Hoofdstuk 1: language and meditation
1.
Book? relationship between language and media.
Multitasking: how digital media have resulted in people constantly paying attention to more than
one thing at a time.
Media convergence: the ways new devices like mobile phones are actually combining different
kinds of media (for example, your phone works like a web browser, a radio, a camera, a television,
a postal service and a phone).
→ all this existed before phones: people were already listening to the radio while driving for ex.
Language and media are both complicated → so linking them also is.
Media are complicated:
• Include all sorts of things: paintings, photographs, internet platforms…
• Connected or used together with other media in complex ways
• Affect the kinds of messages we can transmit to others: who, how, what…
• Effect on how people experience the world (mediation)
• People often have strong feelings about where, when, and how different media ought to be
used.
Language is complicated:
• Includes all sorts of things: from verbal languages to nonverbal language.
• Different kinds of language often used together, and understanding what a message means
depends upon how these different kinds of messages work together.
• Messages communicate facts but also point of views.
Mediation:
Mass media: means of communication such as television, newspapers, and the internet that have the
technical capacity to deliver messages to a large group of people.
BUT media is not only that → broader term: a wide variety of tools people have used to take action
in the world such as coins, maps, sculptures, stamps… + human voice and body.
Medium: basically anything that comes between one entity and another and helps to facilitate
communication or interaction between those two entities. = ‘extensions of man’: they extend our
ability to do things in the world. Media don’t just affect how we communicate but what we can do
more broadly, including how we can think and even who we can be.
Mediation: the process of facilitating the interaction between two entities.
Technological determinism: the view that media determine what we can do, think and
communicate.
Social conventions: one of the most important factors beyond media themselves that affect how
media are used.
1
,Media ideologies: sets of conventions and beliefs about media. It is part of the way different groups
consume media. They include people’s beliefs about how different media should or should not be
used, where and when they should be used alone or with other people, and what sorts of messages
should be communicated through them. We develop media ideologies through watching other
people using media, through using media ourselves with other people in our social groups, and
through being exposed to metadiscourse about media use. → it seems that every time a new media
is ‘born’, opinions get quickly divided with regard to its impact.
Metadiscourse: taal over discourse, wat sprekers/ schrijvers zeggen over de vorm, inhoud, structuur
en stijl van een tekst/ gesprek.
The key word is ‘affect’. Media affect human actions, but humans are also creative in the way they
use media. The use people do of media changes over time. And what people do with media affects
how those media develop and change.
Language and discourse:
We must not focus on media as things, but most on what they do → we focus on the processes of
mediation that they make possible. Same with language: think about what language does rather than
what it is.
Linguistics : the scientific study of language.
Pragmatics: the study of how people ‘do things with words’ using what are called speech acts.
Conversation analysis: the study of how conversations are put together and the kinds of rules that
govern things like turn-taking.
Interactional sociolinguistics: focuses on how people use language to construct identities and
relationships with one another and negotiate what the purpose of their interaction is.
Critical discourse analysis: the purpose of which is to reveal how language can be used to
manipulate people and the power relations that are ‘hidden’ in linguistic structures.
→ all these approaches to languages are sometimes talked about under the broad label of discourse
analysis.
4 differences between discourse analysis and other linguists:
• Discourse analysts are interested in what people do with language rather than in language as
an abstract set of rules.
• Discourse analysts usually focus on longer stretches of language (texts and conversations)
rather than just sentences or words.
• Discourse analysts are not just interested in language in its traditional sense, but also in how
language interacts with other forms of communication such as pictures, gestures, and music.
• Discourse analysts are interested in the relationship between language and the way societies
are organized, what sorts of people have power and what sorts of people don’t.
2
,→ All these concerned are affected by the kinds of media people use to communicate. Mediated
discourse analysis is particularly concerned by these questions.
As media ideologies, there are also language ideologies which are derived from media
conventions.
Language ideologies are sets of beliefs about how people ought to use language, including which
languages or kinds of languages are ‘better’ or more ‘appropriate’ for print and broadcast
journalism. They also include beliefs about the effect certain kinds of media are having on people’s
language.
