meanings of landscape elements (water, for example) are only potential until context ..... the lexical/orthographic equivalents in Serbian, if raw, unprocessed dataâ .... In a more technical sense, as an operational term within the modern ..... evolution of gaming consoles, such as Playstation 4, X-âBox 720, and Nintendo's.
(This is Chapter 3 of my dissertation) Ivković, D. (2012). Virtual linguistic landscape: A perspective on multilingualism in cyberspace.
Chapter 3 Landscapes, linguascapes, and linguistic mediation in cyberspace At least to the more mobile and networked of us, place has become less about our origins on some singular piece of blood soil, and more about forming connections with the many sites of our lives. Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground, 2004, p. 172 This chapter turns to my second core research question: What are the unique properties of VLL as well as those shared with other semantic and communicative environments both in physical geography and in traditional media? In this regard, the goal of the chapter is two-‐fold: first, to conceptualize and delineate the virtual linguistic landscape as an extension of the linguistic landscape, but with a distinctive character and a unique trajectory; and, second, to illustrate the possibilities and constraints that cyberspace presents as a multilingual LL. Here, language in cyberspace is considered in relation to the concept landscape, mediated sensory experience, and perceptions of linguistic artefacts in digital space. In particular, the properties of the linguistic landscape and its virtual counterpart will be compared and contrasted. The notions of landscape, space, and place will be discussed in relation to the terms linguistic landscape, linguistic mediascape, linguistic cyberscape (Ivković, 2007), and the suggested umbrella term linguascape. Further, the interactional and experiential features of language presence in virtual space relative to the ones of LL will be examined, that is, the role of sensory keys; longevity of the V/LL (linguistic and virtual linguistic landscape) objects; agent’s involvement; and conceptual and metaphorical groundedness of VLL in LL. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the eco-‐linguistic view on multilingualism in cyberspace.
3.1
Landscape
Landscape has all the features of language. [...] Like the meanings of words, the meanings of landscape elements (water, for example) are only potential until context shapes them.
Ann Whiston Spirn, 1998, p. 125
We tend to think of landscape as a section of a universe: a landscape has boundaries, and therefore it can be more or less truthfully described in a narrative, replicated in a painting, or mirrored in a photograph. While such conceptualizations may hold for natural landscapes, physical boundaries have only a relative value in defining cultural landscapes, replete with artefacts and generated by human activity, including linguistic artefacts and mediated linguistic activity (on linguistic mediation in cultural activity, see Thorne, 2003). That the word/concept landscape is at the heart of the term virtual linguistic landscape can hardly be overstated: We tend to intuit digital artefacts and relations linguistically, through the ways we make use of items and conceive of relations in the world of tangible materiality (see § 3.2.5). Whether in physical or virtual space, it is the culture and homo linguisticus that ‘scape’ it. 3.1.1 The concept and the word In modern English, the term landscape is polysemous, denoting terrain configuration, with the vegetation that covers the territory; an aspect or part of a scenery that can be seen in a single view; and a painting depicting such a view, suggesting the aesthetic quality (Jackson, 1984, p. 3). The term covers both natural formations—landforms and water bodies—as well as human-‐made, cultural artefacts, that is, buildings, bridges, and other architectural structures, including their artistic representations. Jackson notes that the word ‘landscape’ is increasingly being used in multiple contexts and in numerous lexical compounds, such as roadscape, townscape, cityscape, “as if the syllable ‘scape’ meant a space, which it does not” (p. 4). In Modern English, the bound morpheme ‘-‐scape’—one which occurs only with another morpheme—is also found in neologisms such as soundscape, “a sound or a combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment”—as described in English Wikipedia—suggesting a Gestaltian and contextually embedded composition of elements of a kind (on Gestalt in LL, see Ben-‐Rafael, 2009, p. 42). Various languages highlight one or the other aspect of landscape in the word and concept formation. For example, the Chinese compound character for landscape 景 (view, scene) and 观 (look, observe) and the Persian equivalent (outlook) and (eye) bring to attention the role of the observer in relation to the scene. In West and South Slavic languages, the observed scene itself is underlined: the Czech word krajina (part of the land, land), Polish krajobraz (picture or image of the land), and the Serbian and Croatian equivalents крајолиk/krajolik (face or image of the land) and преде(и)о/prede(i)o have the word kraj (the end, part of the land, borderland) ‘de(и)o’ (part of the land), respectively, in the term. East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian), however, use the German word Landschaft, or ландшафт, in the Cyrillic alphabet. We may credit primarily the Dutch and Flemish masters of the landscape painting art for introducing the word into modern English, with a Dutch cognate
form landshap. It is believed (Jackson, 1984) that the word was introduced into Old English as early as the fifth century through other Germanic-‐speaking groups. However, it is the Scandinavian variations of the word (landskap (Norwegian, Swedish), landskab (Danish), that, by virtue of its morphophonological composition, most authentically mirror the Modern English form and usage. In Old Norse and Modern Scandinavian, the morpheme—in its standard variations the forms skapa (Old Norse, Icelandic, Swedish), skape (Norwegian), skabe (Danish)—is a verb, occurring in phrases such as ‘å skape musikk” (meaning, to make or create music, in Norwegian). By analogy with similar Scandinavian phrases, the etymology of its English counterpart—including its cognates in other Germanic languages (cf. German schaffen)—may be drawn from the meaning ‘to create, make, shape the land,’ highlighting the role of the human agency in the creation of the human-‐made and human-‐experienced environments, or the cultural landscape. 3.1.2 Cultural landscapes and V/LL “Is there a cyber place? Somewhere that you can send all his emails to? So I never have to see them again.” Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, 2008 The relationship between the physical environment and human agency/activity was a prominent topic among the early 20th century American human geographers. Semple (1911), for example, took a deterministic, mostly unidirectional, stance, according to which the environment assumes the primary responsibility for shaping the human culture and historical development, which “takes place on the earth surface, and therefore is more or less molded by its geographic setting” (p. 257). Named “environmental determinism” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 20), the view marshals the critical influence of the environment on culture, arguing that the features of human culture are largely a reaction to environmental factors. The movement was subsequently critiqued because it failed to account for cultural differences, a task that another North American human and cultural geographer, Carl Sauer, will undertake. Sauer (1925) took a critical position towards the deterministic view, arguing that it is the human agency that modifies the earth’s surface and that the humankind (“man”), as “the latest agent” and “an agent of surficial modification,” should be considered a geomorphological agent (p. 139). With regard to the active role of the society in shaping its environment, for example, Колбовский (Kolbowsky) (2003) states: Культурный ландшафт (КЛ), в котором мы обитаем, является социально обозначенным и сконструированным, посредством занесения социальных реальностей в физический мир. Таким образом, культурный ландшафт -‐ способ присвоения, социальной организации и структурирования пространства обитания. В этом аспекте КЛ выступает как социальное пространство, выражающее формы существования
