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In The language of social media: communication and community on the internet. Ed. by Philip
Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (2013). Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 112-138.
Entextualization and resemiotization as resources
for identification in social media
Sirpa Leppänen, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen and Elina Westinen
INTRODUCTION
Drawing on insights provided by linguistic anthropology, the study of multisemioticity and research
in computer-mediated discourse (CMD), this chapter discusses how entextualization (Bauman &
Briggs, 1990; Silverstein & Urban, 1996; Blommaert, 2005, pp. 46-48) and resemiotization (Iedema,
2003; Scollon & Scollon, 2004, pp. 101-103; Scollon, 2008) are key resources for identity work in
social media. Three key arguments inspire and give direction to our discussion, each of them laying
down touchstones for language scholars who wish to investigate identity in social media. First, for
many individuals and social or cultural groups, social media are increasingly significant grassroots
arenas for interaction and cultural activities (Androutsopoulos, 2011; Kytölä, 2012a, 2012b;
Leppänen, 2012; Peuronen, 2011) which overlap, complement and intertwine in different ways with
their offline activities. Importantly, social media encompass a range of diverse formats for social
action, interaction and performance; thus they can also be ‘social’ in quite different ways (cf. Baym,
2011, pp. 6-12) and offer various kinds of affordances for and constraints on identity performance.
Second, from an ontological and terminological perspective, we shift the focus from ‘identity’ to
acts and processes of identification and disidentification. We argue that in social media, identities
are seldom assumed or transparent (or remain so); rather, they are performed in chains and skeins of
activities and interactions. Identities are constructed in active processes of identification and self-
understanding, seeking or eschewing commonality, connectedness and groupness (Androutsopoulos
& Georgakopoulou, 2003; Blommaert, 2005, pp. 203-214; Brubaker & Cooper, 2000;
Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2008).
Third, we suggest that crucial resources for the performance of identity in social media are the
closely related processes of resemiotization and entextualization. Communication in social media
involves not only resources provided by language(s), but also other semiotic resources – textual
forms and patterns, still and moving images, sounds and cultural discourses – as well as the
mobilization of these in processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. The language of
social media is thus woven from multiple and intertwined semiotic materials (cf. Kress & van
Leeuwen, 1996, pp. 1-43; Jacquemet, 2005; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011) which are socially
significant and culturally valuable to the immediate participants and groups involved.
As an illustration of the relevance and implications of these theoretical premises, we investigate
four social media settings which provide different affordances for the performance of
(dis)identification, and show how the participants in each of them draw in different ways and by
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different semiotic means on entextualization and resemiotization for specific social and cultural
ends. First, however, we introduce and define the key concepts and orientations deployed for the
purposes of our argument.
KEY CONCEPTS AND ANALYTIC ORIENTATIONS
We define social media broadly as online environments which enable social interaction (Baym,
2011; Fornäs et al., 2002) between participants either synchronously, with an ephemeral output (e.g.
chat channels, ‘shoutboxes’), or asynchronously, often with more long-lasting ‘end-products’ (e.g.
blogs, web discussion forums; see e.g. Kytölä 2012a, 2012b). Thus in our orientation, social media
include, besides social network sites, other digital environments in which interaction between the
participants constitutes an important part of their activities. Another key characteristic of social
media is that they may constitute only one of the settings in which the participants or groups engage
in shared activities – online activities may intertwine with their activities in offline contexts. The
degree to which the interaction between the participants is organized can also vary. In some cases,
the participants can, over time, organize themselves as relatively stable communities of practice
(see e.g. Lave & Wenger, 1991; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992; Gee 2004). Alternatively, their
activities can take place within more short-lived ‘affinity spaces’, stemming from shared interests,
causes, lifestyles, activities and cultural products with short life spans or passing popularity (Gee
2004). Both long-lived communities of practice and more ephemeral affinity spaces can, however,
offer their participants deeply meaningful arenas for shared social practice as part of a participatory,
active ‘prosumer’ (producer + consumer) culture (Burgess & Green, 2009; Leppänen & Häkkinen,
2012).
The sociality of social media environments also shows in how their social and normative structures
are jointly negotiated and enforced by the participants themselves (Leppänen, 2009; Kytölä, 2012b).
In this sense, they exemplify what could be called ‘post-Panopticon’ sociality (e.g. Haggerty, 2006;
Arnaut, forthcoming; Leppänen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2009), manifest in their lack of centralised
mechanisms of control by ‘those in power’ and in a shift to forms of grassroots, ‘bottom-up’ and
peer surveillance. These are often polycentric in that participants can orient to and shift between
several competing and complementary orders of normativity (Blommaert, 2010, pp. 37-39).
As in any social environment, participants in social media need to reflexively conceptualize and
performatively construct themselves and navigate as particular kinds of personae in relation to their
surroundings. Identity is thus both actively ‘done’ and contractually ‘achieved’. Following
Brubaker and Cooper (2000, pp. 14-21), we argue that such complex (dis)identification work is best
conceptualized as a dynamic and multi-faceted process involving affinity, alignment, emotional
attachment and ideological notions of togetherness. First, it entails self-characterization of oneself
vis-à-vis others and external characterization of oneself by others. This characterization can be
either relational (with respect to the relationship to others) or categorical (as a member of a
particular category). Second, identification includes a psycho-dynamic dimension in that individuals
align emotionally with another person, category or collectivity. Third, identity also involves self-
understanding, a practical perception of who one is and what one's role is in the social environment.
