Language and media: How does language interact with visual communication and with the
kinds of expectations we bring to the message as a result of being members of our society?
Taalgebruik (discourse) is niet neutraal, maar gebeurt altijd in een context waardoor bijna
alle uitingen wel een ideologie overbrengen of vooronderstellen. → Gebeurt altijd via een
medium.
Social media → ordinary people can produce and broadcast (uitzenden) and share
messages of others.
Digital media → results in multitasking: constantly paying attention to more than one thing
at a time.
Media convergence = combining different kinds of media. Denk aan een mobiele telefoon.
Media:
- They include all sorts of things
- They are often connected or used together with other media in complex ways
- They affect the kinds of messages we can transmit to others
- They affect how those messages can be formulated
- They affect who can formulate those messages
- They affect who can receive them
- They affect what recipients can do with them
- They have an effect on the way people experience the world
- People often have strong feelings about where, when, and how different media are
supposed to be used.
Language:
- It can include all sorts of things (verbal and non-verbal, images, sounds, emoji’s)
- Different kinds of language are often used together → understanding what a
message means depends upon how these different kinds of language work together
- We don’t just use language to make meaning → we also use it to do things with and
to others (thanking, apologizing, requesting, etc.)
- We use language to show that we are certain kinds of people and to create certain
types of relationships with the people we are communicating with or communicating
about.
- Messages communicated through different kinds of language never just
communicate facts → they always communicate someone’s point of view.
Media = anything that comes between one entity and another and helps to facilitate
communication or interaction between them.
Mediation = the process of facilitating the interaction between two entities.
Mass media = media like television, newspapers and the internet.
Media affect how we communicate, but some think that media affect what we can do more
broadly → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → → →
Lev Vygotsky (1962): “All interactions between people and their environments are mediated
through cultural tools”
, ● physical tools ⇒ telephones
● mental tools ⇒ language, systems of counting
People who use tools are able to do things that a person without them are unable to do.
Marshall McLuhan (1964): “Media are ‘extensions of a man’, because they extend our ability
to do things in the world.” → ex. microphones extend what we can do with our mouths, and
computers extend what we can do with our brains.
Technical determinism = the view that media determine what we can do, think and
communicate.
- Media affect human actions, but humans are also creative in the way they use it.
Certain social conventions (= arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors
all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them) take place around the
media. → These affect how media are used, but are also part of the way different groups
consume media.
- Social conventions are sometimes also called media ideologies (they include
people’s beliefs about how different media should or shouldn’t use them; what sort of
messages should be communicated through them).
- Media ideologies developed by watching others use media and by using media
ourselves with other people, and through being exposed to metadiscourse about
media usage.
Linguistics → pragmatics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis (= a method of
analyzing discourse that focuses on the ideologies and power relations that are embedded in
and reproduced in discourse to reveal how language can be used to manipulate people and
the power relations that are hidden in linguistic structure, also called discourse analysis).
Differences between discourse analysis and other linguistics:
Discourse analysts Other linguists
Interested in what people do with language Interested in language as an abstract set of
rules
Focus on longer stretches of language Focus on just sentences or words
(texts and conversations)
Interested in how language interacts with Interested in language in its traditional
other forms of communication such as sense
pictures, gestures and music
Interested in the relationship between
language and the way societies are
organized, what sorts of ideologies govern
people’s behavior, and what sorts of people
have power and what sorts of people don’t
Different media allow users to combine different forms of communication together in different
ways, and they have different kinds of potential when it comes to manipulating people,
, helping powerful people hold on to their power, or help less powerful people challenge those
that are more powerful
- Discourse analysts → analyze how language can be used to manipulate people and
the power relations that are hidden in linguistic structures.
Mediated discourse analyst = discourse analyst that is particularly concerned with the
hypothesis of language being affected by media. → To figure out how different kinds of
mediational means (including both language and media) affect the kinds of action people
take.
Language ideologies = a set of beliefs about how people are supposed to use language,
including which language choices are more appropriate or ‘better’ in certain kinds of
situations.
Embodied media = forms of communication that depend on the human body.
- Embodied media can only be used to communicate with people in close proximity to
us.
- They allow us to store communication in durable ways.
Disembodied media = forms of communication that depend on writing
- writing changed the way people thought, interacted and related to the world around
them. → It shifted communication from a context-bound situation of oral
communication to the more decontextualized situations of written communication.
- Invention of printing was helpful (in China during the Han Dynasty). → Was
responsible for bringing people together; so it was responsible for the development of
a nation state.
Electronic media = forms of communication that depend on using electronic devices.
- enabled people to communicate over a distance in ‘real time’, not having to wait for
their message to be delivered for days.
Digital media = forms of communication that depend on using digital devices.
- gave humans the capacity to access information and multimedia content from almost
anywhere in the world at any time;
- gave humans the opportunity to create and disseminate (= verspreiden) their own
media products;
- gave humans the option to interact in complex networks of people online;
- gave humans the option to immediately share things that are happening to them at
any moment;
- gave humans the option to keep track of what others are doing in ways that were
never possible before.
Global village ⇒ people would get along better thanks to the invention of digital media, but
it also leads to trolling, cyberbullying and hacking. It would lead to people being more
informed and more capable of making their own intelligent (political) decisions. But it also led
to a presentation of a distorted view of the world, characterized by scams and fake news.
Bots = computer programmes pretending to be people.
Affordances = the things that the media allow us to do.
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