Rodney H Jones

In this chapter, I will discuss how technology can affect our study of the humanities and the way the humanities can offer insights into our encounters with technology. The theoretical framework that will form
the basis of this discussion is mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 2001), an approach to discourse which focuses on how the semiotic and technological tools we use to interact with the world serve to enable and constrain what we can know and who we can be. Mediated discourse analysis sees the analysis of texts and technologies as occasions for understanding how human social life is constituted and how it might be constituted differently though the exercise of human agency that can come as a result of a heightened awareness of the mediated nature of our experience of reality.. For researchers in the field of digital humanities, it provides a way to reflect on how the tools we use to transform language, history and art into data also end up transforming what we consider language, history and art to be and who we consider ourselves to be as researchers. It reframes key questions about what we regard as knowledge and the nature of research as questions about
the nature of mediation and the ways in which tools affect our actions, our perspectives, our values and our identities, and it reframes the mission of scholars in the digital humanities as not just a matter of using software to analyse texts but of analysing how people use software and how it changes the way they interact with texts.

This book provides an overview of current theories of and methods for analysing spoken discourse. It includes discussions of both the more traditional approaches of pragmatics, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis, and more recently developed approaches such as multimodal discourse analysis and critical sociolinguistics.

Rather than treating these perspectives as mutually exclusive, the book introduces a framework based on principles from mediated discourse analysis in which different approaches to spoken discourse are seen as complementing and informing one another. In this framework, spoken discourse is seen as mediated through a complex collection of technological, semiotic and cultural tools which enable and constrain people's ability to engage in different kinds of social actions, enact different kinds of social identities and form different kinds of social relationships. A major focus of the volume is on the way technological tools like telephones, broadcast media, digital technologies are changing the way people communicate with spoken language. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/spoken-discourse-9781472589927/#sthash.WldC0x89.dpuf

Discourse Analysis:

Provides an accessible introduction and comprehensive overview of the major approaches and methodological tools used in discourse analysis

Introduces both traditional perspectives on the analysis of texts and spoken discourse as well as more recent approaches that address technologically mediated and multimodal discourse.

Incorporates practical examples using real data from conversational interaction, ceremonial vows, dating adverts, social media such as facebook, blogs and msn, films such as When Harry Met Sally, popular music lyrics and newspaper articles on areas as diverse as international political incidents and Lady Gaga.

Includes key readings from leading scholars in the field, such as James Paul Gee, Michael Halliday, Henry G. Widdowson, Dell Hymes, Harvey Sacks and Ron Scollon

Offers a wide range of activities, questions and points for further discussion
Is supported by a companion website featuring extra activities, additional guidance, useful links and multimedia examples including sound files, YouTube and videos.

This title will be essential reading for students undertaking research within the areas of English Language, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.

This chapter proposes an ecological approach to manipulation, influence and deception, drawing on recent work in sociology, media studies, science and technology studies, and 'ecological pragmatics'. Three aspects of online discourse are discussed in light of this ecological perspective, namely: inter(con)textuality, iterability, and metadiscursivity. The chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of an ecological approach to persuasion, manipulation and deception for teaching critical literacies.

Despite denials from tech executives, fact-checks from journalists and explanations from security experts, the "conspiracy theory" that internet companies listen to people's conversations via the microphones in their mobile phones persists. This paper explores the ways people make sense of their everyday encounters with digital surveillance, and how they engage with or resist conspiratorial thinking in the context of the actual conspiracies implicated in the exploitative business models of tech companies. It examines how people talk about their lived experiences of being monitored, and how they work together with others to construct improvised epistemologies to explain them. The data come from a corpus of online discussions on digital surveillance from Reddit, YouTube and Quora. The analysis suggests while the theories that grow out of personal stories of digital surveillance may not be technologically accurate, they still constitute a kind of emerging digital literacy, a collective effort to make sense of and take a stance against the intrusive practices of tech companies. Such talk also serves a social function, providing people with ways to collectively narrativize  their feelings of dwindling autonomy and to work together to formulate strategies to cope with complex technological and economic forces influencing contemporary communication.

This paper explores the metalinguistic tactics used by Hong Kong protesters in 2014 and 2019 and how they reflected and exploited a range of dominant ideologies about language in the city. These tactics are considered both in terms of their rhetorical utility in the "message war" between protesters and authorities, and their significance in the broader sociolinguistic context of Hong Kong. The analysis reveals how such tactics entailed both opportunities and risks, allowing protesters to create shareable discursive artifacts that spread quickly over social media and to promote in-group solidarity and distrust of their political opponents, but also limiting their ability to broaden the appeal of their messages to certain segments of the population and implicating them in upholding language ideologies that promote exclusion and marginalization.

Traditional approaches to the way people react to food risks often focus on ways in which the media distort information about risk, or on the deficiencies in people’s interpretation of this information. In this chapter Jones offers an alternative model which sees decisions regarding food risk as taking place at a complex nexus where different people, texts, objects and practices, each with their own histories, come together. Based on a case study of a food scandal involving a particular brand of Chinese candy, Jones argues that understanding why people respond the way they do to food risk requires tracing the itineraries along which different people, texts, objects and practices have traveled to converge at particular moments, and understanding the kinds of concrete social actions that these convergences make possible.