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Fourth, in identity performance, individuals seek - or eschew - commonality (what they share with
others) and connectedness (ties linking them to others). Finally, commonality, and to a lesser extent
connectedness, are also prerequisites for groupness, a sense of belonging to a group. Groupness
requires that a particular social constellation believes that they actually share something (e.g. a
sense of belonging to the same nation). In social media activities, it is the semiotic constructions
and processes of indexing or eluding commonality, connectedness and groupness which are
available for investigation. These processes will be central in our discussion in this chapter.
Another key argument here is that, in social media, entextualization and resemiotization are vital
semiotic resources for identity performance, and useful analytical notions in understanding complex
social media practices. These two concepts stem from different research traditions: entextualization
originates in the nexus of anthropology and discourse studies (e.g. performance studies; Bauman &
Briggs, 1990; Silverstein & Urban, 1996), while resemiotization was introduced within the research
field of social semiotics (e.g. studies of multimodality; Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, Iedema, 2003).
For our exploration of social media activities, these research traditions and concepts offer a
complementary analytic purchase. This is because both of them make it possible to trace the ways
in which social media activities frequently and crucially build on the active recirculation and
appropriation of complex multi-semiotic material.
More specifically, what the notion of entextualization offers the analyst is the identification and
analysis of the trajectories and re-uses of language and textual material as resources in meaning
making (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, 73; Blommaert, 2005, pp. 46-48; Silverstein & Urban, 1996).
Entextualization highlights how such recycling involves two related processes: decontextualization
‒ taking discourse material out of its context ‒ and recontextualization ‒ integrating and modifying
this material so that it fits in a new context. With entextualization in our analytical toolkit, it
becomes possible to investigate how social media participants, through extracting 'instances of
culture' (language forms, textual or other semiotic material) and relocating these in their discourses
and repertoires, perform identity at the grassroots level of social media activities.
In these activities they are, following the original argument by Bauman and Briggs (1990, p. 76),
active agents for whom entextualization is 'an act of control' through which they can claim a degree
of social power. This power manifests in various ways: it shows in their access to the activity of
entextualization, in the legitimacy of their claims to reuse the texts, in their competence in such
reuse, and in the differential values attached to various types of texts. For the analysis of social
media activities, these four issues of discursive power are of particular relevance): they imply that
the investigation of entextualization is about discovering 'empirically what means are available in a
given social setting, to whom they may be available, under what circumstances, for making
discourse into text' (Bauman and Briggs 1990, p. 74).
The affordances of social media for the performance of identity through entextualization is aptly
described by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, p. 34) as ‘the new realities of the semiotic landscape’.
By this, they point to processes of change taking place at different levels (the nation-state,
technology, and economy) that not only have an impact on political and cultural boundaries but also
on semiotic boundaries. Therefore, the second concept that we wish to introduce here for the study
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of (dis)identification in social media is resemiotization, the process of semiotic change in the
circulation and flow of discourses across social and cultural boundaries.
While entextualization offers the analyst a tool for explaining how in social media activities
discourse material originating elsewhere gets lifted out of its original context and is repositioned
and remodified as a meaningful element in a new context, resemiotization focuses on the
examination of the unfolding and rearticulation of meaning across modes and modalities, and from
some groups of people to others (cf. Iedema, 2003, p. 41; Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Scollon, 2008).
Further, whereas entextualization foregrounds the issue of social access, control and competence in
textual ‘work’, resemiotization emphasizes the need for ‘socio-historical exploration and
understanding of the complex processes which constitute and surround’ meaning-makings (Iedema,
2003, p. 48). Nevertheless, as in entextualization, so too in resemiotization there is a dialectical and
dynamic tension between the patterns (cf. Iedema’s ‘schemes’ (2003, pp. 43-44) or Bourdieu’s
‘homology’ (1984, 1990)) carried over from earlier contexts, experiences or manifestations and the
new forms and meanings that resemiotization gives rise to.
Although the concepts of entextualization and resemiotization are closely related, both are useful
for the analysis of identity performance in social media, highlighting different aspects of the
processual and multisemiotic nature of meaning-making in social media activities. The examples
from social media discussed in this chapter all include, alongside linguistic and textual forms and
patterns of language(s), other semiotic means, and carry traces of socio-cultural action and complex
discourse trajectories (cf. Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Scollon, 2008). Seen from this perspective, our
data samples are thus best seen as particular points, ‘snapshots’, in the cycle and process of
entextualization and resemiotization.
ENTEXTUALIZATION AND RESEMIOTIZATION AND (DIS)IDENTIFICATION IN
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTEXTS
The four cases we discuss in this chapter all illustrate ways in which entextualization and
resemiotization function as key resources for (dis)identification in different social media
environments. We show how entextualization and resemiotization can involve a range of semiotic
materials: linguistic, visual, textual and multi-modal. More specifically, with our first example we
look at the ways in which a close and delimited community of practice defined by shared and fairly
stable activities and interactions construct their identities on Facebook, and how these online
activities are contemporaneous and entwined with their simultaneous offline activities, with the
online participants drawing on and making use of the community members’ offline language uses.
With the help of our second case, we move on to describe the ways in which identity work and
cultural negotiation take place via the modification of mobile cultural emblems in a (sub)cultural
online discussion in which the participants have shared cultural knowledge and interests (Christian
heavy metal). Despite the prevalence of multimodality in many social media formats and sites, our
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third case ‒ collectively maintained and monitored fan fiction discourses ‒ shows how
entextualization and resemiotization of textual material, too, are crucial in (dis)identification in
social media. Finally, we look at a multimodal YouTube video and discuss how identifications of
both performers and audiences in videos of this kind involve the multi-modal modification of text,
sound and moving image.
