A POWERFUL TOOL FOR ANALYSING

LANGUAGE ONLINE
Stance-taking can serve as a powerful analytical tool that cuts across many
areas of online research. We now summarize the various ways in which
stance-taking can inform language and literacy studies of online texts, some
of which can bring new insights into existing concepts and theories of
language.
The pragmatics of stance

In our discussion of stance types, we have shown that often there is no clear-
cut boundary between epistemic and affective stances. A statement may be
epistemic in structure, with explicit stance markers such as ‘I think’ or ‘I
believe’, but it actually expresses an attitude. How the utterance is used has
to be interpreted with respect to its context. As we have seen, the interpre-
tation of stance becomes less straightforward when its social functions such
as politeness and people’s need to receive positive feedback from their
audience are taken into consideration. We have shown many examples from
English in this chapter but people from other cultures and language
backgrounds are also exercising politeness in language online. In China, for
example, Taobao is the biggest online shopping site. Like eBay, sellers are
often rated by buyers for their reliability as well as their service. Because of
this, sellers have created a specific communication style when interacting
with their buyers. For example, they often start a sentence with (‘dear’)
to create a sense of friendliness. This has never been used in everyday con-
versation in Chinese. The endearment here serves only to attract positive
ratings from buyers. Therefore, we suggest that linguistic and structural
studies of stance should take into account the pragmatic functions of the
stance statements in question, making sense of the inference and implications
embodied in the utterance and its immediate, situational, and social contexts.
Such a perspective is particularly relevant to studying stance in online
communication, where playful and humorous linguistic forms tend to violate
traditional beliefs or ‘maxims’ of conversation. (See, for example, Herring’s
(2013b) work on the relevance principles in chat rooms; and Yus (2011) also
examines language online from the point of view of pragmatics.)
Critical discourse analysis

Throughout this chapter, we have primarily discussed stance-taking online
as a multimodal act. There have been studies of stance-taking in new media
that take stance-taking as a vehicle for expressing social ideologies (e.g.
Walton and Jaffe 2011; Chun and Walters 2011; Thurlow and Jaworski
2011). These studies often start with a particular viewpoint or stance in new
media discourse. For example, Chun and Walters’ (2011) research on
YouTube focuses on the issue of race. They look into Orientalism as a par-
ticular act of stance-taking. Drawing upon a range of videos featuring the
performance of a stand-up comedian Wonho Chung, Chun and Walters criti-
cally examine how the performer and responses from his audience (including
YouTube comments) collaboratively construct their stances towards Arab
Orientalisms. Crucially, the authors also take into account their own ‘critical
stance’ (269) regarding race, acknowledging how their reflection and writing
process shape their understanding of the videos. As we have stressed, stances
are always inferred. What is said (the form) may not be what the stance-taker
actually wants to convey (especially in the case of humour and irony). Such
a contextualized, ideological, and critical perspective can be combined with
insights from pragmatics, which often aims to reveal not just what is said,
but what is not said in utterances.
The study of identity performance

In Chapter 6, we discussed how identities are performed linguistically online
and how insights from techno-biographies can inform our understanding of
identities. Our understanding of stance allows us to make sense of techno-
biographies and identities. Techno-biographies are life histories where people
talk about their relationships with technology at different points and
contexts in their lives. In talking about their relationship with language when
going online, the student participants frequently asserted their identities by
positioning and repositioning themselves and others. And the repositioning
is often achieved by referring to the roles they played in life (e.g. a student,
a friend, a family member) and their sense of ‘ownership’ of a certain lan-
guage. For example, one student in our Facebook research, majoring in
English, often explained his preference for English on Facebook in terms of
his major subject (‘I am an English major.’). However, when situating himself
in a public forum, he would avoid using English because he did not want
others to judge his English if he made any mistake in public. This act of
repositioning takes into account the perspective of his target readers. On
Flickr, there are also many interesting examples of positioning through
language choice. For example, in the desciption for the Hispanic photo
Group called ‘HABLA HISPANA’, the content is written in three languages,
in the order of Spanish, English, and French. Why is it not written in Spanish
only if this is a Hispanic group? There are two possible explanations to this.
First, it can be seen as an act of inclusion and exclusion. The orientation or
preference for Spanish is already indexed in the order of languages – Spanish
first, then English, and finally French. In so doing, the administrator on the
one hand clearly conveys the message that ‘we are Spanish’ and the group is
not meant to be a purely English group. Although the group administrator
certainly has a local interest at first, s/he does not want to exclude other
members on Flickr. This is supported by the group description: ‘However,
other languages are accepted, anyone is welcome to participate.’ This again
is an act of positioning the group as a glocal community (see Chapter 3) that
speaks simultaneously to local and global audiences. All these examples
clearly illustrate that stance-taking, i.e. acts of positioning and alignment in
relation to others, is useful in understanding linguistic identities online.
The study of folk linguistic attitudes on Web 2.0

Web 2.0 environments such as Facebook and YouTube are stance-rich. On
Facebook, there is the key feature of ‘status updates’ where users write posts
that serve a range of discourse functions. According to a study of status
updates in Hong Kong by Lee (2011), opinion and judgement was the most
expressed communicative function. Social network sites give rise to public
opinions because of their affordances for self-generated content. The
commenting function on many global sites allow stances to be constantly
expressed, discussed, negotiated, and contested collaboratively among
people from all parts of the world who may not even know each other. While
the kinds of opinion expressed by online users are wide-ranging, there is one
specific stance object that strikes us as frequently occurring in many new
media spaces – attitudes towards linguistic knowledge. In Chapter 8, we
discuss the ways in which Web 2.0 offers an unprecedented space for the
world to express and discuss their folk attitudes towards the subject matter
of language.
8
‘MY ENGLISH IS SO POOR’
Talking about language online
• Talking about language in a textually mediated social world

• Types of metalinguistic discourse online
• ‘My English is so poor’: Self-deprecating metalinguistic discourse on Flickr
• Metadiscursive construction of a supportive social space
• Linguistic reflexivity as powerful digital discourse
TALKING ABOUT LANGUAGE IN A TEXTUALLY MEDIATED

SOCIAL WORLD
THEY’RE going THERE with THEIR friends. It’s called grammar, use it.!!!
(Facebook)
Some languages are hard, like Chinese. Some are easy, like Spanish. You can learn
both, with this group!!
(Flickr)
funny teacher saying foul language

(YouTube)
108 TALKING ABOUT LANGUAGE ONLINE
We do not need to be linguists to have a view about any aspect of language

and how we or other people use it. Language has been perceived as a form
of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1990) for people to act with in this textually
mediated social world. As people become more aware of the social values of
the language they use, ideologies or assumptions about standards of lan-
guage emerge. Language users can easily reflect upon or even assess aspects
of language and its use, be it an accent, the grammar and style of someone’s
speech, or the level of difficulty in learning a language. The quotes at the
beginning of this chapter are some web users’ views about language, taken
from Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The first one is the title of a Facebook
fan page, where Facebook users gather to discuss grammar-related topics in
English. The title suggests some easily misspelled homophones in English,
which is framed as a ‘grammar’ issue. The second is part of the description
of a group on Flickr called ‘Learn a New Language’. The statements evaluate
the level of difficulty in learning languages, that Spanish is an ‘easy’ language
while Chinese is ‘hard’; while the last one is the title of a YouTube video
posted by a secondary schoolgirl in Hong Kong who vlogs about what she
sees as incorrect English used by an invigilator at an examination. Utterances
that express beliefs and attitudes about language are broadly referred to as
metalanguage. The term metalanguage is often defined as ‘language about
language’. Jaworski et al. (2004) comment that this notion is too ‘literal’ and
define metalanguage as language ‘in the context of linguistic representations
and evaluations’ (4). When people engage in metalinguistic talk, whether
online or offline, they are also engaging in the wider discourse of language
ideologies, such as what constitutes standard, good, or correct use of lan-
guage. It thus also makes sense to call these views about language meta-
linguistic discourse. To date, popular metalinguistic discourses have been
largely evaluative and prescriptive. A major source of non-linguists’ views of
language is mass media, especially news reports. In particular, linguistic
features that are publicly recognized as specific to internet communication,
such as the use of abbreviations and smileys in texting, have often become a
key subject of much metalinguistic discourse in the news. Crispin Thurlow
(2007) analysed an extensive corpus of English news articles and identified
ways in which young people’s use of language in new media is misrepre-
sented. Thurlow found that mass media tend to focus on three themes when
constructing young people’s online language discursively:
Theme 1: ‘the homogenization of youth’ – that young people are often portrayed as
one single generation and are given labels such as ‘Generation text’ and ‘wired
teens’.
Theme 2: ‘the de-generation of language’ – that young people’s new media language
practices are threatening standards of language.
Theme 3: ‘The exaggeration of difference’ – that the newness and difference of

internet-specific language is often exaggerated.
TALKING ABOUT LANGUAGE ONLINE 109
These ideas are well illustrated in a classic case when a Scottish schoolgirl
submitted an essay written in what was said to be ‘text message shorthand’.
This is how she began the essay, first cited in the Daily Telegraph on 3 March
2003:
My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids
FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.
(Translation: My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used

to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids
face to face. I love New York. It’s a great place.)
Immediately, this piece of national and even international news received

a great deal of attention from authorities including teachers and government
officials in several different countries. Here is a response from the girl’s
teacher:
I could not believe what I was seeing. The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many
of which I simply could not translate. When I challenged the pupil, she told me that
was how she preferred to write because she found it easier than standard English.
(Sunday Herald 2003)
This comment focuses on the peculiarity of texting language as compared

to standard language. Concerns are also expressed regarding how the
language of texting would negatively affect students’ literacy skills. What
these reports are clearly missing, as Thurlow (2007) also comments on, is
the idea of linguistic creativity and innovation among young people. From
the schoolgirl’s perspective, as reported by the teacher, writing an essay in
text messages was certainly not about her not knowing how to spell – she
decided that texting language was more communicative than what she
considered to be ‘standard English’.
Mass media’s (mis-)representations of linguistic practices online certainly
have a strong impact on what people think about their own language use as
well as language in society more generally. In other words, people’s meta-
linguistic awareness is always discursively constructed. With the advent of
Web 2.0 media, especially publicly available social network sites, meta-
linguistic discourses are no longer confined to traditional mass media but
can be found in a much wider range of online platforms. With the paradigm
shift to more user-generated content on Web 2.0, ordinary web users from
all walks of life can talk about language extensively in various writing spaces
online, as in the examples cited at the beginning of the chapter. Anyone
looking at YouTube comments will observe wide-ranging points of view,
from some abusive comments on one’s English such as ‘HIS ENGLISH
SUCKS!’ to in-depth discussion of a local dialect, such as ‘Le language is
called wolof. Its the main dialect back home. There is about 30 different
dialectes all together’ (which was a comment on a music video of a Wolof
song). These new spaces for representing language have important impli-
cations for learning, as we will discuss in the next chapter.
This chapter considers what and how people actually talk about language
in relation to their online participation. Examples from various web spaces
including Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube are used to show the ways in which
the web provides a platform for people to publicly reflect upon and discuss
language-related topics through self-generated writing, such as personal
profiles and comments. It is this emerging aspect of metalinguistic discourse
online and the purposes it can serve that this chapter is interested in. The
chapter also pays specific attention to how talking about one’s knowledge,
or lack of knowledge, of a language can serve meaningful social purposes
when participating in Web 2.0 spaces, thus becoming an important way of
acting online.
TYPES OF METALINGUISTIC DISCOURSE ONLINE

What aspects of language do people represent or discuss in online spaces?
Studies of metalinguistic discourses online are emerging but they are mostly
reports of individual research studies with a narrow set of data, and a
systematic overview of common types of language representations online is
missing. This section identifies and discusses five key topics of language that
people often talk about in what Squires (2010) refers to as ‘sites of meta-
discourse’ that we have researched or observed.
Linguistic forms and structures

Sociolinguists and dialectologists have long been interested in investigating
non-linguists’ beliefs, attitudes, and theories of language represented in
speech or print media, an area that is termed folk linguistics (Niedzielski and
Preston 2000). A major type of folk linguistic view observed online is when
people talk about what they think is good or bad of language. Discourses
about standards of language and language use also began to emerge in early
forms of CMC, including sites that predate Web 2.0. For example, the BBC
Voices website has a ‘Your Voice’ section for ordinary viewers and experts
to discuss dialects across the UK. From time to time, a common way for site
visitors to represent their language attitudes is through affective utterances,
such as this comment on the issue of language change: ‘The dissappearance
[sic] of the letter “T” drives me mad! I’ve heard people say words such as
letter, better and motorway without pronouncing the “T”. It sounds so lazy.’
While expressing feelings towards t-dropping (‘drives me mad’, ‘lazy’), this
commenter is also aligning to a prescriptive rule of pronunciation, that is, do
not drop an intervocalic /t/.
On YouTube, prescriptivism can be reinforced through multimodal
means. In the video titled ‘funny teacher saying foul language lols’ (men-
tioned in Chapter 4 and discussed in Benson 2010), the vlogger Ruby, a
secondary schoolgirl in Hong Kong, criticizes a teacher for mispronouncing
simple English words. Ruby starts the video in Cantonese introducing the
context to her story – that the invigilator spoke ‘primary school level’ English
at a public examination and she could not stand it. Then, she switches to
English in the video because, as she said, she wants the whole world to know
some common English errors among Hong Kong people. According to Ruby,
the teacher mispronounced ‘ask’ (as ‘ass’), ‘zip’ (as ‘sit’), ‘during’ (as ‘diu2’,
a swear word in Cantonese), and ‘sheet’ (as ‘shit’). Ruby, while attempting
to correct the teacher, comments several times that the teacher’s pro-
nunciation was ‘really really funny’ and that teachers in general should have
a ‘higher English level’. The video itself is only one site of metalanguage on
this YouTube page. What is more interesting is that the video immediately
became a YouTube sensation among local Hong Kong people. Ruby’s
English pronunciation in the video became a key subject of further met-
alinguistic discourses in the form of written comments and video responses
from others. Many responses criticize Ruby for her poor English (some
targeted at her accent) and that she should have taken care of her own
English before criticizing others. For example:
brianfan1: I can’t even recognize her accent, is she trying to pretend to be an

american? Sorry but her attempt miserably failed.
wtboomer: 1. Did she listen to her accent before you post? Bristish [sic]? Nope.
American? Nope. Canadian? Nope. Sounds like a retard to me.
2. She speaks Chinglish, so why is she making fun of others’
Chinglish?
Some commenters even introduce further sets of metalinguistic discourse

among themselves. The following example shows how the discussion of
Ruby’s video has shifted to the grammar of the comment chain and language
in new media in general:
yfjameslo: It’s funny how nearly every comment here commits significant
grammatical errors as well :P
brianfan1: sad but true, I think that’s partly because of negligence of grammar
in SMS nowadays.
What is interesting about this exchange is that, as yfjameslo points out

how most of Ruby’s commenters do not use proper grammar themselves,
brianfan1 immediately frames this within the broader public discourse and
moral panics about the negative impact of texting language. This once again
demonstrates the discursive construction of new media and how people’s
ideologies are shaped by media and other public representations of language
online.
To different extents, the BBC Voices commenter, Ruby, and her com-
menters all position themselves as users of correct English, thus having the
authority to evaluate and even correct others. A similar phenomenon of self-
positioning through metalanguage is also found among German-speaking
commenters on YouTube. Androutsopoulos (2013) looks into how German

dialects are performed and negotiated in a corpus of videos tagged with
German dialects such as Bairisch ‘Bavarian’ or Berlinerisch (Berlin city
dialect). Part of Androutsopoulos’ study focuses on viewers’ comments on
two focal videos – Rinjehaun – ‘Berlinerisch fur Anfanger’ (‘Berlinerisch for
beginners’), which is a three-minute dialect lesson, and ‘MacBookAir auf
Berlinerisch’ (‘MacBookAir in Berlinerisch’). Although the two videos are
quite different in delivery style, the majority of commenters orient their
comments to the dialect features in general or how they are delivered by
speakers in the videos. Common themes have also been identified, such as
taking on an affective stance (e.g. ‘I just love that Berlinerisch. Very cool.
Weiter machen!’ (‘Keep it up!’)); others may debate the authenticity of the
Berlinerisch dialect features used in the video in terms of their own
understanding of authentic Berlinerisch:
Boah ne, sorry, dit is aber ma so ja nich knorke! Da_ hatt er zwar die Vokabeln
jepaukt, aber. . . dit klingt so ja nich Original-Berlinerisch. . . keene Stimmmelodie
drin, weißte Keule!
(Translation: ‘Oh well, sorry, but this isn’t my thing at all! He did learn his lessons,
but. . . It doesn’t sound like original Berlinerisch, no vocal melody in there, isn’t it
mate!’)
These commenters, through authenticating the video content and showing

their insider knowledge of dialects, are also indexing their own linguistic and
cultural identities. What is also special about participation in linguistic
discussions on YouTube is that, as illustrated by Ruby and the German
YouTube participants, metalinguistic discourses and ideologies in new digital
media are often initiated by the visual content of YouTube. In other words,
they are articulated collaboratively and multimodally.
Internet-specific language
Recognizable linguistic practices online have become a subject of discussion
in online spaces too. With computer-mediated discourse gradually gaining
public recognition, users of online language have also developed their own
linguistic repertoire and conventions for the language they use online. A
salient practice is to give labels to what they think of as new varieties of
language that they use in online interaction. In a detailed analysis of two
comment threads discussing language on the internet, Squires (2010) shows
how the commenters often ‘enregister’ internet language by giving labels
such as ‘chat lingo’, ‘IM chat-speak’, and ‘txt-tlk’ to specific forms of lan-
guage. Commenters’ assessments of language online were two-fold – those
who considered internet language as a register used only in specific settings
tended to be positive about it, while others who juxtaposed their arguments
with standard English negatively evaluated language online and its asso-
ciated features. Clearly, people’s thoughts and feelings about online registers
are largely shaped by standard language ideologies, which are influenced by

mass media representation of language. Squires also identifies technological
determinism as another broader conception that shapes people’s beliefs
about new media language. When changes in language emerge at the same
time as new technologies, a newer set of reflections about language and
its use also emerge as a result. This has important theoretical implications.
Metalinguistic discourses are always embedded in the larger context of other
discourses in society, i.e. they are situated practices. As social conditions
change, ways of thinking and talking about language also change accordingly.
Language teaching and learning

There are instances where web users explicitly take on a language teacher or
learner discourse. Many YouTube vloggers, for example, take on new roles
as language teachers to offer language lessons for free to their viewers (e.g.
‘Learn to Speak French - Vlog - En Français!!! Mon NOUVEAU PROJET
POUR VOUS!!’), while others may vlog about ‘tips’ as to how to learn a
language better (e.g. ‘6 Tips to Learn a Foreign Language - from a Polyglot’).
This is more than taking on a teacher discourse. This is also about people
transforming their lay knowledge about language into a more authoritative
discourse of competent speakers of a certain language. This kind of discourse
of teaching and learning is different from the situation where Flickr parti-
cipants say they act as teachers and learners, as discussed in the next chapter.
Being aware of the diverse linguistic and cultural background of YouTube
viewers and with growing multilingual encounters and translingual experi-
ences between vloggers and commenters, there has been evidence showing
that people have also become keen language learners and constantly seek
language help from one another. The fan-fiction website fanfiction.net, for
instance, is a site that exhibits a great deal of discourses of active language
learning. The site provides interactive discussion spaces for fan-fiction
writers from all parts of the world to share and discuss their works with one
another. Users draw upon their school-based and out-of-school linguistic
practices when seeking help from and giving feedback to others. Rebecca
Black’s (2009) study of fanfiction.net presents a good example of how a
Chinese-speaking fan-fiction writer, Nanako, learns from other participants
of the site in order to improve her works written in English. Her commenters
often draw upon their folk linguistic theories, to collaboratively edit her
writing, as in the comment: ‘there was just a few convention (grammar,
spelling, stuff like that.) mistakes, but you had your reasons’. In this way
collaborative editing can be achieved on fan-fiction sites.
Translation issues
As shown in Chapters 4 and 5, the web has become increasingly multilin-
gual. Many web developers have also responded to this change and devel-
oped online translators or made their sites available in multiple languages.
For example, as of June 2012, Facebook’s interface is available in about 70

languages and a ‘translations’ application was created to enable users to
translate content themselves. Issues of translation arise as a result and these
sites provide writing spaces for people to discuss such matters. Translation-
related metadiscourses are discussed in detail in Lenihan (2011), first
introduced in Chapter 5. The study looks into how Irish-language translators
engage in the translations application on Facebook. The non-expert trans-
lators, who can be any users of Facebook, often draw upon a range of ideas
about language endangerment, linguistic purism and verbal hygiene when
discussing English-Irish translations. A topic that the Irish translators in
Lenihan’s study often discuss is ‘bearlachas’, Irish words that are influenced
by English, or what are often referred to as Anglicisms. In the following com-
ment, a translator reveals the ideology of linguistic purism while discussing
the term ‘Anglicism’:
‘béarlachas’ (the modern translation of which is ‘Anglicism’, while ‘bastardisation’

(the process of corruption or evolution of the meaning of linguistic terms) would
be more accurate.
(cited in Lenihan 2011: 58)
Such talk about translations, as Lenihan argues, illustrates how new

web spaces provide the affordances for people to take up possibilities for
translingual practices; in addition, metadiscourses about multiple linguistic
resources also reveal multilingual web users’ attitudes towards their own and
others’ language choice practices for online participation.
Self-deprecating metalanguage
Globalization of the internet has enabled multicultural and multilingual
interaction to take place among users from around the world. A specific type
of metalinguistic discourse that seems to be quite pervasive in these multi-
lingual encounters is what we call self-deprecating metalanguage, i.e. utter-
ances where a person downplays their own linguistic abilities. Alongside other
languages, English is often at the centre of these self-deprecating comments
online. The globalization of internet participants has much to do with this
trend. This leads to ordinary web users’ strong beliefs about English being the
main lingua franca of the web. In the face of global audiences, web users who
do not use English as their primary language may either choose to write in a
language that marks their local identity or use English to speak to a wider
unknown audience, thus participating as a global netizen. Knowledge of
English is still seen as an essential linguistic commodity with high communi-
cative value on the web. In Bourdieu’s term, being fluent in English is a form
of cultural capital. A type of metalinguistic discourse that is strongly repre-
sented online is self-deprecating comments about one’s knowledge of English.
Returning to Black’s case study of a fan-fiction writer, the participant
Nanako often plays down her own English writing skills when seeking
help from others. In her opening and closing author’s notes, she writes:
‘Important note: English is my second language and I only spoken it for
2.5 years. So please excuse my grammar and spelling mistakes.’ She refers to
her ‘bad writing. . .’ and states ‘I am not a good writer. . .’. Identifying herself
as weak in English, Nanako in fact creates a supportive environment for her
fan-fiction writing where she can elicit constructive feedback from other
writers.
As an example of non-English self-deprecating comments on the web, in
their study of YouTube comments, Chun and Walters (2011) also note such
self-deprecating comments in commenters’ feedback on an Asian comedian’s
Arabic-English bilingual performance in Dubai. Here is a short comment
thread where three commenters praise the comedian, Chung, a non-Arab,
for his fluent Arabic in the videos. At the same time they play down their
own native Arabic competence:
xPsYcHoSys: SPEAKS BETTER ARABIC THAN ME!!!!!

for those of you who dont speak arabic, trust me hes perfectly
fluent, no accent either
xx3xotiicxx: HOLYYY SHITTTTTT. i was not expectin that at ALL he speaks
better than my parents :|
L45: He speaks better arabic than me!
All three comments explicitly compare Chung’s Arabic language skills to

the commenters’ own native knowledge of the language. While the com-
parative statements all seem to praise Chung and position him as a ‘better’
speaker of Arabic, the commenters, who are all likely to be Arabic speakers,
also take on a native speaker’s voice. As Chun and Walters argue, they assert
authority and authenticity of a native Arabic speaker that Chung lacks as an
outsider. These comments may also be taken as acts of exclusion, marking
Chung’s otherness as a non-Arab.
As we can observe from the above examples, appearing modest to others
and claiming limited knowledge of language can indeed serve multiple social
functions. What is interesting here is that making self-deprecating comments
is more than just a random choice of utterances. They also become important
self-positioning acts where people articulate their language ideologies, create
supportive environments, and exercise authority. In our study of multilingual
practices on Flickr, such discourses are extremely prevalent. In the following,
we provide a detailed analysis of how people talk about English on Flickr
and what this salient practice means to social participation online.
‘MY ENGLISH IS SO POOR’: SELF-DEPRECATING

METALINGUISTIC DISCOURSE ON FLICKR
Although the original aim of our study of Flickr was to observe and describe
multilingual activities, the participants often revealed their attitudes towards
language in various writing spaces and in the interview, often without

prompting. These metalinguistic comments about language, collected from
people’s self-generated content on Flickr and follow-up email interviews, were
often centred around their perceived function of English and their knowledge
of the language in relation to their online participation. While we have
already acknowledged extensive multilingual practices online in Chapter 4,
some of our participants expressed in the interviews how they perceived
English as the ‘universal’ language on Flickr (Lee and Barton 2009). As our
research progressed and as we observed a wider range of users, we noted that
the underlying importance of English is implicitly expressed by way of some
participants’ self-evaluations of their English proficiency level on their Flickr
profile page, photo captions, and comments. This is shown in the following
examples by two users from France and Germany respectively:
Sorry to write in French but my English is too poor to express my feelings

(leyeti, French)
My English is limited and not so well as it should be :(

(Batikart, German)
This initial observation led us to carry out a more detailed case study of
these comments. In the next two sections of this chapter, we present a study
to explore the ways in which discourses about English are constructed on
Flickr. We first show some of the common ways in which people who do not
use English as their primary language talk about their knowledge of English
on Flickr. We then offer explanations for these acts of self-evaluation of lan-
guage by drawing upon interview data. In particular, we want to understand
how people’s perception of their linguistic competence shapes their level of
participation and particularly, socialization on Flickr, where photography
and image sharing are central.
To understand how Flickr participants construct evaluative comments
about their English, a textual database of over 1,600 examples with explicit
remarks about one’s knowledge and competence in English was first collected
from various writing spaces on Flickr, including descriptions, comments, tags,
and user profiles. We also focused on utterances where people talk about
English. This is because while some Flickr users express their opinions about
other languages that they know, such as ‘my Japanese is limited’ ([HANDverk]),
our initial observation suggested that English is more frequently mentioned
and evaluated than other languages on the site. We started our data collection
through looking up five expressions that are commonly used by Flickr
members to evaluate their own knowledge of English, using the advanced
search function on Google. These search phrases are:
• ‘My English is__’ (e.g. ‘My English is poor.’)

