1st Edition

The Discursive Construction of Place in the Digital Age

Edited By Alejandro Parini, Francisco Yus Copyright 2023
    244 Pages 47 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This collection calls for greater attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the role of discourse in the process of placemaking in the digital age and the increasing hybridisation of physical and virtual worlds.

    The volume outlines a new conceptualisation of place in the time of smartphones, whose technological and social affordances evoke placemaking as a collaborative endeavour which allows users to create and maintain a sense of community around place as shareable or collective experience. Taken together, the chapters argue for a greater emphasis on the ways in which users employ discourse to manage this physical-virtual interface in digital interactions and in turn, produce “remixed” cultural practices that draw on diverse digital semiotic resources and reflect their everyday experiences of place and location. The book explores a wide range of topics and contexts which embody these dynamics, including livestreaming platforms, mourning in the digital age, e-service encounters, and Internet forums. While the overlay of physical and virtual information on location-based media is not a new phenomenon, this volume argues that, in the face of its increasing pervasiveness, we can better understand its unfolding and future directions for research by accounting for the significance of place in today’s interactions.

    This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, digital communication, pragmatics, and media studies.

    Contents

     

    PART I: MACRO APPROACHES

    1. The discursive construction of place through the online-offline interface. From physical locations to wikispaces (Alejandro Parini and Francisco Yus).

    2. The best thing on twitch today was a bike messenger: Experiencing metropolis, mobility and place through live-streaming (Aparajita Bhandari and Lee Humphreys).

    3. Digital first-order place, velocity and chronotope in globalized communication (Isolda E. Carranza).

    4. Space, place and TikTok: propaganda, documentation and accountability (David Nichols).

    PART II: MICRO APPROACHES

    5. The lived experience of place in a Twitter affinity space around the death of sports celebrity Maradona (Patricia Bou-Franch).

    6. The off/online nexus and public spaces: Morality, civility, and aggression in the attribution and ratification of the Karen social identity (Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Lucía Fernández-Amaya).

    7. The physical-digital interface: What does "ici" ("here") mean in a written online discussion? (Michel Marcoccia).

    8. Spatial deixis within political discourse on Twitter (Ana Pano Alamán).

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

    Index

    Biography

    Alejandro Parini is Dean of the Faculty of Languages and International Studies and Full Professor of English linguistics at the University of Belgrano, Argentina. His areas or interest and research include the study of digital discourse and language ideologies and new media.

    Francisco Yus is Full Professor at the University of Alicante (Spain). He has published extensively on internet communication, about which he has proposed the theory of cyberpragmatics. He has also studied the pragmatics of humorous communication.