‘Soaking in God’s presence’ – linguistic entextualization and identification in a Facebook
group
Our first example illustrates how social relations, activities and identities are performed on a
Facebook page of a youth cultural group. The page belongs to a group of young Finnish Christians
who share an interest in extreme sports. They form a proximal community whose members
regularly participate in and organize events associated with extreme sports, and teaching and
studying the Bible. Although a shared physical space is essential for the community members for
engagement in their sports activities, they also disseminate their experiences through digital
communication channels (see Peuronen, 2011).
For this group, Facebook serves as a medium for sharing information on upcoming or on-going
events and provides a space for sending messages, for instance, regarding one’s participation.
Hence, through Facebook, a wider group of people can be familiarized with the community’s
activities. The status updates in the example below illustrate messages posted during an Extreme
Summer Camp organized in 2011. Prior to these updates, the wall of this event had been filled with
messages anticipating the camp, the first ones appearing four months before the actual event. In the
following, we first present the original Facebook posts (ENDNOTE 1), followed by their
translations into English (by SP). 1. Having a blast here also at night. Sauna
+ moonlight swim = brilliant case and
extreme enjoyment. Enthusiastic about
tomorrow’s [moto]cross:)
2. Soaking in God’s presence :)
3. Yes, 50 people here already. We’ve
started wakeboarding and wind surfing,
the sauna is warm and there’s real joy in
the air :D
This example shows how heterogeneous linguistic resources are entextualized on the Facebook
page in order to perform the community’s offline camp activities online. Hence, the Christian
extreme sports enthusiasts render their discourse extractable by ‘lift[ing] it to a degree from its
interactional setting and open[ing] it to scrutiny by an audience’ (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 73).
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By representing their material, lived reality online, the community members characterize
themselves as members of young Christians, showing what they share and how they are connected
with the group. Their membership in this particular community thus gives them access to and
socializes them into the use of linguistic resources and their intended meanings, histories and
ideologies (cf. Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 76).
Since the community combines two different socio-cultural frameworks – Christianity and extreme
sports – which represent very different traditions, practices and values, the members necessarily
draw on diverse linguistic and discursive resources that together form a heteroglossic repertoire (cf.
Bailey, 2012). By making use of the meaning potential that the specific resources have, they
manage to navigate within and between two different discursive realms. They actively engage in the
social management of decontextualizing and recontextualizing linguistic and discursive elements
(Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 74). This is possible through their knowledge of the appropriate
contextual uses of these elements.
In this example, the participants circulate linguistic and discursive constructs from one
communicative space to another. Through this practice, they maintain ‘simultaneous presence in a
multiplicity of sites’ (Jacquemet 2005: 266). The use of different spaces of communication (offline
and online) affects what is said, why something is said and how the message is understood. For
example, the key phrase ‘Soaking in God’s presence’ (line 2) refers to one of the camp’s morning
activities: when ‘soaking’, the participants gather together to pray silently by themselves, to
contemplate God or simply to relax while listening to gentle songs of worship. The phrase has
travelled with the community members to Finland from North America, where some of them have
attended a Bible school and brought new concepts and practices with them. The concept of soaking
has been adopted as part of the community’s local activities and the members’ habitual language
use, and, eventually, it is used in their online communication as well. Therefore, the process of
entextualization in this case includes the geographical, cultural, linguistic and discursive circulation
of a specific communicative item. It has preserved its original English form, even though
Finnishized derivatives, such as ‘soukkaus’, are also used by the community members.
The Facebook update was posted at 10:13 am, simultaneously as the soaking activity took place
(every morning from 10 to 11 am). However, when posted on Facebook, the specific meaning of
this notion is most likely not shared by every reader of the page. Hence, although referring to a
specific activity, the phrase could also be interpreted locally in the context of the Facebook page
alone: there, it may function as an act of self-characterization that even ‘outsiders’ could recognize
as denoting the group’s commonality and its members’ shared activity culture and faith in God
(Brubaker & Cooper, 2000, pp. 20-21).
Similar identification practices are illustrated by the two other messages in this example. In both of
them, the participants perform camp activities by entextualizing them into the online context with
heterogeneous linguistic and discursive resources. The two posters use resources available for them
in different lexical registers (of youth cultures, religion and extreme sports). Since their extreme
sports vocabulary does not contain standardized forms, varied uses of Finnish and English occur:
they use terms such as wakeboarding,purjelautailu for wind surfing, and crosseihin for motocross.
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In addition, they report on their feelings about being involved in the community’s activities with
very positive and vivid expressions, such as aitoa iloa ilmoilla (real joy in the air), innolla
huomisiin crosseihin (enthusiastic about tomorrow’s motocross) and Saunat + kuutamouinti =
loistokeissi ja extremenautinto (Sauna + moonlight swim = brilliant case and extreme enjoyment).
The use of emoticons also emphasises the positive tone of the messages. These updates aim to
convey the posters’ offline experiences and practices by transforming them into a different mode,
that of online writing. By means of decontextualising and recontextualising the linguistic and
discursive elements, the community members thus move from their immediate experience to
mediated performance of their activities and identities on this particular social media site.
From pentagram to repentagram – visual emblems and renaming in cultural identification
As with our first case, two different socio-cultural frameworks or lifestyles are brought together in
our second example. Here we explore how a visual cultural emblem related to Christian metal
music on YouTube, a website built around uploads of videos, is appropriated and made sense of by
members of the cultural group in question. Although YouTube is not a site explicitly aimed at
enabling social networking, it is a social medium: on YouTube, participants not only share and
watch videos, but also actively engage in reviewing the contents of videos and in discussing the
issues emerging in and around them. In this case, however, the participants do not typically
constitute a community of practice; rather, YouTube enables the emergence of an interest-based
affinity space (Gee, 2004; Gee & Hayes, 2011) for participants interested in particular video genres
and the cultural phenomena depicted in them. The structure of any YouTube subpage is another
indication of its social nature: the video frame is immediately followed by audience comments on
the same page.