• ‘I don’t know English__’ (e.g. ‘I’m from brazil, and i don’t know english
very well..lol.’)
• ‘I don’t speak English __’ (e.g. ‘i don’t speak english, i’m speak french.’)
• ‘I don’t understand English __’ (e.g. ‘I’m sorry I don’t understand English
well.’)
• ‘English is not my __’ (e.g. ‘English is not my first language.’)
An additional search phrase, ‘Your English is’, was also included in order
to elicit other people’s response to such self-evaluations.
These six search phrases derived initially from our ongoing active parti-
cipation in Flickr, as well as our observation from the data in the broader
study of multilingual practices on Flickr. We then carried out a basic
meaning-based content analysis of the attitudes towards one’s own English
language proficiency and the stance taken in constructing such discourses,
thus allowing us to identify key types of self-evaluation discourse. The imme-
diate linguistic context of these expressions, that is, what the participant said
before and after the sentence collected, as well as other texts appearing on
their photo pages, were also analysed when necessary. The self-evaluative
comments of English collected were first categorized into seven basic types,
primarily according to their meaning.
Perceived knowledge of English

These expressions convey writers’ affective stance towards their own English
with some typical affective adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘terrible’, ‘poor’.
Almost all of the expressions aim to play down the writer’s linguistic
competence:
My English is poor/terrible /horrible

My weakest trait is my english ability. . .
Apologetic and forgiveness seeking

In this type, the user asks their target reader to forgive the possible
grammatical and spelling errors in their English captions or comments. Some
even apologize for not speaking English as their first language:
my english is not perfect, so excuse my grammar and occasional mistakes in text :)

(JV image, Czech)
Well, i’m sorry, my english is so shitty ugh because i’m french so sorry.
(reddot, French)
Native speaker norm as a model of ‘good’ English

Self-deprecating comments of this type are often juxtaposed with native
speaker norms. Within the corpus, many comments made explicit reference
to native speaker English, some of which reveal negative attitudes towards
‘not being a native English speaker’ or that they are more likely to make
mistakes in English as it is not their primary language:
Sorry for the grammar mistakes, english is not my mother language.

(Camilo, Spanish)
pity that english is not my mother language.. otherwise i’d be glad to give my point
of view about the question.
(wesley)
External resources
While admitting their limited knowledge of English, some Flickr members
explained what was supporting their English writing on Flickr. Some of the
sentences collected refer to dictionaries, online translators such as Google
Translate, and other people in their lives who can act as literacy brokers in
their participation in Flickr:
My English is Google translator . . . Mi español es el traductor de Google . . .. Mon

français est traducteur de Google . . .
(Angelo, Italian)
I don’t understand english but I have got translation through this website, this relpy
wrote by my daughter, you can type English
(pklam, Chinese)
Self-improvement
Although the previous types of metadiscourse seem to represent a rather
negative self-image to others, some sentences in the data also express the
writer’s commitment to learning English and to self-improvement on Flickr:
I’m really glad I found this site cause apart from sharing my pics I get to practice
my English a bit.
(Gabriel, Polish)
my English is poor. Therefore I want to make friends with foreigner, so that I can
improve my oral English skill.
(Kaki Wong, Chinese)
Self-deprecating humour
A small number of the sentences collected also talk about one’s own English
in a light-hearted, playful and humorous manner:
i don’t speak english. . .really. . .all i know how to say is. . .i don’t speak english.
(Pam)
My English is not perfect, so be kind if you’re the Shakespeare’s kind of person or

try to write like this in Spanish.
(Kris001, Spanish)
Photography as the lingua franca

To some Flickr members, language is secondary to photography on Flickr.
Thus, a small number of sentences in the corpus reflect people’s awareness
of the central role of photography on Flickr:
I don’t understand english very well, but this photo impress me. Sometimes the
image is enough.
(Jean, Italian)
And here is an example used earlier, in Chapter 5:
My English is so . . .. . .poor ! so, I take photos. . .

! (sigh. . .my Chinese isn’t good either!)
(I should better take photos.)
(Tiong, Chinese)
Returning to the concept of stance-taking, this initial content analysis of

the corpus clearly reveals the participants’ stance towards the English they
use on Flickr and their perceived affordances of English in their Flickr
participation, that is, what sorts of action possibilities that English can offer
when writing online. First, the structure of these statements conforms to the
two most common types of stance described in Chapter 5, epistemic and
affective stances. By expressing their lack of knowledge through cognitive
verbs (e.g. ‘I don’t know English’), and by expressing feelings about their
English using common adjectives of evaluation (e.g. ‘My English is bad’), the
participants position themselves as not-so-proficient English users. In
addition, these types of stance are expressed through similar linguistic struc-
ture, with extensive use of first-person singular pronouns ‘I’ and ‘my’, and
words that denote possession such as ‘my own English’, thus claiming
ownership of such ‘poor’ English.
Why then is it important for the Flickr users to tell others how much
English they know or don’t know? While it was not our intention to evaluate
a particular participant’s proficiency level of English, what is striking is that
in many instances the participant’s English written on Flickr is indeed highly
communicative, despite their negative self-evaluations. This is shown in many
of the examples above. Another important observation about these utterances
is that they are not simply statements about one’s knowledge of English. The
concerns about English grammar and spelling expressed in the statements
are often related to their participation in Flickr, such as how knowledge of
English would affect their writing of captions and descriptions, or how
participation in Flickr can indeed help improve their English and so on.
To further understand the motivations behind these self-deprecating

comments and how they might affect level of participation in Flickr, we
interviewed 10 participants via Flickr’s private email system. When asked
why they wanted to talk about their English knowledge on Flickr, views from
the interviewees were quite divided. A number of them explained it in terms
of their worries of possible communication breakdown if their readers did
not understand their English, such as:
I scare I write something funny mistakes or peoples don’t understood me.

(digikid, Finnish)
By the same token, some would take into consideration the self-image that
they might project to their target audience if they did not use ‘correct’
English. Thus, admitting to a low level of English, some expect others to
accept the errors in their English. This is illustrated by Amilia’s explanation
as follows:
I think by telling people that my English is not good, so they can accept that; ‘Oh,
his English isn’t good enough, that’s why there is some grammar error in his
photo’s description/title.’ when there is a grammar error in my photo’s description
or titles.
(Amilia, Malaysian)
A similar idea is reinforced by Celia, who pointed out that she could not
tolerate errors in her native language:
Warning people not to know English, because in Portuguese bother me much

spelling mistakes and grammatical serious!
(Celia, Portuguese)
Both Amilia and Celia reinforce what Leech (1983) referred to as the
Modesty Maxim (which was later renamed just Modesty by Leech 2005),
i.e. minimizing praise of oneself or maximizing dispraise of oneself in order
to achieve certain illocutionary goals. To these Flickr participants, degrading
their English proficiency allows them to create a friendly and supportive
social space.
To some users, by contrast, telling others how much English they know
or do not know is an expression of identity, that English knowledge is part
of who they are and who they are to others on Flickr, as Mika explains:
Well, I don’t think it’s so important to tell people how my english is. [. . .] my poor
english level is a part of me. So I thought it was right to notice this point.
(Mika, French)
These interview excerpts show that self-deprecations of ones’ English

skills is more than simply an act of devaluing oneself or just being modest.
As pointed out in Chapter 5, the structure of a stance utterance does not

necessarily suggest its pragmatic function. As shown in this chapter, telling
others how little English they know does allow these Flickr participants to
achieve various meaningful purposes on Flickr. A range of reasons were
given by the interview participants. From the limited set of interview data
collected, it is at least known that talking about English skills allows parti-
cipants to build rapport, to ensure mutual intelligibility, and to negotiate
identity in the Flickr world. It is also clear that the very act of talking about
one’s own language skills is an act of opening themselves to the global Flickr
world, an act of positioning themselves as active participants.
METADISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF A SUPPORTIVE SOCIAL

SPACE
Bringing the examples and analysis of discourses about English in this
chapter together, it can be seen that these seemingly negative comments
about English abilities are often taken by participants quite positively, and
even playfully, as demonstrated earlier under the category ‘self-deprecating
humour’ in the content analysis. For one thing, switching to a different lan-
guage from their native language is certainly an indication of people’s readi-
ness to communicate. Users with limited knowledge of English constantly
express keen interest in participating in the internet as global participants
who are willing to write in a language that may have little or even no use for
them elsewhere in their offline lives.
The strong presence of self-deprecating comments about one’s knowledge
of English is also evidence of people’s strong desire to participate as a
competent member on Flickr. Competence broadly refers to expert skills and
knowledge one needs in order to become a legitimate member in a given
community (Lave and Wenger 1991; see also Chapter 3). To many Flickr
users, being competent in English is indeed an important form of cultural
capital in their participation. However, at the same time, they are aware that
linguistic competence can be constantly negotiated. This is often achieved
through the act of self-evaluation such as the data presented in this chapter.
Using concepts in stance-taking again, evaluation is an act of alignment and
positioning in discourse (Du Bois 2007). By repositioning themselves as not-
so-competent English users through self-deprecating comments such as ‘My
English is so poor’, people are at the same time negotiating their identity such
that they will be accepted by others as legitimate participants on Flickr. And
these negative self-evaluations are a central discourse type for negotiating
such membership.
In addition to negotiating membership, a great deal of social networking
is also initiated by explicitly declaring one’s own English abilities. An exam-
ple to illustrate this is a photo page that belongs to CB, a German speaker,
displaying a picture of a Japanese style bento lunch that she had made.
Underneath the photo, CB wrote her photo title and description in English:
Bentolunch for tomorrow (Friday)

Today my new bentobox arrived! It’s a pretty bentobox with a little bunny on the top.
Of course I had to use it, so I prepared my bento for tomorrow quickly ^.^
(Sorry, I know my English is so so bad! I definitly have to learn it better .. T.T
This photo description, though written in quite ‘proper’ English, contains

what we have called ‘apologetic’ evaluation, written in parentheses: ‘Sorry,
I know my English is so so bad!’. This, however, brings CB a great deal of
encouraging and supportive comments from other Flickr users, who even
praise her English. Here are some comments posted below the photo caption:
pixi125: Pretty bento. And I think your English is good!

Deebibi: Trust me, your English is a lot better than the English of many native
speakers. ^_~
CB: thank you so much, pixi125.. I learned english for 5 years at school, but I
think it isn’t good enough for that ><’ Hehe, nice to meet you, Deebibi!!
Your comment is so nice ^.^ [. . .]
All of the comments, including the one written by CB herself, point to

CB’s remark about her English being ‘so so bad’, instead of the actual
content of the image, or the description of the bento lunch underneath. In
response to such encouraging comments, CB, while expressing her gratitude,
stresses again that her English ‘isn’t good enough.’ What seems to be a
traditional compliment-giving and compliment response sequence here
serves to build solidarity between CB and her Flickr friends. Another
relevant point about this comment thread is the way the commenters
respond to CB’s self-evaluation of her English. While praising CB’s English,
these commenters indeed position themselves as more ‘skilled’ users of
English, which is why they were able to assess CB’s English as ‘better than
native speakers’. CB, in this situation, however, does not have this authority
to evaluate their English. This interesting power relation echoes Chun and
Walters’s (2011) analysis of Arabic speakers’ comments on the comedian
Chung’s native-sounding Arabic on YouTube, as discussed earlier in the
chapter.
Apart from the standard apologetic type of discourse about her own
English, CB also expresses commitment to learning English. She says in the
photo description: ‘I definitly [sic] have to learn it better .. T.T (crying
emoticon)’. Her commitment to self-improvement allows her to also reposi-
tion herself as an active language learner on Flickr with a positive attitude.
It seems that her perceived poor English is actually one of the strongest
motivations behind her participation in Flickr. This kind of self-improvement
and learning discourse is indeed very prominent in our Flickr data, where
users often juxtapose their ‘poor English’ with their commitment to learning
better English through active participation in Flickr.
LINGUISTIC REFLEXIVITY AS POWERFUL DIGITAL DISCOURSE

Reflexivity is a key property of human language. Language users are able to
use language to reflect on language and its use in their everyday lives.
Metalanguage is a salient dimension of language and talking about language
has become a common practice in our increasingly textually mediated social
world. New media have also provided new opportunities and spaces for
social actors to reflect upon language-related issues, especially in the form of
written language. The examples and findings presented in this chapter have
clearly shown that web participants often talk about language and the
learning of it; people evaluate their own and others’ knowledge of language;
people are motivated language learners; and people regularly reflect upon
their folk linguistic theories. They do not need to be expert users of a certain
language to assess it and how it should or should not be used.
Self-deprecating metalinguistic discourse is found to be particularly
pervasive in Web 2.0 spaces, as shown in many of our examples. We have
discussed a particular example of how people talk about English on Flickr
to further illustrate this. The seemingly negative evaluations about one’s own
English are not simply a result of being modest or self-devaluing; explicitly
acknowledging one’s limited knowledge of English is indeed a powerful
discourse on Flickr as it serves a wide range of social functions, such as social
networking and widening participation. The chapter also reveals the ways
in which new media sites such as Flickr provide the affordances and writing
spaces that enable users to create a collaborative, supportive environment to
express their vernacular theories of language through self-generated content.
This chapter also serves to bring together the themes presented in previous
chapters about multilingual practices, identity construction and stance-
taking. For the particular group of participants in our study, being able to
reflect on their language abilities and to show awareness of their language
choice is a way of expressing willingness to engage in the increasingly multi-
cultural and multilingual online world. In particular, self-deprecating meta-
linguistic comments allow users to assert their specific stances or positions
towards language in relation to their online participation. In so doing, they
are also doing some identity work – they portray themselves as particular
kinds of language users, thus asserting who they are to others.
More broadly, metalinguistic discourses are always situated practices,
a central notion that informs our study of language online. For one thing,
these comments are always located on a web page which is in itself part of
a complex nexus of other web pages containing other metadiscourses about
languages, which in turn are also situated in broader social practices and
ideologies, such as public or mass media representation of language in
society. As we have seen, participating in metalinguistic discourses also
allows web users to co-construct an environment that supports informal,
self-directed, and collaborative learning. This also sets the scene for the next
chapter about discourses of learning online.
9
E V E R Y D AY L E A R N I N G O N L I N E
• Theories of adult learning

• 365, a deliberate act of learning
• How people learn online
• Language learning in supportive networked spaces
Language and learning are woven into each other in many ways and most
learning involves using and extending language. Language provides a
powerful medium for learning and for being reflexive. People then have some
control over their learning: they articulate their learning, and language
provides the discourses, the strategies and theories they operate from. As we
have already shown in Chapter 8, in global online spaces such as Flickr,
participants often reflect on the learning opportunities they are able to take
up, including learning about language. One thing that they are learning is
how to use those forms of language appropriately, providing ways to interact
with a wider range of people from all parts of the world. New social media
have also provided valuable spaces for informal language learning, which we
will cover later in this chapter. Within the languages people already know,
they are expanding their repertoires and learning new genres and styles. This
is true whether the aim is learning to play the guitar, learning to take good
photos, learning to be a supportive friend, or learning English. Language
can be the aim of learning; it can be a resource for learning, and it can be
EVERYDAY LEARNING ONLINE 125
both. Whatever they are learning, people are participating in new language
practices.
This chapter shows how online spaces are important sites of learning of
all sorts, especially languages. The chapter examines how online spaces
change the ways in which people learn and how these spaces are important
in how they support learning. It argues that, with its forms of support and
its spaces for reflexivity, the internet can be a particularly good place for
learning. The chapter turns first to theories of learning more generally and
provides a brief overview of theories relevant to how adults learn in their
everyday lives. It then uses examples from the Flickr data, as well as
Facebook and IM, to show how key aspects of these theories apply to
language online. The chapter points to the role of other people and networks
for learning. It then links up with a set of issues around reflexivity, identity
and discourses of learning that have been introduced in earlier chapters. The
chapter concludes with a focus on language learning showing how informal
language learning takes place in various online spaces.
THEORIES OF ADULT LEARNING

So far in this book we have described and worked within a social practice
view of language to explore language online. Here we complement that with
a social practice view of learning. This approach to language and literacy
practices has identified issues such as the importance of interactions with
others, of specific forms of participation in different sorts of groups, and of
reflexivity. These are key in understanding how language is used. The
starting point for this investigation of learning is people in their everyday
lives and it is not the more usual starting point of children in schools and
other educational settings, where participation is compulsory and learning
is relatively controlled by teachers. As explained earlier, understanding
people’s practices is a prerequisite for examining learning, and learning in
everyday contexts is a basis for learning in formal educational settings. In
this way, there are educational implications of everyday uses of social media
and these are pursued in Chapter 11. While existing research on digital
literacies has identified a wide range of learning activities and opportunities
in online spaces, a language focus is often missing.
To provide a brief overview of a social practice view of learning, this
approach views learning as consisting of active participation in social prac-
tices. People are active participants in their learning. They have their own
individual aims located within a cultural environment and their learning is
purposeful and self-directed. They have their own motivations and make
their own meanings and connections to their existing knowledge. People take
on different roles and identities within practices and changing the way that
they participate in a particular practice can be a form of learning. People are
often part of networks of support and communities of practice that support
their learning. This approach emphasizes the central role of social interaction
126 EVERYDAY LEARNING ONLINE
and mediational tools, and the importance of appropriate tools as structur-

ing learning environments and supporting learning. Learning is going on all
the time, and is often implicit and unnoticed. Nevertheless, people can and
do articulate things about their learning and this reflexivity can aid and guide
learning. This summary has been adapted from Tusting and Barton (2006),
which provides a longer integrated overview of theories of how adults learn.
A socio-cultural view of learning where practices are central has been most
clearly articulated in the work of Jean Lave on situated learning (Lave 1988)
together with Etienne Wenger’s work (1998) elaborating ideas of learning
within communities of practice. This work stresses the importance of partici-
pation and changing forms of participation. These approaches were devel-
oped in offline contexts and it is worth examining the extent to which they
apply to Web 2.0 activity.
365, A DELIBERATE ACT OF LEARNING

Many of the examples used so far have been taken from the study of multi-
lingualism on Flickr. In this chapter, a new set of Flickr data is being intro-
duced. In the multilingual data, one person was participating in an activity
of taking a photo a day for a year. This is referred to as ‘365’ in Flickr
discussions, and he belonged to a Flickr group devoted to this. It turned out
to be a very common activity that was worth studying in its own right in
more detail. 365 is an activity where someone undertakes to take a photo a
day for a year and put each one up on Flickr. There are many groups devoted
to 365 activities. In some of them the photo can be on any topic; others have
specific topics, such as a group where the photos have to be self-portraits.
Many Flickr members undertake 365 projects of their own but do not add
their photos to group sites. This is a particular photographic practice that
was started on Flickr and has spread to other sites, such as Tumblr. It is
dependent on a chain of new technologies available for the easy production
and circulation of images. This practice was not really feasible in earlier print
photography where it would have been expensive and there would have been
a time lag between taking the photo and seeing the results. When the 365
groups were set up there was not any particular expectation of feedback or
support from others. Nevertheless, it has become a very social activity and,
as we will see, there can also be a great deal of self-evaluation in these
projects.
Looking across the Flickr sites of photographers who were undertaking a
365 project, it was soon clear that learning was frequently mentioned and
so a detailed examination of 365 sites was carried out. Initially, more than
200 sites where people have undertaken a photo a day projects were
identified by searching for ‘365’. From these, 50 sites where people talked
about their learning were examined in more detail, again using content
analysis to identify key themes. The data from these sites will be referred to
as the ‘365 data’ and will be included alongside discussions of learning in the
multilingual data. Overall the data consists of analysis of the sites including
what people say about learning there, together with online interviews with
the multilingual Flickr users. More detailed analysis of this data appears in
Barton (2012).
Going back to the multilingualism study, the first point to emphasize is
that the people studied were not asked about learning: it was not mentioned
in the questions, nor in the interview protocols. They were asked about
language choice and multilingual practices. Nevertheless, we found that
people frequently mentioned their learning and they spontaneously reflected
on how they learned. We had also noticed from further analysis of their
Flickr sites, including their profiles, that there were many references to
learning. People were drawing on their multilingual resources, developing
them and learning to deploy them in new ways. These observations provide
the starting point for this examination of learning on Flickr.
Turning to what people were learning, there are different sorts of learning
going on side by side in any situation. The Flickr members were learning
about a range of topics in a general way and they were learning how to
participate in various activities in specific practical ways. People reported
they were learning about Flickr. This includes learning about the affordances
of the different writing spaces. Initially they have to learn how to use titles
and descriptions, tags, commenting and profiles as new spaces. They do this
partly through a form of intertextual learning (Lee 2009), drawing on
existing practices elsewhere and applying them to new contexts. A simple
example of this is that some Flickr users had come across tagging on other
sites before they started using Flickr and they drew upon this earlier
experience.
At the same time they were learning about photography more generally
and that was often their stated aim. More broadly people reported that they
were learning about themselves and their lives. They often made comments
about this broader perspective. This was sometimes partway through the
project or at the end they often looked back and summarized what they had
got out of taking a photo a day for a year, as explained by Jumx:
I’m grateful to the 365 project for the many things it has taught me – how to get in
front of the camera, for one! . . .I’ve learned more about portrait photography,
lighting, creative use of timers, about myself – my body, my face, my life. Looking
back, it’s a wonderful chronicle of a year.
(Jumx)
These purposes are learned informally as people take up new affordances

of Flickr and as they participate actively on the site. To some of the parti-
cipants, Flickr is a site for learning about photography. To many others,
participating in Flickr is a process of discovering new purposes for using
Flickr over time. Whether the learning was deliberate or unconscious, parti-
cipating in Flickr not only provides opportunities for people to learn how to
do things on Flickr, it also changes people’s writing practices over time as their
perceived purposes of Flickr change, a topic which will be discussed later.
HOW PEOPLE LEARN ONLINE

Turning from what people learn online to how people learn online, we can
make several points which are important for any learning: people learn by
participation in practices; this involves joining with other people; people
reflect upon their online participation; and learning involves taking on new
identities.
People learn by participating in practices

Learning can be seen as participation: how people participate in a broader
range of practices and the ways in which they change the way they parti-
cipate. This is active participation in practices and changing forms of engage-
ment. One such change that Lave and Wenger (1991) identified is moving
from being on the edge to being central within the practice. They refer to this
as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. When applied to online activities, this
validates the act of initially observing what other people are doing and
lurking as reasonable ways of learning to participate in new activities. In our
research, learning by doing can be clearly seen in university students’
participation in IM. None of the participants in that study reported that they
had ever consulted any documents (such as official websites, online tutorials,
the ‘help’ option in the chat programmes, or guide books) before using IM.
When asked how they learnt to use it, many did not see using IM as involving
any formal learning:
I don’t need to learn it. . .I just observe

(Erika)
No I just picked it up!