различных пространственно-‐временных отношений -‐ так называемых "хронотопов."1 Landscape is a spatio-‐temporal ‘land-‐shape’ or chronotope, a product of both vertical (historical) and horizontal (spatial) societal activities and processes, which are by no means exclusively physical, which, according to Sauer (1925), may be defined “as an area made up of a distinct association of forms, both physical and cultural” (p. 300). In Corner’s (1991) view, landscape is a cultural schemata and itself a text whose hermeneutical nature invites transformation and interpretation (p. 130). To advance these claims, what matters is not only the material substance but more so the associations or assemblage of these forms—earthly or digital, linguistic or non-‐linguistic, man-‐made or naturally occurring—that give rise to mental spaces created in and by the mind. For Creswell (2004), landscape is not just a panoramic view of a chunk of land with a potential observer at a distance; rather, landscape is interrelated with space and place (p. 12), place being “not just a thing in the world but a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world” (p. 11), and, essentially, an instance of social space, endowed with meaning (p. 12). According to Tuan (1977), space and place can only be defined relative to each other (p. 6). While place is more concrete and means security, space is more abstract and means freedom (p. 3). To describe this interrelation, one might say that space and place are increasingly being experientially and perceptually spliced together in today’s both directly experienced and mediated world, whereby cyberspace licences the mind, if not the body, to steer through space in order to find place. Once we find place, we are attached to it, but long for space (Tuan, 1977, p. 3). The notion of ‘landscape’ in its social variant is akin to the notion of ‘social space,’ that is, the kind of space that according to Lefebvre (1991), “subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder” (p. 73). By making space, we locate self (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010b, p. 6). We produce (e.g., Lefebvre, 1991), construct (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977), shape (e.g., Cosgrove, 1984) and scape spaces, through linguistic and other semiotic expressions and means, by generating and regenerating meanings where we are allowed, where we can, and how we can. To treat the linguistic landscape as place and its virtual counterpart as space would be simplistic, although it is no coincidence that word cyberspace is derived from the notion of choice implicated in the word ‘space’—the relative freedom to be who we want to be and where we want to be. The idea of physicality, on the other hand, standardized in traditional geography, is anchored primarily in the concept of place, place denoting and connoting the notion of “bounded settings in which social relations and identity are constituted” (Duncan, 2000, p. 582) (see Figure 3.1), with boundaries that provide the sense of security but nonetheless impose certain constraints, such as the 1
The cultural landscape (CL) we inhabit is socially marked and constructed through the influence of social realities on the physical world. Accordingly, cultural landscape is a way of adopting the social organization as well as a way of the structuration of the living space. In this connection, CL assumes the role of social space, expressing the modalities of various spatial and temporal relationships, or chronotopes. [my translation] Retrieved November 15, 2011 from http://kultland2003.narod.ru/1-2.html
constraints of representation (i.e., who we want to be), and movement/access (i.e., where we want to be). Graham (1998) argues that one should be cautious of the perils of adopting a Euclidean notion of viewing space and place as Cartesian categories, “embedded within some wider, objective framework of time-space” (p. 181). Instead, places need to be defined in relational terms as well. As Massey (1994) also suggests, places need to be defined, As articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of these relations, experiences, and understandings are on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself. (p. 69) According to McCullough (2004), in the age of mobility and social networking, we increasingly belong to several “socially constructed and personally perceived” (p. 171) places and communities. Strate (1999) relates place to the cultural and rhetorical, to order and familiarity, whereas he associates space with “the natural, the chaotic, the unnamed, and the untamed” (p. 393). He goes on to write: The term cyberspace, then, carries with it the concept of freedom, of a frontier to explore, and its popularity may be related to the novelty and unfamiliarity of the electronic landscape. In contrast, the alternative of cyberplace better represents the idea of the virtual community, specifically computer networks and nodes, bulletin boards, web pages, MUDs, chat rooms, and commercial services, virtual environments, etc. Landscapes, in the argument above, are equated with the concept of space, and are therefore (potential) places in the making. A human-‐inhabited landscape is what may be transformed into the public domain, where individual and private meanings converge and in so doing acquire a public and sharable nature. Similarly, electronic landscapes are (potential) cyberplaces in the making: The latter are instantiated in the concepts such as electronic mailboxes, online discussion boards, websites, online social networks, or can be even visually transformed acquiring geometrical and other properties of physical objects, as illustrated in the representations from Figures 3.1 and 3.2. Mapping virtual space with language Described as a ‘toy’ on its website, Worldle is actually a software for generating ‘word clouds’—cloud-‐like clusters of word tags—from the text provided by the user, with clouds giving “greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” 2 Once created and posted, these images/objects become a public domain or the public sphere, as stipulated by Jonathan Feinberg, who created Wordle, and may be copied and used by anyone in any way one chooses, even commercially. 2
http://www.wordle.net/
Figure 3.1 The Cyrillic versus Latin alphabet in Serbia (a ‘word cloud’ depiction)3
Figure 3.1 is generated from the user comments posted on Blic Online (a Serbian online news website), discussing the status of the Cyrillic alphabet and the dominance of the Latin alphabet in Serbia(n). The input text is created from the responses to an article entitled “Ћирилица i/ili Latinica” (Cyrillic and/or Latin Alphabet).4 The first part of the code-‐switched title means ‘Cyrillic’ in Serbian and is written in Cyrillic, while the second part—latinica—means ‘the Latin alphabet.’ As illustrated in the figure, the commentaries are visually represented with words in both alphabets, as they were written. The lexical items denote the following dichotomies: alphabet choice (Cyrillic versus Latin), nationality (Serbian versus Croatian), countries (Serbia versus Croatia) in Serbian, in both alphabets. Together with the language-‐related items, such as језик/jezik (language), писмо/pismo (writing system), слово/slovo (letter/grapheme), they are dominant lexical words and are depicted with larger fonts (on the pragmatics and ideology of script choice in Internet Serbian, see Ivković, in press a). Similarly, Figure 3.2 is generated from the comments of YouTube users posted on Eurovision Contest YouTube pages discussing the English language song ‘Divine’ representing France in Belgrade in 2008 (see Ivković, in press b). While some words potentially belong to the lexicons of both French and English—for example, France, video, points—it seems that content words in English prevail. The English word song, for example, is prominently larger than its French equivalent 3 4
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5131082/Cyrillic_andor_Latina_alphabet_in_Serbian http://www.blic.rs/Komentar/Kultura/230091/Cirilica-iili-latinica Retrieved April 10, 2012
chanson. In addition, the principle by which Wordle operates illustrates the technological bias, which favours English (the language of the source code) and other weakly or non-‐inflected alphabetic languages. The Serbian word for ‘script’ (pismo/писмо) in the singular, for example, has eight possible forms, four in each alphabet, that is, pismо/писмо (Nominative/Accusative), pismа/писма (Genitive), pismu/писму (Dative/Locative), pismom/писмом (Instrumental). This means that in Wordle, a reference to script in English may be eight times as prominent as any of the lexical/orthographic equivalents in Serbian, if raw, unprocessed data— previously ‘unstemmed’—are used as input text.
