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Rodney H Jones

University of Reading, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Faculty Member

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Stephen McNulty

Stef Slembrouck

Ghent University

Dr Siddharth Gosavi

Manipal Academy of Higher Education

Martina Bellinzona

Università per Stranieri di Siena

Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology

Gregory Hillhouse

Tanta University

Reem Alkhammash

Queen Mary, University of London

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Books by Rodney H Jones

Mediated Discourse Analysis and the Digital Humanities

Routledge handbook of English language and digital humanities, 2020

In this chapter, I will discuss how technology can affect our study of the humanities and the way... more 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.

Spoken Discourse

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

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

Health and Risk Communication: An applied linguistic perspective

Understanding Digital Literacies

Discourse Analysis: A resource book for students

Discourse Analysis: Provides an accessible introduction and comprehensive overview of the major ... more Discourse Analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papers by Rodney H Jones

Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2024

Lip-synching and Young People's Everyday Linguistic Activism on TikTok

S Reichl & U. Smit, U. (eds.) #YouthMediaLife & Friends: Interdisciplinary research into young people's mediatised lifeworlds, 2023

Among the unique affordances of the video sharing app Tiktok is the ability it gives to users to ... more Among the unique affordances of the video sharing app Tiktok is the ability it gives to users to appropriate the verbal performances of others and represent them with their own bodies through practices of lip-synching. This often involves users appropriating the voices of people of races different from their own, which sometimes results in others critiquing the authenticity of their performances or criticizing them for 'cultural appropriation' or for perpetuating racial stereotypes. This chapter explores how young users of TikTok engage in voice appropriation and negotiate social norms surrounding it. It begins by describing how practices of lip-synching on TikTok raise broader issues around voice appropriation, racism, and the exploitation of people of colour who use the platform. It then discusses how concepts from sociolinguistics such as stylization, crossing, indexicality and (in)authenticity can help us to understand the ways lip-synching performances function in the linguistic marketplace of TikTok and the factors affecting people's negotiations of voice appropriation and authenticity. Finally, it demonstrates how the same technological affordances which facilitate practices of everyday racism (in the form of language mocking and cultural appropriation) also provide the tools for creators to 'call out' racist performances and engage in acts of 'everyday linguistic activism'.

Affective geographies and tribal epistemologies: studying abroad during COVID-19

by Rodney H Jones and Zhu Hua

Applied Linguistics Review, 2023

This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experien... more This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experiences of Chinese international students studying in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from student diaries, interviews, and focus groups, it explores how boundaries between in-groups and out-groups were erected and dismantled through processes of socio-temporal scaling, whereby social actors configured affective geographies by linking local spatial relationships to higher level (national and international) scales. The analysis reveals how negative emotions like fear of infection led to practices of spatial distancing and the drawing of cultural boundaries between groups, while feelings of worry about family members in China shaped communication patterns and information flows across geographic spaces. At times, however, positive emotions like affection and sympathy helped participants transcend boundaries, leading them to readjust their emotional mappings of the world and reevaluate their beliefs about COVID. The study highlights the central role affect and emotional labor play both in the formulation of epistemologies around health and in the drawing of boundaries between groups.

Culture Machines

Applied Linguistics Review, 2024

This paper discusses the way the concept of culture is discursively con- structed by large langu... more This paper discusses the way the concept of culture is discursively con- structed by large language models that are trained on massive collections of cultural artefacts and designed to produce probabilistic representations of culture based on this training data. It makes the argument that, no matter how ‘diverse’ their training data is, large language models will always be prone to stereotyping and over- simplification because of the mathematical models that underpin their operations. Efforts to build ‘guardrails’ into systems to reduce their tendency to stereotype can often result in the opposite problem, with issues around culture and ethnicity being ‘invisiblised’. To illustrate this, examples are provided of the stereotypical linguistic styles and cultural attitudes models produce when asked to portray different kinds of ‘persona’. The tendency of large language models to gravitate towards cultural and linguistic generalities is contrasted with trends in intercultural communication towards more fluid, socially situated understandings of interculturality, and impli- cations for the future of cultural representation are discussed.