(JC)
I don’t need to learn anything. . .it’s very easy to use!

(Lo)
These comments do not suggest that no learning took place at all. Rather,
these views reveal that students’ learning-related activities in IM often took
place unnoticed and incidentally through participation in informal and
routine activities in everyday life. Some students learnt about how to use IM
through informal conversations with friends and family. Some acquired
knowledge of linguistic resources through everyday experience of using
texts. Other cases of learning took place during the actual IM sessions, such
as observing how their chat partners use a particular emoticon.
When it comes to more recent Web 2.0 activity, a key feature is that
content is user-generated so that learning is embedded in the process of using
the internet. In this way the distinction between learning and use begins to
break down. As noted earlier, many online participants have had years of
experience with different sorts of online communication spaces. Many of

their practices in newer sites are indeed carried over from what they have
learned in older or existing media. We have noticed, for example, that people
learn to write status updates on Facebook not only by participating in
Facebook itself, but also by their concurrent participation in IM. To some,
status updates on Facebook first reminded them of ‘mood messages’ on IM,
the short messages (usually one-liners) that appear on one’s contact list to
update friends about current mood or what one is up to. In online spaces,
such intertextual learning is a crucial form of learning by participation.
On Flickr, people learn all the time and everywhere. In this way what is
happening in Web 2.0 spaces fits well with the earlier work on how people
learn. As mentioned earlier, although the multilingual study reported in
Chapter 4 was not about learning, the Flickr participants nevertheless often
referred to learning when talking about their Flickr activities. Like our
observations of learning on IM, the Flickr participants said they just picked
up the mechanics of using Flickr without any conscious effort. However,
elsewhere they refer to learning about other aspects of life. Some people made
explicit references to how they learned, such as deliberately searching for
advice about specific problems. They referred to learning more indirectly and
explained how others shared their knowledge, referring to other people as
teachers or role models. Flickr was seen as a supportive space. Overall people
were using Flickr for many purposes and using it in many everyday practices
and they took up affordances and opportunities for learning of all sorts.
People draw on others as resources for learning

In the techno-biographies discussed in Chapter 6, we saw that many online
participants started their internet experience by learning from their ‘tech-
nology mentors’ such as their parents and school friends. These people not
only introduced them to the world of the internet, but also influenced their
language choice online in various ways. Similarly, Flickr users are constantly
linked in to other users in and beyond the photo-sharing site. They refer to
other people when talking about their learning experiences. People talk
about experimenting, observing others and taking advice from them. This
mixture of activities and the role of others is summarized in the words of
another Flickr member, written in his profile in French and repeated in
English. He summarizes the different ways he learns:
I began photography dragged to this passion by a friend. Since then, I love the
challenge to try to improve my skills and create beautiful images. I didn’t have any
specific training, so I had to experiment with different techniques by observing
others work and following the advices of my flickr’s friends.
(Guianx)
In Chapter 3 we referred to people supporting each other by acting as

mediators, mentors and brokers. The examples provided so far of people
talking about their activities within Flickr have emphasized the role of others
in these ways. One space on Flickr where such networking takes place is
commenting, and users have developed a culture of giving positive and
encouraging feedback on each other’s photos. Positive comments and feed-
back from others provide a friendly, supportive, and relatively safe environ-
ment for informal learning to take place (see also Davies and Merchant
2009; Black 2009). People also talked of the networks of support which they
are located in and which they draw upon and the importance of reciprocity.
Often they praised Flickr as supporting their learning:
Flickr has been such a great place to learn and teach, to have a friend or be a friend
. . .. to press myself for more or to just seek relief from my busy day.
(Krix)
This comment also shows the importance of the software itself and people
often discussed and compared different software. Flickr provides a frame-
work of support for learning by the way it is structured. This ‘scaffolding’
is particularly important when considering online activity. Flickr as a plat-
form can be seen as a sponsor of certain sorts of practices in that it has been
deliberately and consciously designed and it is constantly redesigned.
Designers want their sites to be easy to use and for people to progress
through them in a straightforward way. Online sites are therefore designed
to be engaging, and even to be enjoyable.
When discussing this support, it is important not just to identify reading
and writing as something which individuals do within networks. Rather,
groups of various sorts may use reading and writing in different ways. It is
much broader than this and Deborah Brandt (1998, 2001) talks of the role
of individuals and institutions acting as ‘sponsors’ of literacy practices and
as supporters and facilitators for people. The idea of sponsors makes it clear
that support comes from both individuals and institutions. These sponsors
support specific views and provide a framing to act within. Taken together
these ideas can help show how people act within the possibilities avail-
able to them online, and contribute to that framing. People identify with
particular online resources, and in the example here they identify strongly
with Flickr and also with others involved in the 365 activity. Participation in
365 can best be seen as participation in an affinity group, a transitory
grouping where people join together for a specific purpose, and they may
move in and out of such groupings (as discussed in Chapter 3).
These structural supports are complex in online sites. Some structures are
from the original makers, the owners (who, with the exception of Wikipedia,
are mainly private businesses aiming to make a profit from our use of their
products). Around Flickr and many Web 2.0 sites there are also individuals
who add tools for everyone to use, and who may or may not be motivated
by profit. So Flickr users themselves may use uploading tools, or other tools,
for instance to make collages or to edit their pictures, which are made by
fellow users. Users may also set up discussion spaces for others to use for
teaching and learning, such as the ‘Learn a New Language!’ group. These
can all be seen as sponsoring particular practices. The features of Web 2.0
are ideal for informal learning, given that it is interactive and collaborative,
that content is user-generated and that social support and networking are
central. On Flickr, learning happens everywhere. Having conflated learning
and use, we also accept that there are nexuses of learning, particular places
where learning is more likely. The 365 groups and the Flickr blog, for
instance, can be seen as particular nexuses of learning. In addition, Flickr
can be used as a deliberate educational resource, as we show in Chapter 11.
Reflexivity supports learning

There are spaces for extensive reflection on Flickr and other sites, where a
culture of supportive commenting has grown up. Although it is not the
primary or the stated purpose of such sites, part of the way in which Flickr
and the web in general are providing learning spaces is in the particular
spaces where people can self-reflect and talk about themselves, their lives,
their hopes and, as we have seen, their learning. Just as educational spaces
can provide a safe environment for exploration, the people studied here saw
Flickr as a safe environment for learning where they had considerable con-
trol and where deliberate acts of learning were supported. These spaces can
become transformative ones.
The combination of written language and images is powerful for
reflexivity. During the year when people were carrying out 365 they might
comment on what they learned from specific photos. In this way, reflexive
learning on Flickr is a multimodal act. One man often reported what he had
learned from each day’s photograph, so for example writing one day:
Maybe not the most interesting shot for many of you, but for me it’s important to
not only use the images that I think look the best, but also the ones that I have learnt
something through. This whole project has been about learning and the biggest
thing I have learned so far is how important light is – in many ways it is the most
complex, but valuable tool a photographer has.
(Andx)
He then made similar reflections on other days. Here there was constant
learning by him, through reflecting on his self-generated content. In this way,
people explore new affordances and create the possibilities for learning.
Reflexivity, that is self-reflection which leads to action, is central to
theories of how adults learn. The idea is that people take space and time
to reflect on their experiences and it is through such reflection that they
turn their experiences into learning. People can ‘learn about learning’ and
become ‘autonomous learners’ (Benson 2004) in the sense that they are not
dependent on formal teachers. While much learning may be incidental and
unplanned, learning based on reflexivity can be powerful. Reflection is
crucial for transformative learning: that is, certain activities, such as
encountering problems, can lead to reflection, enabling people to recognize

their experiences and see them in new ways, potentially transforming the
personal and the social. This links up with particular approaches to educa-
tion: transformative learning is an integral part of a social practice pedagogy
(Barton et al. 2007) and is an essential step in a multiliteracies peda-
gogy (Cope and Kalantzis 2000: 30–36).
Elsewhere, research on learning in adults’ lives has identified the impor-
tance of ‘imagined futures’ as well as pointing to the significance of people’s
life histories and how these shape current practices and identities (Barton et
al. 2007). People were seen to make choices about their actions based on a
combination of the possible options they perceived in their current circum-
stances, and the futures they desired or imagined to be possible for them-
selves. This orientation to the future is an important aspect of reflexivity.
Crucially, these imagined futures can change over time – at first people may
set out to use Flickr to share their photos with friends and they later join
other groups and meet new people when they see the widening possibilities.
This is not only relevant for understanding the 365 Flickr activities, but is
also true to much of people’s online activity, as shown in people’s techno-
biographies where they talked about changes in practices throughout their
technology histories.
What is interesting in terms of learning is that someone’s 365 project
is often a consciously reflective one. These are deliberate acts of learning.
Sometimes people comment on what they are doing as they go along,
expressing their hopes at the beginning of the project, then reflecting as they
progress with it, and looking back – and forward – when they have finished,
or when they give up part way through. Others only reflect on the project
when they have finished it. In many cases this involves commenting specifi-
cally on their learning from their participation in the 365 project.
In the longest entry in the photo-a-day data, at the end of her 365 project
a woman from UAE listed ‘99 things I learnt from my 365 days project’. In
the list she is highly reflexive, in the sense of thinking about and making
sense of what she has done and is doing. To give an example of the list:
1- I realized how much I adore surreal.

2- never give up, this project taught me how to handle and stick on my decisions !
3- concepts first, perspective second, techniques third.
4- I learnt how to draw/ create my own line in photography.
5- copying myself or even other people works is boring !
[. . .]
96- I’m in love with deep or complicated photos who made me think twice.
97- conceptual type is my thing !
98- offer the photo what it need so she can offer you great results.
99- and finally I learnt that good friends who share their true opinions are the ones
who love you.
(Anwx)
She combines comments about photography with observations about

herself. She then uses this reflexivity to talk about plans and possibilities for
the future. This Flickr page has had more than 1,250 views and more than
70 comments from other people complimenting her and discussing the list.
The discussions and comments, such as the ones above, all add up to a
particular discourse of learning: that learning is a good thing; it is a chal-
lenge; it is fun; it involves other people; and people can be both teachers and
learners in their everyday lives. Most work on discourses of learning has
been carried out within educational contexts, and has been concerned with
identifying dominant discourses which underlie different approaches to
teaching (as in Ivanič 2004). Rather than identify dominant discourses, here
we are more interested in people’s own ways of talking about learning, that
is, their vernacular discourses, as in the previous chapter. These will be
hybrid, shifting and context-dependent, and will draw on a range of sources
(including dominant discourses) but in the data here they sediment into a
characteristic way of talking about learning in this space.
There are of course many discourses drawn upon in Flickr, and they can
have contradictory characteristics; in Chapter 8 we drew attention to the
seemingly more negative discourse where people talk about their lack of
knowledge of languages, as in ‘my English is so poor’. There is also a limit
to the data discussed so far in that it is dealing with comments about learning
that were made in passing. However, when asked directly about how they
learned, as when they say that they ‘just picked it up’, learning becomes
naturalized and people may not easily reflect upon it.
Learning as taking on new identities

Learning is always about taking on new identities. For the multilingual
participants they were often conscious of how using Flickr changed them as
they came into contact with new people across the world. In some ways they
were developing new ways of becoming multilingual, as discussed in Chapter
5. Often the effects of participation were unexpected. This was apparent
with the people taking a photo a day. They sometimes saw participation as
life changing, as effectively becoming a different person. We have discussed
in Chapter 6 how participants’ relationship with technologies are shaped by
the different identities and roles they play in both their online and offline
lives (such as the example of how Tony shifted between his student and
teacher identities on two Facebook sites). In our Flickr data, people reported
how unexpected the changes to their lives were:
I thought it would be fun, challenging, and a great way to document a year in my

life. I had NO IDEA at all how much it would change my life.
(kelx)
Some people in the 365 project certainly saw themselves as becoming

different people as a result of this learning. The effects that the 365 project
had on people’s lives were often unexpected, and they expressed surprise at
its pervasive influence. This included surprise at the breadth of what they
were learning about, even a sense of wonder at their own learning. Some
people reported a life-changing year. Often they drew upon the metaphor of
learning as a journey, and this could also be realized as a literal journey:
When I started this project, I was engaged, living in Washington, D.C., had a great
job, and had no clue what the hell I was doing with a camera.
During these 365 Days, I have broken off an engagement, quit my job to travel and
move to San Francisco, met so many people that I consider my best friends, met a
guy that makes me happy, and found my voice through photography.
I never thought when I started this that my life would change so drastically. I never
thought that I would meet people through Flickr that I could lean on during one of
the roughest years of my life.
(Dotx)
LANGUAGE LEARNING IN SUPPORTIVE NETWORKED SPACES

Part of the learning that takes place online is learning to use language. This
is both learning about texts and learning about practices, effectively learning
the structures of language and also how to use language. James Gee refers to
this as ‘the internal (design) and external (behaviour) grammars’ (Gee 2005:
223). The former refers to the grammar of content while the latter is the
grammar of social practices and identities. In Gee’s study, where he examined
the everyday activity of video gaming, a great deal of the learning consists of
the participants learning to extend their language use.
In a large-scale study of the online practices of young people in the United
States carried out by Mimi Ito and colleagues, they explore the self-directed
learning which takes place on the internet and they show the ways in which
the online world lowers barriers to learning (Ito et al. 2010). The internet, a
space supporting friendship-driven networks, enables young people to learn
informally from one another in a stress-free environment. Much of the
informal learning in the study took place in what is called ‘peer-based inter-
action’ online, such as IM and Facebook. Such learning includes expanding
ways of using their first language.
Turning to second language learning, sites such as YouTube allow people
to post videos on language learning. Looking through what is offered for
learning English, this ranges from the old-fashioned and traditional uses,
through zany and parodying videos, to innovative Web 2.0 inspired ones.
Similarly, the range of videos for an English speaker to learn Chinese is
eclectic. Moving to more informal and often incidental learning, many other
global websites create environments where people may interact extensively
in more than one language and there is space for the informal learning of
second languages. The value of these spaces for language learning is
demonstrated in how people talk about languages online as well as in their
reflexive accounts in techno-biographic interviews. New media not only

offer new platforms for people to reflect upon and articulate their own
theories and ideas about learning, as shown throughout this chapter, but
these new spaces also give rise to new language learning opportunities, in the
context of learning a second or foreign language.
Eva Lam has carried out a series of case studies of the out-of-school
second language literacy practices of young Chinese immigrants to the
United States. Her work has been concerned with how these young people
represent and reconstruct their second language learner identities through
participating in online networks. In one study (Lam 2009), she examines in
detail how a Cantonese speaking immigrant, Kaiyee, develops her Cantonese
and English abilities through instant messaging with three groups – a local
network of Chinese immigrants where participants combine Mandarin and
Cantonese, a gaming network where African American Vernacular English
is used, and finally a transnational network where Kaiyee would mix
Mandarin with Shanghainese when chatting with other IM participants.
Through drawing upon multiple linguistic resources in these networked
groups, Kaiyee and the other young immigrants gradually developed their
new multilingual identities alongside their linguistic abilities in English and
Cantonese.
There have been many studies of gaming online and the learning that
takes place, such as Gee’s (2004) study mentioned earlier. A growing body
of work looks into the value of video gaming in second language learning.
Kuure (2011: 37), for example, shows how Finnish speakers take up
opportunities for English language learning offered by online gaming and
how these opportunities support social relationships and collaborative prob-
lem solving. In Kuure’s study, Oskari, a young Finnish man, was frequently
exposed to the English language when participating in online gaming and
practices around it. He interacted with international gamers in English; and
when he was unsure about his English use, he turned to his family who used
dictionaries to help him, or to work things out with his peers in chat rooms.
To give another example, a major study entitled ‘English in a Globalized
Finland’ interviewed Finnish people of all ages. It found that the internet is
a very prominent domain for reading and writing in English. The language
is used extensively online for a range of activities, the most common being
searching, reading newspapers, participating in discussion forums, ordering
goods and services, and playing games (Leppänen et al. 2011).
Another approach is to start out from sites supporting specific practices,
so that Benson and Chan (2011), for instance, have examined the practice
of subtitling of videos, or fansubbing, which is done largely by young people
and is a vernacular practice. This provides a lively space for learning and
Benson and Chan found extensive comments that discuss language. People
comment on and correct the translations and discuss language issues with
each other. In their study, Ito et al. (2010) also mention fansubbing as a space
for learning and how the activities young people participate in can include
cross-language collaborations, but they do not focus specifically on language

learning.
In another study, which is framed in a literacy studies approach, Benson
and Chik (2010) explore how university students in Hong Kong take up
English learning opportunities online. They specifically examine the learning
histories of two university students, CK and Sophie, and discuss how their
English improves over time through participating voluntarily in online
gaming and fanfiction.net respectively. Both students are actively involved in
written communication with native English speakers on these platforms.
Sophie, for example, is a keen writer of fan-fiction, texts created by fans of
popular novels and other original works, often posted on fan-fiction sites.
While posting her work on fanfiction.net, she constantly seeks advice from
other English speakers in the network by ‘asking and trying’, as she puts it.
As time goes on, her English knowledge enhances as her fan-fiction texts
improve. Such learning activities, as we can observe, are autonomous, self-
directed and collaborative. Also focusing on fanfiction.net, Black (2009)
offers a close text analysis of the feedback one Chinese teenager receives on
her 14-chapter fan-fiction text Love Letters. Through drawing upon
different discourse strategies, such as self-deprecatory comments on her
knowledge of English (see also Chapter 8), Black shows how the fan-fiction
authors and commenters co-design a supportive and encouraging English
learning environment.
Although these varied studies focus primarily on second language learning
of English online, they all point to the important fact that learning in new
networked spaces often takes place incidentally and is not controlled by any
authority. The learning activities identified are all situated. They often start
with a particular purpose, such as to revise and improve on a fan-fiction text;
they often involve support from others; they are constantly changing and
renegotiated. All these are in line with the social practice view of literacies
and learning that we take in this book. These language learning activities
also reveal how language learners perceive, take up, and rediscover the
affordances of online interaction spaces so as to reassert their cultural and
linguistic identities. More broadly, new networked spaces such as Flickr,
YouTube, and fan-fiction sites have all proved to be relatively safe and
supportive environments for learning of all sorts. There is a shift in the
relationship between everyday informal learning and the more formal
educational domains, and the spaces between them. The technology breaks
down borders between domains of activity. Accepting this shift and taking
account of it in designing pedagogies is a major challenge for all fields of
learning, including second language learning.
10
LANGUAGE ONLINE AS NEW
VERNACULAR PRACTICES
• Vernacular literacies
• Popular photography as a vernacular practice
• Pregnancy as online literacy practices: The case of Peggy
• Redefining the vernacular in a global context
The main research discussed in this book so far, about Facebook, Flickr and
Instant Messaging, has started out from these particular online platforms
and has gone back and forth between examining the language on the sites
and investigating people’s language and literacy practices. An alternative
starting point, which we are turning to in this chapter, is to step back and to
start from social practices in people’s everyday lives, their vernacular prac-
tices, and to find out how they draw upon new media in carrying out
activities in their lives. Specifically, this alternative approach starts from
people’s lives and examines how they draw upon vernacular language and
literacy practices to get things done. We now return to vernacular literacies,
which were introduced in Chapter 1. We examine how the practices asso-
ciated with reading and writing are being transformed by people’s partici-
pation in online activities and, as a result, how the dynamics of everyday life
are changing in profound ways.
138 LANGUAGE ONLINE AS NEW VERNACULAR PRACTICES
This chapter first provides a more detailed overview of the concept of

vernacular literacies and examines general changes in literacy practices that
have been taking place in the past 20 years. We then revisit the local literacies
data collected in the 1990s (Barton and Hamilton 1998). It is worth
returning to the social practices documented in that study to see how these
have changed as a result of new media. Our starting point is a specific
vernacular practice, popular photography, providing a brief history and
examining how it has been transformed by new media, specifically Flickr.
Drawing on further examples from Facebook and elsewhere, we then return
to the characteristics of vernacular literacies and discuss how their meanings
are changing in Web 2.0 spaces and how they are now more valued as people
participate in more global spaces. The chapter addresses the extent to which
the writing practices on Web 2.0 constitute new literacy practices and, more
broadly, to what extent the characteristics of vernacular literacies are
changing in a global context.
The reason for revisiting the notion of vernacular literacies is that new
digital media are changing the ways people can act in their everyday lives.
Technologies have been ‘domesticated’, in that they have moved into having
a central role in everyday lives. As we have seen in Chapter 6, everyone
has a unique techno-biography. People use computers, the internet and
mobile devices in their lives for writing, obviously with email, texting, and
instant messaging, but, as we will demonstrate, also in many more ways.
Technologies provide ways for people to engage in new activities, ones which
they have not engaged in before and which have not been possible before.
VERNACULAR LITERACIES
Vernacular literacy practices are rooted in everyday experiences and serve
everyday purposes. Barton and Hamilton’s (1998) ‘local literacies’ study of the
role of reading and writing in an English town identified key areas of everyday
life where reading and writing had a central role for people. These areas were:
organizing life, including activities such as checking timetables, writing to-do
lists and the records they kept of their finances; personal communication, such
as the notes, cards and letters people sent to friends and relatives; the practices
involved in personal leisure activities they participated in including sports and
music; the documenting of life where people maintained records of their own
and their family’s lives; the sense making people carried out in relation to
such things as health issues, legal issues and understanding their children’s
development; and their social participation in a wide range of activities. The
vernacular literacies ranged from record keeping and note taking through to
extended writing of diaries, fictional writing, life histories and local histories.
This framework has been used in other studies, as varied as a study of the
practices around Icelandic sagas (Olafsson 2012) and a study of Edwardian
postcards (Gillen and Hall 2010). We return to this framework later to show
how the ways in which people act in these areas have been transformed by
new media and the shifting role of language.
LANGUAGE ONLINE AS NEW VERNACULAR PRACTICES 139
A key feature of vernacular literacies is that they are voluntary and self-
generated, rather than being framed and valued by the needs of social
institutions. Dominant institutions in fields such as education, law and
religion sponsor particular forms of literacy, meaning that they support,
structure, and promote particular forms of reading and writing, as described
by Deborah Brandt (1998). Brandt refers to everyday literacies as self-spon-
sored. In dominant institutional literacies, often there are experts and profes-
sionals through whom access to knowledge is organized and controlled.
Vernacular practices are not particularly approved of by formal domains.
They are often downgraded and not valued by schools, especially when
associated with popular culture, and there are recurrent moral panics about
the deleterious effects of popular culture on young people. These concerns
are magnified when combined with moral panics about the effects of social
media on young people.
Vernacular texts tend to be circulated locally and not kept for long. As
they are relatively unregulated in comparison with dominant literacies and
they remain under people’s own control, vernacular practices can be a source
of creativity and originality, and they can lead to new practices. It was clear
from the local literacies study that when people act in their lives, in fact they
utilize all the resources available to them and they mix institutional and
vernacular practices. People encounter official texts, but what they do
with them, their practices, can be vernacular. Vernacular practices can be
responses to imposed literacies. Some vernacular responses to official literacy
demands disrupt the intentions of those demands, to serve people’s own pur-
poses; and sometimes they are intentionally oppositional to and subversive
of dominant practices (as in Maybin 2007).
While anyone can participate in vernacular practices by keeping a record
of their lives or by doing creative writing, what is also important are the
ways in which vernacular activities can provide a voice for groups and
individuals who may otherwise not be heard. (See Barton et al. 1993;
Sheridan et al. 2000.) This is particularly true of writing and there is a
growing history of studies of the power of everyday writing (such as Camitta
1993; Sinor 2002; Lyons 2007; Blommaert 2008). These have covered
monolingual and multilingual studies and have included writing in vernacu-
lar languages. We should reiterate the point that when referring to vernacular
writing this is not the same use as when the term ‘vernacular’ is used in
reference to vernacular languages, which often refers to local languages.
There can be a great deal of overlap but vernacular writing is not necessarily
tied to specific languages, especially in a global context such as the internet.
Rather, as we have demonstrated in earlier chapters, there is a complex
relationship between writing and the specific languages used.
Local Literacies in Lancaster

