Stephen S Pihlaja

This Element focuses on how narrative is used to construct religious identity in superdiverse contexts, considering specifically how people talk about their own religious identity, and the religious identity of others. Drawing on interviews with twenty-five participants, and numerous site visits throughout the city of Birmingham (UK), the analysis focuses on how self and other positioning is used to construct religious identity in talk about beliefs, actions, and behaviours in different contexts. Additionally, the analysis shows how conflict emerges and is resolved in spaces where people of different faiths and no faith interact, and how people talk about and understand community. Finally, a model for talking about faith in diverse contexts is presented to help people find common goals and act together towards shared interests.

Discussions of storytelling and narrative have encompassed abstraction in different ways including master narratives (Bamberg, 1997) and storylines (Harré & van Lagenhove, 1998). These discussions, however, have often viewed storytelling and abstraction as a binary distinction, rather than a spectrum where speakers move between different levels of abstraction when recounting experiences. This article argues for a nuanced approach to abstraction in storytelling that considers how specific details of stories-namely, actors, actions, contexts, and time-are excluded or abstracted in the recounting of experience, with a link between increased abstraction and implied moral judgement. The article first outlines the theoretical basis for this argument, and then shows specific examples of abstraction taken from stories about religious experience. Finally, the productive implications of a nuanced view of abstraction are outlined, including for narrative and discourse analysis, for understanding of storytelling and cognition, and for critical analysis of racist language.

With over one million subscribers, YouTube fitness vlogger Steve Cook has a well-established presence both on social media and the health and fitness community. Using frequent direct address to the audience, Cook consistently positions himself as an authentic, down-to-earth figure and core member of his community. Using close narrative analysis (Bamberg, 1997) of five of Cook's videos (1 hr 41 mins 14 secs) and thematic analysis (Owen, 1984) of the video comments (n = 807), analysis focuses on how Cook performs authenticity and how his followers respond. Analysis shows that the vlogs create intimacy and implicitly challenge the traditional positioning of celebrities and fans. Viewer responses show an ongoing engagement with Cook a relatable community member as well as an expert. However, the analysis also shows how ‘authenticity’ is problematic in creating a false sense of intimacy and unrealistic expectations in viewers. Finally, the broader impact of social media celebrity and market capitalism on mental health and user self-esteem are discussed.

Media discourse is changing at an unprecedented rate. This book presents the most recent stylistic frameworks exploring different and changed forms of media. The volume collates recent and emerging research in the expanding field of media stylistics, featuring a variety of methods, multimodal source material, and a broad range of topics. From Twitter and Zooniverse to Twilight and Mommy Blogs, the volume maps out new intellectual territory and showcases a huge scope, neatly drawn together by leading scholars Helen Ringrow and Stephen Pihlaja.

Contributors write on topics that challenge the traditional notions and conceptualisations of "media" and the consequences of technological affordances for the development of media production and consumption. There is a particular focus on the ways in which contemporary media contexts complicate and challenge traditional media models, and offer new and unique ways of approaching discourse in these contexts.

This article investigates the use of biblical stories and text in the preaching of Joshua Feuerstein, a popular Facebook evangelist, and focuses on how biblical stories are used to position the viewer in comparison to biblical characters and texts. Taking a discourse dynamics approach (Cameron & Maslen, 2010), a corpus of 8 short videos (17 minutes 34 seconds) and their comments (2,295) taken from the Facebook are analysed first, for the presence of metaphorical language and stories taken from the Bible. Second, they are analysed for the role of metaphor in the narrative positioning (Bamberg, 1997) of the viewer, particularly as it relates to Gibbs’s notion of ‘allegorises’, or the ‘allegoric impulse’ (Gibbs, 2011). The corresponding text comments from the videos are then also analysed for the presence of the same biblical metaphor, focusing on how commenters interact with the metaphor and Feuerstein’s positioning of them. Findings show that biblical metaphorical language is used to position viewers and their struggles in the context of larger storylines that compare everyday experiences to biblical texts. This comparison can happen both in explicit narrative positioning of viewers with explicit reference to the Bible, and implicit positioning, through the use of unmarked biblical language. Analysis of viewer comments shows that use of metaphorical language is successful in building a sense of camaraderie and shared belief among the viewer and Feuerstein, as well as viewers with one another.

Reading and interpreting the Bible is an important practice in Evangelical Christian communities, both online and offline. Members of these communities employ biblical exegesis not only in convincing others about the validity of their beliefs, but also influencing the development of the social context in which they interact. Thus, reading and interpretation of the Bible serves both a theological purpose, allowing users to provide textual evidence for beliefs, and a practical social purpose, allowing users to map their own and others’ actions onto biblical texts, either to condone or to condemn them. For users who hold the same belief about the importance of the Bible in making moral judgements, the biblical text can be a particularly useful tool to position oneself and one’s actions. In this article, I employ concepts from positioning theory, to analyse how Evangelical Christian YouTube users read across the books of the Bible by treating similar uses of metaphorical language as interchangeable, and using them to position particular users and to make moral judgements about their actions. The analysis shows that reading and exegesis of scripture can be used in dynamic online environments to map characters and storylines from diverse biblical passages onto a particular online argument, providing a common resource for users from different backgrounds and contexts. Findings show that reading and interpretation of scriptures provide a powerful means of claiming authority for Evangelical Christians in the community, and are used to position oneself and one’s actions, influencing the subsequent discourse and emerging social context.

