Tag Archives: Dialogue

It’s a bird! It’s a tweet! It’s an utterance!?!

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Seven months ago I joined Twitter. Now I want to reflect on that decision.  In my post I claimed that Twitter has changed language use and what I meant by “language” at the time was what I would call grammar, or certain rules that we have in place for language. Today, seven months later, I still support that general claim.  However, I don’t think Twitter has changed the wider use or rules of language; instead, what it has done is create a language and rules within Twitter that may or may not work outside of that interface. For instance, it would sound rather peculiar if we actually said “RT” or “MT” when we shared or modified someone’s ideas aloud.

What I mean is that content within Twitter is tied to a specific context, the Twitter interface, and is therefore contextualized. The content, however, is not tied just to the interface but is also tied to the person who originally posted the tweet. Any Twitter user knows what happens next. The tweet gets responses sent directly to the original publisher, it gets re-tweeted by a person to all of their followers and/or it gets marked as a favorite.

As soon as this process begins the content starts to become decontextualized. The idea or content embedded within the tweet also becomes a dialogue opposed to the monologue that it started as. The difference, of course, between monologue and dialogue is that there is one voice in the former and multiple voices in the latter. What I find interesting, though, is that tweets can move from a monologue to a dialogue back to a monologue if we think of a monologue not only as having one voice but also as internalizing an idea and making it our own.

What I am describing is a theoretical approach to an issue, the thoughts of which originated after reading a blog post by James Hayton. He wrote,

“…because everything is limited to 140 characters, conversations about complicated topics become reduced to soundbites devoid of any subtlety of meaning. I write a 1000-word blog post on skill development in writing, and I get a 140-character reply saying ‘get words down and worry later’. It makes me want to beat my head against the desk.”

How can I write about Twitter and linguistics and discourse analysis all in one blog post? Consider a tweet an utterance. Better yet, pretend you’re a linguist and refer to it as an utterance proper.

photo-5

If we were to analyze tweets, what would we define as an utterance? As the picture shows, every utterance proper is responsive and anticipatory. It responds to a previous action or idea and anticipates an answer or justification. We can think of the entire diagram as one utterance so it’s not solely the original tweet, but also the ideas that came before and the responses to that tweet. The utterance changes only when the theme or topic changes.

My reflection after seven month comes down to this: As an academic I can overthink and evaluate the whole process. However, Twitter is a tool that has many benefits when properly used. It has a language of it’s own that one must learn and internalize but once that language is internalized you can gain meaningful connections and participate in meaningful conversations.

Dialogic research

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I’ve been thinking and writing today about research participants as authors of their own experiences — or more accurately as potential co-authors with us of the representations we make of their experiences as learners. The problem in a nutshell is this: we are each the only people who can make meaning out of the flow of impressions, actions, activities, and encounters that make up our lived experiences. But when we attempt to reflect on that lived experience we always do so from an incomplete point of view – we have difficulty stepping out of the lived experience itself in order to reflect on or represent it. Even when we manage, our point of view is limited. We can take the point of view of the “I” who experienced, but in order to create a fuller, more complete account of that experience, we also need to be able to take the point of view of others towards ourselves. We need to see ourselves as both subjects of our experience and objects of our (and others’) reflections.
The problem, of course, for researchers is just the opposite. The researcher has access to their own points of view on our actions, and potentially to multiple points of view on our actions, but unless they also engage us in dialogue about our points of view on those actions, their representations are also incomplete at best and simply caricatures at worst.
In either case, we end up with incomplete representations of human experiences: either the outsider (researcher) view is privileged, or the insider (subjects) view is privileged. As Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out in his work from the 1920’s on the relationship of the author and hero and in his work from the 1970’s on human sciences, both of these perspectives tend toward monologue. They tend to be presented as authoritative statements about our experiences that don’t allow much room for interpretation or negotiation of meaning. The end results it is that I am either represented as a unique subject whose experiences are not generalizable, or represented as an object of research whose experiences are so generalizable as to be personally irrelevant.
Bakhtin’s solution to this problem is to base the “human sciences” on dialogue. Specifically, he calls for dialogue among points of view represented by the voices of active subjects of lived experience and active observers who address and respond to each other. But what would that actually look like in a research setting like the Cyberlab at HMSC? How do we maintain both the generalizable aspects of visitors’ experiences while giving room for visitors’ own personal, unique experiences to shape our research, our findings, and our representations of those findings? That’s a question I’ll be returning to in upcoming weeks and one I hope will spark a dialogue here.