Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 1253
Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)
Resemiotizing Climate Change: Remixing and Recontextualisation as Subversive Discourse Strategies on YouTube
Authors: Tereick, Jana
Submitted by: Tereick, Jana (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Sociolinguists have used the term “resemiotization” to describe how “meaning making shifts from context to context” (Iedema 2003). In this talk, I consider different forms of resemiotization as discourse strategies on YouTube. The video platform is characterized by a “participatory culture” (Jenkins 2006), which allows for a large range of opinions and positions to be represented. Drawing on media discourse analysis, multimodality research and corpus linguistics, I analyse how participants use available semiotic resources produced by others to take “stance” (cf. Jaffe 2009).
Examples are drawn from ongoing research on climate change discourse online. The corpus was compiled via scripts using the YouTube Application Programming Interface and contains the 1,000 most-viewed German videos on climate change and accompanying comments, which have been made available for corpus-linguistic analysis.
Whereas climate change discourse in traditional German mass media has shown a growing consensus that 'anthropogenic climate change exists and has to be prevented', YouTube's unregulated Web 2.0 environment offers the opportunity for the formation and negotiation of 'anti-hegemonic' positions. Very different voices coexist, interact and collide on the platform. Both ends of the spectrum reaching from the self-proclaimed 'sceptic' position '(man-made) climate change is a lie' to the 'mainstream' position 'climate change exists and is man-made' find substantial support on the platform.
In accordance with Jaffe's concept of “stance” as “positioning with regard to both the content and the form of [...] utterances” (Jaffe 2007), recontextualisation takes place on different levels. Participants use “remixing” (Knobel/Lankshear 2008) techniques to modify and subvert discourse which they perceive as hegemonic: 'Sceptics' rearrange and overlay mass media material in order to convey manipulation and “propaganda”. Similarly, NGOs and individual actors remontage commercials by large energy corporations to reverse their messages. These adoptions of different “voices” in participatory culture can be described as instances of resemiotization.
In another act of recontextualisation, the opposing parties appropriate each other's words, argumentation schemes and topoi in forms of stylized parodies and reductiones ad absurdum as parts of a whole set of rhetorical strategies. Thereby, they produce “semiotic circles” (Scollon/Scollon 2005) which call for an integrated discourse semiotic analysis.
References:
Iedema, Rick (2003): Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. In: Visual communication 2 (1), pp. 29-56.
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (2007): Codeswitching and Stance: Issues in Interpretation. In: Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6 (1), pp. 53-77.
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (2009): Stance: sociolinguistic perspectives. New York; Oxford.
Jenkins, Henry (2006): Convergence culture. Where old and new media collide. New York.
Knobel, Michele / Lankshear, Colin (2008): Remix: The art and craft of endless hybridization. In: Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52 (1), pp. 22-33.
Scollon, Ron / Scollon, Suzie Wong (2005): Lighting the stove. Why habitus isn’t enough for Critical Discourse Analysis. In: Wodak, Ruth / Chilton, Paul (eds.): A new agenda in (critical) discourse analysis: theory, methodology and interdisciplinarity. Amsterdam; Philadelphia (PA), pp. 101-117.