Figure 3.2 La guerre des langues (War of languages): French versus English in commentaries on Eurovision Song YouTube pages discussing the 2008 English language song representing France (a ‘word cloud’ depiction)5
Both Wordle figures possess essential elements of a geographical representation as depicted on geopolitical maps, including a bidimensional shape, resembling mostly natural borders in the majority of regions, and use of colours to mark political borders. Figure 3.1 accidentally somewhat reminds of Bulgaria, and Figure 3.2 almost looks like Austria on the map (at least to me). These digital forms and shapes, however, are not entirely arbitrary as they are internally generated by the frequencies of the lexical items from the input—the source text—and externally by the programming algorithm of varying complexity, including parameters that the user may supply, that is, font type, colour, and layout. Geography of human activity Both the linguistic and virtual linguistic landscapes are instantiations of language use and linguistic expression constituting the geography of human activity, and 5
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5114716/Tellier%2C_France_2008
therefore are matters of human and cultural geography (e.g., Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010b, pp. 2–6). The linguistic character of new media—the multiplicity, hybridity and indexicality of language in cyberspace—in spite of the seemingly ‘placeless’ character of cyberspace, devoid of a physical territory, is here considered within a more comprehensive scope of research in human geography, as “the discipline of geography concerned with the spatial differentiation and organization of human activity and its interrelationships with the physical environment” (Johnston et al., 2000, p. 353). Sherman and Craig (2003) illustrate the ‘place-‐like’ treatment of what they call ‘new space,’ referencing the modalities of the usage of deictic adverbs here and there in a live chat forum, as in the question “‘Is Baker here?’—here being the space created by the forum” (p. 17). Accordingly, the notion of physicality, inherent in the term ‘geography,’ extends to the digital environment by virtue of the engagement—human activity and its relationship with the environment—that supersedes the disciplinary bounds of traditional geography, the former being constrained to what is only permeable to tactile/textural, gustatory and olfactory sensory response (see Figures 3.3a & 3.3b). Figure 3.3 depicts a suggested disciplinary framework of human geography centred on the constructs of the linguistic and virtual linguistic landscape. In this context, the field of inquiry of human geography is further subdivided into cultural and, in turn, language geography. Language is regarded as a cultural artefact that both shapes and is shaped by the environment, its affordances as well as constraints (§3.3.2). Withers (2000) defines language geography as “the study of the changing distribution and social usage of language, including the ways in which language within geography is now and has in the past been used to establish and negotiate power and identity” (p. 432). In the process of power and identity negotiation, language usage, including communication in individual languages, appropriates space, and in so doing also draws borders delineating various ethnolinguistic communities, interest groups as well as communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991. Space thus becomes place arising from social interactions, including linguistic activity: Environment becomes ‘homeplace’ once we name the ‘objects out there’ and convert them into real presences “by casting a linguistic net” through storytelling and naming (Tuan, 1991, p. 686). Tuan (1991) argues that language has the capability to make places and to transform the environment in ways other than materially (pp. 684–687), by using the power of words to bring about change. He goes on to say that, “naming is power—the creative power to call something into being, to render the invisible visible, to impart a certain character to things.” (p. 688)
Figure 3.3 V/LL and geography
The linguistic and virtual linguistic landsacpes are here regarded as domain-‐ or media-‐specific instantiations of language and language use in the public sphere. They are linguistically and semiotically constructed by human action and sign production in their respective socio-‐cultural spheres, whether they be urban life in public venues or in cyber worlds, in physical or in virtual geographies (Figure 3.3), the latter being viewed by Papacharissi (2009) as “founded upon a fluid premise of evolving connectivity" (p. 215). Papacharissi goes on to say that virtual geographies are situational and not static, with a flexible architecture of online social systems permitting “to form organically and not as colonies of their offline equivalents.” The virtual geographies are constituted by the underlying physicality of bits and bytes, cable networks, and complex computer architectures which give rise to virtual, digitized geographies of cultures and languages, ultimately relying “on the physics of silicon” (Cicognani, 1998, p. 20). So far in this chapter, I have argued that both physical and virtual landscapes are concerned with the role language plays to mediate actualization of human agency situated here and now, as well as in its historical Umwelt, physical or digital. Emergent in linguistic and socio-‐cultural practices, the agency, or the capacity to exert influence and effectuate changes, is—linguistically, socially and culturally— both constrained and enabled (Ahearn, 2001, p. 8) by space/place as well as time and heterogeneity of the environment it inhabits. In the next section, I will consider the notion of VLL as constituting the ‘linguascape,’ or language presence and linguistic diversity in the public sphere.