Lancaster, the site of the original local literacies study, is a city in north-
west England. Alongside its physical existence, it has for many years had a
‘virtual’ existence in, for instance, guide books, maps, and novels. Like
elsewhere, Lancaster now has a strong online presence and exists much more
strongly as a virtual city. This is based upon the physical infrastructure of
fast broadband coverage, along with complete mobile phone coverage,
which have all been created within the past 25 years and which did not exist
at the time of the original study. The amount of personal technology which
people have access to has also changed dramatically. The original study,
carried out in the mid 1990s, came across just two computers in the
neighbourhood, one in the local community centre and the other in the house
of a man who saw himself as a writer. Both computers were used by
local people wanting to make simple adverts and print them off. There was
no world wide web, no Google, no Facebook and no smartphone apps.
Computers and computing were largely restricted to workplaces. Laptops
were rare, heavy and expensive. Mobile phones were just beginning to
become common and text messaging was just taking off in the late 1990s.
National surveys confirm that most people in Lancaster and in much of
the world now have the internet at home and most people have a mobile
phone with them throughout the day and practices of meeting and socializ-
ing are mediated by their phones. Furthermore, all the main institutions
affecting the city have an internet presence. People’s vernacular practices
around literacy have changed profoundly in a relatively short space of time.
To get a gauge of this, Barton and Hamilton (1998) provided an A–Z sample
of local groups which existed in the mid 1990s, from the Archaeological
Society to the Zen Meditation group. Nearly all of this web of vernacular
activity still exists, and these groups now have an online presence. Some
groups have locally created sites, like the Lancaster Beekeepers, which lists
events, has items for sale, imparts advice, and documents the history of the
association. Others are local versions of national sites, such as the local
history site. Such sites also link to other spaces, such as Twitter feeds, as well
as blogs and Facebook. Like most towns and villages in England, Lancaster
has its own Flickr groups used by locals and visitors.
In addition, there are blogs about Lancaster life. As well as individuals’
diary-like blogs, there are specific green blogs and conservative blogs. There
are satellite images available of Lancaster and anyone can walk the streets
of the city virtually with Google Street View. People book restaurants, check
movie times and comment on and evaluate hotels, pubs and restaurants.
They find out about council services online, and some of these things can
only be done online. In these ways online activity is integrated into the
everyday practices of people and organizations. People’s practices bring
together the virtual and the material. So, in a relatively short period of time
there has been a dramatic change in people’s lives and they have created an
online life. This has changed the nature of vernacular practices.
In the data collected 25 years ago, literacy was used by people to make
sense of events in their lives and to resolve a variety of problems, such as
those related to health, to their jobs, to their children’s schooling and to
encounters with the law. Often this involved confrontation with professional
experts and specialized systems of knowledge, and people often drew on

their networks for support and knowledge, thereby becoming expert in a
particular domain and becoming a resource for other community members
themselves. Literacy was also used for personal change and transformation,
both within and outside education-related domains, for accessing informa-
tion relating to people’s interests, for asserting or creating personal identity,
and for self-directed learning.
In the six areas of vernacular activity identified earlier, people’s practices
in the UK have changed significantly in a relatively short period of time. All
everyday activities are affected, online and offline. It is not just a question of
going online, but of integrating online and offline activities. These changes
were beginning to happen in the mid 1990s and are continuing.
1. People now extensively organize their lives with appointment diaries and
address books on their computers and phones. Arrangements to meet and
the micro-coordination of social interaction are mediated by new media.
Increasingly, relations with institutions like banks and tax offices are
done online, and customers are required in many cases to move away
from their previous print-based practices, such as printing transaction
histories in a bank passbook, to web-based ones, such as retrieving
e-statements online. The local council utilizes digital technology as well
as print and face-to-face contact to represent itself and to communicate
with citizens about diverse issues such as school entry, recycling and
adverse weather. Government policy itself may make new textual demands
on people and assume access to up-to-date communication technolo-
gies. These findings fit in well with other research that examines how
technologies are deployed as people pursue their everyday concerns and
interests and how this changes the nature of their literacy practices. Today,
while people still reside in physical places, and government institutions still
impact on them in those places, people increasingly interact with their
virtual, or digital, city intertwining the physical and the virtual.
2. Personal communication has been revolutionized by smart phones and
social network sites. As a simple example, the holiday postcard now
exists alongside the holiday text message or the shared Facebook
photographs. Postcards and an extensive variety of greetings cards still
exist physically but their meaning and significance are being renego-
tiated within the greater range of alternative possibilities.
3. What was referred to as private leisure in the original study is increas-
ingly done online and, as the boundaries between private and public are
renegotiated, much activity is more social and public. In addition,
although the online world is strikingly multimodal, it is nevertheless
extensively mediated by literacy.
4. Contemporary life is documented by the footprints left online through
social participation on Facebook and elsewhere. Alongside this, activi-
ties like documenting family and local history are supported by easily
available online resources.
5. In terms of sense making: the internet is a crucial part of researching

such things as health issues, and problems with children’s development
or legal grievances. For many people, to investigate a problem in their
everyday lives, their first step is to turn to Google to search the internet.
Elsewhere, to find out about particular issues they turn to online
discussion groups like Mumsnet, the UK’s largest discussion site for
parents, or similar sites.
6. Turning to social participation, obviously social network sites have a
central role. Further, social and political participation is manifested in
following and contributing to blogs and Twitter, and other spaces for
commenting. And, as pointed out above, nearly all local groups and
associations have moved to having an online presence.
POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY AS A VERNACULAR PRACTICE

We now turn to a particular example of a vernacular practice to see how
it has changed. The example provides a way of investigating what has
happened to local vernacular practices as they move online. The aim is to
examine the extent to which people’s online activities constitute vernacular
practices, how such practices are located in earlier practices and how the
nature of vernacular practices is changing. The example comes from the
photo site Flickr. So far in this book we have drawn upon Flickr when
investigating the topics of multilingual activity, identity formation, stance-
taking, metalinguistic awareness and learning. Here we return to Flickr to
examine its use as a vernacular practice or, rather, we examine one vernacu-
lar practice that now draws upon Flickr. The brief example is everyday
family photography and in particular using photo albums.
Since its early days in the 1840s, photography has been referred to by its
proponents as ‘the democratic art’. As a vernacular practice it has been
relatively cheap, accessible and easy to learn for at least a hundred years.
Companies like Kodak from the beginning of the twentieth century were
sponsors of these practices, encouraging people to buy simple cameras and
to take photos of their everyday life. Photography was an everyday activity
and there would often be a camera present on holidays and at celebrations.
While it was an everyday activity, the practicalities of taking a photo
remained fairly constant throughout the twentieth century. Compared with
today, it was also fairly complex and expensive. One would buy a roll of film
to take 12, 24 or 36 photos. The camera could only be opened in the dark
to load the film or remove it. The film then had to be taken to or sent to a
film processor, which would take a few hours or a few days and one would
only see one’s pictures at the end of the process. Getting copies of photos
took further time and money. Photos then might be kept in the envelopes
provided by the film processors, or kept in tins, or put in albums.
Creating an album has been a common practice for a long time. Figure
10.1 is an early image showing a family album, dating back to 1864. It is a
popular portrait of US President Lincoln sitting with his son Tad (Ostendorf
Figure 10.1 Abraham Lincoln with photo album
1998: 182). This is a well-known photo and is available on Flickr from the
Library of Congress photostream, and also on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
This is an interesting example for us here for, although we cannot see the
content of the album, we can see people participating in a practice. In this
literacy event the father is holding the album and turning the pages. They are
close together and they are sharing the text. Their joint attention is on a page
of the album. (In fact, there are layers of practices in this particular event. It
is a staged event as the photo was taken in a studio and it was then, and still
is, common for studios to provide props, like books, to stage formal photos.
And, presumably, it was deliberately set up to show the everyday, family side
of the president.)
From examination of other representations of albums and their uses, we
can say more about practices around such albums. They tend to be shared
in small groups, often within families. They are stored in the home, often on
bookshelves next to books, and may be passed on across generations. People
use them to document their lives. They are part of a range of similar books,
such as scrapbooks and postcard albums. Turning to the language within
photo albums, the only writing, if any, is usually limited to a name, a place
and a date – Who? Where? When? There may be just a name or a date
written in the album or on the back of the photo, and one of the frequent
frustrations for later generations looking at such albums is the lack of this
minimal information. What is written tends to have been written by the
original author, although others may later add more information.
In the original local literacies data, there were several occasions when
albums were mentioned or shared with the researcher. For instance, after
several visits to the house, one woman shared her wedding album with the
researcher, going through it in the living room page by page and naming and
talking about her relatives. We interpreted this as a strong sign of acceptance.
Another informant reported that she had started a ‘baby book’ of her child
with photos, along with details of developing weight and height, but had not
kept it up for long.
Writing for a range of purposes

This brief sketch provides a background for returning to Flickr, where the
change in photographic practices can be clearly seen. Cameras are now much
more ubiquitous and, as part of phones, are carried around everywhere.
Many people have more than one camera. Once one has paid for the
equipment there are not additional costs in taking a photo. Photos are taken
everywhere for particular celebrations such as birthdays and for ordinary
events. With digital cameras, it is possible to check the photos on the camera
display screen immediately, an action referred to as ‘chimping’. Feedback is
immediate and if one wants to record a particular scene it is possible to
retake photos until a satisfactory version is produced. Often several people
take photos of the same event and the immediate sharing then becomes part
of the event. Sharing is quick and Flickr is just one of many ways to share
photos with friends and strangers alike.
Photography has become digital and people’s practices have changed to
take advantage of the affordances online. So in our data, a friend bought a
new mother a baby journal as a present. It has places to record personal
details and changes over time, along with spaces for regular photos as the
baby develops. There are equivalent online scrapbooks (e.g. www.baby
chapters.com) where all this can be recorded on websites that also provide
the option of purchasing high quality physical copies of the scrapbook. In
this way, offline and online practices merge seamlessly so that people may
still have physical albums and scrapbooks, alongside digital resources.
A person’s Flickr photostream can be regarded as an album and often it
is broken down into sets that cover specific events, such as weddings and
birthdays. In our data, people often first saw Flickr as some sort of album –
they were carrying out existing practices of making a photo album in new
ways. Often the initial way into Flickr was to use it to share photos such as
weddings (one of the most popular tags on Flickr) or birthdays with friends
and relatives, especially those who may not live locally, as with this quote
from a Scottish photographer:
At first, I intended to use Flickr for sharing photos with friends and family and for
storing images only. But I found some of ppl commenting on my work and watching
the photo work from other. After that, I keep surfing Flickr daily to keep friendship
and to learn/improve my work.
(*andrew)
Several people in our study reported this progression from sharing with
friends and family on to meeting new people. As they participated more,
people began to use Flickr for many purposes and different people use it very
differently. In terms of the earlier list of vernacular practices, people certainly
used it for communicating with others, for leisure, for documenting life and
as a form of social participation. This range of purposes can be summarized
by what one user said:
To learn about photography; To share my photos; To have fun; To meet people

(Charleeze)
These purposes can change and develop over time and are revised as
people take up new affordances of Flickr and as they participate in Flickr in
different ways. To many, participating in Flickr was a process of discovering
new purposes for using the site. For example, some people gradually learned
more about themselves and the world. This was often achieved through
interacting with other Flickr members:
Sharing images with people – not my photographic skills, but my way of seeing the
world . . . and Flickr members are very good at sharing knowledge.
(Carolink)
As we have seen in the previous chapter, whether the learning was delib-
erate or unconscious, participating in Flickr not only provides opportunities
to learn how to do things on Flickr, but people also change their writing
practices as their perceived purposes for using the site change.
Flickr as a social web space

A very common practice is to use Flickr to socialize. Writing on Flickr is
always potentially interactive, as in the comments area. People also com-
pared Flickr with other photo-sharing sites, suggesting the interactive
affordance of the site. One of our participants from Hong Kong explained
how interactivity on Flickr was different from other sites:
The most interesting characteristic is the interactive nature of the website. Features
such as tagging, commenting, favourites, groups, contacts allows me to share my
photos with people around the world with the same interests and getting feedback.
Whereas most other sites, it is just a one way conversation with you showing the
world your photos.
(HKmPUA)
Other participants in our study characterized Flickr as a safe and friendly

social space:
I like Flickr because people, especially my own contacts, make friendly and objective
comments. Not having any comments may suggest that your photos are not
popular; but that doesn’t matter. I like the harmonious atmosphere on Flickr, which
is very different from other photo sharing sites. On the photo sharing sites I’ve used
before, if you don’t receive enough comments, your photos will not be recom-
mended by the administrators. This leads to some people making biased and
unsolicited comments about each other’s photos (just for the sake of adding up the
number of comments). This affects my mood.
(sating)
They were very happy to meet strangers through Flickr and chat with them:
This was the first place I knew to share photos, it started as something I did once a
week or so, but then I started to meet people. I guess that’s the most interesting
feature, the people.
(ädri)
Over time other sites have made it easier to load and manage photos and
people use photos on different sites for various purposes. In fact, at the time
of writing, the use of Flickr is declining (according to figures from www.
compete.com in June 2012). There are several possible reasons for this: more
sites are offering comparable photo sharing possibilities, like Snapfish,
Instagram and Picasa; existing social network sites, like Facebook and
Google+, are improving their photo handling properties; and other sites like
Twitter and Pinterest offer different niche possibilities for sharing images.
Flickr members also communicate through responding to titles, descrip-
tions and tags given by the photographers. For example, the photo descrip-
tion by a Chinese participant ‘i LOVE people-watching. Happy weekend^^’,
directly addresses the audience by wishing them a good weekend. This
immediately initiated a series of comments not only about the content of this
photo, ‘Mr Doughnut’, but also wishing her ‘Happy Weekend’ in return.
For some people, writing on Flickr helps maintain and extend their
physical relationships. Most people reported that they already knew some of
their contacts personally when they started using Flickr. When asked what
the most interesting feature of Flickr was, ‘meeting people’ was commonly
mentioned:
This one was the first place I knew to share photos, it started as something I did
once a week or so, but then I started to meet people.
(ädri)
People also talked of their intended and imagined audiences. We saw this
when they shifted from being interested in their existing friends and relatives
and began seeing strangers as potential audience. In this way they shifted to
participating in a different way and remaking the global flows of language

and culture. In various chapters, we have discussed the significance of
audience in projecting new identities. Taking account of imagined audience
is a very salient practice in Flickr and other Web 2.0 spaces and although
people also imagine audience in other kinds of writing, this issue seems to
have higher significance in Web 2.0. Thus they were interacting with new
people, with different people and with people in different places. They were
asserting new identities, including complex multilingual global identities
that they were projecting to new audiences. In this way they had a sense of
themselves as global citizens – or netizens.
PREGNANCY AS ONLINE LITERACY PRACTICES: THE CASE

OF PEGGY
In all the cases discussed above the language practices are clearly embedded
in people’s lived experiences. To give another example of the situated nature
of new media, pregnancy is an area of life that has been transformed
significantly by new media. Being pregnant used to be mainly a private and
personal experience. The advent of new media and social network sites has
turned this lived experience into publicly available stories. When our
informant, Peggy, found out that she was pregnant, the first thing she did
was share the news online, starting with a Facebook status update ‘Peggy is
pregnant!! =v=’. Sharing this news online breaks the traditional Chinese
practice that women do not reveal their pregnancy until the end of the first
trimester (i.e. after three months). Since then, much of what she posted on
both Facebook and her blog was exclusively about her pregnancy. In addi-
tion to words, her pregnancy was largely represented through images,
including ultrasound X-ray images of her baby, which used to be kept private
and rarely shared with others. When Peggy eventually went into labour at
the hospital, she made the most of Facebook, starting with the status update
‘@hospital.’ She then kept updating her status every few hours using her
mobile phone, such as ‘Labour has started’. Just minutes after her long
labour, Peggy announced on Facebook, ‘After over 20 hours of labor, yatyat
was born!’ This instantly attracted 25 comments congratulating Peggy and
welcoming her new daughter. When Peggy returned home, she resorted to
her blog in a post entitled ‘A life of three has begun’ and adding more details
about what had happened in the hospital together with photos of her baby.
Since then, she has gone back to blogging and posting summaries of her blog
content regularly on Facebook. This small case illustrates how Facebook and
other new media were never separable from Peggy’s immediate, embodied
experiences during her pregnancy. Her extensive use of images alongside her
texts shows how digital photography has provided new affordances for the
way key moments of life such as giving birth are captured and represented.
In fact, the first ever camera photograph taken and shared with friends and
family online was a photo of a new born baby, taken by the inventor of the
camera phone Philippe Kahn in 1997.
REDEFINING THE VERNACULAR IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

All aspects of the processes and practices of reading and writing need to be
re-examined now that so much reading and writing takes place in new spaces
with new affordances. We have provided a detailed example from Flickr.
What we have shown about changes in writing practices can also be found
in other Web 2.0 sites, including blogs and social network sites, as shown in
Peggy’s case above. The concept of vernacular literacies can be re-evaluated
by pursuing issues raised earlier in the book about the extent to which these
are new literacy practices on Web 2.0 and how they are similar to or different
from traditional notions of vernacular literacies.
Discovering new affordances for new practices

It is clear that people who are writing in new media spaces are engaging in
new vernacular practices. Such newness refers both to doing things that they
had not done before and to extending existing practices. (See also Chapter 1
for a discussion on newness.) Based on the interview data, we can see that
some existing everyday activities, such as creating a wedding album or
sharing family photos, are carried over to these new spaces, that is, parti-
cipants are carrying out existing practices in new ways. People find that the
new media facilitates these practices, in that it is quicker and easier to create
such albums and to share them. Their involvement with Flickr often starts
out with a desire to carry out existing practices more effectively. They then
discover that they can do more with their photos, for example they can easily
annotate them and can share a large number of photos with distant relatives.
At the same time their photos are being treated differently by others: dif-
ferent people, such as work colleagues, might see the leisure photos and
strangers might see and comment on family photos. For the people we
studied, they then extended what they did with Flickr into new areas of
activity. Their new practices broadened out to include activities such as
publicly evaluating other people’s photos, classifying their own photos using
keywords, making connections between their own and others’ photos, and
even interacting with international audiences in multiple languages. Tagging
is a good example of an activity that participants said was new to them as a
way of dealing with their photos. By creating tags, they were organizing and
classifying their photos in new ways and making their photos more
accessible to others. As we have pointed out earlier, people are not using this
writing space just to create their own folksonomies to enable easy searches
of their photos, as the designers originally intended. They are not just
classifying their photos as a researcher might do. They are also using this
writing space to write poems, to make comments and to create idiosyncratic
classifications for themselves. Tagging is a vernacular activity where people
turn the affordances to their own purposes.
This opened up the possibilities for new uses of their photos. Looking
across the data, the ways in which the writing spaces on Flickr are used point
to a vibrant area of writing, but at the same time it may challenge existing
definitions of writing. Certainly, activities like tagging expand notions of

what counts as writing. There are tensions in definitions of reading, writing
and literacy online which have already been pointed out (as in Leu et al.
2004; Coiro et al. 2008) and Brandt (2009) discusses how writing is
emphasized on the internet and there are new relationships between reading
and writing developing.
These specific activities are part of broader social practices where people
are relating to the world in new ways. As a way of examining these broader
social practices in which the writing was located, we return to the six areas
of life where reading and writing were seen to be of central importance to
people, given at the beginning of the chapter: organizing life, personal
communication, leisure, documenting life, sense making and social partici-
pation. The Flickr users engaged in these areas of vernacular activity in new
ways. For example, new forms of social participation developed. They
became involved in social networking, for instance in deliberately setting out
to get more views for their photos and trying to get a higher chance of being
searched for, as in HKmPUA’s use of multiscriptual tags where he added tags
with the same meaning in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Like others he
wanted to get more comments on his pictures. This data further illustrates
how users were also documenting their lives in new ways and how their
personal leisure activities, such as their interests in music and in photog-
raphy, were changing as Flickr took up more and more of their time. On
other web spaces, people also discover and take up new affordances. With
these new practices in mind, we now turn to the characteristics of vernacular
practices discussed earlier and examine how they need to be redefined in the
light of activity in new media, with specific focus on Web 2.0 spaces.
Vernacular practices in new media are self-generated

Most Web 2.0 sites provide writing spaces for users to generate content
voluntarily. As with other vernacular literacy practices, the new literacy
practices described are voluntary and self-generated, as illustrated by
people’s participation in Flickr. What people do on Flickr has its roots in
everyday experience – with the caveat that the framework is provided by a
private company driven by commercial concerns. It provides the possibilities
and constraints within which people act. Companies such as Yahoo!, the
owners of Flickr, can be seen as sponsoring particular practices. Burgess
(2007) discusses the Flickr business model and how it sponsors certain
practices and Cox (2008) demonstrates how it is designed to satisfy commer-
cial practices. Users are providing data that is of value to the company and
it becomes the product which they can sell.
Flickr is also relatively unregulated and largely self-moderated. While
there are lively accusations and discussions about censorship more generally
on Flickr, this did not come up in our data and the people we studied saw it
as providing many possibilities for them to discover new ways of using their
photos and to meet people. They appreciated the freedom they had and did
not refer to perceived restrictions. Different platforms vary a great deal in

this. Elsewhere on the web there are many examples of imposed writing
which are highly structured and constrained, as anyone who has ordered
goods and services online or has had to fill in an online tax form can affirm.
Sites like Amazon have a mixture of obligatory spaces such as filling out an
order form and optional open spaces such as book reviews.
Vernacular practices in new media are a source of creativity,

invention and originality
On Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube, people are
creating, sharing, collaborating and organizing. Users are more active and
these sites afford spaces for originality and creativity. This is evident, for
instance, in the participants’ wide-ranging purposes for writing on Flickr,
their creative deployment of language resources, as well as their specific ways
of socializing on Flickr. The vernacular writing also led to new practices such
as sharing knowledge and supporting each other. This was apparent in the
online comments as well as being reported in the interviews. This support
was around photography as well as other aspects of life. More generally,
creativity can also be seen in the ways in which people are taking different
photos from before. The possibility for this arises in part from digital
cameras where, once one has the camera, individual photos are effectively
free and the results can be immediately seen and evaluated. People can take
a large number of different photos and then just delete ones they do not want
to keep. In this way, a space for experimentation is opened up where web
users can try things out and get instant feedback. In terms of topic it seems
that people are taking more photos of the everyday, of the mundane, of the
self, exploring one’s room, one’s body and one’s workplace. More people are
taking more photographs. (See Van House 2007 on the changing uses of
everyday photography, and also Sarvas and Frohlich 2011.) People also
undertake systematic investigations such as the 365 projects, described in
Chapter 9. In exploring the current possibilities of photography people are
increasingly getting ideas from one another, and not primarily from pro-
fessionals through How-to books and photography magazines. There is a
shift in where expertise lies as it moves from being the realm of professionals
and becomes more distributed amongst people.
Another central idea to creativity in vernacular practices is ‘playability’
(Burgess 2007), which refers to the ways in which new digital media afford
a space that combines use, play, experimentation, and mashupability. Mash-
up refers to a process of remixing and reappropriating different modes and
resources for meaning making, thus generating new vernacular practices.
This is happening on Flickr, which provides spaces for people to combine
and play with resources of images and written text to create new content and
share it online. Very often, people play with resources on Flickr in this way
not only to socialize, but also to learn and support others (see also Davies
2009). Sometimes participants may need technical support from other users,
and at other times they may help others with their photography skills. These
are all done through visual and verbal means. Creativity and remixing
resources are also evident on many other sites that we have discussed in the
previous chapters, including IM, YouTube fansubbing, and fan-fiction
writing. Although not typically labelled as a Web 2.0 site, IM does share
many of the characteristics of Web 2.0 such as self-generated writing and
creativity. We have seen in Chapter 4 that college students in Hong Kong
play with their linguistic resources of English and Chinese to create new
ways of representing meaning. Similarly, YouTube users demonstrate crea-
tivity by remixing content from different sources to create a new video that
is different from an original piece of work by others.
Vernacular literacies are valued in new media