The example in focus here is a video entitled Great Christian metal bands, compiled by a user
named pinoyoctopusgo (ENDNOTE 2).The video, made by editing audioclips and pictures and
merging them together, presents its maker's favourite Christian metal artists. In this way, it is an
example of resemiotization: visual material (band logos and photographs of band members) and
audio material (extracts from Christian metal and rock songs) as well as text (band names, album
names, and biblical extracts) are modified and fused together into a personalised representation of
Christian bands. The video also exemplifies entextualization in that it is an outcome of a process
involving the extraction of materials from elsewhere (e.g. band websites, CDs, mp3s, the Bible) and
their recontextualization as part of the video maker's own audio-visual contribution. Importantly,
these operations are not simply idiosyncratic and random acts: this is suggested by the fact that the
video is presented as belonging to an evolving genre of ‘My favourite bands’ on YouTube.
The visual cultural emblem that is of particular interest in this video is a Christian metal band logo,
a resemiotized object with a particular trajectory. The logo belongs to a Christian heavy metal band
Impending Doom (Fig. 1) and is shown in the video at the beginning of the 20-second time slot
dedicated to the band (starting at 0:21).
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Fig. 1. The repentagram. ©Impending Doom. Fig. 2. A pentagram.
Reproduced with the band’s permission
Note to the copy-editor: please place Figures 1 & 2 next to each other.
In the video, the logo stands alone without any explanatory text or background graphics. While one
aspect of its resemiotization is its trajectory from a pictorial logo to an element in an audio-visual
video, another, and more complex, aspect of resemiotization in play here is the way in which the
logo makes use of a visual form that refers to and evokes certain (sub)cultural contexts. Indeed, the
logo is very similar to many other heavy metal band logos in that it uses dark colours and lines that
cross each other to form a diagram (cf. Jousmäki 2012; Karjalainen et al., 2009). In this case, the
diagram resembles the notorious pentagram (Fig. 2) which, in the context of rock music, is
associated with non-Christian, ‘black’ metal music genre in general, and in particular with the anti-
Christian or Satanic worldview of its adherents. The video, however, offers the audience no explicit
cues on how the pentagram-like diagram of the Christian band Impending Doom should be
interpreted.As a result, it gives rise to a great deal of puzzlement in the discussion thread on the site.
For example, one discussant, DieToFleshNotSpirit, initiates a long thread with the question ‘what
with the satanic star in the beginning aren’t this bands christian?’, thereby constructing Satanism
and Christianity as incompatible with each other. To this s/he receives 18 replies, expressing
reactions to the logo and offering various suggestions for its interpretation, including the following:
@DieToFleshNotSpirit It's the Repentagram. Impending Doom took the pentagram and made it into the
Repentagram, a Christian symbol. REDMAX777
@REDMAX777 and... What does it mean?? franco802
@franco802 It combines the words "repent" and "pentagram". It's basically a play on words that tells people
the way to be saved: "repent" of your sins. REDMAX777
Another participant, REDMAX777, thus explains how Impending Doom transformed the pentagram
into ‘a Christian symbol’ - and explicitly points to the central role of entextualization and
resemiotization as means of self-identification for a Christian band seeking to build a bridge
between their Christian values and the metal music community (Jousmäki 2012). The ideological
transformation of the symbol from non-Christian to Christian involved the addition of four sides to
the original five sides of the pentagram as well as the renaming of the symbol with the lexical prefix
‘re-’. The choice of the word ‘repentagram’, in turn, suggests that the band prioritizes repentance as
the key to salvation (see Jousmäki, forthcoming). Thus, Impending Doom is finally interpreted by
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the discussants as having modified the pentagram for Christian purposes and for the purposes of
Christian metal in particular, in order to characterize itself as a Christian metal band.
However, the outcome of these meaning-making operations is not simple or straightforward. This is
clearly evinced by the prolonged discussion that ensues over what counts as ‘Christian’ and what
does not, demonstrating that the ‘participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging’
(Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 69). This discussion foregrounds the fact that the entextualization and
resemiotization of an originally Satanic emblem as a Christian symbol is not unproblematic. One
issue seems to be that some elements of the original non-Christian scheme may, nevertheless, have
been transferred (Iedema, 2003, p. 43-44) to the new Christian context, and hence many discussants
remain uncertain whether the remodified emblem is a relevant and appropriate resource for
identification or not.
‘RANMA NO BAKA’ – rewriting and genre modification as identity work on fan fiction sites
Our third example focuses on fan fiction sites as a particular social medium enabling interaction and
shared cultural production (rewritings of, for example, the characters, plot and themes of popular
films, TV series or novels) by fans. Although the crux of fan fiction is rewriting cult texts, fan
fiction sites are also fundamentally social media environments, as they can only exist and thrive if
these texts are read, commented on and discussed by readers. In this way, fan fiction sites crucially
build on interaction between the participants. Within the cultural and normative framework of fan
culture, based on the fans' adoring attachment to cult objects, fan fiction sites thus evolve as and
constitute social niches for particular, collectively created and monitored participatory cultures
(Burgess & Green, 2009; Leppänen, 2009).
As in each case investigated in this chapter, in the fan fiction culture, active entextualization and
resemiotization of semiotic resources are crucial for creating and maintaining a shared socio-
cultural reality for individuals (Leppänen, 2012). What, however, distinguishes fan fiction from, for
example, Facebook or YouTube discussions, is the amount of effort it often requires: many writers
invest a great deal in their writing and painstakingly craft it in ways appreciated by members of
these fan communities.