This chapter discusses how tools from discourse analysis can contribute to our understanding of digital surveillance, exploring how the interaction among social relationships, discourse practices and technological tools in contemporary digital and physical spaces has created a ‘communicative ecology’ (Foth & Hearn, 2007) in which nearly all of our social interactions are engineered to produce data of maximal value for internet companies, advertisers and governments. While much of this new communicative ecology is made possible by digital technologies and the sophisticated patterns of participation and methods of discourse processing they make available, much of it also depends on more fundamental practices of human communication that stretch back to the birth of human language itself (Dunbar, 1996), practices like gossip and boasting, and our seemingly insatiable desire to ‘see’ and ‘be seen’.
  The chapter first explores what insights from discourse analysis can contribute to our understanding of surveillance more generally. Then it discusses the mediated nature of all surveillance and the different affordances and constraints different media bring to it. Then it gives an overview of the main discursive processes involved in digital surveillance, including participation, pretexting, entextualization, recontextualization, and inferencing, showing how they occur differently when mediated through digital technologies. Next, it identifies some of the key issues and ongoing debates around digital surveillance related to discourse analysis, specifically identity, agency, and power. It then goes onto discuss the implications of a discourse analytical approach to digital surveillance for the professional practices of applied and sociolinguists. Finally, it lays out some future directions in which research on discourse and digital surveillance can move.

We investigate the practices by which bilingual university students in Hong Kong appropriate texts in producing utterances, particularly written texts. Following Wertsch and his colleagues we ask: • To what extent do our students appropriate texts in constructing their own discourses? • What linguistic means do they use to do this? • What can these processes tell us about what they now can do with discourse representation; and • What do we need to teach them?This research shows that our students' writing displays considerable intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Responses to this writing in tutorial sessions indicate that they are skilled at orchestrating the multiple voices within their own discourses. The commonly stated concern that our students do not know how to do quotation and citation correctly is somewhat misplaced and researchers need to move the focus away from the mechanisms of citation and attribution to the social practices of textual appropriation.

This paper describes the recent development of identity and community among gay men in China. It focuses both on the ways emerging forms of gay identity relate to larger ideological and discursive shifts within society, and on the ways these new forms of identity and community affect situated social interaction among gay men themselves. In particular, it addresses the question of how these emerging forms of gay identity and gay community affect the ways gay men in China understand the threat of HIV and make concrete decisions about sexual risk and safety.Among the chief tactics used by gay men in China to forge identity and community involves appropriating and adapting elements from dominant discourses of the Party-State and the mass media. This strategy has opened up spaces within which gay men can claim “cultural citizenship” in a society in which they have been heretofore marginalized. At the same time, this strategy also implicated in the formation of attitudes and social practices that potentially increase the vunerability of Chinese gay men to HIV infection.

This paper explores the role of digital media and creativity in the processes of learning that occur in groups of urban skateboarders. In particular, it examines how the production and consumption of amateur videos contribute to both skaters’ mastery of the techniques of the sport and their integration into the culture of the sport. The data come from an ethnographic study of skateboarders in Hong Kong, which included in-depth interviews, participant observation and the collection of texts and artifacts like magazines, blog entries and amateur skating videos. Skateboarders use video in a number of ways that significantly impact their learning and integration into their communities. They use it to analyze tricks and techniques, to document the stages of their learning and socialization into the group, to set community standards, to build a sense of belonging with their ‘crews’ and to imagine ‘idealized futures’ for themselves and their communities. Understanding the value and function of such ‘semiotic mediation’ in learning and socialization into sport cultures, I suggest, can contribute to helping physical educators design tasks that integrate training in physical skills with opportunities for students to make meaning around their experiences of sport and physical education.

This paper explores the identities projected in advertisements directed towards HIV positive individuals and people with AIDS. Fifty such advertisements were collected from three popular American magazines for gay men over a period of seven months. Analysis of the ads reveals a paradoxical presentation of people with HIV/AIDS, which offers simultaneous conflicting images of hope and fear, power and weakness, innocence and guilt. An interactive sociolinguistic model through which this contradictory discourse might be understood is presented, drawing on Goffman’s insights on stigma management and the presentation of the self in social interaction. Advertisements directed towards people with HIV/AIDS, it is suggested, present a contradictory discourse in which the advertisers are positioned as ‘the wise’, offering to mediate the conflicting identities of the stigmatized. The identity values enacted in this contradictory discourse are further measured against American conceptions of communication and the self as observed by Carbaugh and others. The possible consequences of these positionings on the roles made available to people with HIV/AIDS in the wider social context are discussed.