In many ways the practices seen on Flickr are quite similar to the vernacular
practices described in Barton and Hamilton (1998). But in other ways these
writing practices on Web 2.0 challenge and extend earlier notions of the
nature of vernacular practices. First, vernacular practices have been regarded
as being of less value than more dominant practices which are sponsored and
supported by education and other external institutions. In the case of Flickr,
these local practices are now more valued. What was personal and often
private is now put into the public realm. People are making public and giving
greater circulation to activities that previously were local and where people
could regulate access and use. These activities are no longer confined to the
local sphere. People are using these writing spaces consciously and deliber-
ately to tell the world something about their personal experiences or local
life. They are knowingly addressing and responding to a global audience to
create new identities, in a similar way to the examples presented in Chapter
6. Through making comments on one another’s photos, people using Flickr
have become reviewers, commentators and evaluators of their own and
others’ work, drawing on their resources for stance-taking online, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 7. The comments they make are often valued by members
of Flickr and others, who all draw upon and contribute to expanding global
funds of knowledge. At the same time such photos are more valued else-
where, even within dominant institutions where vernacular practices are
generally discouraged: for instance, Flickr is regularly searched by publishers
and journalists needing photos of specific topics for books, magazines and
newspapers. Teachers and researchers are exploring its use in classrooms, as
discussed in Chapter 11, and extensive materials and advice on its educa-
tional potential are available on the internet. Returning to our focus on
language online, the creative multilingual and multiscriptual practices shown
in Chapters 4 and 5 are not always valued in institutional contexts. Moral
panics and public discourses about how technologies deteriorate students’
literacy skills well illustrate this. However, it is clear from our data that
students demonstrate high levels of creativity and dexterity in their digital

texts and that hybrid linguistic practices such as code-switching play a
crucial role in students’ everyday online communication. This tension
between students’ everyday and institutional text-making practices will be
discussed in Chapter 11.
11
LANGUAGE ONLINE
A N D E D U C AT I O N
• New media in classroom-based teaching and learning of language and literacy

• How understanding online practices can change language teaching and
learning
The two previous chapters provide a context for this chapter. Chapter 9
identified some of the vernacular learning that goes on in online spaces and
has argued that online spaces can be powerful places to learn. Chapter 10 has
shown the growing value of everyday practices. Here we turn to educational
contexts, taking account of the everyday. This book does not start with an
education agenda, although a growing amount of research in digital literacies
offer new meanings of literacy from an education perspective. (See, for
example, Buckingham 2007; Davies and Merchant 2009; Alvermann 2011.)
Grounded in a social theory of literacy and seeing language online as situated
practices, our first step is to examine what people do with online texts in
different areas of everyday life. Our language-focused research on new media,
however, naturally leads on to the question of how understanding language
and literacy practices online can inform educational practices.
This is also a particularly relevant question in the area of language
teaching and learning, especially with the rise of moral panics and public
154 LANGUAGE ONLINE AND EDUCATION
discourse about falling standards of language. In this chapter, we address

two education-related issues that this book can shed light on. The first starts
from existing provision, in that it takes current educational frameworks for
granted: how specific digital media can be incorporated into classroom-
based teaching and learning, especially in the context of language education.
This is about how to do existing practices in new ways and, as suggested
earlier, can be the first step in a change in practices. When participants see
the new possibilities of technologies and can imagine new futures then they
move on to the next step and education has to change. The second section
explores how understanding online practices can change language teaching
and learning.
NEW MEDIA IN CLASSROOM-BASED TEACHING AND

LEARNING OF LANGUAGE AND LITERACY
Computers have played a role in education for a long time. As early as the
1970s, the area of ‘computer-assisted teaching and learning’ only meant the
use of computer software to facilitate classroom instruction and learning.
Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) also emerged as an indepen-
dent field of research (e.g. Warschauer 1996; Levy 1997). The Literacy
Studies framework has established the tradition of researching details of
everyday and vernacular literacy practices. One primary aim of studying
details of people’s everyday practices is to influence formal education and
policy (as in Hull and Schultz 2002, for instance). The Literacies for
Learning in Further Education project (Ivanič et al. 2009), for example,
explores the relationship between college students’ everyday and college-
based literacy practices, both digital and non-digital. The project has
identified characteristics of students’ informal literacies such as hybridity,
multimodality and collaborative knowledge sharing, which lecturers can
draw upon in pedagogy. Although originally the project did not focus
primarily on technologies, its findings suggest that new media play a central
role in college students’ textual practices and meaning making processes.
One of the few large-scale studies of youth digital literacies is Ito et al.’s
(2010) three-year multi-sited research in the US, as mentioned earlier. This
work provides in-depth ethnographic case studies of young people’s digital
practices and explores how they shape youth’s identities and learning
experience. Most digital practices are textually mediated. Producing and
using texts online occupies much of people’s lives. A number of studies
highlight the textual dimension of digital literacies on various platforms,
such as chat rooms (Merchant 2001), instant messaging (Lewis and Fabos
2005; Lee 2007a), video gaming (Gee 2004), and fan-fiction (Black 2009),
among others. This body of work, which pays attention to young people’s
practices, has come to the consensus that digital texts are creative, hybridized
and multimodal. For example, Merchant (2001) shows how teenagers
display extensive creativity by combining features of spoken conversation
and writing in chat rooms. Merchant argues that creativity and hybridity are
LANGUAGE ONLINE AND EDUCATION 155
features of the contemporary social world. In other words, participating in

online chat is indeed a way of developing linguistic capital and marketable
skills required to participate in the new social order. However, because online
chat often takes place in informal and private contexts, they are not valued
by formal institutions. Also, focusing on textual practices, Lea and Jones
(2011) start with university students rather than teenagers. In making a
connection between students’ academic textual practices and their everyday,
private digital texts, Lea and Jones illustrate that the meaning making
process of assessed writing in higher education often involves students
drawing upon a wide range of digital and non-digital genres and modes. The
importance of researching texts as language online is also highlighted in this
chapter and elsewhere in this book.
All of the studies reviewed here are explicitly or implicitly education-
oriented. They are either conducted in formal learning contexts, or they
discuss implications for formal education. Another key thread of digital
literacies research aims to provide practical applications of new technologies
to education (as in Haythornthwaite and Andrews 2011). A specific example
of this is a study of the value of computer conferencing in university students’
writing for assessment, especially in distance learning contexts (Lea 2001;
Goodfellow et al. 2004). At the same time, there has been a strong tendency
to shift to social media or Web 2.0 sites that feature self-generated content,
social networking, and collaborative knowledge sharing. More broadly,
most of the comparable research on learning online has been concerned with
young people in educational settings, such as work reported in Carrington
and Robinson (2009) and Sharpe et al. (2010). Web 2.0 sites have also been
found valuable to support classroom literacy teaching and learning (Braun
2007) and the learning of second and foreign languages (Benson and Chan
2011; Benson and Chik 2010; Lam 2000). In the following, we provide some
examples of how popular Web 2.0 platforms have been adopted to facilitate
literacy-related teaching and learning activities.
• Weblogs: As one of the earliest and most popular examples of what Tim
Berners-Lee (2005) refers to as the ‘read/write web’, weblogs are an ideal
space for students to practice reading and writing. Teachers and students
around the world have taken up affordances of blogs such as easy self-
publishing and continuous updating of multimodal content and turned
them into an educational opportunity. A common educational activity
involving blogging is that students are asked to choose a topic of their
own choice and do bibliographic search on it and then blog about their
findings. Not only does blogging provide ample opportunities for
authentic writing, it also involves a great deal of reading – for one thing,
before students can blog about a topic, they would have to look up and
read as well as organize information around their chosen topic. Spaces
for commenting can serve as platforms for peer feedback, thus enabling
students to become more critical readers. (See Richardson 2006: 40–42
for a comprehensive list of possible classroom uses of blogs; other lists,
for blogs and for other platforms, can be found by searching online for
sites devoted to teaching.)
• Wikis: Like blogging, wikis offer the possibilities for user-generated
writing and easy web publishing around a topic, using the form of
encyclopaedic entries. The key feature of wikis is however collaboration
and group-based knowledge creation. Wiki entries are normally written
and frequently updated by multiple authors. These affordances encour-
age collaborative writing and content editing. Through creating wiki
entries and editing others’ writing, students also get to learn how to
work with others and work as a group. Many wikis also include
hyperlinks to external sources, which then allow students to think
critically about online materials (see also Augar et al. 2004 for a review
of the pedagogical values of different wikis).
• Photo sites such as Flickr: Flickr was used as an example of deliberate
vernacular learning in Chapter 9. The educational value of Flickr has
been recognized by some literacy scholars (as in Davies 2006; Davies
and Merchant 2009). Various features on Flickr may support classroom
learning. For example, it provides an extensive database of license-free
images (although many photos on the site are copyrighted) for teachers
to download as pedagogical resources. The rich array of writing spaces
surrounding a photo support different kinds of language teaching and
learning activities. The description text box underneath the picture
serves as a powerful tool for storytelling around images; tagging allows
students to make use of new words they have learned in class to describe
an image; Richardson (2006) has found the notes function on Flickr
(where one can write annotations on the photos) particularly useful for
classrooms and has proposed several ways of using it – for example, a
teacher can post a photo and ask students to annotate what they see.
The commenting function can encourage participation and discussions
among students. And because Flickr connects people from all parts of
the world, students who are doing projects on international cultures may
use Flickr’s keyword search function to look for pictures and infor-
mation about other countries. With guidance from teachers, students
may also get to interact with people from other parts of the world and
learn about their languages and cultures.
• Video sites such as YouTube: YouTube is another excellent database of
multimedia content. The site has been found to promote autonomous
language learning, as with the fansubbing example described in Chapter
9. At the level of formal classroom education, more and more teachers
are using YouTube as resources for teaching. The multimodal affor-
dances of the site are especially valuable for language learners of all
sorts to practice speaking, writing and listening. For example, in class,
students may be asked to hold oral discussions around the content of a
video on YouTube that they have been asked to watch before class; some
teachers may record and host their lessons on YouTube for students to
review after class. And because creating and editing videos is relatively
cheap and easy, many language teachers would encourage students to

make their own videos as an assignment and share them on YouTube.
For example, a group of American students present their Spanish project
in the form of a short film. The conversation of the characters has been
translated into English using YouTube’s annotation function. The
annotation (by self and others) and commenting functions on YouTube
also encourage students to evaluate the content of the videos, thus
enhancing interactivity through writing outside the classroom.
• Virtual worlds such as Second Life: Second Life is best known amongst
educators for its life-like 3D environment, which makes learning
activities fun and enjoyable. Teachers and students interact in their
virtual worlds as avatars, self-created characters that can take any forms,
including humans and animals, who can even fly and teleport within and
across worlds. These characteristics allow for an interactive learning
environment that mimics face-to-face classroom learning. Compared to
text-only online learning spaces, Second Life provides a more personal
context for student-student and student-teacher interaction as they feel
more involved communicating in a close-to-real-life context. Some
students find virtual worlds less intimidating than face-to-face classroom
interaction and are more willing to participate. Many universities have
created virtual campuses on Second Life (e.g. Ohio University’s virtual
campus). Second Life is also found valuable for second or foreign
language learning (Cooke-Plagwitz 2008). Its multimodal environment
supports not only text and images but also voice interaction – which
allows language learners to practice speaking skills with avatars from
other cultures, thus reinforcing collaborative learning. Other general
uses of Second Life in education can be found in Conklin’s (2007) list of
101 uses of Second Life in the college classroom. For more on education
in virtual worlds, see Peachey et al. (2010) and Merchant et al. (2012).
• Microblogging, including Twitter: Microblogging services such as
Twitter have played an increasingly significant role in academic and
educational settings over the past few years. For example, Twitter has
often been adopted by academics to support backchannel discussion at
seminars and conferences (Ross et al. 2011) and university lectures
(Elavsky et al. 2011). Participants are encouraged to post live to Twitter
as the presenters are giving their talks. They are usually given a hashtag,
a keyword that marks the theme or topic of a tweet, to attach to their
posts for easy archiving and searching. The main advantage of doing so
is that the live discussion allows outsiders or people who cannot be
physically present to follow the event in real time. Twitter has also been
found useful in second language learning. Borau et al. (2009), for
instance, have carried out a case study of using Twitter in an English
language class offered to Chinese students. All students were required to
post at least seven messages a week and to read other students’ posts as
a way of practising reading and writing. This not only helps develop a
sense of community among students, but also provides opportunities for
learners to ‘actively produce language’ (Borau et al. 2009: 78), including

outside the classroom.
• Social networking sites such as Facebook: Since its launch in 2004,
Facebook has currently become the most popular social network site. Its
wide-ranging features and affordances have been adopted by educators
and students in various ways. The Group function on Facebook is
especially suitable to facilitate both teacher-initiated or student-initiated
teaching and learning activities. For one thing, unlike other features of
Facebook, Groups are membership-based. The Group administrators
can make content private and available to only members who have had
approval to join, making it a relatively private and safe course or class-
based platform (Lee and Lien 2011; see also the case study below on
how it is adopted in an undergraduate linguistics course). Students may
also set up private Groups without the teacher’s initiative to discuss
assignments and organize their projects, as reported in English and
Duncan-Howell (2008).
While the newness and affordances of these media may be tempting

and attractive, exploring how exactly the use of these media can enhance
students’ learning experience needs to be worked out in each situation. Lewis
and Fabos (2005), in their discussion of IM, also remind educators of the
possible challenges of introducing students’ out-of-school new media
practices into classroom teaching:
The question that should be asked is not how to actually use IM in the classroom
but how to apply to school settings the literacy practices we observed young people
take up with a great deal of engagement.
(Lewis and Fabos 2005: 496)
Starting from a social practice view, the first step is to understand

students’ knowledge and their informal uses of new media. As Ivanič et al.
(2009) make clear, it is not a question of then incorporating the practices
into classroom settings. Rather, there will be specific aspects of practices
which can be drawn upon. One of the issues to be considered, for example,
is that concepts of time and space in school-based lessons can be very
different from those in interpersonal communication among friends. Take
IM as an example, private IM activities are often nested and multitasking is
taken for granted; whereas in schools classes are organized into individual
sessions which do not match with the temporal and spatial flexibility in
IM. Researching a different educational setting, Kinzie et al. (2005) have
explored the potentiality of IM for instructional purposes in university
lectures in the US. Their students were assigned a discussion topic in a face-
to-face lecture and they were expected to take notes and discuss among
themselves while also listening to the lecturer. Although the students were
able to multi-task in the lectures, some students found IM distracting in a
formal classroom context. Lewis (2007) also reminds us of the issue of need,
that is whether or not schools want, and are ready, to acknowledge students’
out-of-school and innovative practices in digital literacies.
Facebook group for university courses

To examine how taking into account students’ everyday practices can inform
educational practice, we provide two examples from our own teaching. We
first show a case of how one of us, Carmen, set up a Facebook Group for an
undergraduate linguistics course with 33 students. In the spring semester in
2011, a private Facebook Group was created as a platform for course-based
communication including sharing of lecture notes and discussion based on
shared external content such as web links and videos. The decision to use
Facebook instead of other platforms was a result of considering both the
teacher’s reflection on her experience with educational technologies as well
as students’ preference as expressed in a course survey. Throughout the 14-
week semester, students actively posted in the Group and they made over 350
comments. A strong sense of community was developed outside the class-
room context because the Group served to bring together students from
different disciplines. The social networking affordance on Facebook also
facilitated collaborative learning, with students often sharing newly dis-
covered, course-related information on the web.
While facilitating teaching and learning activities, what was particularly
revealing was the ways in which students constantly negotiated and reappro-
priated their discourse styles and identities according to the changing pur-
poses of the Group. First, the written texts in this Group exhibited a
hybridity of languages. Both students and teachers moved beyond the stated
medium of instruction, which was English, to mixing linguistic resources, a
practice commonly found in informal uses of Facebook. A range of discourse
styles were identified, from formal academic announcements by the teacher
to more interpersonal and playful posts. The boundary between teacher and
students was not always clear. Students sometimes acted as teachers by
initiating discussion topics while teachers would also learn something new
from these student-initiated posts. These features illustrate that the Group
provided what Moje et al. (2004) call a ‘third space’ for teaching and learn-
ing. They define a third space as a space that ‘brings the texts framed by
everyday discourses and knowledges into classrooms in ways that challenge,
destabilize, and ultimately, expand the literacy practices that are typically
valued in school and in the everyday world’ (44). In the case of the course
Group, it served as a space where the relatively controlled academic dis-
course and interpersonal hybrid and informal discourse styles met. Appendix
2 provides further details of this case study.
Exploring students’ techno-biographies

Turning from Hong Kong to England, at Lancaster David draws on students’
techno-biographies in his courses (taught with Julia Gillen and Uta Papen).
On both the undergraduate language and media course and the MA digital
literacies course that he teaches, his starting point with students is to get
them to investigate their own practices on and offline. This is also important
for getting an idea of what they are using and know about in terms of new
technologies (and it inevitably changes from year to year and the course has
to adapt to reflect this). Their techno-biographies are then data for the
course. On the undergraduate course, after investigating their own practices
in preparation for the first weekly seminar, the students then have to
interview someone different from themselves, like a grandparent or someone
from a different culture. This provides a comparative perspective across
generations or cultures. The next step is to examine national surveys of
internet use to locate their practices in broader quantitative studies which
cover the country or the world.
When they get on to projects which they have to carry out for assessment,
several of the students include online interviews or surveys. Also they get to
see online and offline activities as integrated and not separable. The structure
then is a week-by-week moving out from their own experiences, and drawing
on different sorts of data. During the course they also explore their online
reading paths and they reflect on their changing academic literacy practices.
Most of the readings for the course are available online and an early com-
pulsory reading is to watch and take notes on a YouTube video. They also
keep a reflective diary of their changing practices since beginning the course
and they participate in other online activities.
HOW UNDERSTANDING ONLINE PRACTICES CAN CHANGE

LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING
As a way of showing the significance of the research described in this book
for educational practice, we identify several ways in which understanding of
online practices can impact on what goes on in the classroom. We keep to
our focus on language teaching and learning and are thinking of all levels of
education, from pre-school through to college education. We show some
ways in which seeing language as a social practice provides theories, methods
and data for the language classroom.
1. Autonomous language learning: The research reported here has

demonstrated that there is a great deal of language learning going on in
students’ everyday lives which is initiated by them and under their
control. It takes place in what for them are authentic situations and it
provides evidence of autonomous language learning. There have been
examples of this throughout this book. On Flickr some people delib-
erately use the site to practice and improve their language. In the IM
research, some of the participants, without being prompted, revealed in
the interviews how they sometimes stretched the affordances of IM and
saw IM as an informal language learning tool. One of the participants,
Hang, said IM could serve as a space to practice his Chinese typing and
writing skills. Another person, Wing, recalled that she once wrote to her
IM friends in English only in order to prepare for her A-level English
examinations. These instances demonstrate students’ own approaches
to informal learning, such as learning by doing, in their private and
everyday lives. These student participants were well aware of what and
how to learn in IM. These informal learning activities also allowed
students to take charge of their own learning, where they can learn
actively, effectively, and enjoyably through a medium of their own
choice.
2. Understanding students’ everyday practices: As we have emphasized
throughout the book, our projects have focused on texts and practices
online. We always pay close attention to what people do with their
texts in their everyday lives instead of just the words on the screen.
Understanding details about practices has important implications for
education. First of all, while it is important for teachers in the classroom
to take advantage of the opportunities offered by new media, it is crucial
to draw on activities which reveal what students are doing outside the
classroom, including their meaning making resources and their private
text-making activities and to understand the nature of online practices.
To give one small example, school curricula in many countries have
already included email writing, but it is often described as one coherent
genre in its own right, and is presented in a rather prescriptive manner
(such as rules about how to write an ‘effective’ email). What the investi-
gation of everyday practices reveals is that email is not a genre, rather it
demonstrates the underlying creativity and the superdiverse nature of
such platforms. Writing consists of a range of situated activities, and
email serves many purposes and can take many forms. Language as
social practice provides ways of thinking about and talking about lan-
guage and literacy, that is, it provides theories of language and literacy,
which are of value in the classroom.
3. Understanding teachers’ practices: Teachers, at all levels, vary in their
knowledge and confidence with new technologies. Most teachers in
contemporary society are not newbies to technologies but have had
years of experience with both educational and informal digital practices.
In making decisions about pedagogical uses of everyday technologies,
they can be reflexive and constantly reflect upon their own relationships
with new media in and outside the classroom context. This may entail a
re-negotiation of the relationship between the teacher’s knowledge and
the students’ knowledge along with acceptance of and respect for
students’ expertise in some areas.
Understanding teachers’ knowledge has been explored, for example,
in Graham’s (2008) study of how teachers’ own experience with tech-
nology impacts on their teaching practices. As one example from our
own work, the Facebook Group discussed above grew out of the teacher
reflecting on her years of experience with both educational and informal
technologies. The teacher’s multiple identities as a university lecturer,
researcher, and an active Facebook user continuously shape her linguistic

practices and forms of participation when interacting with students
online. This may even extend to becoming a member of her students’
online discourse community. In the Group case study mentioned earlier,
the teacher was able to adopt a negotiated discourse style that university
students often employ in their private online textual practices. Having
seen the lecturer adopt their everyday style of online writing, students
were happy to take on an informal and even playful voice. This constant
negotiation of discourse styles certainly helps create a friendly and
pleasant learning environment.
4. Continuous awareness of students’ changing practices: Digital literacies
is a fast-changing area of research as technologies and their use change
rapidly. What works one year on a course may be inappropriate the next
year and courses need to be in a state of constant flux with spaces for
innovation. Teachers and students can research these changing practices.
This cannot be achieved by carrying out occasional studies, or reading
the results of research carried out a few years ago, but only through
ongoing and perhaps longitudinal observations of students’ digital
practices inside and outside the classroom. Through the methods of
techno-biographies described earlier, teachers and students become
researchers, and the methods of researching everyday practices can also
be used in the classroom. This works at all levels of education and even
children under eight years can investigate their own practices in the same
way as university undergraduates or teachers on professional develop-
ment courses can. In this way the relationship between ‘out-of-school’
and school practices changes.
5. New pedagogies for new times. Researchers such as Gunther Kress
(1995) have consistently called for a new vision of education to take
account of contemporary change. So far, the examples assume that edu-
cational provision continues unchanged. However, there is a progression
in that at first teachers may be bringing in new technologies to function
within existing practices, and then they see further possibilities through
the affordances of the media, and start to use the media for new
purposes and in the end these are transformed into new practices. The
new activities online include the Web 2.0 characteristics identified earlier
such as new forms of collaboration, joint production, and knowledge
creation rather than learning of just facts.
Some educators have developed lists of what they refer to as ‘twenty-
first century skills’ (such as the list in Jenkins 2005), many of which are
not particularly valued within existing educational practices countries.
They are based on these Web 2.0 affordances and emphasize activities
such as: playing to experiment; performance adopting identities for
improvisations and discovery; multitasking; navigation across media;
and drawing on and contributing to collective intelligence. While we
would prefer not to isolate them as separable skills, and would locate
them within practices, it is worth examining how these practices bring
different aspects of language to the fore. Coming from a different direc-

tion it is also important to see how Gee’s lists of principles of learning
(2003) impact on language practices. These approaches challenge con-
temporary education to change. For classroom-based courses, there is a
need to develop a pedagogy where the online is central and it is not
brought in just to boost existing practices. What goes on in the class-
room is intimately bound up in what goes on outside it. Ultimately the
dislocation of time and space online can fundamentally change the
nature of education.
6. Informing language policies in the classroom: As shown in Chapters 4
and 5, multilingual literacy practices have gradually become a crucial
way of participating in the globalized online world. This also has
important implications for policies related to medium of instructions in
multilingual communities like Hong Kong that have focused largely on
using one language at a time in academic settings. The level of dexterity
and creativity that students demonstrate in online communication is an
important indicator of their preference for a more linguistically diverse
learning environment. Our findings of multilingual practices in IM and
Facebook among students in Hong Kong have provided empirical evi-
dence, both in the form of authentic texts and students’ insider know-
ledge, that there are mismatches between discourse styles in different
contexts. Different combinations of languages and scripts, alongside
other text-making resources, are evident in online writing by multi-
lingual people around the world (Danet and Herring 2007). Very often,
it is the affordances (including constraints) of the media that open up
new meaning making possibilities that are not normally available in
offline settings, classrooms included. The language education policy in
Hong Kong, for example, is one that fosters linguistic purity (see detailed
discussion in Evans 2002). Classroom instructions and written assign-
ments are expected to be in either English or Chinese but not mixed-
code. As with other vernacular literacy practices, hybrid linguistic
practices online are not always valued in institutional practices. However,
code-switching online often demonstrates students’ abilities to creatively
remix their existing text-making resources to respond to constraints of
the media, so as to achieve different communicative purposes.
12
RESEARCHING LANGUAGE ONLINE
• Texts and practices: The question of starting point

