7 Screenshot from the Withings Health Mate app

7 Screenshot from the Withings Health Mate app

Citations

... Identity is fundamentally fluid and is shaped through discourse (Jones, 2015). It gains meaning and legitimacy, or lack thereof, through everyday discourses that naturalise certain ideologies, reflecting often taken for granted values and beliefs (Van Dijk, 2006a). ...
Article
Malaysian social media platforms have been a dynamic space where both supporters and opponents of LGBTQ+ rights voice their opinions, either contesting or reinforcing discriminatory sentiments. We conducted an enthymematic deconstruction of arguments on two popular Malaysian social media platforms, expanding the concept of topoi within the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to explore how various standpoints are (de)legitimised. The findings show that both sides deliberately draw from the same broad categories – religion, biology and society – to support their respective views. Specifically, anti-LGBTQ+ arguments include appeals to divine punishment, God’s original design, contrary to natural order, pathological disorder, harmfulness and existential consequences, while pro-LGBTQ+ ones are arguing about religious pluralism, God’s creation, natural order, health/normality, harmlessness and overpopulation. Both groups’ appeal to the same foundational principles highlights the dialectical nature of their arguments, allowing each side to negotiate and adapt its values and beliefs in line with the wider cultural and ideological discourse. This helps explain the persistent and contentious nature of the issue in Malaysia, characterised by its diverse demographic makeup.
... Drawing on poststructuralist theory, the present study conceives identity as a fluid, contextual, and discursively constructed site rather than a fixed and static entity (Butler, 2004;Jones, 2015;Weedon, 1996). Identity construction implies multiple strategies among which one is stance taking. ...
Article
Digital platforms offer users various meaning-making resources to express their stances towards specific issues, and, as a result, to perform and manage their identities. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, this paper explored how individuals who identify as Two-Spirit, an umbrella term used within Native American communities to refer to non-binary people, discursively construct their identities on the popular video-sharing platform TikTok by enacting varied practices of stance taking. Specifically, this paper provides a detailed analysis of three videos marked by the hashtag #TwoSpirit in which the content creators explain the meaning of the term to their audience. The findings not only illustrate the approaches taken by three content creators to the explanation of the term (i.e., contrastive, pedagogical, and metamorphic), but also shed light on the multimodal nature of stance-taking on TikTok and the centrality of embodied practices in the mediated era. In detail, embodied practices are seen as particularly relevant to disrupting colonial heteropatriarchy. -------- PLEASE NOTE: This paper has been selected for inclusion in the Editors' Choice section of the Discourse, Context and Media journal. In recognition of this, the journal has made the article freely available for download until 31st December 2023. You can read my paper at this link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/discourse-context-and-media/about/editors-choice
... As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, few linguists have paid attention to the discourse of the Quantified Self, except for Paganoni (2019) and Jones (2015), so this is a quite new topic for linguistics and discourse analysis. Furthermore, as far as I know, no linguist or discourse analyst had systematically examined the relations between the QSers' discourse and their mind, or the cultural models of Quantified Self. ...
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With the spread of digital surveillance technologies from the domains of military and medical to those of personal and everyday, we have seen invention of novel metaphors to conceptualise our daily practices as well as our selves in relation to such emerging technologies as Big Data, which aggregate, crunch and sort our personal information collected from the sensors and cameras embedded ubiquitously now in our living environment, known as an ‘infosphere.’ They sort our selves in a new way, thus altering our self-concept and informing a new, data-driven self culture. The epitome of this trend is the Quantified Self (QS) movement. The participants, known as QSers and who are prosumers, seek ‘self knowledge through numbers’ generated by commercial self-monitoring devices, such as Fitbit and Mi Band. They put their bodily activities under self-surveillance for becoming the experts of self-management and self-optimisation. The global popularisation of QS culture has three implications for our human condition. First, it creates a sham utopia. The platform economy brings into being a precariat, who struggle daily for security and success. In response, the QS gadget companies advertise to a white, middle-class clientele that they can offer them both. Second, it promotes neoliberal reflexive practices and discourse of selfhood. QS culture is historically rooted in the American success culture, which prizes individual success made through self-reliance and continuous self-reinvention. This culture foregrounds personal agency in influencing individuals’ living conditions and life chances, while discounting social structural factors. Third, it makes privacy, hence self-reinvention, problematic. When it comes to the issue of ownership of QSers’ self-data, it is ambiguous to whom they belong and whether the QSers can still enjoy ‘the right to forget’ once the data are uploaded to the cloud. Sociologists have studied the QS culture and its relations to neoliberalism, but they have not tackled the QSers’ subjective experience, particularly their own discourse and mind, in a systematic manner. Meanwhile, although cognitive linguists have had the tools to probe QSers’ discourse, mind and culture, or the cognitive schemas and structures that influence QSers’ beliefs and behaviours, they have not done so, either. Therefore, my thesis contributes to the QS research by cross-fertilising, or transgressing the boundaries of, the disciplines, adding to it another dimension of cognitively-informed critical metaphor analysis of QSers’ mind. I have applied critical discourse analysis for both literature review and empirical analysis. For the empirical chapters, I have systematically mapped out the relations between a QSer’s use of conceptual metaphors in a blog post and the underlying cognitive schemas, which constitute a cultural model of Quantified Self for a sample consisting of a small corpus (52,177 words in total). I used the methods of MIP and SMA to identify the linguistic, conceptual and systematic metaphors in a prototypical blog post, sampled from my proprietary corpus of 40 unique QSers’ blog texts. Based on the identifications, I further traced three metaphor trajectories, or the blogger’s thought patterns, that involved the self, QS tools and data. I found that 1) the blogger thought his HEALTH CONDITIONS WERE OBJECTS that could be managed and controlled with hard work and help from self-monitoring devices, thus giving him a sense of self-made success and being in control. 2) He thought the QS TOOLS WERE PEOPLE, who were productive, capable, intelligent and friendly. This reflects the infosphere’s structural influence on people’s cognition, which decentres the humans and places them on par with other informational agents. 3) He conceived that his DATA WERE VALUABLE RESOURCES, whose ownership was unclear. Meanwhile, alternative metaphors that were relegated to the background by the QS culture were revived and discussed along these trajectories. Altogether, they have demonstrated the framing effects of QS metaphors, i.e. the metaphors can both enable and constrain a QSer’s conceptualisation of self in connection with data and self-control.