Fan fiction is essentially about the entextualization and resemiotization of textual resources of
different kinds. Recognizable elements of the source text are decontextualized, modified and
embedded within a new textual context. In this way, the new text can still appear to readers as a
recognisable version of the original text. At the same time, these entextualized aspects of the source
text, when integrated within the new text, make the fan fiction text a novel construction. Very often,
entextualization and resemiotization are thus geared towards the creation of new imaginative
interpretations of the source texts which are simultaneously appreciative of some of their aspects
and critical or subversive about their other features (Leppänen, 2008).
In fan fiction, writers strive to create texts that constitute a bricolage in which objects are reordered
and recontextualized ‘to communicate fresh meanings’ (Clarke, 1976, p. 177). In practice, bricolage
can be achieved through a number of semiotic means. First, it can be created by fan writers when
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they draw on and mix resources provided by different languages and styles (e.g. English dialogue
resembling the kind of talk typical of a particular TV series along with everyday, vernacular Finnish;
see Leppänen, 2012). Second, bricolage can also be created through generic diversity. For example,
the genre features of the source text can be modified, mixed and combined with features of other
genres. Third, aspects of the contents and narrative of the source text ‒ characters, settings and plot,
for example ‒ can be manipulated in various ways. A very common bricolage of this kind is one in
which characters that originally populate different texts are brought together within fan fiction,
often for the purpose of creating new romantic liaisons between them (Leppänen, 2008).
Here, the cross-over, combinatory and transformative aesthetics of fan fiction are briefly illustrated
with a text submitted by a young Finnish woman (ENDNOTE 3). The text entextualizes and
resemiotizes linguistic and textual elements from several popular cultural discourses, including (at
least) the Finnish Moomin stories and Japanese Ranma ½ manga, and the television genres of
cooking competitions and sports commentary. The left-hand column contains the original Finnish
text and the column on the right its English translation (by SL):
Kamala kokkisota
Erotuomari aloitti lähtölaskennan:
"Paikoillenne, valmiit, kokatkaa!"
"Noniin, kilpailijat saivat luvan aloittaa! He
alkoivat availla kaappeja mielipuolisella
raivolla!
Minä olen teidän selostajanne, Ryouga Hibiki,
ja selostan teille yksityiskohtaisesti jännittävän
kokkisodan Akane Tendon (ah, Akane)
ja Pikku Myyn välillä uskollisen
asiantuntijatiimini avustuksella. […]
”Shampoo, mitäs sanot Akanen
maustamistekniikasta? Liikaa vai liian vähän?"
"Typerä tyttö liikaa pippuria laittaa. Ranman
suu palaa!" […]
Akane tunki lusikan Ranman suuhun. Syntyi
syvä hiljaisuus. Kaikki, kilpailijat mukaan
lukien, tuijottivat tuota naamaa, joka sanoi:
"Yääääääääkk! Kamalaa! HYI HYI HYI!
Pahinta mitä olen koskaan maistanut!"
"RANMA NO BAKA" mätks
Kaikki (paitsi Akane):
Macho macho man, I gotta be a macho man…
Tuli Pikku myyn vuoro. Täsmälleen sama
toistui. (Nodokan kommentti: "Kyllä he
varmasti ovat sisaruksia!") […]
The horrible cooking competition
The referee started the count-down:
"Ready, steady, cook!"
"Right, the competitors have permission to
begin! They began to open cupboard doors with
insane frenzy.
I'm your commentator, Ryouga Hibiki, and will
report to you in detail on the exciting cooking
competition between Akane Tendo (ah, Akane)
and Little My with the help of my faithful team
of experts. […]
“Shampoo, what do you say about Akane's
spicing technique? Too much or too little?”
"The stupid girl too much pepper puts. Ranma's
mouth will burn!" […]
Akane stuffed the spoon into Ranma's mouth. A
deep silence followed. Everyone, including the
competitors, stared at that face, which said:
"Aaaaaargh! Horrible! OH OH OH! This is the
worst thing I have ever tasted!"
"Ranma is stupid [Japanese]" smash Everyone
(except Akane):
Macho macho man, I gotta be a macho man...
Then came Little My's turn. Exactly the same
happened again. (Comment by Nodokan: "They
must be sisters!" […]
The main characters here are Akane and Little My. Akane is the female protagonist of the Japanese
manga series Ranma ½. Little My, in turn, is a tiny female character in the Moomin stories. The two
characters resemble each other a great deal and this similarity has most likely been the stimulus for
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the writer to create the story. This is also noted by one of the characters here (‘They must be
sisters!’).
The text depicts a scene in which the two cartoon characters are set against each other in a cooking
competition, the performance-like quality of which is further accentuated by the fact that there is
also a commentator who reports on the events as well as an audience - consisting of other Ranma ½
characters who chip in with their own comments. As is typical of fan fiction on the whole, this text
is linguistically and stylistically heterogeneous. It is mainly written in standard Finnish, but also
includes one utterance in Japanese (RANMA NO BAKA (‘Ranma is stupid’) and another in English
(‘Macho macho man, I gotta be a macho man’). In the same vein, the text displays stylistic
heterogeneity: the announcements by the sports commentator (e.g. ‘Right, the competitors got
permission to begin! They began to open cupboard doors with insane frenzy’) simulate the register
and style of live sports commentary. In addition, one of the character’s comments (’Stupid girl too
much pepper uses’) resembles, in its syntactic distinctiveness, the idiosyncratic speech style of
another famous fantasy character, Yoda from Star Wars. Likewise, the contextualization of the
snippet from the famous song by Village People (‘Macho macho man’) adds yet another dimension
of meaning to the text: Ranma, the main protagonist of the manga, who at times transforms into a
woman, is urged here to be a man, and forget his other girly, non-macho persona.