3.2 Linguascape: Language Presence and Linguistic Diversity in the Public Sphere Landscapes can be treated as texts with subtexts, the tangled meanings of which are seldom clear. Tuan, 1991, p. 685 For Jackson (1984), a landscape is more of a synthetic space, “superimposed on the face of the land” than it is just a natural feature (p. 8). Recognizing the instrumental role of the environment in “reorganizing space for human needs,” Jackson suggests a new definition of landscape as “a composition of man-‐made or man-‐modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence” (p. 8). If we extend the notion of infrastructure to other semantic spaces (Tække, 2002, p. 26) and non-‐physical domains, including online social networks and virtual worlds, Jackson’s definition may well fit definitions of other ‘scapes,’ including cyberscape (Figure 3.4), to describe and account for the role of human agency in configuring its lived, experiential spaces, and spaces of activity, for which the term linguascape may be used as a common denominator. Jaworski et al. (2003) describes linguascaping as a creative force and linguascape as a product of languages, domestic and host, and their associated referents, such as “the shots of local people and scenery,” ethnic music and even “sampling and descriptions of local food and drinks” (p. 19) (on linguascaping, see also Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010a). Steyaert, Ostendorp, & Gaibrois (2011) seek to re-‐ conceptualize the term linguascaping, taking on the neologism as a discursive multilingual practice and contextualizing it in the business settings of two Swiss companies. Interestingly, Steyaert at al. mention the term linguistic landscape as an equivalent name to linguascape, however, without anchoring these remodelled concepts within the existing LL literature and research, at the same time restricting the referential value and scope of the term to discursive practices to describe “how the flow of languages that cross a specific organization space [here italicized for emphasis] is discursively mediated” (p. 270). Similarly, other researchers have used the word linguascape in various contexts, mostly in a non-‐technical sense, as expressive and descriptive terms. Mufwene (2008), for example, attributes changing of the African linguascape to the linguistic colonialism of the Western European nations and to new socioeconomic structuration, “that favoured the emergence of new language varieties” (p. 258). In a more technical sense, as an operational term within the modern sociolinguistic inquiry of V/LL, the term linguascape, it is here suggested, may extend to other places and spaces of public interaction (Figure 3.4)—top-‐down intervention and bottom-‐up socialization and activism—mediated through linguistic and other semiotic means, that is, as a common denominator and umbrella concept for all the instantiations of semantic spaces linguistically and semiotically created by human agency in the different embodiments of primarily public spaces, physical or digital (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4 Linguascape: language in the public sphere
The physical world (cityscapes, streetscapes), traditional (TV, film), or New Media (networked gaming, Internet, cyber worlds) are all potential loci of language contact, intercultural encounter, and ethnolinguistic contestation where current and future bottom-‐up and top-‐down language policies and practices are forged. The arrows (Figure 3.4) represent the ‘cross-‐overs’ and interconnectedness between the traditional and new media, indicating blending of communicative spheres or ‘social spaces’ of a kind. In essence, communication is not restricted to a single social space. According to Lefebvre (1991), social spaces in isolation are abstractions, actualized only in interrelationship with other social spaces within “an unlimited multiplicity or unaccountable set of social spaces” (p. 86)6. Examples of these mediated linguistic and semiotic item flows emerging from ‘social spaces’ are a photograph of a multilingual (or monolingual) street plate shown on TV or displayed on a web page, or the Eurovision Song Contest as part of all three environments—landscape, mediascape and cyberscape (Chapter 5). The linguo-‐semiotic flows—discursive elements and processes that mediate social interactions—cross-‐reference the items in the ontologies of both traditional and new media. These trans-‐media flows further enhance the complexity of the linguistically and modally heterogeneous experience, traversing the increasingly porous media boundaries and thus involving a variety of senses and varied extents of their use. At the same time, they emerge from parallel social spaces that “interpenetrate one another and/or superimpose themselves upon one another” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 86).
6
This is in contrast to Bourdieu and Thompson’s (1991) conceptualization of ‘social space’ as “a set of distinct and coexisting positions [italicized for emphasis] which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through their mutual exteriority” (p.270)
3.3
Linguistic Mediation in Cyberspace
Physical or virtual, linguascapes are parts of an ontology selected by an agent— observer, spectator, flâneur, or Internet surfer—and mediated by material and symbolic artefacts. These slices of a universe sui generis are distinguishable by the types and configuration of linguistic and non-‐linguistic (including multimodal) objects, properties, relations, processes, and events, whose exhaustive taxonomy constitutes the domain of V/LL. Whether a digital photograph, a screenshot, a panoramic video recording, or a 3D image, these digital artefacts (that is, material, digitally generated objects) possess properties that both enable and constrain interaction, while at the same time co-‐define their environment with an agency and mediate our involvement in and with the world. Our virtual experiences are still predominantly bidimensional and ‘screen-‐based,’ mediated by “a rectangular surface that frames a virtual world and that exists within the physical world of a viewer” (Manovich, 2001, p. 16). Mediation is one of the central themes in sociocultural theory (SCT). The concept rests on Vygotsky’s claim that “higher forms of human mental activity are mediated by culturally constructed auxiliary means,” the latter arising “as a consequence of participation in cultural activities” (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, pp. 59). Lantolf and Thorne distinguish between cultural artefacts (e.g., books, paper, clocks, technology, toys, eating utensils), cultural concepts (e.g., self, person, family, time, literacy law, religion, mind), and physical tools (e.g., hammers, bulldozers, shovels) that are inserted between our activity and an external object (pp. 59–60). Our concern is the relationship between language as a symbolic artefact, in its multiplicity and hybridity, and the human agency, the experiencer, this relationship being mediated through digital objects, essentially of sensory, and therefore physical, nature, in multilingual and multimodal cyberspace. We experience and interact with the environment and objects by selectively employing our sensory motor system in response to these affordances and constraints. With regard to V/LL, the following properties of objects and their generative and interactional capabilities within the environment will be examined: sensory keys, longevity of objects; agent’s involvement; and VLL as a conceptual metaphor, including the constraints of such conceptualization (Table 3.1). Table 3.1 Properties of linguistic objects in V/LL Properties a. Sensory keys b. Longevity of objects c. Conceptual metaphor