... Good investments are tracked: push-ups done, books read, money saved, days on NoFap, and other goals are meticulously recorded in tweets. As Jones (2015) has argued, the ubiquity in digital culture of on-going self-measurement and auto-diagnosis constitutes the "entextualization of the self," which works to increase a sense of agency through building a narrative where the individual is the hero of their own story. Self-Masters are also clearly jockeying for their position in the masculine hierarchy through specific "evidentiary stories" (Montemurro 2020). ...
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Critical masculinities scholarship has identified a number of ways in which abstention from sex, pornography, and masturbation works to repair and reproduce hybrid and hegemonic masculinities. Though the mercurial and plural nature of contemporary online masculinities is investigated on a number of fronts, analysis to date has often pinned down abstention to a particular subject position, often understood predominantly in its gendered dimensions. In this article, I argue that the anti-pornography, anti-masturbation movement NoFap should be understood as a site of political contestation for the meaning potential of abstention and that these subject positions should be read intersectionally. Through analysis of a large corpus of tweets (6,569) scraped from the micro-blogging site Twitter, I present evidence for seven distinct subject positions linked to discrete myths, which include extreme anti-feminist and anti-Semitic articulations. I argue that this bird’s-eye view of NoFap uniquely lays out competing myths in their specificity, facilitating a nuanced understanding of “morbid” identities.
... This study employed Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MMDA), (Jones, 2015;Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006) as its theoretical framework. MMDA was chosen for three reasons. ...
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In the past decade, the popularization of social media in Pakistan has greatly influenced the way in which people communicate and interact with each other. The rapidly evolving nature of online social media communication in the country when viewed against the backdrop of the country’s socio-cultural characteristics and religion is particularly significant. Facebook, being the prime social media platform in Pakistan has been revolutionary and liberating because while acting as a medium of communication, which transgresses the traditional manner of gendered social interactions, it has at the same time enabled the users to perpetuate and reinforce the existing gender ideology. As a result, Facebook in Pakistan has evolved into a space where individuals construct gender identities discursively. Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis, I investigate the ways in which Pakistani men multimodally construct their gender identities on Facebook. I show how Pakistani men are not only upholding the existing socio-cultural norms and discourse but also there are subtle signs of digression from the established models of masculinity.
... Drawing on the work of Jones (2015) and Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), I used Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) as my framework. This enables a multifaceted analysis of the range of semiotic resources, such as language, images, gestures, videos and gifs that are utilized to produce meanings. ...
... This enables a multifaceted analysis of the range of semiotic resources, such as language, images, gestures, videos and gifs that are utilized to produce meanings. Moreover, MMDA also facilitates examination of the meanings constructed via the integrated deployment of these resources in a given situation (Jones, 2015;Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). More significantly, it assumes that, like language, all other modes of communication have been shaped by their cultural, historical and social uses to fulfill specific social functions and that people produce meaning by using and reconfiguring the various resources available to them (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). ...
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Facebook has recently gained popularity among young, digitally literate and predominantly urban Pakistanis. Such social networking sites allow users the freedom to express themselves using usernames, visuals and topics of their own choice. In this article, I examine how Pakistani Facebook users mobilize such resources in their identity work. Using Multimodal Discourse Analysis, I investigate how Pakistani women construct their gender identities on Facebook using visual and linguistic resources. The results revealed the significant impact of Facebook on the socio-cultural and linguistic norms of discourse in Pakistan that enables women to challenge established communication models while they simultaneously reinforce traditional gender models.