• A mixed-method approach
• Online methods and being responsive to participants’ lives
• The researcher’s stance
This chapter has a focus on methodology. As well as providing an overview

of major methods of researching online texts in existing studies, it includes
approaches adopted in our own research projects on new media language
and literacies. We first raise the issues of the starting point of studies
researching language online. We then discuss both traditional methods
(including observation and interview) and newer methods (such as auto-
ethnography and techno-biography) adopted in the research on IM, Flickr,
and Facebook, which have been covered in the previous chapters. Other
topics discussed include: the importance of combining both texts and prac-
tices; developing a responsive methodology; the researcher’s stance; and
challenges of carrying out research on the internet.
TEXTS AND PRACTICES: THE QUESTION OF STARTING POINT

There are many possible starting points for examining language online and
a recurring issue for researchers who are interested in both language as text
RESEARCHING LANGUAGE ONLINE 165
and language as practice is where to begin. If we have decided to research a

particular website or platform, should we start by observing the written
word shown on the screen? Or should we start by understanding practices,
through, for example, interviewing text producers or users?
The answer to these questions is closely tied to the aims of the research.
Several key methodological approaches have been identified within linguistic
studies of computer-mediated communication, which were overviewed
in Chapter 1. Much early research on language online took a variationist
approach, i.e. aiming to describe what was seen as a new variety of language
that is used exclusively for online communication. Such studies tended to
focus on characteristics of potentially ‘new’ structural features that were
considered to be specific to the internet. Under this approach, online lan-
guage data were collected without considering specific social contexts of use.
Generalizations about linguistic features of the internet were then made
through observations of such decontextualized data. Some examples of this
trend include Ferrara et al.’s (1991) ‘Interactive written discourse’, Shortis’
(2001) The Language of ICT, and Crystal’s (2006) notion of ‘Netspeak’.
With a similar starting point, other studies were carried out by drawing on
methods from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
A large body of work adopts quantitative methods. Much of this work
involves collecting a large corpus of texts in order to make generalizations
based on statistical results, such as Herring and Paolillo (2006) on blog
genres and Baron (2010) on IM. Such linguistic descriptions are important
in understanding the extent to which the web has introduced new varieties
of language that are specific to different types of CMC. However, feature
counting does not address the situated nature of language in use. That is why
other studies began to complement text analysis with user surveys and
interviews (e.g. Cherny 1999; Nardi et al. 2000). As an example of this
trend, one of us carried out a study that looked into linguistic practices of
email and IM among young people in Hong Kong (Lee 2002). In this study,
two sets of texts were collected, from email and from ICQ (an IM program),
with the aim of generating descriptive statistics of the frequency of occur-
rences of features such as emoticons and abbreviations in each set of data.
These findings were complemented by a questionnaire survey and interviews.
The primary focus of the above studies is CMC as text and as language.
Understanding language online within a social practice theory of language
and literacy makes it possible to rethink the meanings of text in our data,
and to also consider how texts are produced in authentic contexts of use,
and most importantly, why people employ different linguistic strategies in
different contexts of use. Certainly, linguistic descriptions alone cannot deal
with these issues. It also follows that starting the research with just observ-
ing the words in texts on particular platforms is not enough to inform an
understanding of what writing online means in people’s lives. In view of this,
research on digital literacies emerged to look into details of everyday digital
practices (e.g. Ito et al. 2010). This work has practices as a basic unit of
analysis. The researchers also consider how pedagogy can take into account
166 RESEARCHING LANGUAGE ONLINE
students’ everyday digital practices. Following a social practice theory of

literacies, digital literacies scholars also adopt more ethnographic-style
methods in researching details of people’s everyday digital practices. Davies
and Merchant (2007), for example, analyse academic blogging as a social
practice. They adopt an auto-ethnographic approach in their research on the
literacy practices of their own blogging activities. (See Anderson 2006 for an
explanation of this approach in social science research, and it was also used
in Barton 2011b.) Such an approach also allows them to highlight the advan-
tages of conducting insider research. In particular, their first-hand knowledge
of blogging not only allowed them to collect rich data about what actually
happens in blogging; it also raised issues about ethnography as a method for
online research, such as the benefits of carrying out auto-ethnographic
research online and the researchers’ relationship to the digital culture being
researched.
As described in Chapter 1, our research on language online focuses
on text-making practices, ‘the ways in which people choose and transform
resources for representing meanings in the form of texts for different pur-
poses’ (Lee 2007c: 289). Understanding online text-making practices involves
not just analysing structural features of language, but also observing par-
ticular ways of creating and using texts, moving towards investigating the
how and the why of text-making through observing details of participants’
lives. People’s perceptions, feelings, and values are also taken into considera-
tion within this theoretical construct. In short, the essence of text-making
practices is to study texts in terms of what people do with their texts. As
a different starting point, a practice-based approach can also begin with
people’s everyday lives outside the screen. This serves as a way of looking at
how technologies have transformed these already existing practices.
With these conceptual framings in mind, we argue that texts and practices
are inseparable in researching language online. However, as we have stressed
throughout the book, we do not see language as simply a set of structural
features, nor is it just a mode alongside other modes of representing digital
discourse. Language online is also situated social practice. Different ways of
using language serve a range of discourse functions in different social con-
texts, leading to different intended illocutionary meanings of what is said.
Ways of deploying linguistic resources are shaped by various factors situated
in people’s everyday lived experiences of language use and beyond. In this
regard, neither language nor practice should be seen as the sole point of
departure. Instead, these methods go back and forth between data of lan-
guage and data of people’s practices. When observing the words on a web-
site, we frequently get to learn something about the life of the text producers
such as where they are from, what they do for a living, their interests and
hobbies, their linguistic repertoire in online and offline situations, and so on.
With Flickr, for instance, looking at people’s profiles, and their language
used in various writing spaces, can reveal a great deal about the user’s
linguistic and cultural identities they are presenting. This combination of
analysing online discourse as well as people’s practices is also captured in

Androutsopoulos’ (2008) discourse-centred online ethnography.
A MIXED-METHOD APPROACH
Throughout the book, various studies conducted by us have been cited as
examples to illustrate issues related to language online. In this section, we
provide detailed descriptions of the methods of data collection adopted in three
of the research projects involving different forms of new media online. The
three studies in question are the study of IM text-making practices, the research
on multilingual practices on Flickr, and the study of Web 2.0 writing activities.
The overall methodological assumption in our research is that under-
standing writing in web-based environments involves connecting texts and
practices, both of which are crucial in understanding the production and use
of language online. Without looking closely at the texts, we would not be
able to understand the actual linguistic products of activities online; and
without observing users’ lives and beliefs about what they do with their
online writing, we would not be able to see the dynamics of language online.
Through the lens of text-making practices, we are also able to understand
language online from the user’s perspective. Connecting traditions of lin-
guistic analysis with practice-based research requires new methodological
design and the reshaping of traditional methods in response to the changing
affordances of new media. A mixed-method approach is preferred, as no one
single method can be employed to address all research questions pertaining
to both the texts and the practices surrounding them. Sometimes we need to
combine quantitative and qualitative methods; at other times, we move back
and forth between face-to-face methods and online methods. It is important
to be explicit about research methods and instruments so as to present
and discuss issues and challenges involved in doing online research more
generally.
The IM study
The overall aim of the IM project was to understand how young people in
Hong Kong deployed their multilingual, multiscriptual, and multimodal
resources when participating in IM. Because the overall objective of the
study was to understand the situated nature of language deployment on IM,
it generally took a qualitative and multiple case study approach. Data were
collected from a group of 19 young people in Hong Kong, aged between 20
and 28. It should be noted that the data were collected between 2006 and
2007 and the methods adopted drew upon what was available at that point
in time. Looking for informants for this study was not an easy task, given
the amount of personal and private communication involved in IM. New
informants emerged at different points in time. Some started participating
at a very early stage while some were identified later by way of existing
informants, an approach referred to as ‘snowballing’.
Two points are worth noting regarding the research design of the IM
study. First, not all participants were researched with the same research
procedure. Rather, it was a ‘responsive’ methodology, as discussed below.
Second, the same participant might have been involved in the study through
different pathways of data collection. Some participants were studied
through the first pathway below, which involved a mixture of traditional
ethnography and online methods, including the following stages:
(i) Initial observation: This involved the researcher going to the parti-
cipants’ home or student residence and sitting behind them to take field
notes as they were sitting at their computer and chatting with their
friends online. This way, the researcher had access to the participants’
private spaces of communication. This close observation of messaging
also revealed other online practices such as multi-tasking – some parti-
cipants often switched to other applications such as using MS Word for
homework, with IM in the background at the same time. (See Appendix
3 for a list of what was covered in this observation session.)
(ii) Collection of chat logs: The participant was asked to print out the chat
history from phase (i). This ensured the authenticity of the textual data.
(iii) Face-to-face interview: Based on the researcher’s field notes, a face-to-
face interview was then conducted with the participant on the spot.
(iv) Initial analysis: Then the researcher went away and analysed all the data
collected from (i)–(iii). This phase started with a discourse analysis of
the chat texts. Linguistic features identified in texts then became themes
for follow-up interviews.
(v) Follow-up: Based on the themes emerging from (iv), follow-up inter-
views were conducted either face-to-face or online, depending on how
accessible the participants were. Keeping in touch with the informants
helped track changes in their IM usage. For example, towards the end
of a semester, some participants began to use IM for project discussion
with classmates instead of just for social and interpersonal chat.
As the research progressed, an alternative procedure was developed in

response to the participants’ everyday digital lives. In this second pathway,
the participants were studied primarily through online methods.
(i) Electronic logbook: Each participant was asked to keep a seven-day

word-processed diary or logbook, in which the participant described
their daily IM and online activities. They were also asked to copy and
paste their chat logs onto this logbook, which was then emailed to the
researcher. (See Appendix 4 for guidance notes for the logbook writers.)
(ii) Initial analysis: The logbooks were analysed and coded for content.
Interview topics were identified from this analysis.
(iii) Online interview: Follow-up interviews were mostly done through IM.
This interview method was particularly suitable for researching students
who the researcher did not know well or had only met electronically, or
those who were not able to meet with the researcher face-to-face.
While a close observation of the IM messages was important in under-

standing textual features, insights from qualitative data such as interviews
and logbook allowed the researcher to delve into the participants’ lives and
how their IM text-making might have been mediated by other online
practices. For each participant, a profile was created according to informa-
tion obtained from field notes and the various stages of data collection.
Across-case analysis was also conducted, with an aim to look for emerging
themes and patterns.
The Flickr research on multilingual practices

The original research aim of the Flickr study was to understand how people
deployed their linguistic resources when interacting with an international
audience. We began the study by eliciting data about the level of linguistic
diversity and the overall distribution of languages on Flickr. To do so, the
first step was to conduct an exploratory observation of 100 Flickr sites.
These sites were selected from one of the largest interest groups on Flickr,
called FlickrCentral, where users with a wide range of linguistic and geo-
graphical backgrounds can be identified. As joining groups is an optional
activity, this was also an effective way of identifying active users, which was
our main target group. We observed the first 100 users we came across on
FlickrCentral, considering only those who had actively contributed written
content, including giving titles, descriptions and tags to many of their photos.
From these 100 sites, we obtained descriptive statistics about the presence
and distribution of English and other languages in major writing spaces,
including profiles, titles and descriptions of photos, tags and comments. As
much as possible, we also noted languages used by the users and their
locations. Despite this being set up as an English medium site, we noted the
presence of many other languages and half of the sites in the initial analysis
included languages other than English, as reported in Lee and Barton (2011).
Having familiarized ourselves with the technological possibilities and general
trend of multilingualism on Flickr, we then collected multilingual texts on
the site and contacted the producers of these texts. Our starting point, or our
primary unit of analysis, was a selection of Flickr sites, that is, the individual
web spaces where users can upload their photos. We also focused largely on
Flickr activities that involve user-generated writing. We collected mixed-
language texts from four distinct writing spaces provided on Flickr: profiles,
titles and descriptions, tags and comments.
Having obtained a snapshot of the multilingual situation on Flickr, the
next step was to take a closer look at individual users’ multilingual practices
in these different writing spaces on Flickr. Separate from the 100 sites
described above, we identified a set of sites where English and other lan-
guages co-exist. We were able to select 30 active users, 18 Chinese speakers
and 12 Spanish speakers. By ‘active’ users, we are referring to people who

regularly uploaded photos and contributed writing to the site, for example,
in the form of photo captions and comments. These 30 focal participants
came from various geographical areas where Chinese or Spanish were the
main languages, but apart from this criterion, we studied the first active users
we came across. They were first invited to complete an online survey
questionnaire about their general Flickr practices. The survey covered
questions about what they used Flickr for, and what languages they would
use in different areas on the site and why. There was a 50 per cent response
rate to our initial request, which we considered as high for an online request
to strangers. The reason for this high response rate may well be that all
participants were first approached through Flickr’s private email system
called FlickrMail, which is only available to members; in that initial email,
we identified ourselves as fellow Flickr users as well as academic researchers;
the survey was posted on a free online survey site which was easily accessible
to the respondents.
The survey was then followed up by a series of email interviews, so as to
identify different ways of participating in Flickr and ways in which these
people deployed their linguistic resources on their own sites. (See Appendix
5 for an example of an email sent to one of the interviewees). As we started
to develop a closer relationship with the participants, we sometimes switched
to our personal email accounts, according to their preference. Our infor-
mants all had a large number of photos and one recurrent issue in online
research is how to sample from what can potentially be too much data. To
narrow down the scope, for each participant in the research, we examined
the 100 most recent photos they had uploaded. In the interviews, our
questions then focused on specific areas of these Flickr sites as well as the
answers to the initial survey questionnaire. In so doing, we were able to pay
close attention to details about actual situations of Flickr use. The interview
data were then coded and categorized according to emerging themes from
the transcripts. Our research interest in Flickr also grew out of our personal
participation in this site. We thus also carried out auto-ethnographies of our
own activities on Flickr, which we cover in greater detail below when dis-
cussing researcher’s stance.
This core study of Flickr then acted as a starting point for additional
studies of language online. For example, the additional study of people
undertaking the project of taking a photo a day began from observing that
one of the participants in the main Flickr study was involved in this and was
a member of a 365 group. Initially, more than 200 sites where people had
undertaken a-photo-a-day projects were identified by searching for ‘365’.
These sites were looked at broadly and from them, 50 sites where people
talked about their learning were examined in more detail, using content
analysis to identify key themes.
The Web 2.0 writing research: techno-biographies

The third key study we have drawn upon in this book is a study of Web 2.0
writing activities among young people in Hong Kong. In addition to
identifying major Web 2.0 activities, the research specifically looks into the
ways in which a group of bilingual undergraduate students in Hong Kong
deploy their multiple linguistic resources on Web 2.0 sites, and how that
relates to their identity performance online. This study was carried out from
2010 to 2011. Two phases of data collection were involved and multiple
methods were adopted: the first phase of data collection aimed to elicit
demographic information about the students and to identify case parti-
cipants through an initial online questionnaire survey sent to all undergradu-
ates at a university in Hong Kong. Over 170 undergraduate students
responded. This was followed by ‘persistent observation’ (a term used in
Herring 2004) of selected participants’ most frequented Web 2.0 sites, the
links to which were provided by the participants in the questionnaire. Similar
to the Flickr research, the survey questionnaire for this study also covered
questions about the participants’ linguistic practices in different online and
offline domains, such as the language(s) they said they would use when
writing an email to a professor, or when they looked up information for
their homework on the web, and so on. This first phase of the study
then served as a basis for designing the interview protocol in phase two of
the study.
The core data came from detailed techno-biographic-style interviews with
20 participants, all of whom indicated in the survey that they agreed to
further participate in the research as case participants. These student parti-
cipants also shared a similar set of linguistic resources. That is, they speak
Cantonese as their primary language in everyday life, while having know-
ledge of standard written Chinese, a standard written variety taught in
school and used in institutional contexts; written Cantonese, a non-standard
local variety of writing, may also be used for informal purposes. English is
one of the official languages in Hong Kong and is taught as a second
language in Hong Kong. Mixing Chinese and English in utterances then
becomes a prevalent linguistic practice among these young participants.
Each techno-biographic interview started with a screen-recording session,
where a student participant was asked to go online for about 30 minutes
with their screen activities recorded using the screen-recording software
Camtasia. This was then followed by a face-to-face interview lasting between
30 and 50 minutes, in which the screen recording was played back and the
participant went through and discussed the recorded online activities with
the researcher. The questions in the interview revolved around their linguistic
practices in online and offline contexts in different phases and domains of
the participant’s life, as well as new topics that emerged during the con-
versation. Follow-up interviews were carried out via the private message
function on Facebook (as all participants reported to be active Facebook
users). See Appendix 6 for the key areas and questions that were covered in
the techno-biographic interviews.
Both within-case and across-case analyses were carried out. For each
participant, a profile was first created according to the information obtained
from field notes and the various stages of data collection described above.
All of the transcripts were coded using the qualitative data analysis software
ATLAS.ti to examine emerging patterns across participants. In addition
to the interview data, what the participants wrote on Facebook, their
blogs, and IM was also analysed as data of techno-biographies. These new
media provide new affordances and ways for online users to write about
themselves, thus allowing them to create and constantly update their own
auto-biographies in real time. The meaning of technobiography has also
been extended to include online profiles, status updating, and visual repre-
sentation of the self through images.
ONLINE METHODS AND BEING RESPONSIVE TO

PARTICIPANTS’ LIVES
The research projects on new media outlined above have made extensive use
of online methods. These methods range from conducting surveys on the
internet through to observing participants’ lives on the web unannounced
and interviewing participants via email or real-time chat. At the same time
the internet can be used as a research tool for providing various methods of
qualitative data collection such as interviews and participant observation.
Using these approaches we examine what people do online and the sense
they make of the online world. These methods can be seen as part of ethno-
graphic approaches, which highlight people’s perspectives and locate their
activities in broader cultural contexts. In an extensive discussion of virtual
methods, Hine (2000) emphasizes the importance of seeing the internet as
culture and the key role of ethnographic approaches:
Naturalistic studies overall, and ethnography in particular, have posed a challenge

to the limited view of CMC provided by experimental studies. In highlighting the rich
and complex social interactions that CMC can provide, researchers have established
CMC as a cultural context. In doing so, researchers have drawn upon frameworks
that focus on the construction of reality through discourse and practice. A style of
ethnography that involves real-time engagement with the field site and multiple
ways of interacting with informants has proved key in highlighting the processes
which online interaction comes to be socially meaningful to participants. In claiming
a new field site for ethnography and focussing on the construction of bounded
social space the proponents of online culture have, however, overplayed the
separateness of the offline and the online.
(2000: 27)
Hine’s approach fits in well with a literacy studies’ focus on practices.