What seems to have motivated this particular mélange of semiotic features is, first, that both its
writer and audience are no doubt very familiar with the genres and particular discourses in question.
Their lives are saturated by mediated popular culture Moomin cartoons and films, Japanese
manga and anime, and televised cooking competitions, as well as their languages, registers and
styles. They recognise and enjoy the enmeshing of these in fan fiction and appreciate the craft of
such art and can read between the lines, catching the (implied) meanings in sometimes quite subtle
ways. They inhabit a cross-discourse, cross-media, cross-language discourse universe in which the
creation and reception of media products is not a unidirectional act whereby the singular message/s
of one particular media discourse is encoded by the sender and de-coded and contemplated in the
reader’s or spectator’s mind, but an active, interventional and heteroglossic activity (Leppänen,
2012). In this sense, fan fiction sites are social in a way that goes beyond the interactive dynamics
of their participants’ activities, one that involves a shared set of formal preferences, productive and
interpretive conventions and of norms regulating how far and in what ways they can create and
interpret their discourse.
Fan fiction is about claiming, gaining and being accepted as a member of a fan culture, about
participation in communities created and maintained through shared practices, and about
identification as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of alignments and values who
strives to signal commonality and connectedness with a group of like-minded fans. What this means
is that the entextualizations and resemiotizations fan writers make are also highly indexical and
presuppose a certain social context with a shared normative order. Within such a context the choices
made by the author in our previous example can become interpreted as playfully and
respectfully interventional - and not, for instance, as dismissive about the cult texts they draw on.
12
This kind of affiliation with a shared indexical order is also frequently foregrounded in the
discussion that fan fiction generates. For example, one of the discussants of the fan fiction text
discussed above spells out his/her evaluation of the writer's choices as follows:
I'm positively surprised that I could distinguish between My's and Akane's lines. I haven't followed Moomin
for many years, and Ranma manga I have practically fast forwarded (many fanfics are in my opinion much
more meaningful than the original work... as weird as that may sound). (Translated from Finnish by SL)
Acting as a ‘post-Panopticon’ grassroots gatekeeper, this commentator invokes here an authority
position and makes it very clear that s/he is fully in the know about what makes good fan fiction.
Commentary like this also shows that in fan fiction, writing in an appropriate way is considered a
means for claiming and acquiring social capital and prestige in fan cultures.
Although at first glance it may seem that, in fan fiction, there are limitless possibilities for
entextualization and resemiotization, it is also policed by quite specific norms (Leppänen 2009).
Thus, fan fiction is not merely free play, but, in the same way as all other human social spaces, it is
regulated (Blommaert, 2005, 2010) by its own orders of normativity and mechanisms of control
which constrain the discursive and identity options fans may utilise in them.
‘Mammat riivaa’‒ video and music as resources for entextualization and resemiotization in
viral YouTube videos
Our fourth and last example deals with (the) entextualization and resemiotization of multimodal
resources in a music video on YouTube. This video was created in the summer of 2011, when a
Finnish rap artist, Ruudolf and his colleague, Karri Koira, transformedDanza Kuduro, the previous
summer’s tropical hit single (ENDNOTE 4) into a Finnishized version entitled Mammat Riivaa
(‘The chicks are harassing us’ ENDNOTES 5 & 6). Such YouTube videos are an increasingly
popular genre; their popularity stems largely from the playful ways, typical of rap music on the
whole, in which they adopt and modify music samples or the entire musical background of an
existing cultural product. At the same time, thanks to the way in which this particular video plays
with the cinematic and linguistic resources of the original music video, it is also quite a novel
phenomenon (for a discussion of the typical features of Finnish hip hop, see e.g. Westinen, 2010).
The video Mammat Riivaa, now with almost 1.4 million views on YouTube (November 27, 2012),
is a complex multi-semiotic product and a remodification of the original song consisting of music,
moving images, dance and lyrics. While the background music and the composition are exactly the
same as in the original, every other aspect of the original video has been transformed. Firstly, its
setting has been relocated from the Caribbean Sea to Finland, specifically to a Helsinki seaside
suburb, Aurinkolahti (‘Sunbay’). At the same time, this new setting remains ambivalent in that
some of its semiotic features also link it with the original geographical context, the United States.
These include, for example, the rapper Ruudolf’s shirt, which bears an image of the US flag, and his
cowboy-like straw hat. The connections between the two videos are further accentuated by the fact -
known to his fans - that Ruudolf has Mexican-American roots and has studied in a Bible College in
13
California. These facts, along with his explicit references to the United States (e.g. titles such as
Born in the U.S.A. and Florida Funk) thus convey an image that his identity as a rapper is one that
aligns with both Finland and the US.
FIGURE 3: A screenshot of the official Mammat riivaa dance video (ENDNOTE 7)
In addition to the re-localization of the song, the dance performance in the original video has been
transformed in the Finnish video. While Danza Kuduro features half-naked women dancing around
the male singers, in Mammat Riivaa it is the two male rappers who do the dancing. Their
choreography also differs a great deal from the original: in comparison to the professional gyrations
in Danza Kuduro, the young Finnish men's dance looks quite amateurish. In another scene, the two
dancing rappers are joined by a group of ordinary-looking young Finnish men. Amongst them,
however, are some local hip hop and sports celebrities. This ‘face-dropping’ practice further
emphasizes the local Finnish nature of the video.