LL objects VLL objects Full sensory involvement Limited sensory involvement Relatively stable and permanent Relatively unstable and transient Source domain Target domain
d. Agent’s involvement
Often part environment
of
the
same Mediated through a digitally empowered object
3.3.1 Sensory keys Linguistic landscape items often have analogous representations in the digital realm, the digital world mostly involving auditory, visual and to some extent haptic senses. Hearing different languages or ethnic music in a street or on YouTube (see Chapter 5) and spotting a message in a particular language or script displayed in a mall advert or in online commentaries (see postings in Cyrillic and Latinized Macedonian, in Figure 2.5) are noncontroversial aspects of both LL and VLL. Unlike analogous VLL referents, the olfactory and gustatory senses may have a function in supporting the awareness of multilingualism in the physical world: a smell or taste of a food associated with a language or culture (cf. Jaworski et al., 2003), e.g., Indian curries, Greek gyros and souvlaki, or Hungarian goulash; the visual or olfactory identification of fresh produce associated with a particular geography, e.g., guava in Mexico and Central America; or the scent of incense associated with a religious institution or ceremony (e.g., Divali), all contribute to the sensory complexity of a linguistic landscape and may even introduce it prior to visual and/or auditory experience. While a linguistic landscape can be viewed on a photograph or from a videotape the experience ultimately comes from the physical, tangible, and three-‐ dimensional world (Table 3.1), offering a possibility to employ all five senses (Figure 3.5). The card displaying a ‘thank you’ note in seven European languages, including Welsh (‘diolch’) and Finnish (‘kiitos), can be easily manipulated so that all five senses are involved (some cards may even be edible). In contrast, its digital counterpart—functioning as an electronic simulacrum of the class of physical objects conventionalized as ‘a thank you card’ (Figure 3.5b)—may only be viewed and, if so enabled, listened to, and manipulated on a touch screen. For example, the multilingual e-‐card displays a ‘thank you’ note in eight languages, including Chinese (‘ 谢谢 ’) and Japanese (‘ ありがとう ’). Like other virtual objects, it can be easily redesigned, copied, or deleted, but not smelled or tasted. On the other hand, languages displayed on the e-‐note may be replaced and messages in other languages can be added. Even those with limited and no knowledge of particular languages and scripts (e.g., Chinese and Japanese characters) can copy and paste the message from the Internet, creating an exact, and easily multipliable, replica of the text/object. The multilingual message can then reach multiple recipients in a second or two. In contrast, manually copying a Chinese, Arabic, or Armenian characters by those who are not familiar with these wiring systems would very likely result in misrepresentations.
Figure 3.5a Multilingual ‘thank you’ card and Figure 3.5b Multilingual ‘thank you’ ecard7
3.3.2 Longevity of objects Comparing the material and interactional qualities of the linguistic items in physical and virtual spaces, Ivković & Lotherington (2009) note the following: Analogous to the physical LL, VLL delineates the linguistic community and marks language status in expressed power relations among the coexisting linguistic choices in the cyberspace community. […] As such, VLL functions as an identity marker, providing choice in textual access and expression. Typical markers of LL in cityscapes, such as public signs, characterizing such information as street names, parking options, and public transport stops, as well as commercial signs identifying shops, are relatively stable over time (here see Table 3.1). Repairing or replacing these signs involves time, material and labour costs. However, web content may be updated as often as 7 http://seiza.ro/ecards/show/id/1004 Retrieved January 18, 2012
daily or even more often; and whether a routine update or a substantial reprogramming of a web page, it is a much less expensive renovation. (p. 19) Consequently, the linguistic content indicating ownership, identity, and laws used in physical landscape signage is, by nature, more fixed and stable than that available to VLL. Thus, signage in physical space explicitly targets a local population, which the Internet cannot do, though specific online communities can control and restrict membership, allowing some focus. Furthermore, language choices implicitly typecast an audience. Despite the fact that Internet sites are more linguistically dynamic in character than their physical counterparts, individual linguistic choices in VLL are still shaped by the environment, though translation assistance is more easily accessible, if not always accurate. The Internet offers more democratic opportunities in authoring and authority; e.g., sites can be created and revised through multilateral editing using wiki software, e.g., Wikipedia, or a content sharing websites, e.g., YouTube or Flickr. Many real world billboards are programmed screens, changing messages at timed intervals, or displaying up-‐to-‐the minute advice on highway driving conditions. So, just as Web 2.0 advancements towards real-‐virtual interactions are incrementally converging the worlds of atoms and those of bits, so is physical LL absorbing digital signs. Because of this flexibility, virtual content can more dynamically reflect ‘real-‐time’ socio-‐political relations. The cityscape does include signs that are more transitory in nature, including revolving commercial materials, such as billboards for goods and services and entertainment posters; seasonal public notices, such as building permits and roadworks (Figure 3.6); and recyclable materials, such as political and business notices.
Figure 3.6 Multilingual digitized poster8
This digitized PDF file is written in multiple immigrant languages of Australia, including Amharic, Bengali, Khmer, and Turkish. Some of the major international languages are missing: notably, French and German. The linguistic choices indicate that the area is predominantly populated by the first-‐language speakers of languages spoken in developing and former socialist nations, including Ethiopia, Iran, India, Somalia, Vietnam, as well as former USSR and Yugoslavia. In addition, the multilingual digitized poster targets only the local population, facilitating the access through the Internet, while potentially keeping the cost of printing down and preserving the natural resources via paperless information distribution. However, as the poster is obviously displaced, its function is possibly a warning for those who intend to take the road for travel and/or an illustration of safety measures taken by the Australian Department of Transport and its agencies, potentially reaching global readership. In any event, this multimodal artefact delineates the territory/space both in LL and VLL. The artefact from Figure 3.4 represents features of LL that have a limited residual value within their physical milieu. VLL, however, has more in common with the rotating content on physical billboards than with stationary signs because websites are cheaper and easier to maintain, develop and expand. Web 1.0 manifestations of static but hypertext linked advertising—analogous to billboards— provide multiple configurations of multilingualism.
