scholarly journals COMPUTATIONAL AFFORDANCES, CONTEXT COLLAPSES AND OTHER CHALLENGES TO LINGUISTIC STUDIES

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 583-600
Author(s):  
Vinícius Vargas Vieira dos Santos

ABSTRACT With the increasing incorporation of digital media in 21st century societies, a paradigmatic phenomenon is occurring on the language issue: communicative practices have started being widely mediated by technology. Besides incorporating earlier technologies, such as radio and television, computers have enabled users, who were mere passive recipients, to become information emitters as well. Starting from the principle pointed out by Marshall McLuhan (1964) that the medium controls the scales and actions configured in language, this paper seeks to understand the scalar levels of new technologies contexts and how they reverberate on meditated linguistic practices. Digital media are considered here as their own computational designs, communication channels that, far from being neutral, are previously set by large computational companies and, therefore, present ideologies and already configured forms of interaction, stimulating semiotic and pragmatic dimensions of language, reflecting on aspects of culture and, consequently, on political life.

Communication ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Howard

Cyberpolitics is a domain of inquiry into the role of new information technologies in contemporary political life. It is an exciting domain of inquiry because not all of the things that communication scholars learned by studying mass media systems and interpersonal communication hold up in digital media environments. Studying cyberpolitics usually means one of two things. It can mean investigating the ways in which political actors use new technologies in creative—and sometimes problematic—ways. Some voters use digital media to improve their knowledge of public affairs, others use the same media to limit the flow of news and information. The Internet allows some journalists to do more research and track down more sources, but such digital media has had a significant impact on the organization of the newsroom and the features of the news market. Politicians and candidates for elected office use the Internet to reach out to new voters, but they also use it for data mining and manipulating public opinion. But studying cyberpolitics can also mean investigating the less overt political machinations that go into setting telecommunications standards and making decisions about how to engineer information infrastructure. Allocating the public spectrum, setting privacy standards into law, building universal broadband access, or deciding which information packets may be more important than others are technical issues with significant implications for political life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Boulianne ◽  
Yannis Theocharis

New technologies raise fears in public discourse. In terms of digital media use and youth, the advice has been to monitor and limit access to minimize the negative impacts. However, this advice would also limit the positive impacts of digital media. One such positive impact is increased engagement in civic and political life. This article uses meta-analysis techniques to summarize the findings from 106 survey-based studies (965 coefficients) about youth, digital media use, and engagement in civic and political life. In this body of research, there is little evidence to suggest that digital media use is having dire impacts on youth’s engagement. We find that the positive impacts depend on directly political uses of digital media, such as blogging, reading online news, and online political discussion. These online activities have off-line consequences on participation, such as contacting officials, talking politics, volunteering, and protesting. We also find a very strong relationship between online political activities, such as joining political groups and signing petitions, with off-line political activities, which undermine claims of slacktivism among youth. Finally, while research generally assumes a causal flow from digital media to participation, the evidence for the alternative causal flow is strong and has very different implications on interventions designed to address youth’s levels of engagement in civic and political life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-174
Author(s):  
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik ◽  
Ioana Literat

One of the far-reaching implications of the current global COVID-19 pandemic has been the sudden boost in use of digital media due to social distancing and stay-at-home orders. In times of routine, youth are often the first to adopt new technologies and platforms, to experiment with modes of production and practices of sharing, and often spend significant time and energy socializing online. Now such digital practices have become common among much wider demographics. Moreover, the move to online learning in schools and the spurt of innovative digital experiences offered has abruptly shifted the rhetoric of concern often associated with youth’s so-called “screen time.” The articles in this thematic issue—though written long before the COVID-19 pandemic—address many of the questions that now are significantly brought to the forefront. What are the potentials and opportunities offered by youth digital participation for learning, for self-expression, for identity formation, and for social connection? How does digital participation shape civic and political life? And finally, especially when digital participation is so ever-present, what are barriers to youth participation online, and what are the challenges and risks it poses?


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Betsy Rymes ◽  
Gareth Smail

AbstractThis paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in context may have something unique and underexamined to offer us as researchers of communicative diversity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
D.I Ansusa Putra

<p><em>Dajjal appearance discussion in the last decade has been the trending among Muslim. There are massive search for religious doctrines text on Dajjal in digital media. This is oriented towards certain views about the world, social and cultural conditions, political project, political subjectivity, attitudes, and practice or competence. The behavior affects social-political life through the contextualization of hadith about Dajjal. This study aims to obtain a complete picture of digital media behavior in understanding religious doctrines related to  Fitna of Dajjal among Muslims. This article combines Muslim theory of Cosmopolitanism Khairuddin Aljunied and living hadith approach, supported by data from google trend search throughout 2019. The results showed that there were four digital behaviors of Indonesian Muslim related to Dajjal hadith, first, searching instantaneously; second, reviewing from internet; third, joining the contextualisation discussion; and fourth, liking the personalization and illustration. The most frequently sought topic is about the prayer to be protected from Fitna of Dajjal. In addition, the study also tried to prove that this digital behavior is formed massively because of supply and demand pattern. It means that there are groups producing Dajjal hadith in public sphere regularly since they are supported by the many interests of consumers.</em></p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Michael Menrad ◽  
József Varga

Research on banking regularly assumes that digitalisation has an impact on banking. This blanket assumption is not erroneous, but it is too inaccurate, too undifferentiated and probably only applies in the long term. Results of this study show that the customers’ habits and requirements and thus the willingness to accept digital technologies in the banking sector are changing within a significantly different speed. The spread ranges from almost complete use, as in Scandinavia, dynamic development, as in the Czech Republic and Greece, to almost complete rejection, as in Bulgaria and Romania. This paper examines and demonstrates the influence of various socio-demographic and emotional characteristics on the use of digital media. Shifts in customer behaviours are revealed and discrepancies are identified by time series analyses and factor analyses. The results reveal the forthcoming death of the bank branch network accompanied by a regionally varying acceptance of Internet and mobile banking. This area of tension requires banks to have a good understanding of customer requirements regarding the demand for digitisation in order to avoid misguided decisions. However, the bank’s side in the adoption process of new technologies by customers has been neglected by scientific studies so far. In order to measure the state of digitisation of banking services, a comparison equation is presented that allows banks to be benchmarked in terms of the degree of digitisation and enables banks to dynamically track changes in their customer portfolios.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 307-316
Author(s):  
Mandra Saragih ◽  
Habib Syukri Nst ◽  
Rita Harisma ◽  
Ismail Hanif Batubara

This research aims to develop digital literacy model through a school culture-based. Digital literacy was chosen considering the development of information through digital media. This study used Research and Development (RD). The research step was to collect data and design a product in a literacy model design based on school culture. The components of developing a school culture-based digital literacy model consist of participants, select participants, a digital literacy program in the form of training, the content of digital literacy programs in the form of exercise, media, teaching materials, assessment, program socialization, implementation, evaluation and mentoring. This research is the design of a guideline for implementing a school culture-based digital literacy model that can be used in digital literacy activities in schools.


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