B) Language, mediation and sites of engagement
Media as ‘extensions’ of human beings
Impossible to communicate with others without using some sort of medium → most common is
voice, but also facial expressions and gestures → embodied media (forms of communication which
depend on the human body): very limited because only with people in close proximity to us, and
don’t allow us to store and preserve communications in a durable way.
Disembodied media: the 1st example could be the writing. Became then the most important
technology.
Writing is very important because it let people overcome to the limitations of their bodies, and
changed the way they interact with the world + huge impact on language itself, leading to
standardization of language.
Then, electronic media introduced new possibilities of communication → communicating in real
time (phone and telegraph), broadcast voices (radio, tv). And, it influences their way to see the
world.
Finally, digital media gave humans the capacity to access information and multimedia content from
almost anywhere in the world at any time + giving the opportunity to share things that are
happening at any moment.
Thought that internet would lead to global village → but, no: more fragmented world with people
attacking others… they also thought internet would lead to more informed citizens for political
decisions but no → distorted views of the world with fake news …
Affordances and constraints:
Affordances (= mogelijkheid): the thing that media allow us to do. New media allow people do
things they couldn’t before → dramatic social, political and economic changes. For example, phone
and radio afford the transmission of the human voice over long distances. It is a matter of the way
human beings interact with media.
Constraints (= beperking): the limitation that media impose on our actions.
• media affordances can change over time.
Media are ‘biased’ towards different kinds of social actions → media biases. Different media
embody biases in terms of how they organize information and how they enable people to control the
dissemination of information.
Communicating in and across ‘sites of engagement’
Affordances and constraints affect 3 things:
• what we are able to communicate
• whom we can communicate with: how many people, where they are in relation to us,
whether the communication us one-way or reciprocal, and whether it is one-to-one, one-to-
3
, many, or many-to-many.
• how we combine different aspects of communication: different languages, differents texts
and texts types, words of different people, different modes.
Media enable and constrain whom we communicate with by the way they allow us to disseminate
messages: allow us to communicate only to people who are close by, who we want to, very quickly
or slowly.
3rd way a media can enable and constrain the way we use language: has to do with the way media
interact with different kinds of texts, with other media, and with the physical world, and the way
they help to create different sites of engagement: → a moment when different media, different
discourses, different people, and different social practices come together to make certain kinds of
social actions possible. Why important? Reminds us that we never use one medium at once + media
can connect people, places and social practices in very complicated ways + the messages that are
communicated are not only a matter of language, but also of people, their histories, experiences…
Remediation and convergence:
= Two ways media can be connected to each other.
Remediation: the phenomenon of a new media form ‘absorbing’ and ‘refashioning’ older media
forms → the content of any medium is always another medium.
It is not replacing older media, but transforming them, retaining some of their characteristics and
improving on them.
2 important concepts about remediation: immediacy and hypermediacy.
Immediacy: refers to the phenomena of media becoming so immersive that they almost become
transparent, and people forget that their experience is mediated (eg: the feeling that you’re so
immersed in a movie that you think it’s real).
Hypermediacy: refers to the fact that media always call attention to themselves, often by reminding
us of old media. Eg: computer operating are designed to remind us of the physical aspects of
manipulating information associated with older office media: ‘files’, ‘folders’...
Convergence: the trend for multiple media to be integrated in single devices → smartphone. It can
result in blurring previously clear lines between different communicative practices such as between
information, education, and entertainment. Convergence can also refer to the growing convergence
of smaller media companies into large conglomerates (Time-Warner, Disney).
C) Media uses and users
Only activities.
D) Media, mediation and mediated discourse:
3 excerpts providing slightly different perspectives on media and mediation.
Media and ‘human interconnection’:
Today, media refer to many different things, depending on the person. It is not an exact technical
term, but everyone continues to use it in a broad or more specific sense.
Humans’ interconnectedness: not just through the direct contact of people’s bodies, but also
external forms → they can interact by mediational means.
2 issues:
4