8 http://www.safework.sa.gov.au/uploaded_files/aeSafetySignsx5.pdf Retrieved January, 18 2012
Figure 3.7 Complementary multilingualism: travel advertisement
Figure 3.7, a home page of a Spanish airline, illustrates complementary multilingualism. The webpage interface offers versions in ten European languages, including four official languages in Spain, either at the national level (Spanish or castiliano/español) or locally (Basque/euskara; Catalan/català; and Galician/galego), shown in a drop-‐down dialogue box. The web page is a complex multilingual and multimodal semiograph—material form of the sign—displaying a number of bilingual clusters: in the upper left corner there is code-‐switched, English-‐Galician-‐English message “flying hoxe (‘today’) means VUELING,” and several English and Spanish clusters on otherwise Galician version: ¡WOW! Cuantas rutas nuevas,” “reserva now,” “tu las maletas and yo los vuelos” [code-‐switched segments in English are underlined]. The English word ‘wow’ is preceded with the inverted exclamation mark, which is the orthographic convention unique to Spanish. In the central part of the embedded cluster, the contours of clouds are formed in the shape of the English word ‘new,’ illustrating the ludic function of metaphorical code-‐ switching (for example, see Crystal, 1998, for ludic function in language).
It is also important to note that the examples of the static Web in the dissertation are necessarily snapshots of digital artefacts (semiographs) captured at a single point in time and space/place. The display of the semiographs, however, is also impacted by the type of browser used (e.g., Explorer, Safari, Firefox), type of device (e.g., desktop, hand-‐held), and locale (user adaptation based on the information about the presumed language and culture of the user collected from the IP address, included in the HTTP header). Depending on the browser, device type, and locale, the Web server may input different culture and language-‐specific parameters, which could result in different variants (instantiations) of the digital semiograph (see Figures 2.2 & 2.3 displaying two language-‐specific versions of the website of the Icelandic Board of Tourism).9 3.3.3 Conceptual metaphor Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what system is like. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 3 According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the cross-‐domain correlations from our experience and persistent use of a particular metaphor may create perceived similarities. This assertion is easily evidenced through the use of metaphors associated with computer-‐mediated communication. Virtual space is a computer-‐ generated and mediated environment, in many ways conceptually grounded in objects and relations from the physical world. Metaphors in this sense are not mere tropes and poetic ornaments; rather, they are conceptual categories whereby more abstract ideas map to more concrete and salient concepts, exemplified in the conceptual metaphor WEBSITES ARE NAVIGABLE SPACES, described below: WEBSITES ARE NAVIGABLE SPACES People navigate sites. They follow links from place to place. They wander around a site, they get lost, they can't find a page or resource they know is there. Sites have designers or architects and an organized structure. There are site maps and navigation guides. Zack Tomaszewski, 200210 Items, processes and events from virtual space are often coined using the same vocabulary representing items from the physical world, such as the information highway, chat room, discussion forum, virtual tour, website, home page, mouse, the Net, computer virus, ebook, and even a virtual forest (Figure 3.6). An Internet user might surf the net, lurk in a chat room, shout in an email, visit a virtual art gallery, and even cruise a website, though none of these physical actions is possible. Lakoff and Johnson give examples of conceptual metaphors [capitalized and articles 9
I am indebted to Melanie Baljko for this observation. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/ling440/proposal.html
10
omitted by convention], followed by their use, such as: IDEAS ARE PEOPLE, as in ‘He breathed new life into the idea’; IDEAS ARE PLANTS, as in ‘That’s a budding theory’; IDEAS ARE PRODUCTS, as in ‘We generated a lot of new ideas this week.’ The notion of earthly space is also at the core of the term VLL as almost any idea of interaction in cyberspace is anchored in the concepts that are borrowed from our lived experiences in bounded physical space, land (Figure 3.8).
Figure 3.8 VLL as a ‘metaphorical space’: Virtual Forest11
Figure 3.8 presents a monolingual educational website that invites the viewer, an elementary school biology student, who is positioned both as a detective and scientist, to explore a virtual world, linguistically (verbally)—Let’s cruise!!!, Sprawl, Timberrr!, Tree DETECTIVE—and visually—owl, racoon, cat, trees, four-‐leaf ‘lucky’ clover, detective, green maple leaf, turtles, birds, green background—landscaped by the metaphors. Thanks to her familiarity with the concepts and relations from the tangible, physical world, the student can make sense of, and transfer that knowledge to, the phenomena that are taking place in distant locales, such as the Amazonian rainforest. On the basis of this intertextual—verbal and visual—knowledge, coupled with the student’s “previous experiences of the objects presented and the relations among them,” she is “able to make the various objects and locations that are presented converge into a coherent visual presentation of a virtual world” (Baldry & Thibault, 2006, p. 120). Once the student makes sense of the virtual objects and 11
http://www.ext.vt.edu/resources/4h/virtualforest/ Retrieved January 21, 2012
relations, she can then transfer and scaffold the newly acquired knowledge back onto the phenomena in the lived world. The home page introduces the following verbal and visual ‘metaphorical clusters’ (for cluster analysis, see Baldry and Thibault, 2006, pp. 120-‐125): 1. STUDENT IS SAILOR, as in agentive ‘Let’s cruise!!!’: She needs to know how to steer and navigate the Web for relevant information. 2. FOREST/INTERNET IS SEA, as in ambient ‘Let’s cruise!!!’: The Internet is a forest, which in turn is a sea, a vast amount of information at one’s disposal, but where one can be lost if not able to navigate. 3. STUDENT IS RACOON, as in the anthropomorphized image of a racoon dressed in a detective suit and holding a magnifying glass in her left hand: Student is an investigator and researcher, whose task is to find out causes and come up with solutions. 4. PEOPLE HURT PLANET EARTH, as in ‘Sprawl’ (see the embedded window in Figure 3.8 displaying the message, ‘Human Impact on the Forest Ecosystem’). People destroy their habitat. The students should be aware of the damaging effect of uncontrolled sprawl of human infrastructure all over the planet, and eventually be active in protecting our common environment. Such metaphors indicate that we transfer lived experiences onto the virtual domain. With regard to human perception in the virtual world, Sherman and Craig (2003) claim that, “the transference can be accelerated if a direct analogy is pointed out between the concept under study and an already understood concept.” They go on to write, “As patterns of analogous relationships become apparent, the shared concepts can often be generalized into a class of operations (e.g., a mathematical concept)” (p. 212). The metaphors from the source domain thus enable the user, particularly the novice (Maglio & Matlock, 1998), to interact with the virtual domain based on familiar experiences from real world domains. The main role of at least novel metaphors is to enable a novice (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986; Dreyfus, 2001 in a target domain, such as the Internet, to interact with the target domain based on previous experiences from correlate and familiar domains, such as the physical or ‘real’ world. Through the metaphor INTERNET IS WEB, a beginner conceives the Internet as a system of intricate threads, more so than an experienced user does. In a study that examined metaphorical conception of the WWW among novice and experienced users, Maglio and Matlock (1998) found that inexperienced users— when prompted to explain their experience browsing certain websites—“more often mixed in their experiences using the keyboard mouse, and other elements of the physical (non-‐web) domain (e.g. ‘I clicked on...’ or ‘I typed in…’), whereas experienced users did not. In addition, beginners were more likely to refer to the web as a container than were experienced web users.” The experienced user, on the other hand, has already adopted the new metaphor, while disregarding some of its original properties and associations. For example, an expert Internet user regards ‘web spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ distinctly in terms of their technical properties and roles within a given context, rather than associating those terms with the insects of the same name.