Using a new literacies framework, Leander reviews Hine’s study along with
other virtual ethnographies as ‘connective ethnographies’ (Leander 2009).
We would emphasize that often these are ‘ethnographic approaches’, draw-
ing upon a useful distinction from Bloome and Green (1992) who differen-
tiate between the full immersion in a culture involved in ‘doing an ethnog-
raphy’ and the narrower and more focused aim of ‘drawing on ethnographic
approaches’ (as also discussed in Barton 2011a). Often online research is
doing the latter.
A recurrent method that we have adopted is online interviewing. It is a
useful instrument that complements online surveys. Surveys on their own
have sometimes been criticized as a data collection tool because of their lack
of selection criteria when choosing focal participants (Dillman 2007). This
is why in our various projects we complement online surveys with inter-
viewing carefully selected participants. Online interviewing has proved
particularly useful for researching data that involves personal and private
communication that the participants would not have been comfortable to
discuss with the researchers elsewhere. Crucially, the physical presence of the
researcher is not required in an online interview. This can also create a
relaxed research atmosphere and avoid any possible embarrassment that
might exist in a face-to-face context. For example, in the IM research, most
interviews were conducted via IM, which was at the same time the main
research site of the study. With this method, the IM participants who were
relatively quiet in face-to-face interviews turned out to be very articulate in
the online context. As one participant explicitly reflected, without being
prompted, towards the end of an IM interview session:
I like it this way [doing an ICQ interview] because I feel less nervous. I can have a
clear mind when I write my messages.
The relatively relaxed interviewing atmosphere created by IM is also

noted by Voida et al. (2004). They argue that through IM, both the inter-
viewer and the interviewee can communicate interactively without feeling
obliged to engage themselves in intense listening and note-taking activities.
In addition, the time lag between messages, i.e. when we were waiting for
each other to type our reply, allowed time for both the participant and the
researcher to organize and reflect upon their thoughts. Although drawbacks
of online interviews have been acknowledged (for example by James and
Busher 2006), data collected from our online interviews often yielded much
richer information about the participants’ perceptions and ideologies than
face-to-face interviews would have done.
In deciding what then makes the most appropriate online interviewing
tool O’Conner et al. (2008) outline the pros and cons of using asynchronous
or synchronous tools. Because of its delayed mode of communication, asyn-
chronous tools such as email allow the participants to take their time to think
before they respond; whereas synchronous platforms such as IM resemble the
level of interaction in face-to-face talk, which email lacks. Indeed, any form
of CMC can become an interviewing tool. We have realized that the most
effective online interviewing platform is one that is readily available on the
site that we are researching, or something that the participants are already
familiar with and use actively in their everyday life. In our research, we have
always been able to identify an interviewing tool from the actual research site
(using IM, FlickrMail, and private messaging on Facebook for carrying out
the interviews).
We also realized the importance of identifying useful research tools and
methods based on the participants’ existing situated online experiences. At
the time of carrying out the IM research, both using IM and processing Word
documents on a computer were integral in university students’ lives in Hong
Kong. These are the activities with which students identified and felt most
comfortable. Understanding students’ existing online practices allowed the
researcher to develop a responsive methodology (Stringer 1999; Barton et al.
2007) that revolved around these two electronic tools – interviewing via IM
and writing diary entries on MS Word. Fitting data collection activities into
participants’ everyday practices, together with the flexibility of time and
space provided by these electronic methods, can greatly enhance student
participants’ interests and motivation when taking part in the process of data
collection, especially one that involves multiple data collection stages over a
long period of time.
Issues of ethics and privacy

Virtual ethnography shares many principles of traditional ethnography and
in many ways it also has its concerns of ethics. However, online research also
brings up new issues. Ethics, especially in relation to issues of privacy and
ownership, has been a major topic of debate amongst online researchers (e.g.
Elgesem 1996; Herring 2002). The Association of Internet Researchers
(AoIR) has published a comprehensive Ethics Guide online (Ess and AoIR
2012) providing worked examples of informed consent forms and outlining
key ethical concerns when carrying out research on the internet. The Guide
is not a recipe, however, and may not be applicable to all contexts of internet
research. There are certainly unsolved problems when it comes to research-
ing multimodal content, and using screen shots, images and public comments.
Major questions that online researchers are still addressing are:
• What kind of public space is the online world and who owns and has
rights over the use of publicly available texts online?
• When and to what extent should anonymity be assured? When should
screen-names of participants be preserved as they appear online? When
do faces need to be censored?
• When is it ethical to lurk unannounced or observe without participating
in publicly available sites?
• In what situations can freely available online content be used for
research purpose without seeking permission?
• If permission is needed, what kind of permission is needed and whose
permission should be sought?
• In what way can researchers seek consent from strangers online?
While informed consent has been widely adopted in research involving

people, internet researchers have noted that privacy can only be protected to
a limited extent in online research (Elgesem 1996; Herring 2002). For
example, in the IM research, new IM chat sessions often occurred unplanned
and spontaneously while observing the participants. While chatting with one
person, new messages from other chat partners might also arrive simul-
taneously and unpredictably. It was, therefore, not possible for the researcher
to contact all participants prior to the observation sessions and consent from
the participants’ chat partners was sought only if the logs were cited in
publications. Elgesem (1996) points out that since the internet is an open and
public space, participating in online communication already assumes some
risk of making information publicly known. Thus, there are limits to which
one’s online privacy can be claimed. There are also likely to be different
answers to these questions depending on the sensitivity of the data and the
vulnerability of the participants.
Herring (2002) also points out that informed consent might seriously
affect the quality of CMC research, especially research that involves studying
group identities in public CMC such as IM and chat rooms. She explains that
signing an informed consent form could imply an additional identity, i.e. the
research subject. This extra identity imposed on the chat users may have a
strong impact on the naturalness of interaction as participants may be
consciously aware of their role as research participants. These concerns and
issues are also taken account of in our research projects. In a context where
the data is not sensitive and the participants are not vulnerable, we believe
we are able to preserve the authenticity of our data and fulfil our aim of
studying people and their lives. For example, in our initial invitation letter
to our Flickr participants (via private FlickrMail), we always positioned
ourselves as active Flickr users showing interest in their photographs and
their language use on the site, while also suggesting their potential in being
research participants in our project. We made it clear to the participants that
their content was used strictly for research purposes, and that they could
withdraw from the study at any point. In cases where we wished to publish
their self-produced content and even their faces, we wrote to the participants
concerned again to seek their written permission. In short, while there still
remain uncertainties regarding online research ethics, we adopt a flexible
approach and try to protect our participants as far as possible, while still
being able to capture the naturalistic and authentic aspects of our research
sites.
THE RESEARCHER’S STANCE

Finally, we highlight our roles and our stance as researchers of language
online. Just as good qualitative research makes other aspects of its method-
ology explicit (Barton 2011a), we believe it is essential for researchers them-
selves to make their relationship to the research, that is, their stance, explicit
in their analyses and writing. As data collection and analysis proceeded, we
became aware of the multiple roles we played at different stages of our

studies. First of all, our interests in researching new media, be it IM, Flickr,
or Facebook, all grew out of our own personal participation on these sites.
As well as studying the sites and users, we constantly reflected upon our own
participation, thus carrying out our own auto-ethnographies, or to be
precise, our auto-netnographies, ‘autobiographical personal reflection on
online community membership’ (Kozinets 2010: 188).
Take the Flickr research as an example. Both of us have been active users
of Flickr for more than six years. As discussed earlier, we regularly upload
photos to our photostreams; we provide tags and write about our photos;
and we make contact with other Flickr users and comment on their photos.
In addition to our familiarity with Flickr, we both know an additional
language besides English – one of us is a Chinese-English bilingual and the
other has knowledge of Spanish, coincidentally the two most used languages
on Flickr after English. Our multilingual experiences on Flickr inform our
understanding of the relationship between English and other languages
online, offering some insider perspectives to our research. In other words,
our position as a researcher of Flickr was partly enabled by our role as an
insider and active user of Flickr. To our research participants, we were some-
times their Flickr contacts or friends; at other times, we were their site
visitors and researchers. Some of these roles were consciously and imme-
diately reflected upon as we interacted with our informants, while some were
revealed as we analysed the data. Davies and Merchant (2007: 173) have
usefully summarized the ways in which new media researchers position
themselves:
• ‘Researcher as identifier of new tropes’ (i.e. discovering the ‘newness’ of

technologies);
• ‘Researcher as insider’ (i.e. an active user of the technology examining
other users of the technology in question);
• ‘Researcher as analyst’ (i.e. analysing texts and practices);
• ‘Researcher as both subject and object’ (i.e. doing auto-ethnographies);
• ‘Researcher as activist’ (i.e. studying the social impact of new tech-
nologies).
The boundaries between these roles can be fuzzy and very often they
overlap. From our experience, simultaneously being both an insider and an
analyst has benefited our research immensely. Just like doing ethnographic
research on any site, online researchers need to familiarize themselves with
what goes on in their research sites before they can study them. This means
more than just signing up for an account and lurking – in our cases, we
constantly participated as active and experienced users. We already possessed
insider knowledge prior to the studies. In the IM research, for instance, the
researcher’s familiarity with IM-specific language features in Hong Kong
(such as code-switching and a range of Asian emoticons) allowed her to
compare her own experience and knowledge with the informants’ practices,
thus discovering the diversity in text-making practices surrounding IM. As

‘insider’ analysts, understanding our informants’ online practices through
reflecting upon our own allowed us to understand both the texts and text-
making practices in greater depth.
In short, we see online methodology as an additional way of under-
standing participants’ lives online, instead of something that competes with
or challenges traditional methods. It also does not mean that the researcher
has to shift their research site entirely to an online context – the online and
the offline work closely with each other in our approach. A language-focused
approach to digital literacies research, together with a multitude of tradi-
tional and online research methods, provide a rich array of data for us to
understand better the relationship between online and offline lives, or more
precisely, how the online is embedded in participants’ everyday lives, which
is crucial in understanding participants’ text-making as situated literacies.
When applied to linguistics or discourse-based research, virtual ethnography
has also proved extremely useful in understanding the social functions of
computer-mediated discourse.
13
FLOWS OF LANGUAGE
ONLINE AND OFFLINE
• Offline presence of internet language

• Public enregisterment of internet language
• Commodification and indexicality of internet language
• Where we are now
OFFLINE PRESENCE OF INTERNET LANGUAGE

We have called this book Language Online. Our primary interest has been
texts and practices in the context of internet writing spaces. At the same time,
throughout the book, we have presented cases and examples demonstrating
the everydayness of language online and how it travels across online and
offline domains of life. It is the domestication of technologies that blurs the
boundary between the so-called online and offline worlds, which is also
changing traditional conceptualizations of community and networking.
Wellman’s argument cited in Chapter 1 that ‘[t]he cyberspace-physical space
comparison is a false dichotomy’ (2001: 18) is not an exaggeration. Many
of people’s online activities have their roots in offline ones, as shown in
Chapter 10. The demolishing of the online-offline dichotomy is also evident
in everyday linguistic practices, in that people carry out their lives weaving
together online and offline resources. This final chapter offers a linguistic
FLOWS OF LANGUAGE ONLINE AND OFFLINE 179
angle to the relationship between online and offline contexts, moving on to

understand the increasingly diversified nature of language, life, and the
global world.
This book has provided many examples of how people’s writing activities
online are embedded in everyday social practices. We have seen in several
chapters that college students deploy specific meaning making resources
online to project different identities, including the roles they already play in
their offline lives as students, friends, family, and teachers, as in Chapter 6;
interacting with people through language and image on Flickr is turned into
important learning opportunities, ranging from learning to take better
photos to learning to become a better person, as discussed in Chapter 9;
pregnancy becomes a major online literacy event, as shown in Peggy’s case
in Chapter 10, where she travelled seamlessly between Facebook and her
blog before and after she gave birth to her daughter. These episodes of
language online clearly demonstrate that writing activities on the internet are
not separable from people’s lived experiences off the screen.
The situated nature of language online is also evident at a more micro-
linguistic level. Linguistic features that are commonly considered to be
specific to ‘online’ communication have made their way to our everyday off-
screen contexts. Public spaces are gradually infiltrated with texts with traces
of what public discourse would refer to as ‘textese’ or Netspeak. This seems
to be happening all around the world. Here are a few examples:
• A London convenience store is called ‘4 UR Convenience’ (Figure 13.1);

• An English academic department in Hong Kong has ‘English @ CUHK’
as their department logo;
• A sign on the wine shelf in a supermarket in New Zealand warns
customers to ‘THNK B4 U DRNK’;
• ‘@’ indicates a public computer area in a hotel in Spain.
There are many more examples of this that we cannot cover here.1 What
we can observe immediately though is that many of these public texts contain
features identified in the first generation of CMC research that focused on
linguistic description of a CMC genre containing features such as word
reductions, acronyms, and letter and number homophones. (For the sake of
convenience, we use ‘internet language’ in this chapter to refer to these
features.) The @ sign, though originally used in other contexts that predate
the internet, has been popularized by its use in email addresses and more
recently on Twitter. Honeycutt and Herring (2009) have identified 12 func-
tions of the @ sign on Twitter and show how these uses facilitate interactional
coherence within the complex network of tweets. An important function of
@ on Twitter is to address another user in a tweet (e.g. @CarmenLee). The @
sign is now widely used in public places to represent the locational preposition
1Interested readers may refer to our set of data posted on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/
onofflineproject/
180 FLOWS OF LANGUAGE ONLINE AND OFFLINE
Figure 13.1 ‘4 UR Convenience’, a convenience store in London
‘at’ (e.g. ‘Only @ Watsons’). The Facebook ‘Like’ has made its way to the
offline world as a key element in print-based advertising. Other features
include playful punctuation and emoticons in public signs.
The examples given above are based on English only. What is even more
interesting is how some of these English-based expressions are inserted into
texts in other languages, as shown in Figure 13.2. This poster is an
advertisement for a fitness centre in Hong Kong. As a common marketing
strategy nowadays, the ad asks potential customers to become a fan of the
fitness centre by ‘liking’ its fan page on Facebook in exchange for a gift. The
Facebook ‘Like’ button here is not only an additional marketing strategy in
the poster, but is indeed part of the syntax of the slogan ‘– Like ’ (‘Like
us and you will be rewarded’). The act of liking posts on Facebook has
introduced new meanings to the verb ‘like’. In the case of the slogan here,
‘Like’ is not taken literally but should be interpreted as the act of clicking the
‘Like’ button on Facebook. Although the Chinese equivalent to ‘Like’ is
available on Facebook, the poster designer decided to use a mixed-code
message to speak to the local Hong Kong customers who are used to code-
switching in speech.
PUBLIC ENREGISTERMENT OF INTERNET LANGUAGE

The growing presence of specific forms of language in public places is a clear
sign of public enregisterment of language. Enregisterment refers to the
process through which ‘a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within
Figure 13.2 Fitness centre in Hong Kong
a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha 2003: 231). As

access to the internet and communication over networked spaces becomes
commonplace, public discourses and metalinguistic descriptions about the
influence of the internet also grow. It is easy for people to talk about their
language use online and its possible influences. Metalinguistic labels like
‘chatspeak’, ‘textese’, and ‘textspeak’ have been used by the mass media and
in public discussions, and even linguists in early CMC research, to refer to
specific features of language that seem to be exclusive to the internet. The
existence of these labels is evidence of a recognizable and emerging ‘variety’
of language that is quite different from other forms that are already in use.
In this case, internet language use often contrasts with existing ‘standard’
language. While internet language is often misrepresented by mass media
and other public discourses (see Chapter 1), our data shown in the previous
section suggest that people are at the same time gradually accepting such
features of language as ‘normal’. Internet language is no longer just a set of
innovative codes used by a small group of people. Some frequently used
abbreviated forms such as LOL (‘laugh out loud’) and BFF (‘best friends
forever’) have been codified in the Oxford English Dictionary, which
suggests that these linguistic forms have become part of people’s everyday
language practices, whether online or offline.
182 FLOWS OF LANGUAGE ONLINE AND OFFLINE
COMMODIFICATION AND INDEXICALITY OF INTERNET

LANGUAGE
Language is always indexical. Sociolinguists have discussed how language
and its forms, such as an accent, can convey specific social meanings and
identities. The growing presence of internet language in offline contexts also
serves to index and position particular social identities such as people of a
certain age group and lifestyle. Crystal (2005) once argued that SMS abbre-
viations are designed to accommodate the technological limits of texting,
and that they have no place in other contexts where such limits do not exist.
The growing presence of online linguistic features in broad domains of
offline life clearly shows that such linguistic features do have their values in
offline contexts.
Abbreviations used in texting are no longer just a way of responding to
the word limit on mobile phone texting systems. With easier and cheaper
mobile technologies with no word limit imposed on texting, abbreviations
and initialisms have still survived. One of the reasons is the commodification
of internet language, in that language online is given marketable and
economic values. That is why the examples we have shown are mostly
present in commercial domains. We have seen OMG printed on bags and
shirts, emoticons in print-based advertisements, and the @ sign is found in
many shopping centres in big cities. The indexical values of these features
have to be interpreted in their immediate contexts of use. In contemporary
society, internet language has become an important form of cultural capital
that indexes ‘coolness’ (boyd 2006), being modern, having an urban lifestyle,
and perhaps youthfulness. And in societies where English is not used as a
primary language, these social meanings are further reinforced because of
the use of English-based internet language in local public texts. All these also
provide further evidence that vernacular linguistic practices are valued in
new media linguistic landscapes. As part of the development of a super-
diverse society, Blommaert suggests that language features used in text
messages have developed into a ‘supervernacular’, ‘a particular and new type
of sociolinguistic object: semiotic forms that circulate in networks driven,
largely, by new technologies’ (2013, 3). The examples we have seen in the
previous sections are, however, no longer text messages when moved to
offline contexts. Mobile texting codes are not just one supervernacular. They
have been reshaped and refashioned into further varieties to suit different
purposes. This also fits in with the situated approach to written language
that is taken in this book.
WHERE WE ARE NOW

Propositions about literacy practices made two decades ago already made it
clear that literacy is historically situated and that literacy practices change
(Barton 1994b). These two characteristics of literacy practices also apply
to linguistic practices online. Language online is historically situated where
changes take place constantly according to human decision-making. People

draw upon and often reappropriate familiar practices from their previous
experience with technology whenever they come across a newer medium.
With this in mind, what is commonly conceived of as internet language is
hardly new – abbreviating or shortening a word has been a common word
formation process through history; and the @ sign and Facebook ‘Like’ are
amongst the many examples of pre-existing semiotic forms being given new
pragmatic meanings when they move between contexts, whether online or
offline. Thus, it is not language but what people do with it that has become
different and changes. As a way of summarizing what we have discovered
about changing linguistic practices brought about by new media, the follow-
ing list characterizes some of the things people do with language online.
When engaging in writing activity online, people:
• participate in new multilingual encounters, use and develop minority

languages, are more tolerant of language varieties and more informality;
• project new identities, explore multiple identities and different senses of
the self;
• position themselves and others through multimodal means, combine
semiotic resources in new ways, invent new relations between language
and images;
• respond to new affordances and deal with constant change, participate
in highly textually mediated activities;
• are more reflexive; reflect on their learning, undertake intentional
projects, learn in different ways, and new ways;
• reshape vernacular practices, make vernacular practices public;
• sort, classify, categorize in different ways, collaborate in new ways,
participate in digital scholarship, contribute to knowledge;
• do more reading and, especially, more writing, are changing the relation
between writing and reading.
The issues raised in this chapter both return us to the beginning of the
book and hint at possible further directions. Topics such as the changing
materiality of language and the shifting commercial control of language are
all perennial issues. New media are constantly being developed at any
moment and so are their related language and literacy practices. Research on
new media, like any subject areas, is ongoing and dynamic. The above list is
likely to be dated soon as technologies change and what people do with them
change. For instance, spoken language may have increasing importance
online and there may be shifts in what is paid for and what is available free,
along with conflicts over who can say what online. Returning again to our
discussion of newness in Chapter 1, practices online are deictic. Concepts,
descriptions, and theories of language online thus need constant updating.
Nonetheless, language is fluid and keeps moving and changing across
domains, time, and spaces. Language flows and changes with people, their
social practices, identities, and purposes.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1: TWO FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSING

LANGUAGE ONLINE
1.1 SOME LINGUISTIC PHENOMENA TO ATTEND TO WHEN

ANALYSING LANGUAGE AND IMAGE GENERALLY
This is a short list of topics. The specific areas vary according the purpose of
the analysis and the nature of the data:
• Participants: how they position themselves and others, how they address
others
– I, me, you, we
– Sentence types, questions and imperatives
– Hiding the self, passives, nominalizations
• Intertextuality and voices of others
• Metalinguistics and talk about talk
• Modal verbs, hedges, etc. . ..
• Conversational devices: Well, I mean
• Digital devices such as !!!!! :)
• Beginning and endings, Given and new: such as ‘I think that. . ..’ and
‘. . ..:)’
• Warrants, how people back up what they say, through:
– Assertion of beliefs
– Experience
– Deduction
– Reference to other people
APPENDICES 185
1.2 A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING MULTIMODAL AND

MULTILINGUAL STANCE-TAKING ON FLICKR
This shows the step-by-step stages used to analyse stance.
The photographer’s stance (in different writing spaces)

• How does the photographer use the title and description to express what
s/he knows about the image?
• How does the photographer use the title and description to express her
feelings and attitudes about the image? (e.g. Does he/she explicitly
evaluate the image? Does the description focus on a particular part of
the image?)
• How does the photographer use a particular language/image to tell
others who s/he is?
• How does the photographer use a particular language/image to relate to
his/her viewers (e.g. contacts, commenters, strangers)?
The viewer(s)’ stance (mostly via comments)

Generally, this is about how the comments tie intertextually and cohesively
to the image, the title, the description, the tags, etc. on the page.
• How do the commenters express knowledge/belief/opinion/feeling

towards (a particular part of) the image?
• How do the commenters express knowledge/belief/opinion/feeling
towards the title and/or description?
• How do the commenters refer to a previous comment?
• What languages do the commenters use to make their comments?
• How do they relate to other commenters?
• How do they relate to the photographer? (e.g. through a common
language)
The researcher-viewer’s stance (the analyst’s gaze)

• What is your reading path, e.g. what draws your attention first? What
do you look for next?
• How does your role as a researcher and your research agenda shape your
reading path?
• How does your prior knowledge of the content of the image and/or the
language(s) used shape the way you analyse the photo page?
The researcher-viewer as a Flickr user

• How does your knowledge about Flickr and its affordances shape your
reading path and the way you study the photo page?
186 APPENDICES
• How does your own experience in using Flickr shape your reading path
and the way you study the photo page?
• How do your attitudes towards Flickr shape your reading path and the
way you study the photo page?
BROADENING OUT
Go back and forth iteratively between the image and the researcher’s stance
to inform the stance analysis.
Observe further:
• Other photos in the photo stream;

• Other information about the photographer (e.g. the profile page);
• Any other external links to make more sense of this all (e.g. the user’s
blog).
APPENDIX 2: USING FACEBOOK GROUP IN AN UNDERGRADUATE

LINGUISTICS COURSE
Reflections on Facebook group in an undergraduate linguistic course

(by Carmen Lee)
In my own teaching, I have explored different tools to facilitate out-of-
classroom interaction with my students in Hong Kong, from learning
platforms like WebCT to social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
WebCT was selected in my first year of teaching because it was a tool that I
had used when I was a student. In my own courses, however, students did
not log in as often as I wished and sometimes even missed important
information that I posted. After two years, I added Twitter with the hope
that students would participate in backchannel discussion during my lectures
and back home they would receive updated information about the course.
To my surprise, however, very few students signed up for a Twitter account.
What I have learned from these years of combining technologies with face-
to-face classroom interaction is that we do not simply select a platform that
we teachers think can improve students’ learning; what is more important is
to consider a tool that is situated in students’ everyday lived experiences (see
also Ivanič et al. 2009 on how college students learn outside of school). That
is why at the end of my courses, I often ask students to assess their online
learning experience. One year, a student suggested “Start a Facebook group
because we use FB every day!” And so I did it!
In the spring semester in 2011, I formed a Facebook Group for my senior
undergraduate course Language, Literacy and Technology, which 33
students were taking. While sharing most features on Facebook, a ‘Group’
on Facebook is a membership-based area that gathers people with shared
interests and purposes. A Group may be public or private (called a Closed
Group). My course Group was a closed one meaning that only course
APPENDICES 187
members were allowed to join the Group and read the posts there. In this
Group, all members were encouraged to take the initiative to write posts.
Students and teachers interacted through multimodal means, from text-
based posts and comments to images from other sites and videos from
YouTube. A feature that is exclusive to the Group area on Facebook is
‘Docs’, which allows members to compose and share text-based documents
– that is also where I share my lecture notes with the students. Participation
in the group was voluntary and no contribution in the Group was formally
assessed. All students joined the Group as they interpreted their Facebook
participation as part of their general participation grade, which counted
towards 10 per cent of their overall coursework. At the end of the course, a
questionnaire survey of students’ experience of using Facebook in the course
revealed that 92 per cent of them preferred the Facebook Group to other
course platforms that they had used. This positive feedback was partly due
to the fact that all students were already avid Facebook users. A course-
based platform on Facebook would not have created extra work for them.
Whenever they logged in to Facebook, the latest course information was
there. In terms of level of participation, although most original posts were
still teacher-initiated, over 350 comments (together with many ‘Likes’) were
made by students throughout the 14-week semester. It was also apparent that
a strong sense of community was developed outside the classroom context
(e.g. offering opportunities for students from different faculties and majors
to interact outside class). The social networking affordance on Facebook
also facilitated collaborative learning, with students often sharing newly
discovered, course-related information on the web, thus taking on the role
of a teacher at the same time.
A strong sense of community was developed both inside and outside the
classroom through adopting a hybridity of discourse practices by the course
participants. Although the Group was academic in nature and was initiated
by the teacher, course members drew upon a mixture of conventional and
unconventional language practices that did not seem to exist in the physical
classroom context. The following extract shows an original post by a student
Carrie, who shares her view on an internet-specific word (‘geilivable’) that
she found on the Yahoo Dictionary website (Hong Kong version), followed
by a comment from me, the course lecturer.
Carrie Chan: This page really shocks me today! I haven’t thought of having this
as proper vocabulary in English! BTW using to explain is
still too vague to those non-Chinese netizens. . .
(NB: In the original post, Carrie shares a web link to the word
geilivable Yahoo Hong Kong Dictionary. Geilivable is a blending of
the Chinese internet jargon geili, meaning to give force, and the
English suffix -able.)
Carmen Lee: thanks for sharing, carrie! and here are more examples:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-
12/25/c_13663775.htm
188 APPENDICES
In this post, Carrie adopts a hybrid discourse style that does not normally
exist in formal academic interaction. First of all, the post employs code-
switching, which is commonly found in students’ informal digital communi-
cation (as shown in the IM example in Chapter 3). Second, internet-specific
discourse features such as ‘BTW’ and trailing dots (. . .) are incorporated into
the post. Third, the hyperlinks embedded in Carrie’s post and my response
also demonstrate intertextuality, a major characteristic of young people’s
textual practices (Ivanič et al. 2009; van Meter and Firetto 2008). This
student-initiated post also provides a nice example of how Facebook affords
collaborative learning. It shows how Carrie exercised agency (Satchwell,
Barton and Hamilton, forthcoming) and shared her views on this newly
discovered information with the rest of the class, including the course
lecturer. Thus, the roles of teacher and student are not always clearly defined
and are constantly renegotiated in this space.
Course participants had different opinions about the relationship between
how they wrote in this Facebook Group and how they wrote elsewhere on
the internet, as two students reflected:
sometimes it’s more formal when i write in facebook group as it is like an academic
platform. but it also depends on the nature and formality of that message. if it is not
related to academic field, i would rather switch to some chinglish as it looks more
friendly and funny.
(Big C, online interview)
I used English only in the group, and I seldom do that elsewhere on facebook. I do
think this is an academic group, so I feel uncomfortable about using loose grammar,
having typos and using excessive Netspeak features. However, I use emoticons all
the time as in other online platforms.
(Tony, online interview)
These two students were well aware of the text-making resources available
to them for meaning making in this teacher-initiated space. While seeing the
Group as an academic discussion platform, they also brought in their every-
day, private, vernacular online text-making practices to the Group interaction.
Even though Tony pointed out he was not entirely comfortable to adopt a non-
standard linguistic style in the Group, emoticons could be tolerated, which
turned out to be Tony’s negotiated form of online academic discourse.
As the lecturer, I also found myself constantly negotiating between my
university teacher identity and my active Facebook user identity through
reappropriating my language use in this Group. For example, I once shared
a YouTube video that introduces a new book written entirely in PowerPoint
style. This is how I described the video in my post:
Carmen Lee: hmmm writing a novel in PowerPoint format sounds fun! More
thoughts for the notion of ‘affordances’. hmmmmm..I wonder if
that makes writing easier or more challenging.. :-)
APPENDICES 189
In this post, while attempting to remind students of course-related con-

cepts (affordances), I frame my message in a relatively informal, inter-
personal discourse style that is typically found in youth online writing, such
as the insertion of emoticon :-), trailing dots (..) and hedges (hmmm) to
indicate that I was thinking and I welcomed ideas from the class. This also
allowed me to play down my lecturer identity in the course so as to build
rapport with my students.
APPENDIX 3: OBSERVING ELEMENTS OF IM ACTIVITIES
Observing elements of IM activities