... The data I will draw on in this discussion come from a three-year-long ethnographic study of the Quantified Self Movement, involving attending 'Meetups' and conferences in five different countries, collecting and analysing 73 'show and tell talks', interviewing 'quantified selfers' and using various technologies to quantify my own behaviour and physical responses (such as heart rate, weight, sleep patterns) (see Jones 2013aJones , 2013bJones , 2013cJones , 2015aJones , 2015b. The study made use of the principles and methods of nexus analysis , the methodological component of mediated discourse analysis which allows researchers to explore the complex ways that discourses and technologies circulate through communities through a combination of ethnographic observation and the close analysis of texts and interactions. ...
Chapter
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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.
... Entextualisation is defined as the process of detaching language from its original context and transfer it in a different one(Jones, 2015) ...
... To understand children's cultural production with virtual dollhouses and commercial transmedia, I used nexus analysis (Jones, 2015;Scollon & Scollon, 2004) to make visible the social, material, and ideological effects of media convergence in children's play. Nexus analysis tracks the mergers of materials, bodies, social groupings, and discourses that make up the nexus of expected, almost automatic practices mobilized across space and time that cluster in a particular site or phenomenon, in this case, a transmedia franchise's official website. ...
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Background Today, children play in transmedia franchises that bring together media characters, toys, and everyday consumer goods with games, apps, and websites in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas. Recent research on youth videogames and virtual worlds suggests the productive possibilities and tensions in children's imaginative engagements on these commercial playgrounds. Purpose Transmedia websites are conceptualized and analyzed as virtual dollhouses, or assemblages of toys, stories, and imagination that converge digital media, popular media, and social media. In this framing, transmedia websites are not texts to be read but contexts to inhabit. Are virtual dollhouses safe places where children can reimagine the worlds they know and play the worlds they imagine? Are girls doing more than playing simple repetitive games, dressing up avatars, caring for pets, and decorating rooms in virtual dollhouses? Research Design Nexus analysis tracks the histories and social functions of traditional doll-houses, then examines the monsterhigh.com website for these functions and converging practices. In nexus analysis, when practices repeat or support one another across imaginaries, shared normative expectations for ideal players and performances are thickened and amplified. Similarly, conflicting practices create ruptures that disrupt expected trajectories and usual ways of doing things. Nexus analysis of website and game designs and children's YouTube videos identifies repetitions of social practices with the dolls in the commercial website and in child-made films on YouTube social media, making visible the resonances across converging cultural imaginaries as well as ruptures that open opportunities for player agency and redesign. Conclusions As children engage the pretense of virtual dollhouses, they play out blended activities that are at once both simulated and real: dressing their avatars, creating imagined profiles, shopping, playing games, purchasing in-app goods, watching and “liking” videos, recruiting followers/friends, and affiliating with the brand and other fans. These lived-in practices align with particular visions of girlhood that circulate naturalized and normalizing expectations for girls that also converge in these concentrations of media. However, examination of the digital dress-up and online doll play that children produce and share on social media shows that players also make use of the complexity that convergence produces. Children remake imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture these expectations. The analysis points up the need for (a) nuanced and expanded research on children's transmedia engagements, (b) productive play and digital literacies, and (c) critical media literacy in schools.
... These new media environments involve what has been called "digital discourse ," a broad concept which covers metadiscursive framings, genres, style, and stylization as well as ideological stance (Thurlow and Mroczek 2011). Digital discourse has semiotic characteristics including coherence and cohesion , or texture and flow (Gee 2015); intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Vásquez 2015); a dialogic character, the interaction between readers and writers and between human users and machines (Jones 2015); multimodality ; and reflexivit y, the ability to analyze input and customize based on human actions (Jones 2015). These semiotic characteristics are deeply influenced by various affordances of social media such as hyperlinking and tagging. ...
... These new media environments involve what has been called "digital discourse ," a broad concept which covers metadiscursive framings, genres, style, and stylization as well as ideological stance (Thurlow and Mroczek 2011). Digital discourse has semiotic characteristics including coherence and cohesion , or texture and flow (Gee 2015); intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Vásquez 2015); a dialogic character, the interaction between readers and writers and between human users and machines (Jones 2015); multimodality ; and reflexivit y, the ability to analyze input and customize based on human actions (Jones 2015). These semiotic characteristics are deeply influenced by various affordances of social media such as hyperlinking and tagging. ...
... The publication of books like Discourse 2.0. Language and new media (Tannen and Trester 2013), Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age (Jones et al. 2015), and others illustrates a variety of new approaches to discourse analysis that have emerged to study the new discourse communities created by digital media. One important characteristic of recent studies of digital discourse is researchers' emphasis on the need for an interdisciplinary approach, combining frameworks and approaches so as to capture the complexity of digital media and new forms of discourse. ...
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Discourse communities, their characteristic features and communicative routines, have long been a focus of research. The expansion of technology has changed discourse communities, however, because a much broader set of members can now participate in them. Contemporary research has begun to explore how technology-mediated discourse communities form and change, as well as how they serve educational and other social functions. In this chapter, we review research on discourse communities, focusing on the various changes that mediated online environments such as social media have brought to contemporary discourse communities. We also describe advances in and the challenges of conducting research on discourse communities established through social media.