Jones 2024 Surveillance at the interface

Discourse, Context and Media, 2024

This paper discusses how facial recognition technology is changing the way interfaces are designe... more This paper discusses how facial recognition technology is changing the way interfaces are designed for digital surveillance. Drawing on work in mediated discourse analysis, it argues that interfaces for surveillance (as well as digital interfaces more generally) should be understood as sites of engagement where particular texts, bodies, social relationships, and social practices come together to make surveillance possible. To illustrate this framework, I analyse the controversial facial recognition service PimEyes, exploring how the 'discourses in place' on the PimEyes website, the 'interaction orders' it makes possible, and the 'historical bodies' that users bring to the site work together to lure users into using the service and contribute to the normalisation of digital surveillance using facial recognition. This paper contributes not just to our understanding of surveillance, but also to our understanding of digital interfaces more generally by showing how they function to enable new kinds of social identities, social relationships and social practices.

An ecological approach to manipulation, influence and deception

Rüdiger, S. & Dyter D. (eds.) Manipulation, Influence and Deception: The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 2024

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

Is my mobile phone listening to me? Conspiratorial thinking, digital literacies, and everyday encounters with surveillance

Discourses of and about conspiracy theories, 2022

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

Metalinguistic Tactics in the Hong Kong Protest Movement

Journal of Language and Politics , 2021

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

Suicide candy: Tracing the discourse itineraries of food risk

Communicating risk, 2015

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

Jones Digital surveillance and discourse

Discourse analysis and digital surveillance, 2020

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

Digital Literacies

Cite as: Jones, R. (2016) Digital literacies. In E. Hinkle (ed.) Handbook of research into second... more

Title: Evidentiary Video and " Professional Vision " in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

by Rodney H Jones and Neville C.H. Li

The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos ... more The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos over mainstream and social media, has played an important part in many contemporary social movements, from the Black Lives Matter Movement in the US to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Such videos serve as both evidence of police abuses and discursive artefacts around which viewers build bodies of shared knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about events through engaging in exercises of “collective seeing”. This article analyses the way a video of police officers beating a handcuffed protester, which became an important symbol of the excessive use of force by police during the Occupy Hong Kong protests, was interpreted by different communities, including journalists, protestors, anti-protest groups, and law enforcement officials, and how these collective acts of interpretation served as a means for members of these communities to display group membership and reinforce group norms and ideological values.

Digital Literacies for Language Teachers

The paradox of culture in a globalized world

Sites of Engagement as Sites of Attention

Mediated Discourse Analysis and the Digital Humanities

Routledge handbook of English language and digital humanities, 2020

In this chapter, I will discuss how technology can affect our study of the humanities and the way... more 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.

Spoken Discourse

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

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

Health and Risk Communication: An applied linguistic perspective

Understanding Digital Literacies

Discourse Analysis: A resource book for students

Discourse Analysis: Provides an accessible introduction and comprehensive overview of the major ... more Discourse Analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2024

Lip-synching and Young People's Everyday Linguistic Activism on TikTok

S Reichl & U. Smit, U. (eds.) #YouthMediaLife & Friends: Interdisciplinary research into young people's mediatised lifeworlds, 2023

Among the unique affordances of the video sharing app Tiktok is the ability it gives to users to ... more Among the unique affordances of the video sharing app Tiktok is the ability it gives to users to appropriate the verbal performances of others and represent them with their own bodies through practices of lip-synching. This often involves users appropriating the voices of people of races different from their own, which sometimes results in others critiquing the authenticity of their performances or criticizing them for 'cultural appropriation' or for perpetuating racial stereotypes. This chapter explores how young users of TikTok engage in voice appropriation and negotiate social norms surrounding it. It begins by describing how practices of lip-synching on TikTok raise broader issues around voice appropriation, racism, and the exploitation of people of colour who use the platform. It then discusses how concepts from sociolinguistics such as stylization, crossing, indexicality and (in)authenticity can help us to understand the ways lip-synching performances function in the linguistic marketplace of TikTok and the factors affecting people's negotiations of voice appropriation and authenticity. Finally, it demonstrates how the same technological affordances which facilitate practices of everyday racism (in the form of language mocking and cultural appropriation) also provide the tools for creators to 'call out' racist performances and engage in acts of 'everyday linguistic activism'.