(i) Participants: How many people is the informant chatting with? Who is
s/he chatting with? Are they using nicknames? Does the informant
always appear to be online in IM? Are there other people in the physical
setting (apart from the researcher)?
(ii) Texts: Apart from texts in the chat window, are there other texts on the
screen? Are there other texts in the off-screen setting? If so, are the texts
related to the chat? How are alert systems and text boxes, menus, icons,
and toolbars being used by the informant?
(iii) Tasks: Does the informant use IM for chatting only? Does the
informant do other things in his/her physical environment while using
IM (e.g. reading, writing short notes, talking on the phone)? Are there
other types of reading and writing activities? Does the informant talk
about the chat content with other people? What else is done on the
screen (e.g. checking email, surfing the web, using search engines, other
computer-based activities such as typing assignments, listening to music
files)? Do texts determine what actions the informant is going to take
in IM? How does the informant read, write, and send messages?
(iv) Resources: What IM programme is the informant using? Does the
informant use any technological tools to facilitate IM, e.g. does s/he use
Chinese inputting systems? Does s/he use other inputting devices in
addition to the keyboard?
(v) Modes/Media of Interaction: Is the interaction only based on typing?
Does the interaction take place in words only? What does the text look
like (languages, scripts, and other semiotic symbols)? Is there any
talking in the off-screen setting?
(vi) Time: When does the informant start logging on/off IM? When does the
chat session begin? When does it end? How long does it take? How
many chat sessions are performed within this time frame? Is it a
continuous session or does the informant stop chatting for a while to
attend to other activities?
(vii) Places and Settings: Where is the computer situated? Is it a shared
computer? To what extent is the setting private or public?
190 APPENDICES
APPENDIX 4: NOTES GIVEN TO LOGBOOK KEEPERS IN THE

IM STUDY
Notes given to logbook keepers
A logbook of online chatting activities

Please keep a record of how you use online chat in the next seven days.
Note the following points in particular:
• Don’t forget to activate the ‘save history’ function.

• When do you start communicating online? Until when? How many
times have you used chat programmes on a particular day?
• Where do you chat online? E.g. at home in your room, in a computer
lab, etc.
• Why do you chat? This refers to the purpose(s) e.g. private chat, discuss
homework, etc.
• With whom? E.g. friends, classmates, family, etc. You may include their
names.
• Do you use more than one chat programme at the same time?
• What else do you do when you chat?
– On-screen activities: e.g. using Word or PowerPoint to do your home-
work, listening to music, checking email, browsing websites. . .
– Off-the-screen activities, e.g. scribbling notes on paper, talking on
phone, watching TV, talking to people around you. Also try to note
down any media available in your surroundings.
– What else do you do while you’re looking at the screen? Do you
read aloud your messages? How do you use your mouse?
• Please copy and paste your chat history – you may omit anything that
you don’t feel like disclosing. You are not obliged to give me everything.
• You may make use of the following template for keeping your records.
You may use any language and format of your own choice. There is no
limit on length. Choose a method that you feel most comfortable with,
e.g. you can write as if you’re writing a diary.
• You may add extra pages if necessary
• If you are unable to keep your record on a specific day, you can skip
that day and continue the following day.
• Method of submitting the logbook: you can email the document to me
or print it out and give it to me in person.
DAY 1
Start-time of ICQ/MSN:
End-time of ICQ/MSN:
Record of chat-related activities
Please paste your chat history (all or selected) in the space below
APPENDICES 191
APPENDIX 5: SAMPLE EMAIL FROM INTERVIEWER IN FLICKR

RESEARCH
This is an example of an email that the researcher sent to the participants
after they had answered the online questionnaire. The questions were
individually designed for each person.
Dear XXX,
Thank you so much for responding to the questionnaire so quickly. We are

very interested in some of the things you’ve said in the questionnaire.
Could you please take your time and answer the following open-ended
questions as detailed as possible. You may write your answers in English or
Chinese or mixed code. Please let us know if you want us to clarify any of
the questions.
First of all, we are interested in particular times when you use English and
Chinese:
1. Is there any reason why you give this photo a Chinese and English name
but the description is only written in English? (link to photo page)
2. Why did you name and describe this photo in English only? (link to
photo page)
3. Recently you seldom tag your photos. Why?
4. Why is your profile page written in both Chinese and English?
5. Who do you see as the audience for your photos? Who are you trying to
reach? (E.g. any particular community, or people who speak a particular
language, or people who share some of your background and interest,
etc.)
6. Before using Flickr, did you do anything like tagging of your photos or
commenting on other people’s photos? And did you communicate with
other people around the world before Flickr and blogging?
7. In the questionnaire, you said it is more polite to use English if the others
do not understand Chinese. How do you know whether your viewers
understand Chinese?
8. What is the role of English in your life? Do you need to use English in
other aspects of your life apart from Flickr?
If it is easier for you, you can write to us at: (researcher’s personal email)
Thank you very much for your time. We look forward to hearing from you
as we are very interested in what you have to say.
Best Regards,
David and Carmen

192 APPENDICES
APPENDIX 6: TOPICS COVERED IN THE TECHNO-BIOGRAPHIC

INTERVIEWS
Other than using techno-biographic interviews as a research instrument,
these questions and topics can serve as a basis for classroom discussion.
Current practices
• What are the sites you use most often, and what are the ones you have
contributed to?
• Do you visit different sites in different places (home computer, school
computer, mobile devices)?
Ways of participation
• How much reading and writing do you do on these sites?
• What are the different functions of these sites?
• Do you make cross reference (i.e. similar content posted on different
sites, though may be written in different ways)?
• Do you enjoy posting on these sites? Why?
• Do you use different languages/scripts on different sites? Why?
• How often do you post pictures/videos on these sites?
• Do you write things about your photos? What do you write?
• Any interesting experience in posting status updates on Facebook/
blogging, etc.?
A day in the life

• Think of yesterday, what technologies did you first deal with when you
woke up, how did it continue during the day?
• Can you imagine a day without the internet? What difference would this
make to your life?
Technology-related life history

• When and how did you start using the computer?
• What did you use the computer for at that time?
• When and how did you start using the internet?
• When and how did you send your first text message? Write your first
blog? Search Wikipedia? Start using Facebook? Etc.
Transitions
• Have you noticed any changes in your computer/mobile phone use over
the years? What are they (e.g. different phases like secondary school life
vs. uni life)?
APPENDICES 193
Domains of life
• Do you use different technologies in different areas of your everyday life,
e.g. at home, at school, at work? Other domains, such as religion, sports,
politics, music, etc.
Cross-generational comparisons
• Do you notice differences between the technologies used by your parents
and yourself? How about your grandparents? Are there younger
children in your family who are exposed to technologies? How are their
online activities different from yours?
• Do you notice any differences in technology use between your own and
your friends from other countries? How about gender differences?
Imagined future
• What does the internet mean to you now and what do you think your
internet use will be like in 10 years’ time?
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INDEX
@ sign (use of) 179–80, 183 Catalan 44, 65

Chinese 44, 45, 47, 50, 58, 63, 74, 80, 83, 104,
abbreviations 38, 118, 165, 181–83 171
actor network theory 35 Ching, C. C. 71
adult learning 20, 125–26 cloud translation 63
affinity groups 32, 47, 130 code switching 46, 48–51, 53, 54, 58, 64, 66, 80
affordances 17, 19, 27–29, 39, 55–56, 183; commenting systems 10
Flickr 59; IM 59 communities of practice 32–33, 125
ALL CAPS 88 competence 121
Androutsopoulos, J. 14 computer assisted language learning (CALL)
Arabic 43, 64 154
Association of Internet Researchers 174 computer-mediated communication (CMC)
Assyrian 64, 65 4–5, 43, 53, 68, 165, 175, 179; and gender
Asturian 65 research 69; discourse features of 5
asynchronous communication 53 computer-mediated discourse (CMD) 4, 5–6, 8
audience 17, 21, 56–57, 82, 147 computer-mediated discourse analysis
authorship 17, 44, 93 (CMDA) 5
autonomous learning 131, 136, 156, 160–1 convergence culture 39
corpus analysis 21, 87
Barton, D. 13, 159 critical discourse analysis 14, 104–105
Basque 65 Crystal, D. 8, 11, 42, 44, 70, 165, 182
Berners-Lee, T. 155 cultural capital 68, 108, 121, 182
bilingual text corpora 63 cultural ecology 71
bilingual writing 57
Black, R. 113, 114–15 deictic 8, 183
blogging 6, 155–56 design 27–9, 38, 53, 130
blogs 9, 87, 155–56 diasaporic websites 65–66
Brandt, D. 130, 139 diasporic communities 65
digital discourse 44, 166
cameras 93, 144 digital divide 10
Cantonese 43, 49–50, 74 digital literacies 4, 13, 125, 154, 165–66
206 INDEX
digital natives 10, 85 German 65, 112

discourse analysis 6 ,14, 16, 21 global citizenship 48, 82
Discourse centred online ethnography globalization 13, 21, 34–36, 64, 83, 114; and
(DCOE) 14 language 34
discourse communities 32 glocalization 34, 83–84
domains of activity/life 12, 24 Google 26, 116
domestication of technologies 2, 70, 138–39, Google Scholar 70
178 Google Street View 140
Dor, D. 43 Google Translate 63
Dropbox 70 Google+ 146
Graham, L. 71
eBay 104 grammar 17, 108, 111
educational practices, change in 160–63; use Greek 44, 66
of microblogging 157–58; use of photo sites
156; use of social networking 158; use of Hakka 77
video sites 156–57; use of virtual worlds 157; Hawisher, G. 71
use of wikis 156; weblogs 155–56; with new Heath, S. B. 12
media 153–160 Herring, S. 9
Egyptian Arabic 64 Hong Kong 49, 74, 163, 170
email 53, 165 humour 89, 90
emoticons 5, 30, 38, 165, 176, 180, 182 Hymes, D 12
English language 11, 43, 45, 50, 58, 60, 80, 83,
101, 114, 116, 121, 171 ICQ 77
English-Caribbean 66 identity 6, 18, 31, 64, 67–68, 81, 133–34, 147,
enregisterment 180 183; and language choice 68–70;
construction online 82–83; management
face 88 68; markers 46, 57; national 75, 81;
Facebook 28, 38–39, 40, 52, 69, 146; performance 82, 84, 105
collaborative translation 63; 'Like' 88–89, informal learning 20, 131
180; linguistic diversity 52–53; online Instagram 146
translation 62; profile 72; status update 38, instant messaging (IM) 8, 40, 48, 58, 128, 151,
52–53, 73; translation issuses 114; use in 154, 158, 160–61, 167–69, 173; code
educational practices 158, 159 switching 48–51
facework 80 internet language: commodification and
fan-fiction 113, 124–25, 136, 151, 154 indexicality) 182; in public use 180–81;
fansubbing 135, 151, offline presence 178–80
Fishman, J 42, 43 Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 68
flaming 88 intertextuality 17
Flickr 30, 31, 36–38, 40, 45, 58, 59, 65, 73, 83–84, Ito, M. 134, 154
111, 149, 150; 365 126–27, 132–3, 170; as a
vernacular practice 142–47; comments/ Jones, R 14
commenting 38, 94, 130; decline 146; in
educational practices 156; linguistic diversity Kahn, P 147
45; photography 119–21; profiles 37, 46, 72; Kennedy, H 71
screennames 45, 69; self-deprecation on knowledge creation 21
115–21; socializing 145–46; stance taking Kress, G. 2
90–102; tags/tagging 37, 46–47, 94, 148–49;
titles and descriptions 46; translating Lam, E 135
content 61; writing spaces 148–49 Lancaster 139–40
folk linguistic theories 93, 106, 110, 123 language 2–3, 21
folksonomies 37, 148 language acquisition 73
language as situated practice 3
gaming 33, 79, , 134, 135, 136, 154 language biographies 73
Gee, J. 33, 134, 163 language choice 17, 60, 62; posts 58; use of
gender 69 medium 59; users 56; viewers 56–57
INDEX 207
language ideologies 6, 108 Moodle 70

language learning 61 moral panics 7, 10–11, 19, 81, 111, 139, 151
language online 4, 107–10 morphology 17
Lave, J. 32, 126 MS Word 70
learning online 19–20, 124–36, 155, 183; MSN Messenger 49
deliberate learning 126–7, 132, 156, 159; multilingual encounters 48, 60, 183
FlickR 365 126–27; identity 133–34; language multilingual practices 44, 57, 82
learning 134–36; participation 128–29; multilingualism 17, 21, 35, 44
reflexivity 131–33; resources 129–31 multimodality 18–19, 29–30
Lee, C. 49, 159 Myers, G. 87–88
lingua franca 83, 114
linguistic ideologies 64 netiquette 88
linguistic imperialism 43, 55 netizenship 84
linguistic landscape 18 netspeak 11, 70, 165, 179
linguistic negotiation 57 networked individualism 84
linguistic output 8 new literacies 13
linguistic pluralism 55 new media, role in teaching and learning
linguistic resources (in IM use) 49 154–60
LinkedIn 69 new media discourse 104, 111
literacies 8 new technologies, and social change 2–3;
literacies studies 13 impact on academia 2
literacy events 12 newness 7,9, 108, 148, 158, 176, 183
literacy practices 12, 24, 70, 84, 85; sponsors newspapers 26
130; text-making practices 40, 49, 161,
166–7 Och, F. 63
literacy skills (and moral panic) 11 online, definition 7
literacy studies 8, 11–14, 24–25, 28, 33, 35 online translators 60, 62
local literacies 138–40, 144 online/offine differences 7, 21, 34, 64, 84, 178
Lunfardo 58, 65 online/offline identity 80, 179
Luxembourgish 64 Orientalism 104
Oxford English Dictionary 181
Mandarin Chinese 49
Maori 63 paperless office 28
mashupability 150 Persian 44, 65–66
mass media 6, 11, 109, 181 persona-taking practice 98
McLuhan, M 1–2 photo albums 143–44
media studies 17, 21 photo sharing 39, 144–45, 147
metalanguage 6, 108 photography 2, 73, 93, 142–44; creativity in 150;
metalinguistic discourses 82, 108 digital 67–68, 144
metalinguistic discourses, internet specific Picasa 146
language 112–13; linguistic reflexivity 123; Pinterest 146
self-deprecation 114–21, 123; supportive politeness/negative politeness 88, 96, 104
social spaces 121–22; teacher/learner pragmatics 6
discourse 113–14; translation issues 113–14; Prensky, M. 10
prescritivism 110 presentational culture 68
micro-blogging 38, 51 publicly private/privately public 68
Microsoft Bing 63
migration 35 reading path 27, 30, 91, 94, 96–7, 100, 103,
minority languages 64–65, 183 160, 185
mixed methods approach, Flickr research reflexivity 19, 123, 125, 131–33, 183
169–70; IM study 167–69; techno- research methodology 11, 21, 29, 164–74;
biographies research 171–72 ecological approach 13, 28, 56, 71, 85; ethics
mobile phones 27–28 and privacy 174–75; ethnography, auto-
mobilities 65 ethnography, virtual ethnography 13, 2–22,
modesty 120 166, 172, 174, 176, 177; IM study 167–69;
208 INDEX
mixed-method approach 167–72; online/offline linguistic resources 80

quantitative 165; responsive methodology technological determinism 5, 13, 19, 53,
22, 164, 174; situated approach 55; texts and 113
practices 164–67; variationist approach 165 technology mentors 78, 129
research methods, IM 173; informed consent technology-related life 70
175; lurking 174; online interviewing 173; teenagers 71
online methods 172–74; online survey 173; text 3, 11–12, 14, 16–17; multimodal 30; online
virtual methods 172 26
researcher stance 99, 102–03, 175–77 textually mediated, self 84–85; social world 13,
Romanized Cantonese 50 15–16, 25–27, 107, 123
Thurlow, C. 108
scaffolding 130 transformative learning 131–32
Scollon, R. 14 translating content online 61–62
screen names/nicknames 45–46, 69 translation 18
second language education 54 translingual interaction 60–61
Second Life 157 translingual practices 11, 18, 39, 54, 60–61
self-presentation 85 transliteration 49
Selfe, C. 71 Twitter 9, 26, 38, 52–3, 146, 157–58, 179, 186;
site of engagement 99 linguistic diversity 52
situated practices 51, 123
Skype 40 Urry, J. 84
SMS texting 4, 6, 8, 11, 70, 108, 109, 111 user profiles 72
Snapfish 146
social network sites 6, 9, 28, 51, 63, 106 vernacular literacies 138–39; pregnancy 147;
social networking 7, 9, 40, 73, 121 value 151
social practice theory 25, 166 vernacular practices 20, 45, 89, 137–38,
social practices 7, 11, 13, 24–25, 71, 137 183; changes in 141–42; creativity in
sociolinguistics 3, 6, 73 150–51; new affordances 148;
Spanish 44, 45, 65, 83, 111 photography 142–44; user generated
speech communities 32, 60 content 149–50
stance 19, 31–32, 81, 87–90; affective 87, 93, Vertovec, S. 35
94–96; analysis of 91; epistemic 87, 92–94, Vigdor, L. 71
93, 104; evaluative 94, 101; Flickr 92–94; visual images 73
pragmatics of 104 vlogs 39, 89, 113
stance marking 88 VOIP 40
stance objects 91, 95
stance resources 91 Web 1.0 9–10, 21, 44
stance takers 90–91 Web 2.0 6, 8, 9,-10, 19, 30, 31, 40, 44,
stance taking, multimodal 89 62, 72, 74, 106, 123, 130, 131, 149, 154,
superdiversity 7, 35 170
supermobility 7, 35 WebCT 70
supervernacular 182 Wellman, B. 7, 178
Wenger, E. 32, 126
Tagg, C. 70 Wikipedia 4, 9, 26, 62, 92, 130, 150; issues of
tagging 37, 100 language 62
Taobao 104 Wittgenstein, L. 25
techno-biographic approach 70–82, 85; Wodak, R. 14
interviews 72 writing spaces 16, 19, 30, 31, 36–41, 47, 51, 52,
techno-biography 10, 71, 111, 132; continuous 54, 86, 90, 123, 127, 148–49
status updating 73; in educational practice
159–60; online profile 72–73; visual Yahoo! 149
representation 73 YouTube 30, 31, 39, 40, 65, 72, 82, 134,
techno-linguistic biography 18, 73, 78; attitudes 150, 156–57; meta-linguistic discourse
81–82; home-school experience 79–80; key on 109, 110–12; multilingualism on
phases of technology use 78–79; 53–54, 60

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Language Online

David Barton is Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of

Carmen Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Chinese

ISBN: 978–0–415–52494–0 (hbk)

Typeset in Sabon and Scala Sans

LIST OF FIGURES vii

1 Language in the digital world 1

2 Ten reasons why studying the online world is crucial for

3 Acting in a textually mediated social world 23

4 Hello! Bonjour! Ciao! Hola! Guten Tag! Deploying linguistic

5 Taking up the affordances of multiple languages 55

6 ‘This is me’: Writing the self online 67

7 Stance-taking through language and image 86

8 ‘My English is so poor’: Talking about language online 107

9 Everyday learning online 124

10 Language online as new vernacular practices 137

11 Language online and education 153

12 Researching language online 164

13 Flows of language online and offline 178

studies of multilingualism, and then explore identity, stance, multimodality

The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and

These changes identified by McLuhan continue apace with newer tech-

It is important to make clear that technologies themselves do not auto-

The centrality of language

people’s everyday lives and language use, we explore their ‘technobiogra-

APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE ONLINE: THREE KEY DIRECTIONS

(i) Structural features of computer-mediated communication

mediated communication (CMC) should be treated as speech or as writing,

(ii) Social variation of computer-mediated discourse

shaped by various social factors and is situated in their specific contexts of

(iii) Language ideologies and metalanguage

SOME OVERARCHING ISSUES WHEN DISCUSSING

[t]he cyberspace-physical space comparison is a false dichotomy. Many ties operate

The question of the ‘new’

Nevertheless, it is worth identifying where there are continuations of

phenomena familiar from older computer-mediated discourse (CMD) modes such

We return to the idea of newness when contrasting literacy studies from

The Web 1.0–Web 2.0 dichotomy

Another important feature shared by Web 2.0 spaces is their commenting

The concept of digital natives

The problem of moral panics

LANGUAGE ONLINE AS TEXTS AND PRACTICES

In this socio-cultural approach to written language, literacy is a social

By examining the changing role of texts we uncover the central tensions of

In relation to globalization, the examination of literacy practices provides

2008). Literacies remain central as much of the internet is mediated by

Linguists have long been interested in investigating language as either speech

1. THE WORLD IS INCREASINGLY TEXTUALLY MEDIATED

2. BASIC LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS ARE CHANGING IN

3. NEW MULTILINGUAL ENCOUNTERS ONLINE SHIFT

4. LINGUISTIC RESOURCES ARE DRAWN UPON TO ASSERT

5. PEOPLE COMBINE SEMIOTIC RESOURCES IN NEW WAYS

approaches of linguistic landscape research, which can be moved from

6. THE INTERNET PROVIDES SPACES FOR REFLECTION UPON

7. LANGUAGE IS CENTRAL TO THE CONSTANT LEARNING

8. VERNACULAR PRACTICES ARE BECOMING MORE PUBLIC

new characteristics of vernacular literacies in Web 2.0 spaces. We show how

9. LANGUAGE IS CENTRAL TO NEW FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE

10. NEW METHODS FOR RESEARCHING LANGUAGE ARE