This Special Issue on “Polymedia in interaction” theorizes and empirically investigates practices and ideologies of
digitally mediated interaction under conditions of polymedia. We argue that the proliferation of mobile interpersonal communication in the
2010s calls for, and is reflected in, conceptual and methodological shifts in empirical research on digital language and communication in
pragmatics and sociocultural linguistics. In this introduction, these shifts are crystallized in five interrelated themes: (1) a turn from
‘computer-mediated communication’ to ‘digitally mediated interaction’ as a bracket category; (2) a move beyond the on/offline divide and
focus on the integration of mediated interaction in everyday communication in micro-units of social structure (e.g. transnational families,
business or academic communication); (3) an empirical downscaling towards private and small-scale public data; (4) a shift from the study of single modes of digital communication to polymedia; and (5) a focus on semiotic repertoires and registers
of digital mediation. Research that orients to (some or all of) these focal points is compared with other trends in digital language
research, including computational methods. The papers in this issue flesh out these five dimensions with findings from qualitative research,
based on multi-sited linguistic and digital ethnographies in various sociolinguistic settings.
Article outline
Digitally mediated interaction
Beyond the off/online divide: Couching mediated interaction in ‘real life’
Downscaling: From public to private settings, from ‘big’ to ‘small’ data
Polymedia: From single channels to digital ecologies
2015Enregisterment and Communication in Social History. In: Asif Agha and Frog (eds.) Registers of communication, 27–53. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Agha, Asif and Frog
2015An Introduction to Registers of Communication. In: Asif Agha and Frog (eds.) Registers of communication, 13–23. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis, and Andreas Stæhr
2018 “Moving Methods Online: Researching Digital Language Practices.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity. ed. by Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge, 118–132. Abingdon: Routledge.
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2016 “Respecifying Mediated Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (4): 290–309.
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2018 “How Young Users Deal with Multiple Platforms: The Role of Meaning-Making in Social Media Repertoires.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 23 (5): 245–259.
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2020 “Beyond the Online Offline Distinction: Entry Points to Digital Discourse.” Discourse, Context & Media 351.
Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, and Pilar Blitvich
2012Social Interaction in YouTube Text-Based Polylogues: A Study of Coherence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 171:501–521.
boyd, danah and Kate Crawford
2012Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5): 662–679.
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2018What is so special about online (as compared to offline) hate speech?Ethnicities 18(3): 297–326.
Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond
2019 “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. ed. by Jean Burgess, Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick, 233–253. London & New York: Sage.
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2018 “Digital Writing Practices and Media Ideologies of German Adolescents.” The Mouth. Critical Studies in Language, Culture and Society 31: 85–103, [URL]
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2021 “The Interactional Principle in Digital Punctuation.” Discourse, Context & Media 401: 1–10.
Clarke, Isobelle, and Jack Grieve
2019 “Stylistic Variation on the Donald Trump Twitter Account: A Linguistic Analysis of Tweets Posted between 2009 and 2018.” PLoS ONE 14 (9): e0222062.
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2011 *-repair in Online Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 43(3): 918–921.
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2020E-Leadership or ‘How to Be Boss in Instant Messaging?’ The Role of Nonverbal Communication. International Journal of Business Communication 57(1): 3–29.
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2014Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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2014Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 731: 37–52.
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2015 “Systematic Patterning in Phonologically Motivated Orthographic Variation.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 19 (2): 161–188.
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1997Self-presentation and interactional alliances in e-mail discourse: the style- and code-switches of Greek messages. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 7/21: 141–164.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra and Tereza Spilioti
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2010 “Media Ideologies. An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (2): 283–293.
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2015 “Microanalysis of Online Data: The Methodological Development of ‘Digital CA.’” Discourse, Context & Media 71: 41–51.
Greschke, Heike M. and Josephine Ott
2020 “Rethinking Community in Migration Studies: Lessons from Transnational Families for Rethinking the Relationship of ‘Community’ and ‘Society’”. In: Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research, ed. by B. Jansen, 127–143. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.
1999 “Interactional Coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4 (4) [URL].
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2015 “Computer-Mediated Discourse 2.0.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 127–151. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Hutchby, Ian
2001Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity.
Ilbury, Christian
2019 “’Sassy Queens’: Stylistic Orthographic Variation in Twitter and the Enregisterment of AAVE.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 24 (2): 245–264.
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2004The problem of context in computer-mediated communication. In: P. LeVine and R. Scollon (eds.) Discourse and technology: multimodal discourse analysis, 20–33. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Jones, Rodney H.
2005Sites of engagement as sites of attention: time, space and culture in electronic discourse. In Discourse in action: Introducing mediated discourse analysis, ed. by Sigrid Norris and Rodney H. Jones, 141–154. London: Routledge.
König, Katharina
2019 “Stance Taking with ‘Laugh’ Particles and Emojis – Sequential and Functional Patterns of ‘Laughter’ in a Corpus of German WhatsApp Chats.” Journal of Pragmatics 1421: 156–170.
Kusters, Annelies, Massimiliano Spotti, Ruth Swanwick, and Elina Tapio
2017 “Beyond Languages, Beyond Modalities: Transforming the Study of Semiotic Repertoires.” International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3): 219–232.
Lee, Carmen
2011Texts and practices of micro-blogging: status updates on Facebook. In Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, ed. by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 110–28.
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Lexander, Kristin Vold and Jannis Androutsopoulos
2021Working with mediagrams: A methodology for collaborative research on mediational repertoires in multilingual families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 42(1): 1–18.
Licoppe, Christian
2004 “’Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1): 135–156.
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2018 “Multimodal Expression in Written Digital Discourse: The case of Kineticons.” Journal of Pragmatics 1311: 18–29.
Madianou, Mirca
2014a “Polymedia Communication and Mediatized Migration: An Ethnographic Approach.” In Mediatization of Communication. ed. by Knut Lundby, 323–348. Berlin: de Gruyter.
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2014b “Smartphone as Polymedia.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 191: 667–680.
Madianou, Mirca
2016 “Ambient Co-Presence: Transnational Family Practices in Polymedia Environments.” Global Networks 16 (2): 183–201.
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2012Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Routledge.
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2019Homo prostheticus? Intercorporeality and the emerging adult-smartphone assemblage. Information Technology & People 32(2):453–474.
Meredith, Joanne
2017 “Analysing Technological Affordances of Online Interactions Using Conversation Analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 1151: 42–55.
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2019 “Lörres, Möppes, and the Swiss. (Re)Discovering Regional Patterns in Anonymous Social Media Data.” Journal of Linguistic Geography 7 (2): 113–134.
2013 “Back and Forth, Back and Forth: Channel Switching in Romantic Couple Conflict.” CSCW 2013 – Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 237–247.
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2021 “Mode-Switching in Video-Mediated Interaction: Integrating Linguistic Phenomena into Multimodal Transcription Tasks.” Linguistics and Education 621.
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2011Beyond genre: Closings and relational work in text-messaging. In: Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek (eds.), Digital Discourse. Language in the New Media, 69–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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2016Heteroglossia in text-messaging: Performing identity and negotiating relationships in a digital space. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20:1: 59–85.
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2021Repertoires on the move: exploiting technological affordances and contexts in mobile messaging interactions. International Journal of Multilingualism 18:2: 244–266.
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2016 “So Sick or So Cool? The Language of Youth on the Internet.” Language in Society 45 (1): 1–32.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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