Affective geographies and tribal epistemologies: studying abroad during COVID-19

by Rodney H Jones and Zhu Hua

Applied Linguistics Review, 2023

This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experien... more This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experiences of Chinese international students studying in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from student diaries, interviews, and focus groups, it explores how boundaries between in-groups and out-groups were erected and dismantled through processes of socio-temporal scaling, whereby social actors configured affective geographies by linking local spatial relationships to higher level (national and international) scales. The analysis reveals how negative emotions like fear of infection led to practices of spatial distancing and the drawing of cultural boundaries between groups, while feelings of worry about family members in China shaped communication patterns and information flows across geographic spaces. At times, however, positive emotions like affection and sympathy helped participants transcend boundaries, leading them to readjust their emotional mappings of the world and reevaluate their beliefs about COVID. The study highlights the central role affect and emotional labor play both in the formulation of epistemologies around health and in the drawing of boundaries between groups.

Culture Machines

Applied Linguistics Review, 2024

This paper discusses the way the concept of culture is discursively con- structed by large langu... more This paper discusses the way the concept of culture is discursively con- structed by large language models that are trained on massive collections of cultural artefacts and designed to produce probabilistic representations of culture based on this training data. It makes the argument that, no matter how ‘diverse’ their training data is, large language models will always be prone to stereotyping and over- simplification because of the mathematical models that underpin their operations. Efforts to build ‘guardrails’ into systems to reduce their tendency to stereotype can often result in the opposite problem, with issues around culture and ethnicity being ‘invisiblised’. To illustrate this, examples are provided of the stereotypical linguistic styles and cultural attitudes models produce when asked to portray different kinds of ‘persona’. The tendency of large language models to gravitate towards cultural and linguistic generalities is contrasted with trends in intercultural communication towards more fluid, socially situated understandings of interculturality, and impli- cations for the future of cultural representation are discussed.

Jones 2024 Surveillance at the interface

Discourse, Context and Media, 2024

This paper discusses how facial recognition technology is changing the way interfaces are designe... more This paper discusses how facial recognition technology is changing the way interfaces are designed for digital surveillance. Drawing on work in mediated discourse analysis, it argues that interfaces for surveillance (as well as digital interfaces more generally) should be understood as sites of engagement where particular texts, bodies, social relationships, and social practices come together to make surveillance possible. To illustrate this framework, I analyse the controversial facial recognition service PimEyes, exploring how the 'discourses in place' on the PimEyes website, the 'interaction orders' it makes possible, and the 'historical bodies' that users bring to the site work together to lure users into using the service and contribute to the normalisation of digital surveillance using facial recognition. This paper contributes not just to our understanding of surveillance, but also to our understanding of digital interfaces more generally by showing how they function to enable new kinds of social identities, social relationships and social practices.

An ecological approach to manipulation, influence and deception

Rüdiger, S. & Dyter D. (eds.) Manipulation, Influence and Deception: The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 2024

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

Is my mobile phone listening to me? Conspiratorial thinking, digital literacies, and everyday encounters with surveillance

Discourses of and about conspiracy theories, 2022

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

Metalinguistic Tactics in the Hong Kong Protest Movement

Journal of Language and Politics , 2021

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

Suicide candy: Tracing the discourse itineraries of food risk

Communicating risk, 2015

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

Jones Digital surveillance and discourse

Discourse analysis and digital surveillance, 2020

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

Digital Literacies

Cite as: Jones, R. (2016) Digital literacies. In E. Hinkle (ed.) Handbook of research into second... more

Title: Evidentiary Video and " Professional Vision " in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

by Rodney H Jones and Neville C.H. Li

The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos ... more The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos over mainstream and social media, has played an important part in many contemporary social movements, from the Black Lives Matter Movement in the US to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Such videos serve as both evidence of police abuses and discursive artefacts around which viewers build bodies of shared knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about events through engaging in exercises of “collective seeing”. This article analyses the way a video of police officers beating a handcuffed protester, which became an important symbol of the excessive use of force by police during the Occupy Hong Kong protests, was interpreted by different communities, including journalists, protestors, anti-protest groups, and law enforcement officials, and how these collective acts of interpretation served as a means for members of these communities to display group membership and reinforce group norms and ideological values.