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the interactional dynamics of face-to-face and on-line peer-tutoring in writing by university students in Hong Kong. Transcripts of face-to-face tutoring sessions, as well as logs of on-line sessions conducted by the same peer-tutors, were coded for speech functions using a system based on Halliday's functional-semantic view of dialogue.Results show considerable differences between the interactional dynamics in on-line and face-to-face tutoring sessions. In particular, face-to-face interactions involved more hierarchal encounters in which tutors took control of the discourse, whereas on-line interactions were more egalitarian, with clients controlling the discourse more. Differences were also found in the topics participants chose to focus on in the two modes, with issues of grammar, vocabulary, and style taking precedence in face-to-face sessions and more “global” writing concerns like content and process being discussed more in on-line sessions.

This paper analyses the COVID-19 narratives of US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, combining principles from applied linguistic approaches to illness narratives and sociolinguistic approaches to language and gender. It focuses specifically on the ways Johnson and Trump structured their stories to portray themselves as certain kinds of 'characters', the ways they discursively constructed agency in their narratives, and the ways they engaged in various practices of stance-taking. The analysis reveals that, although Johnson and Trump seemed to have taken very different lessons from their illnesses, the subtext of both their narratives promoted a masculinist discourse designed to depict them as 'strong leaders' and to detract attention from discussions of their reckless personal behaviour leading up to their infections and the failures of their governments to formulate coherent plans to control the pandemic.

The increased use of cell phone cameras by citizens to record their interactions with law enforcement officers has altered practices of policing and of talking with police. It is widely assumed that the presence of cell phone cameras can have the effect of making police officers more accountable for their actions. The degree to which this is true, however, depends crucially on how citizens and police make use of the camera as an interactional resource in the moment by moment negotiation of rights and responsibilities that unfolds over the course of the encounter. This paper provides close examination of two different encounters between citizen and police officers in the US, one involving a Caucasian motorist, and the other an African American. It focuses on how citizens used their cell phone cameras to construct different kinds of 'auditors' of the interaction and how the officers responded in various ways to these strategies. The analysis shows that increasing the accountability of police officers requires more than just technological means (cameras) and the 'legal right' to use them, but rather depends on a range of complex discursive strategies both drivers and officers engage in at the intersection of the immediate interaction order and larger systems of power and inequality.

This talk explores the challenges involved in teaching language and literacy at a time of ‘always on’ digitally-mediated communication in which meaning-making is shared between humans and algorithms, and in which the everyday texts people get to read and the everyday social interactions they get to have are to a large degree engineered in order to maximize the profits of corporations. I begin with an overview of the dominant 'dystopian narrative' about the consequences that these new infrastructures of communication have had on our societies, which focuses on issues of truth (and ‘post-truth’), tribalism, linguistic toxicity, ubiquitous surveillance, and the erosion of human agency. As a counter to this narrative, that portrays internet users as passive and powerless, I examine ways in which tools from applied linguistics, especially pragmatics, can be used to help learners examine the practices of inferencing they develop to cope with the complex communicative landscapes in which they now operate (Jones 2019, 2020). I then move to argue that the focus on 'meaning' that pragmatics offers, while useful,  is not enough, that a real understanding of how people communicate in algorithmic environments requires attention to affect—specifically the affective triggers and affective routines that make us legible to algorithms, and the background feelings of ‘weirdness’ that predictive algorithms and recommendation systems can sometimes create. I end by proposing a ‘literacy of repair’ when it comes to helping our students understand algorithms and reclaim agency in digital environments, a literacy that focuses on ‘glitches’, and ‘creepiness’ and leverages the everyday literacies that they are already developing when it comes to ‘hacking’ algorithms. True digital literacies, I argue, cannot just focus on how individual learners engage with individual texts, but rather must adopt a systemic perspective in which users, technologies, and the economic systems they support are considered and critiqued together.
Jones, R. H. (2019) The text is reading you: Teaching language in the age of the algorithm. Linguistics and Education. (Published Online: 11/10/19 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.100750)
Jones, R. (2020). The rise of the pragmatic web: Implications for rethinking meaning and interaction. In C. Tagg and M. Evans (eds.) Message and medium: English language practices in new and old media (pp. 17-37). Amsterdam: De Gruyter Mouton.

Despite denials from tech executives, fact-checks from journalists and explanations from security experts, what Mark Zurkerberg calls ‘this conspiracy theory that gets passed around’ that internet companies listen to people’s conversations via the microphones in their mobile phones persists (‘Transcript…’ 2018). This paper explores the ways people make sense of their everyday encounters with digital surveillance, and how they talk about their lived experiences of being monitored, engaging in and resisting various forms of conspiratorial thinking, and how this thinking influences their actual digital literacy practices. The data come from a corpus of online discussions on digital surveillance from Reddit, YouTube and other social media sites. The analysis suggests that stories people’s lived experiences of digital surveillance, and the conspiratorial thinking that is often deployed to make sense of these experiences, and sometimes distract attention from the more pernicious ways internet companies monitor people. At the same time, conspiratorial thinking also constitutes an important epistemic tool for people whose access to the technological workings of digital surveillance is constrained by limitations in knowledge and proprietary practices of corporations. Such talk also serves an important social function, providing people with ways to collectively narrativise their feelings of dwindling autonomy and to work together to formulate strategies to cope with complex technological and economic forces influencing contemporary communication.