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Ambient identity construction via massive anonymous danmu comments

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Abstract

This article contributes to the scholarship on digital identity work by examining the linguistic mechanisms of ambient identity construction in fully anonymous online environments. It investigates how video viewers construct textual personae by leaving massive anonymous comments in danmu, a viewing-and-commenting system that synchronously posts comments onto a video screen as it plays. Drawing on the sociological concept of homophily and the linguistics-informed Appraisal framework, this study systematically tracks the patterns in the attitudinal orientations among massive anonymous comments left over a high-profile Chinese video featuring a teacher's home visit. The article argues that the technological affordances of danmu lead to the inherent collectiveness of anonymous digital identity construction. It reports two attitudinal meaning-making mechanisms through which massive anonymous comments converge into a homogeneous mass and describes the viewers' collective ambient identities revealed in their comments. This project brings clarity to the dynamics of ambient digital identity construction by deploying computational tools to linguistic analysis and has practical implications for marketing research, social media monitoring, and community building.

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... Bullet screens and traditional static comments beneath the video both belong to user behavior in online videos, where static comments appear static and independent of the viewing process (Xi et al., 2021). In contrast, when users watch videos, they are allowed to engage in realtime, anonymous interactive comments, and bullet screens seem like bullets simultaneously on the screen, enabling viewers to see comments sent by other viewers at the same timestamp of the movie, creating a ''pseudosynchronous effect'' atmosphere of information interaction, where individual discourse establishes connections through homogeneous groups and collective contextual (Xu & Jing, 2024). In the context of movies, bullet screen comments not only serve to analyze information about the film but also serve as evidence of relationships among viewers, the entire film, and its characters (Gee et al., 2012). ...
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This paper will explore the ways in which online, anonymous interaction on the website 4chan.org can complicate traditionally situated discursive theory. Through an examination of the politically incorrect board (/pol/), this paper begins to reanalyze scale, alignment, and double-voicing approaches in ways that necessitate novel understandings of digitally placed discourse. This website has demonstrated unique engagements with these categories, engaging with global and personal discourses through anonymity, geographically "situated" flag markers, and green-text narrative techniques, among others. This essay contains a number of examples found through 4chan's /pol/ via qualitative-oriented, inscriptive gathering techniques of discourses concerning both the continuing European and American migration issues, as they are explored by a globally situated, digital community. Through banal, everyday engagements with both the material and the website features themselves, users craft new realizations of identity and interaction in a space that seeks to make all anonymous.
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This study deals with the interactional achievement of laughter in WhatsApp conversations. We aim to describe how texters mobilize “transcribed” laughter (i.e. hahaha), and to what extent laughter is a resource for managing the interactional contingencies linked to the asynchronous nature of the written conversations in which participants are engaged. Using both a conversation analytic approach and quantification, we analyzed 43 WhatsApp conversations collected in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. By focusing on the position of laughter in a message, its sequential position, and the management of turn allocation before and after a message that contains laugh particles, we show that participants recurrently produce volunteered and unilateral laughs combined with assessments as responsive actions. However, depending on the position of laughter in the message and its sequential organization, participants orient to different courses of action. The first pattern includes standalone unilateral laughter (i.e. the message is composed only of laugh particles) that is followed by another message by the same speaker, in which he/she produces an assessment, leading to sequence closing and topic termination. In the second pattern, the speaker laughs in turn-initial position before producing an assessment in the same message; in this case, the next message is performed by the partner, providing him/her with the opportunity to prolong the ongoing topic. Laughter is thus a powerful resource in that it allows participants to orient to interactional moments that are particularly delicate to manage, especially in asynchronous conversations: message-taking and sequence closing/topic termination. Laughter thus opens a window onto how participants display expertise in the management of WhatsApp conversations. Given the impact that asynchronous exchanges may have in social life, the ability to exhibit an identity of “doing being” an expert of new communication technologies appears to be a key competence that deserves further investigation.
Chapter
This chapter discusses the general concepts of stance and voice from the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It opens with a brief introduction to some aspects of SFL theory that inform their exploration, focusing on the subsystem of APPRAISAL. The second part of the chapter describes some applications of the framework in the domain of academic discourse, in particular in analyses of evaluative roles and positioning strategies in research writing within various intellectual fields. The studies represented here reflect a logogenetic approach to discourse analysis, in other words, a focus on tracking unfolding evaluative meanings in instances of texts, highlighting both their complexity and ways they interact. In this respect the approach differs significantly from corpusbased methods while at the same time offering a complementary standpoint. Although the illustrative accounts of the research are necessarily synoptic, they give some indication of the empirical potential of APPRAISAL theory, as well as an opportunity to stress some transdisciplinary explorations of how writers legitimate claims to knowledge.
Book