Social Network Sites (SNS) have increasingly grown as platforms for users to publish and promote content (which includes videos, written texts, and images), in addition to interacting socially. While all published material both online and offline is normally protected by copyright laws, what constitutes copyrighted material on SNS can be difficult to distinguish. Moreover, users on these sites can have differing expectations of how their content is used and viewed by others, causing confusion around both the legal and ethical obligations of others when they use or cite others’ content. Knowing when to attribute content to users and when to protect user privacy is, therefore, a key issue for researchers, particularly linguists working with language data from SNS. Using three case studies, this article looks at content from SNS where applying copyright rules might be problematic: videos that have been published and subsequently removed from a site; user comments on videos published on YouTube and Facebook; and user comments on sites, which might be considered sensitive, such as adult video pages. I discuss the legal obligations in using this content, by first presenting examples where there is a clear legal requirement to cite the copyrighted work of users. I then highlight the ambiguity of copyright law and suggest ways problematic cases might be addressed, enabling the researcher to act both legally and ethically in copying and using online material. In conclusion, I argue based on these studies that attribution of publicly available content on SNS should be the default position, but that the effect of reproducing materials for academic purposes should be taken into account.

This book focuses on the ways in which metaphor contributes to the development of Internet arguments, known as 'drama', particularly on YouTube. Although a growing body of research into YouTube interaction has developed descriptions of user experience on the site, empirical studies of the YouTube video page and discourse analysis of user interaction are rare. This research specifically focuses on user interaction around issues of Christian theology and atheism on the site, analysing how 'drama' emerges.

Since YouTube drama occurs publicly, Antagonism on YouTube focuses on video pages rather than user reports of their actions and responses. It investigates how and why YouTube drama develops through a systematic description and analysis of user discourse activity. Through close analysis of video pages, this study contributes to a greater academic understanding of Internet antagonism and YouTube interaction by revealing the factors which contribute to the development of drama over time.

Pihlaja's research is innovative in that, while previous studies on YouTube discourse have focused on interaction, Pihlaja argues that it is difficult to elicit and identify 'typical behaviour' and has thus taken a novel approach in analysing a group of YouTube participants over time, through a variety of interactions ... Pihlaja's engaging writing style is characterised by clear and concise descriptions of both the discourse he analyses and the theoretical frameworks he uses and develops within his research. As such, this book is a valuable introduction to the discourse analysis of online data, as well as a useful tool for experienced discourse analysts who are keen to discover how communication continues to evolve within the ever-changing landscape of online environments ... In summary, the book is an engaging and well-executed qualitative study that advances the fields of CMC discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, and inter-faith scholarship. -- Lori Gilbert, University of East Anglia LINGUIST LIST

This article presents an investigation of the use of social categories in talk about Christians in a small community of users discussing religious issues on the popular video-sharing site, YouTube. The article focuses on how self-proclaimed atheists employed and modified the category of “Christian” to describe others in a series of antagonistic debates – called “drama” by users. Three video pages, including video talk and comments, were analyzed using membership categorization analysis (Housley and Fitzgerald 2002) to focus on how users, and in particular atheists, employed and modified the category of “Christian” to talk about others. The analysis shows the category of “Christian” was used in different ways to evaluate the actions of others, often leading to conflict about the use of the category. The study shows how the meaning of categories is dynamic in talk, and how local, specific uses emerged as stable on different timescales in the drama. Findings also show that categorization often revealed user beliefs and expectations about social interaction, particularly when the categorization led to moral judgments.

This thesis presents a systematic discourse analysis of sustained antagonistic debate—called 'drama'—on the video-sharing website, YouTube. Following a two-year observation of a YouTube community of practice  discussing Christianity and atheism, 20 video 'pages' (including talk from videos and text comments) from a drama event were identified and transcribed, producing a 86,859 word corpus comprising 136 minutes of video talk and 1,738 comments. Using metaphor-led discourse analysis (Cameron & Maslen, 2010b) of the total corpus, metaphor vehicles were identified, coded, and grouped by semantic and narrative relationships to identify systematic use and trace the development of discourse activity. Close discourse analysis of a subset of the corpus was then employed to investigate membership categorisation (Housley & Fitzgerald, 2002), impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011), and positioning (Harré & van Langenhove, 1998), providing a systematic description of different factors contributing to the emergence of 'drama'.

