Metacommentary

Consumer-grade game engines such as Multimedia Fusion and RPG Maker have dramatically extended the reach of digital games as a medium. They have also spawned online communities, where conventions and canons of using these tools have evolved. These partly stem from the functional constraints of the game engines themselves and are institutionalized through manuals, examples, tutorials, and games made with them. However, some members of game engine communities actively seek to challenge these conventions by experimenting with the engines and finding ingenious ways to put them to unexpected uses. Such experiments can be regarded as a form of metacommentary on the engines’ capabilities and limitations. While arguably impractical and inefficient, they enrich the scope of what can be done with the engine and can contribute to its further development.

The genre of the five paragraph essay (5PE) is familiar to many US high school and middle school students because it is often included in the teaching of literary analysis and general argumentation. Learners of the 5PE participate in its social life consisting of its learning, change, and spread. In this paper, I present a description of some of the online social life of the 5PE. Examining online metapragmatic commentary under theoretical frames of speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986), enregisterment (Agha, 2007), and language governmentality (Flores 2014; Pennycook 2002, 2006), and with the new methodology of citizen sociolinguistics (Rymes & Leone, this volume), I show how numerous instances of metapragmatic commentary on the 5PE, regardless of their positioning, reinforce a governmentality that constructs the 5PE as a practice totally dependent on authoritarian specifications.

Based on the premise that human experience is storied, the researcher engaged in the writing of critical autoethnographic narratives to examine ideological contention in language learning, language use, and language teaching. Using raciolinguistic ideologies as theoretical framework, he shows the ways ideological orientations embedded in circulating metacommentary push individuals to engage in aesthetic labor around the ways they employ their linguistic resources. Findings suggest that language educators and learners should engage in critical examination of seemingly innocent metalinguistic commentary, as these contain contradictory and multiple ideological orientations that largely shape the perception and employment of speakers' linguistic repertoires.

Increasingly, everyday people are compiling detailed illustrations of and commentaries on language via social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Collectively, these postings function as a participatory version of more formal linguistic atlases compiled by professional sociolinguists. While they do not have professional training or credentials, these citizen sociolinguists have become collectors of sociolinguistically meaningful distinctions--meaningful because these are the distinctions that have stood out to everyday language users. Internet circulated citizen sociolinguistic portraits illustrate not only regional speech samples and their phonological and lexical variation, but also, via self-interruptive side-commentary and comments of netizens, the relative social salience of certain emblematic speech features. Citizen sociolinguistic methodology thus 1) draws on self-conscious portraits generated by language users themselves; and 2) assesses the validity of those portraits by examining the commentary on them posted by Internet peers. Findings have implications for sociolinguistic research on the Internet or In Real Life.

This citizen sociolinguistic case study of Roman dialect analyzes the ways in which the Roman variety of Italian is differentially conceptualized by social media users, and the ways that these conceptualizations are linked, implicitly or explicitly, to popular ideas of personhood.

In continuing a line of flight opened up earlier in discussing the zombie as a symbolic device1, a metaphor that frames our relation, not to human labour in it's vitalistic and artistic affectivity, but to the congealment of it's creditory mediation as Capital which grows only as it feeds of living labor, it is worth considering how this symbol's deployment and becoming into a generic staple has presented us with a vision of what in it's immediacy appears to be a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Within the genre of zombie cinema, the horde of zombies themselves feature as the background of antagonisms, dangers and mutating threats which foregrounds human ingenuity and the drama of survival. The stage however is set almost always in a post-apocalyptic period which has already witnessed the fears we know of yet keep at a distance today. Questions such as a real post-scarcity economy, problems regarding the regulations and control mechanisms of biogenetic experimentation and the climatic consequences of our actions are what is retroactively posited to as signs from a future that we fear, but do not believe will really happen. The most recent rendition of such a horizon drenched in the symptoms of our pathologies today is enfleshed by the popular television series, 'The Walking Dead'. What dawns on us as spectators is not merely the horror and carnage that the undead in their lifeless hunger seek to inflict on the living. Actual conflict, unlike other Hollywood productions takes up considerably less reel time than the organizational formations of the pack of survivors and the arguments regarding the decisions they are to take. Whether to stay close to the forrest, which provides resources and is away from the confines and traps of the city, yet risk an ambush by night from the trees? Questions such as these arise in the immediacy of the threat they pose, and while our batch of survivors act also as farmers and scavengers in the meantime, the real anxiety and struggle that unfolds in a world without a demarcated organizational structure and division of labour takes it's toll on them. Friends, and even family turn against one another and this churning of the human will in it's struggle against the hunger that haunts it, among themselves-AND from of the remains of their brethren, animates the real drama of the series. Yet, and here I believe that it is important to insist on the historical genesis of such a metaphor-Frankenstein's creature, the original 'undead' figure, from Mary Shelley's novel, assembled in a laboratory and brought to life, expressed, from within the finitude of his being, an experience of tragedy that to the reader appears more 'human' than the actions of his persecutors who are merely stunned into aggression by such a being's appearance. Tortured thus, and abandoned by his creator we cannot help but ....