Have wireless mobile communication technologies changed the way people talk to one another? What does it mean to be able to speak or write to anyone, anywhere, 24/7/365, and get an immediate response? And what does the current profusion of these technologies mean for the study of language in social life? Do we need to develop new approaches, methodologies and theories? Taking a global perspective, this volume provides readers with a nuanced, ethnographically-informed understanding of mobile communication and sociolinguistics. The text explores a wide range of digital applications, including SMS, email, tweeting, Facebook, YouTube, chatting, blogging, Wikipedia, Second Life and gaming Raising important questions about the nature of language and the creativity of speakers, Ana Deumert examines the role of multimodality and intertextuality in creating meaning, as well as the realities and consequences of digital linguistic inequality. Key features. • Illustrates core concepts in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology • Applies sociolinguistic theories of language from Humboldt and Sapir to post-structuralism to new media • Provides a global and multilingual perspective on digital communication practices and discusses digital inequality and its consequences for sociolinguistic research • Includes a focus on linguistic creativity and poetic language. Drawing on examples from across the world, as well as original multilingual data and analyses from South Africa, this innovative book provides undergraduate and postgraduate readers with accessible explanations of sociolinguistic theories as they apply to the growing field of mobile communication.
Conference Paper
Danmaku comment is a comment technology that overlays user comments directly on the video and creates a co-viewing experience. It originates from Japan and becomes increasingly popular on video sharing sites in China, particularly among the young generation. This exploratory study investigates reasons for watching Danmaku videos through two focus group studies. The results show that the users who watch Danmaku videos found it a way to entertain themselves, to be in company, to have the sense of belonging, and to seek information. Those who do not watch Danmaku videos, however, complained about the abundance of information, the imperfect information quality, and the look and feel. We summarized scenarios suitable for Danmaku commenting from three perspectives: the content, the complexity of information, and the number of viewers. Possible improvements and new applications of Danmaku commenting were discussed.
Book
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
Article
This article uses Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia to explore how linguistic repertoires are exploited in the performance of identity and management of relationships through text-messaging. The study focuses on text-messages sent and received by ‘Laura’, a middle-class woman who has returned from university to her family home in rural England. Qualitative analysis of Laura's texted exchanges, informed by quantitative corpus data and ethnographic interview, details the role of heteroglossia as Laura and her interlocutors position themselves in relation to each other and negotiate differences in gender, class, education, past experience, and personal aspiration. The study shows how heteroglossia can emerge even in interactions between individuals from similar backgrounds with largely shared language resources, and highlights the need for sociolinguistic studies of linguistic repertoire to consider the part that digitally-mediated linguistic resources play in individuals’ wider identity projects.
Article
Online support groups (OSGs) are common sources of both health information and social support. To augment existing qualitative understandings of member roles and identities in OSGs, this article presents a corpus-based investigation of shifts in member lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic choices in a bipolar disorder OSG. In total, 8.4 million words in 57,000 posts were transformed into a structured, grammatically annotated corpus and investigated using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework, focusing on interpersonal and experiential meanings. The findings of mood and transitivity analyses show marked differences between new and veteran members’ language choices over the course of membership in the OSG: particularly, in how veteran members provide advice, and in how new and veteran members ascribe and attribute bipolar disorder to both the self and others. Discussion addresses the affordances and limitations of corpus linguistics and SFL as strategies for providing quantitative support for key claims of earlier research in this field.
Article
"A group phenomenon which we have called de-individuation has been described and defined as a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals qua individuals, and, correspondingly, the members do not feel they are being singled out by others." The theory was advanced that this results in a reduction of inner restraints in the members and that, consequently, the members will be more free to indulge in behavior from which they are usually restrained. It was further hypothesized that this is satisfying and its occurrence would tend to increase the attractiveness of the group. The data from the study tend to confirm the theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Three experiments explored the effects of computer-mediated communication on communication efficiency, participation, interpersonal behavior, and group choice. Groups of three members were asked to reach consensus on career choice problems; they communicated face-to-face and in simultaneous computer-mediated discussions or through computer mail. When groups were linked by computer, group members made fewer remarks than they did face-to-face and took longer to make their group decisions. Social equalization was higher in computer-mediated groups in that group members participated more equally in discussions. Computer-mediated groups also exhibited more uninhibited behavior—using strong and inflammatory expressions in interpersonal interactions. Decisions of computer-mediated groups shifted further away from the members' initial individual choices than group decisions which followed face-to-face discussions. We discuss the implications of these findings for extension of theories about group interaction and for analyses of the effects of Computers in organizations.
Do new romantic couples use more similar language over time? Evidence from intensive longitudinal text messages
  • M M Bakhtin
Bakhtin, M.M., 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press. Banks, J., 2010. Regulating hate speech online. Int. Rev. Law Comput. Technol. 24 (3), 233-239. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2010.522323. Brinberg, M., Ram, N., 2021. Do new romantic couples use more similar language over time? Evidence from intensive longitudinal text messages. J. Commun. 71 (3), 454-477. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab012.
Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media
Tannen, D., Trester, A.M. (Eds.), 2013. Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Georgetown University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cg8wd. Vivienne, S., 2016. Digital Identity and Everyday Activism. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137500748.