This example focuses on the educational aspect of a VLL in the context of metaphorical transference of intermedial (physical onto virtual; printed text or direct experience onto screen) experiences, whereby VLL is considered primarily in its broader sense, as language presence (and absence) and linguistic diversity in cyberspace-‐as-‐the-‐public-‐sphere. Nonetheless, this mini case study also illustrates the more specific interpretation of VLL as visibility and salience of linguistic items and other semiotic markers delinating ethnolinguistic presence and indexing power relations in cyberspace, here defining the space of language use with a monolingual English text, and thus demarcating the context to the primarily North American English-‐speaking student audience. This is also coupled with the non-‐linguistic representations featuring North American flora and fauna as well as images of exclusively Caucasian-‐looking characters. As shown, VLL might equally be painted by the absence of linguistic and non-‐linguistic elements. 3.3.4 Agent´s involvement While visual limitations, such as a bidimensional perspective and the lack of perceptual depth, remain features of virtual landscapes, technology is already making strides towards 3D solutions (e.g., movie Avatar, 2009). According to Hubert Dreyfus (2001), the American phenomenologist and philosopher of artificial intelligence, mastery, and practical wisdom, as the most advanced forms of learning by means of distance learning, would be possible only through a form of telepresence that mimics the learner’s interaction in the real world (p. 49). In 2012, we can say that we are one step closer to the goal. The surfer is increasingly becoming immersed in the environment with advances towards interactive, real-‐time and context-‐embedded systems. For example, the recent evolution of gaming consoles, such as Playstation 4, X-‐Box 720, and Nintendo’s console Wii, which requires physical mimicry to activate screen movement, continue to narrow the gap between the digital and the real. According to McCullough (2004), the paradigm shift from building parallel virtual worlds to embedded, ambient, environmental, pervasive, ubiquitous, and above all, human-‐ centred, computing is already happening. Bits are the atoms of electronic spaces. The underpinning corporeality of physical landscapes is of a tangible and earthly quality, while the corporeal nature behind electronic landscapes comprises invisible streams of clustered bits. A contraction of the words binary digits, bits are 1s (higher voltage) and 0s (lower voltage), whose combinations, called binary codes, are used to represent numbers, letters, pixels, and more complex units of data, such as instructions, segments of text, or images. Access to VLL is always mediated. No one inhabits the digital dimension, though those who regularly engage in digital communication belong to specific communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). The virtual linguistic landscape is experienced through a digitally empowered physical object, e.g., a computer screen or a smart-‐phone interface of hand-‐held devices such as the constantly evolving versions of iPhone and iPad. A computer monitor, in and of itself physical, is a portal whose external physical properties, such as shape and colour of
the monitor enclosure, do not materially impact the virtual objects displayed on the screen. Some of the features of Web 1.0 interaction are spatially multilayered display of text, which enables the reader/perceiver to remain static while the perspective shift on the computer screen is triggered by the events of clicking or scrolling; predefined linking of information sections based on web screens (cross-‐ linking, hyper-‐linking and embedding of web pages), though limiting the range of interaction to a set of pre-‐programmed links. A significant difference between the virtual and physical landscape with respect to fixedness and transience, however, is that the linguistic landscape is immersive: the individual enters and exits, functions, and resides within the physical territory, interacting linguistically within demarcated spatial earthly boundaries, whereas virtual space is delocalized: anyone can find and engage within the virtual space from anywhere as, for instance, in Second Life (SL), a cyber-‐world modelled on the physical world.
3.4
Virtual Linguistic Landscape in Evolving Cyber-World
The vision that I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. Berners-‐Lee and Fischetti, 2000, p. 1 3.4.1 Web 1.0 Since Tim Berners-‐Lee, a British researcher at CERN (the research centre for particle physics) near Geneva, introduced the World Wide Web in 1991, human communication has undergone a seismic shift. The way people do business and research, exchange information, advertise, and entertain themselves has changed irreversibly. Berners-‐Lee started with a vision of the Web that “would not be an isolated tool used by people in their lives, or even a mirror of real life; [but] part of the very fabric of the web of life we all help weave” (Berners-‐Lee & Fischetti, 2000, p. 91). He synthesized several revolutionary concepts radically altering the way humans manipulate and disseminate information: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a communications protocol which facilitates data transfer on the Web; the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), tag-‐based language used to create Web pages; and uniform resource locator (URL), a virtual address in the form of a compact character string that points to the physical address of a digital document. Standardization12 of each of these specifications central to the Web increased its interactivity, portability, interoperability, and overall usability. Computers in this inceptional stage of networking could talk directly to one another; and with a point 12
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994, continues to develop Web standards carrying out a mission “to interact with text and images from an ever-growing pool of information ‘to ensure long-term growth of the Web’”; URL: http://www.w3org/Consortium
and click, instantaneously access an enormous amount of information. However, existing technology and the Web browsers were not yet able to offer the more collaborative approach visualized by Berners-‐Lee, which, he noted, “required much more of a social change in how people worked” (Berners-‐Lee & Fischetti 2000, p. 57). 3.4.2 Web 2.0 and social computing That change indeed happened with the almost parallel developments of the Semantic Web (Berners-‐Lee & Fischetti, 2000) and Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). The fundamental idea behind the Semantic Web is to supply data with descriptors or tags, and in turn define relations with other data through conceptual linking of tags. On the existing hypertext layer, the Semantic Web technology adds a layer that consists of metadata and automated, context-‐driven data manipulation to connect data from different linguistic and cultural domains. Coupled with the introduction of Web browsers, which enable users to interact with text and images from an ever-‐ growing pool of information, the Web soon became the premium medium of finding and sharing information in different languages. The Semantic Web, integrated with the emerging online social-‐networking systems, termed Web 2.0, such as blogs, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr and Wikipedia, is ideally posed to promote multilingualism. File sharing and collaborative content authoring are arguably the most significant features of the Web 2.0. Compared to the first stage, retroactively called Web 1.0, speakers of different languages have more opportunities to communicate with one another, being situated within a single communicative discourse, that is a ‘social space’ (see, for example, YouTube multilingual discussion fora in Chapters 4 and 5). 3.4.3 Immersive computing and virtual ontologies Second Life, a virtual ontology, aspires to mimic the immersive experience of involvement in earthly space, perhaps pointing at a future direction of ambient immersion, much alike the one in the real world. SL has its own currency, linden dollar (L$), which can be traded for US dollars in an increasing number of business transactions, from virtual language classrooms to shopping malls to land purchasing to gambling. Members are represented by avatars, their virtual incarnations which/who 13 socialize, play and conduct business in SL. Avatars, graphical representations of Internet users, called ‘residents,’ become increasingly embodied in the environment; virtual extensions of the SL players, they move and talk within a defined domain. They have a right of entry to public spaces and limited access to private areas, similar to physical spaces or landscapes. Although English is the main language in SL, communication in other languages is increasing. Modes of communication in SL include writing/typing, voice-‐enabled messaging and gesturing, similar to communication in the physical 13
Which or who? The literature is mixed on whether ‘avatar’ takes an animate or inanimate relative pronoun (Ivković & Lotherington, 2009, p. 34).