Other levels of entextualization and resemiotization in Mammat Riivaa include the linguistic and
the musical. Danza Kuduro is a bilingual Spanish-Portuguese song by Don Omar, a Puerto Rican
reggaeton singer-rapper, and Lucenzo, a France-based artist of Portuguese origin. Mammat Riivaa,
in turn, is a rap adaptation of this Latino song, and its lyrics are in spoken vernacular Finnish with
some elements of English, as in the following example:
rapin suomen mestari in the place to be
14
(‘the Finnish rap champion in the place to be’)
The idea behind the new lyrics, particularly the chorus, is what the Spanish (and Portuguese) words
and sentences could sound like in the rap artists’ own language, Finnish (see table below). The
artists thus take advantage of a popular YouTube meme – the so-called ‘mondegreen’ technique –
and create new ‘misheard’ lyrics on the basis of their near-homophony with the original lyrics (see
e.g. Leppänen & Häkkinen, 2012). However, Mammat Riivaa also differs in an important way from
mondegreen videos. Unlike mondegreen videos that typically transform a commercial product into
a personal, non-commercial fan product, in Mammat Riivaa the original music video is a
commercial product transformed into another commercial video. The interventional practices of
post-Panopticon social media are thus adopted here for commercial purposes.
The lyrics for the chorus of each song and their translations are presented in the following table
(Finnish to English translations by EW):
SPANISH
La mano arriba
cintura sola
Da media vuelta
danza kuduro
No te canses ahora
que esto solo empieza
Mueve la cabeza
danza kuduro
its English translation
Put your hands up
Moving only the hips
Turn half around
Dance to Kuduro
Don’t lose your breath now
Because this has just started
Move your head
Dance to Kuduro
FINNISH
mammat riivaa
asfalttisoturii
ne ottaa paidast kii
tuu mun kanssa ruudolf
ei anna taukoo
ne koiraa kauhoo
nyt poika saunoo
mun kanssa tuu jo
its English translation
the chicks are harassing
the asphalt warrior
they grab my shirt
come with me ruudolf
they don’t allow a break
they doggy-paddle
now the boy goes to sauna
come with me
The original party song gives explicit instructions on how to dance this tropical megahit. The
Finnish version, in contrast, describes how the two Finnish rappers are constantly harassed and
flirted with by girls wherever they go. In doing this, the new Finnish lyrics twist parts of the
original lyrics, in the mondegreen fashion, for the rappers’ own purposes. The clearest example of
homophonic matching is with ‘mano arriba’ and ‘mammat riivaa’ – with the Spanish [-‘ri:ba]
sounding close to [‘ri:va:] to the Finnish listener, since in Spanish, /b/ and /v/ are pronounced alike.
Homophonic ‘translation’ is one means by which lyrics can be localized and indexically grounded
(Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 76) as meaningful to Finnish speakers – in other words, as something
they can identify with as fans of Finnish rap. The same effect is also created by the artists’ self-
presentation and self-naming, and by cultural references which link the video content to Finland.
One of these references is ‘the boy goes to sauna’ which is, among other things, a quotation from a
well-known contemporary Finnish sports song in which ‘the boy’ denotes an ice hockey
15
championship trophy which the winning team takes to the post-match sauna when celebrating their
victory. The cultural reference here is quite transparent to Finnish audiences, who are also likely to
be able to appreciate the way in which it has been resemiotized in the context of this song to refer to
the young men (‘the boy(s)’) who, even in a waterfront sauna, are harassed by young women
swimming close by. Hence, this line is another illustration of complex meaning-making operations
involving decontextualization, whereby a textual snippet has been lifted from a particular social
event (the trophy in the sauna), its recontextualization in a new discursive context (a sports song)
and finally its further recontextualization as an ingredient of an another song (Mammat Riivaa),
itself a multi-layered resemiotized cultural object.
The multiple levels of meaning of the Finnish video also shows in the comments made by the
video’s YouTube audience who engage in a reflexive examination of its discourse (Bauman &
Briggs, 1990, p. 69): among other things, they wonder whether Mammat Riivaa is meant for real or
as pure parody. For example, the best-‘liked’ Finnish-language comment on the video (on October 3,
2012) includes the following statement: ‘I heard that some Don Omar had made a parody of this’,
thus suggesting humorously that the original song is Mammat Riivaa and not Danza Kuduro.
Ruudolf himself, however, claims that the song is no joke, but a serious interpretation of a piece
which he likes (Sasioglu, 2012), the lyrics describing his life in which he is constantly pursued by
young girls.
As has been shown above, in the video Mammat Riivaa, Ruudolf identifies both with Finland and
the US. The video is thus characterized by translocality – it simultaneously aligns with the local and
the global as meaningful co-ordinates (Leppänen et al., 2009). As a cultural product, it also creates
affordances for audience identifications which are equally translocal: as revealed, for example, by
the commentary on the video, the audience orients to the song both as a product of a global music
culture as well as of a localized music scene. In contrast, what Ruudolf himself dis-identifies with
remains somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, the lack of scantily dressed women on his video –
a stereotypical characteristic of hip hop videos and a prominent feature of Don Omar’s video –
could be read as an act of dis-identification with the mainstream American hip hop videos and their
apparent sexism. On the other hand, the Finnish lyrics tell a different story of rappers being
constantly surrounded and admired by women, no doubt with the additional implication of bragging,
an essential part of hip hop culture on the whole. In these ways, the entextualization and
resemiotization processes to which the original video is subjected, imply that the identifications of
its audiences remain divided and polycentric.
DISCUSSION
In this chapter, we approached social media as environments which enable social activities,
interaction, and the emergence and sharing of an active, ‘prosumptive’ participatory culture,
regulated by ‘post-Panopticon’ grassroots normativities. Our focus was on (dis)identification, and
we argued that processes and practices of entextualization and resemiotization play a key role in it.
