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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2018
Internet Pragmatics - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2018
Volume 1, Issue 2, 2018
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(Im)politeness, morality and the internet
Author(s): Chaoqun Xiepp.: 205–214 (10)More LessAbstractMuch recent research has contributed to the emergence of a moral turn in (im)politeness research, further confirming the evaluative nature of (im)politeness and the moral basis of (im)politeness evaluations, and further illuminating, among other things, what is really at work when (im)politeness evaluations take place, what the moral order consists of and how the moral order influences (im)politeness evaluations. Meanwhile, thanks to much emphasis on the instrumentality of words and utterances, a distinction can be discerned between ‘politeness without’ (or practical politeness) and ‘politeness within’ (or true politeness). Politeness within is true and truthful, but politeness without is not necessarily so. True politeness may be in when self is out. This special issue aims to further foreground the link between (im)politeness and morality in people’s online interactions, revealing something about ourselves and about our life-worlds.
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The personal and/as the political
Author(s): Alex Georgakopoulou and Maria Vasilakipp.: 215–240 (26)More LessAbstractDrawing on our previous work on the role of small stories in social-mediatized engagements with the Greek socio-economic crisis (Georgakopoulou 2014, 2015), in this article, we set out to shed light on impoliteness on social media through the lens of small stories research. We explore how Facebook and YouTube commenters “bash” political leaders and perceived political opponents and attribute blame to them for the crisis, through comments that attest to specific links of doing impoliteness with storying the crisis. Bashing has been previously related to the affective reactions of participants in online comments on current affairs. In this case, we bring to the fore a salient combination in our data of (mainly on-record) impoliteness strategies for bashing politicians with specific narrating positions in stories about the crisis: the narrator as sufferer, as witness of suffering, and as spokesperson for collective suffering. We argue that in all these cases, on-record impoliteness is normally placed at the end of a small story and presented as legitimated and justified by the preceding account. We conclude with the implications of the association of impoliteness targeting public figures with social-mediatized processes of personalizing and constructing expertise on the basis of experience on the one hand and, on the other hand, of jointly (re)asserting moral order in political affairs.
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Exploring the moral compass
Author(s): Rosina Márquez Reiter and Sara Orthaberpp.: 241–270 (30)More LessAbstractWith the advent of the internet and social media, car and vanpooling have become easily available alternatives to public transport in many parts of the world. This paper draws on publicly available data from a Facebook car and vanpooling group used by Slovenian cross-border commuters to make their journeys to and from Austria more economically sustainable. It examines public displays of moral indignation following allegations of malpractice by relatively new members whose whole purpose in joining the group was to earn a living from driving vans across borders. Vanpool users collaboratively denounce van service providers for transgressing some of the social responsibilities that ought to bind members of the group together and for their lack of accountability. The accusations which entail exaggerations, complaints, insults and threats, among other hostile verbal attacks, convey moral indignation and are similarly resisted and challenged by the drivers. They offer a window into conflicting behavioural expectations at a time of socioeconomic change and transition. The alleged lack of van providers’ accountability which, in turn, informs the van users’ displays of moral indignation is indicative of the moral relativism that emerges as a result of the relocalisation and, the nature of a contemporary global practice at a time when changes in social life are underway. The primacy of the economic return that car and vanpooling offers service providers and cross-commuters with is oriented to by the former as outstripping the social responsibilities typically related to the provision of the regulated services, and by the latter, as morally unjustifiable despite acknowledging its economic value.
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“Ya bloody drongo!!!”
Author(s): Valeria Sinkeviciutepp.: 271–302 (32)More LessAbstractThis paper explores impoliteness-related discourse on Facebook as a form of expressing situated moral judgement. The analysis focuses on negative and aggressive comments as a response to one public post that claims the non-existence of Australia. The content of the post indicates the threat to national identity of anyone who associates themselves with the country. As a result, a large number of impolite comments were made. A qualitative analysis of the dataset (limited to one month from the post’s publication) reveals four main strategies that are used in order to express the judgement of the post’s inappropriateness and repair the wrongdoing. Those range from insults of the author’s mental abilities and suspicion of drug use to violence-related discourse (e.g., death threats) and counter-attack of the author’s national identity. This paper, thus, aims to contribute to a growing area of research into online impoliteness.
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Impoliteness and the moral order in online gaming
Author(s): Sage Lambert Grahampp.: 303–328 (26)More LessAbstractIn recent years, eSports, online gaming, and live computer game streaming have grown into a global, multi-million dollar industry. In the context of online gaming, however, there is a prevailing moral order (Kádár 2017) that allows and perhaps even encourages impoliteness against female gamers, positioning them as inferior, unwelcome, or peripheral. Drawing from a corpus of over 150 hours of live game streams and concurrent open-forum chat, this paper identifies rituals and tropes (such as spam and banter) that reinforce gendered practices as they relate to the moral order in the online gaming setting. It then explores strategies used by one female gamer to manipulate the expectations of the online gaming medium and its hegemonic notions of femininity. In this way, she can resist a moral order which positions her as disempowered, and thereby gain social capital within the community.
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Impoliteness online
Author(s): Manfred Kienpointnerpp.: 329–351 (23)More LessAbstractThis paper provides an overview of the strategies and techniques of hate speech in online discourse (on online discourse or computer-mediated communication in general cf. e.g., Schwarzhaupt-Scholz 2004; Schmidt 2013; Dittler and Hoyer 2014; Seargeant and Tagg 2014). Based on a collection of online texts belonging to different genres (discussion forums, blogs, social media, tweets, homepages), this paper will provide a qualitative analysis of destructively impolite utterances in online interactions. This analysis will make use of the standard typologies of impoliteness and their recent extensions (such as Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2011; Kienpointner 1997, 2008; Kleinke and Bös 2015), but some modifications and elaborations of these typologies will also be taken into account. Moreover, social, cultural and political reasons for the recent dramatic increase in hate speech in online interactions will be explored. Finally, the problem of how to deal with this destructive use of language will be briefly discussed and some possible solutions will be suggested (cf. Banks 2010).
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The meta-conventionalisation and moral order of e-practices
Author(s): Dániel Z. Kádár and Saeko Fukushimapp.: 352–378 (27)More LessAbstractThis paper overviews the phenomenon of the meta-conventionalisation of interpersonal practices in the context of computer-mediated communication. The term ‘meta-conventionalisation’ refers to the coding of the conventional interpersonal practices of a particular group, or various groups, in the form of entertainment as films and novels. The word ‘meta’ refers to the fact that such pieces of artwork narrate a set of conventional practices from a quasi-observer point of view, without involving their audience in these practices as language users – in this sense they are different from good practice guides (typically described as ‘netiquette, in the context of e-pragmatics), which assume that readers will internalise the practices they describe. Meta-conventionalisation has been an understudied phenomenon, in spite of representing an important aspect of our daily lives. We illustrate how this phenomenon operates by examining a Japanese case study: a popular novel which features the online interactions of a group of otaku, that is, asocial young people who lock themselves up and interact in highly specific ways.
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Self-praise online and offline
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Author(s): Yaqian Jiang and Camilla Vásquez
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Introducing internet pragmatics
Author(s): Chaoqun Xie and Francisco Yus
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“Ya bloody drongo!!!”
Author(s): Valeria Sinkeviciute
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