landscape. The Residents inhabit islands, which in the physical world are often a metaphor for isolation and non-‐interaction, but in SL represent specialized communities of practice, who communicate through teleporting, guided by information postings and context-‐driven messages in respective languages. After the initial hype, although still running, SL has lost some of the impetus. However, SL, or a similar ‘alternate reality world’ (e.g., see Naper, 2011), metaphorically conceptualized on the idea of the physical environment, may well be representative of interaction, including communication in a variety of modes and languages, in a not so distant future, evolving from static to interactional to immersive interaction, radically changing the existing linguistic (cyber)ecology. 3.4.4 Linguistic cyberecology While, as a rule, the top-‐down item flow is an instrument of conscious language policy, confirming the present linguistic ecology or striving to alter it by manipulating language choices and modalities of multilingual discourses, the bottom-‐up item flow represents de facto language practices and initiatives created in public spaces, whereby “the public space, whether through signs, forms, instructions or cyberspace, is a very important arena where language battles are negotiated and crafted” (Shohamy, 2006, p. 129). Either guided by pragmatic reasons in order to deliver information or, symbolic, to instil or change opinions, beliefs, and perceptions about the linguistic vitality and status of a particular language, individuals, as autonomous actors, alter linguistic cyberecology, by favouring and propagating certain linguistic choices, thus influencing language attitudes, opinions and beliefs about the status of individual languages or language groups. Multilingual choices and referents from both physical and virtual linguistic landscapes influence our social perceptions and indicate the role and nature of power relations as linguistically and semiotically represented by cultures. The choice, prominence, and use of languages in cyberspace create an important dimension, partaking in the complexity of linguistic cyberecology. Due to the scope of the access that a message has in cyberspace, the potential impact of these clues by far exceeds the influence of a graffiti, message board, physical poster or advertisement. A multilingual discourse, a YouTube discussion forum in multiple languages, for instance, is not only reflective of current linguistic practices, linguistic vitality, and language attitudes, but may also be instrumental in influencing perceptions by disseminating both explicit and implicit messages associated with linguistic potential through the power of numerous individual actors, those who write and those who read those messages, therefore impacting the global linguistic ecology. According to the eco-‐linguistic paradigm, individual languages are seen as inseparable from their immediate sociolinguistic environment, in a similar way as living organisms are dependent of their habitat. On this view (e.g., Nettle & Romaine, 2000; Mühlhäusler, 1995), languages are conceptualized similarly to biological species: endangered languages need to be protected from extinction; diversity and healthy linguistic equilibrium need to be preserved (e.g., Dalby, 2002).
Consequently, no language can be viewed independently of its environment, biological or digital, local or global, micro-‐ or macro-‐linguistic. Languages adapt, change, prevail or decline, overpower or surrender. They undergo changes by natural means, such as linguistic evolution, or by force, such as linguistic colonization, covert discriminatory linguistic practices, or even genocide. The sheer volume of online communication makes the Internet a significant factor in maintaining the delicate balance of global language ecology. On a global scale, technology presents not only unique opportunities, but also new challenges for multilingualism. As they evolve, technological environments influence content presentation and the way message is delivered. Some technological solutions are hidden from the participants in the virtual discourse; nevertheless, these solutions influence the linguistic balance driven by intensified language contact. One of the main consequences of language contact in virtual space is technology-‐induced linguistic bias, favouring the Latin alphabet and English. Continuous use of the Latin alphabet and non-‐standard orthographic variants by a sufficiently large number of Internet users has already produced unofficial ‘Internet’ standards, or an anti-‐standard from below (Ivković, in press a). Although unlikely to be institutionally confirmed as official, these practices are nonetheless becoming accepted as de facto and unmarked conventions in computer-‐mediated interaction. The alphabetic and variant choices, however, do not exist in a socio-‐ political vacuum and are not limited to the political or geographical borders. The orthographic solutions are also directly impacted by the technological options available abroad, as well as the Diaspora writers’ attitudes towards language and scripts. Communication in cyberspace is thus deterritorialized and anyone with adequate technology and linguistic knowledge can take part in by and large linguistically uncensored discussions.
3.5
Summary
The virtual linguistic landscape is both a metaphor and a phenomenon in its own right. In this chapter, it has been argued that linguistic communication in cyberspace not only inherits a number of salient features from the way we communicate in the physical world, but our interaction in digital spaces also emulates qualities afforded/constrained by the world of the intangible materiality of bits, thus outlining unique linguistic cyberecology. The next chapter turns to the core case study, exemplifying VLL from below.