Digital Literacies for Language Teachers

The paradox of culture in a globalized world

Sites of Engagement as Sites of Attention

The multimodal dimension of claims in food packaging

Despite the proliferation of regulations governing health and content claims on food packages, cu... more Despite the proliferation of regulations governing health and content claims on food packages, customers continue to be confused and sometimes deceived. One reason for this is that most regulations adopt a rather restricted, language-centric view of what a claim is, a view that focuses on how claims represent reality as opposed to what claims "do", the kinds of actions and human relationships they make possible. This paper introduces a perspective on package claims that takes account of their performative and multimodal dimensions. The pragmatic force of a food package, it argues, always depends on multiple conditions such as the identities of manufactures, retailers and customers, the conditions under which packages are encountered, and the way multiple semiotic modes such as language, graphics, colors, fonts, the shape of packages, and even the shape and texture of the food itself interact. The multimodal dimension of claims is not limited to the intratextual links among different modes and different materialities on the package, but also the intertextual links among the elements on the package and other modes and materialities in the environments in which customers make purchasing decisions. A multimodal view of package claims attempts to understand how claims are situated within specific material contexts, specific social actions, and specific social practices, and how they function to index social identities for manufacturers, retailers, customers, and even government officials who make and enforce regulations governing their use.

Unwriting food labels: Discursive challenges in the regulation of package claims

This article examines the challenges resulting from the regulation of written discourse on food p... more This article examines the challenges resulting from the regulation of written discourse on food packages. It uses as a case study Hong Kong's strict new food labeling law that requires distributers and retailers to remove certain nutritional claims from packages of imported food before they sell them. This practice of redacting unlawful text on packages requires that distributers and retailers engage in complex processes of discursive reasoning, and it sometimes results in packages that are difficult for customers to interpret. The case study highlight a number of important issues in the regulation of commercial texts concerning collaboration, intertextuality and the conflicts that can arise when the principals, authors and animators of such texts have different agendas.

Mediated Discourse Analysis

Mashing modding and memeing: Writing for a new generation of university students

Discourse and Health Communication

Over the past several decades there has been considerable interest among discourse analysts in va... more Over the past several decades there has been considerable interest among discourse analysts in various aspects of health communication, including physician-patient interaction, the discourse of health promotion texts, the construction of health and risk in the media, and the discursive negotiation of health and risk in everyday life (for overviews see , Jones 2013. Discourse analytical approaches to health and risk communication have been heavily influenced by work in disciplines such as medical anthropology, with its concern with understanding how people's explanatory models of illness and danger can vary across cultures, medical sociology, with its concern with the ways in which communication of health and risk are embedded in social structures, and cultural studies, with its preoccupation with the ideological and 'disciplinary' nature of biomedical discourse (Foucault 1976).

Multimodal Communication 3(2)

by Sigrid Norris, Jarret Geenen, Rodney H Jones, and Shri Ramakrishnan

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/mc

The wounded leader: The illness narratives of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump

Discourse, Context and Media, 2021

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

Auditor Design and Accountability in Encounters between Citizens and the Police

Security, Ethnography, Discourse: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Everyday Unease, 2021

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

Mediated Discourse Analysis in Language and Sexuality Research What does a 'dick-pic' do

Who broke the internet? Who can fix it? Digital literacies in the age of the algorithm. A plenary address delivered at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Virtual Conference, March 20-23, 2021.

AAAL Virtual Conference, 2021

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

Is my mobile phone listening to me? Conspiracism, digital literacies, and everyday encounters with surveillance

A Paper presented at the AAAL Virtual Conference 2021, 2021

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