As an illustration of both the convergent and divergent ways in which identity performances take
place in social media, we looked at four different types of remodifications of social media
16
discourses: of linguistic material on Facebook, visual material on YouTube and its discussion
threads, textual interventions on fan fiction sites, and multimodal resources in YouTube rap videos.
In our analyses of these cases, we aimed at demonstrating the kinds of semiotic means that are
available in each social media setting, to whom they are available, how they are mobilized by
participants in identity performance, and with what kinds of meanings and effects. Considering that
the semiotic landscape of social media is essentially multimodal, we paid attention not only to uses
of language(s) but also to multiple other semiotic means which carry traces of socio-cultural action
and complex discourse trajectories, by drawing on, making use of, reinterpreting and resemiotizing
features, text and discourses which originate and have travelled from elsewhere.
Importantly, we demonstrated how it is specifically these semiotic resources that are crucial in
(dis)identification and meaning-making performances and in orientation to or evasion of
commonality, connectedness and groupness. In all of the social media environments examined here,
mobilization of these resources helped identify the participants as legitimate members of the
particular group or community. For example, such identity performances were achieved by the
participants in each social media setting by their self-selection as legitimate participants in the
social media activities in question, and by demonstrating competence in responding to or crafting
the discourse in appropriate ways. This was further enhanced by the reactions and responses of
other participants, guided by the normative and socio-cultural set-up of the particular environment.
More specifically, in a closely-knit youth group, unified by their Christian faith and interest in
extreme sports, the members’ Facebook updates recorded lived reality online. Through this means,
they were able to characterize themselves as members of a young Christians’ community, showing
what they share and how they are connected with the group. Their membership in this particular
community of practice gives them access to and socializes them into a particular usage of linguistic
resources and their intended meanings, histories and ideologies. In this process, the
decontextualization and recontextualization of particular language uses was shown to be a
significant social resource for the participants.
In the YouTube discussions centring on cultural emblems that followed, similar processes of self-
and other-identification, connectedness, commonality and groupness were identified. On the one
hand, the transidiomatic (Jacquemet, 2005) mobilization of cultural symbols and the comment and
discussion on them clearly functioned as a means for the participants in these social media activities
(Christian metallers) to identify both themselves and others as members of this specific cultural
group. Within the communal context afforded by the YouTube discussion threads, they can share
with one another their interest in particular cultural practices, ways of language use and discursive
resources. On the other hand, these social media activities also foregrounded disidentification and
ambiguity. The case of the entextualization and resemiotization of a non-Christian symbol as a new
kind of a Christian band logo which would link the band not only with Christianity but also with
metal music was shown to be only partly successful. The participants in this social media group had
trouble shedding the original non-Christian aspect of the symbol. Hence, the identification potential
of the processes of entextualization and resemiotization was not realized fully, as the commentators
could not take on board all the meanings conveyed by the appropriated symbol.
17
The entextualization and resemiotization of globally available popular cultural material were also
argued to be crucial resources for creating and maintaining a shared socio-cultural reality on online
fan fiction sites. Self- and other-identification, connectedness, commonality and groupness were
shown to be dependent on a consensually established and monitored discourse practice, in which
the recontextualization of other texts and textual material as well as playful (but normatively
regulated and policed) appropriations of linguistic, stylistic, generic and contents features of source
texts are means for claiming membership and mutual respect in fan cultures.
In our final example, we discussed an interventional Finnish rap video, based on another music
video of trans-Atlantic origin, which sought a balance between the non-commercial YouTube meme
culture and commercial popular music culture. In this case, it was shown how entextualization and
resemiotization were used by the rap artists to create a cultural object which oriented both towards
the global genre of rap music culture and the local music scene and setting, as well as the very local
concerns of the young rappers themselves. These semiotic meaning-making operations were shown
to provide affordances for the artists and their audiences to identify themselves as members of a
translocal and polycentric music culture in which appreciation of the source product and its
localization are important parameters for connectedness, commonality and togetherness.
In conclusion, we wish to argue that the kind of semiotic resources that are available to participants
in social media activities can be empowering as well as delimiting: they can both provide new
opportunities for identification, agency and social action, in which the capacity to use a range of
semiotic resources can play a key role, and also impose new divisions, hierarchies and exclusions.
In addition, our analyses in this chapter highlight the ways in which micro-level discourse practices
are linked and contribute to global social and cultural processes of change, and have considerable
relevance to new kinds of identifications and communality which do not always have a national,
ethnic or local basis. In this way, this chapter provides insights into processes of sociolinguistic,
discursive and semiotic diversity as aspects of participatory sociocultural practices in social media
that are manifest in all corners of the globe where people have access to and interest in engaging
with others through these media.
NOTES
1. Reprinted with permission by these participants.
2. The link to the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcWuO9MmJn4 (accessed 23
November, 2012).
3. The link to the fan fiction text is
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3420979/1/Akane_vs_Pikku_myy_eli_kamala_kokkisota (accessed 23
November, 2012).
4. The link to the video Danza Kuduro is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUFgacK8sZ0
(accessed 23 November, 2012).
5. A translation which would precisely capture the meaning of the Finnish concepts ‘mammat’ and
‘riivaa’ is difficult to form. ‘Mammat’ referred earlier to middle-aged women, often in a derogatory
way. Nowadays, the word can refer neutrally to young women, young mamas (but not necessarily to
18
‘mothers’ in any way). ‘Riivaa’ has the literal meaning ‘be possessed’ in English, but here it has to
do with young women harassing, bugging, pursuing and being obsessed by these young male
rappers.
6. The link to the video Mammat riivaa is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO_hPCYhVX8
(accessed 23 November, 2012).
7. Reprinted with permission by Ruudolf.
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