Analysis shows that 'drama' developed when negative views of one user's impolite words exposed the different expectations of other users about acceptable YouTube interaction. Hyperbolic, metaphorical language derived from the Bible and narratives about tragic historical events often exaggerated, escalated, and extended negative evaluations of others. Categories like 'Christian' were used dynamically to connect impolite words and actions of individuals to social groups, thereby also extending negative evaluations.

With implications for understanding 'flaming' and transgression of social norms in web 2.0 environments, this thesis concludes that inflammatory language led to 'drama' because: (1) users had diverse expectations about social interaction and organisation, (2) users drew upon the Bible's moral authority to support opposing actions, and (3) the online platform's technical features afforded immediate reactions to non-present others. The 'drama' then developed when users' responses to one another created both additional topics for antagonistic debate and more disagreement about which words and actions were acceptable.

Using membership categorization analysis, this article investigates membership categories in a YouTube video made by an Evangelical Christian in which he differentiates between “saved” and “religious” users. Analysis will take a discourse-centred, multimodal approach grounded in longitudinal observation, using analysis of video discourse to instruct analysis of video images and user comments. Findings will show that categorization is accomplished by using recognized categories with ambiguous descriptions of category-bound activities that include metaphors, such as “being hungry for God” and not “hanging out with atheists.” These categories are recognized by commenters on the video, but the category bound activities applied to the category members are disputed. Findings will also show that scriptural reference plays an important role in categorization in the video, drawing on direct Bible quotes as well as paraphrases of key passages.

For non-native teachers of English (especially in Japanese high schools), questions of appropriate English usage and possibility are constant. Although corpora usage has widely  been discussed as a useful tool for EFL students, this paper discusses the possibility of corpus-usage for non-native EFL instructors in answering questions of usage and helping prepare material for classrooms. Using the online British National Corpus, a simple
step-by-step methodology for teachers searching words with shared meaning and usage was presented. Analysis of the search results shows that although corpus results are often complex and require time to sufficiently analyze, corpus studies can help clarify usage and meaning questions. The paper discusses the problems of motivation with using the corpus and discusses possibilities for improving teacher motivation for using corpus studies.

This article is an evaluation of gender roles in the Planet Blue Japanese high school textbook. Using criteria built on biases found by Jane Sunderland, it evaluates the textbook on basis of exclusion, subordination and distortion, and degradation. On the whole, the textbook appears to have made significant improvement in these three criteria, especially in the presentation of career roles for woman. The roles of men and women in romantic relationships presented in the text, however, are still presented in stereotypical terms. The article presents these remaining biases as opportunities for EFL instructors to provoke discussions regarding gender roles in Japanese culture as well as English- speaking cultures.

Using membership categorization analysis, this article investigates membership categories in a YouTube video made by an Evangelical Christian in which he differentiates between “saved” and “religious” users. Analysis will take a discourse-centred, multimodal approach grounded in longitudinal observation, using analysis of video discourse to instruct analysis of video images and user comments. Findings will show that categorization is accomplished by using recognized categories with ambiguous descriptions of category-bound activities that include metaphors, such as “being hungry for God” and not “hanging out with atheists.” These categories are recognized by commenters on the video, but the category bound activities applied to the category members are disputed. Findings will also show that scriptural reference plays an important role in categorization in the video, drawing on direct Bible quotes as well as paraphrases of key passages.

Pihlaja, Stephen. (2010) The Pope of YouTube: Metaphor and Misunderstanding in Atheist-Christian YouTube Dialogue. The Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue 3: 25–35. Available online at: <http://irdialogue.org/journal/issue03/the-pope-of-youtube-metaphor-and-misunderstanding-in-atheist-christian-youtube-dialogue-by-stephen-pihlaja/>

With the Charlie Hebdo shooting earlier this year, the attack at a Copenhagen “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” event, and now another attack in Texas on a “Draw Muhammad” contest, violence around depictions of the Prophet have once again become a prominent issue both in the US and Europe. Tensions are increasing and the rhetoric around these events often plays right into pre-existing extremist narratives about Islam. Much of the conversation has centered on differing opinions about the limits of “free speech” and how they are, or are not, complicated by “hate speech.”

In translations of Japanese to English, issues of loss and gain are especially pertinent. Whether in translating honorific and humble forms or absent and inferred words, translators of Japanese are often faced with decisions on how to best fill in the large gap between the two languages, especially when translated text genres have not yet been clearly defined. This paper will discuss how cultural expectations of academic writing in both the Source Language (SL) and Target Language (TL) should affect how voice is constructed in translation. The translation of language with implicit relational or cultural cues as well as loss/gain issues will be discussed, particularly the problem of subject inference in Japanese and to what extent passive sentence construction should be used to translate such inferred subject constructions. The paper will first present model translations of problematic structures and discuss how these translation methods are or are not successful, and then discuss tactics that were used to overcome the same cultural problems in a translation done by this author. Methodology will focus mainly on the importance of genre considerations and a nuanced understanding of culture and genre when translating.