Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: I am not a specialist in digital communication, and instead I do interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (henceforth 'IS' and 'LE'), a syncretic research programme that draws inter alia on linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis and Goffman, usually cross-referring to relevant work in other disciplines (Rampton, 2022). 1 IS/LE centres on the careful ethnographic observation, recording and analysis of embodied communication, and it investigates communication's embedding in a layered and interweaving multiplicity of social, cultural and material systems and processes.Depending on the questions and arguments that it is addressing, IS/LE certainly varies both in the forms of semiosis and the systems that it attends to (and I myself have tended to focus on spoken interaction in recreational and educational locales affected by racism, social class and securitisation).But when Helen Kelly-Holmes asks whether artificial intelligence (AI) now departs from 'the known world for sociolinguistics', it is a timely opportunity to reflect on the possibilities for-or indeed possibility of-IS/LE.Kelly-Holmes speaks of a 'seismic shift' in the scholarly universe, citing Jan Blommaert (2017, p. 7), who also advocated 'an acute eye for change', saying that 'reality changes.The bastard changes all the time; society refuses to sit still' (Blommaert & Van de Aa, 2020, p. 6).But Blommaert could also be rather equivocal about the significance of these changes, and elsewhere recommends less spectacular adaptations-'we have to adjust. . .[and] what you do needs to be relevant, so don't go for the big recipes' (2020, p. 6).Not knowing more about AI, I cannot gauge authoritatively the magnitude of its implications for IS/LE, but pursuing Blommaert's more muted second option, I can see several ways in which AI can remain a researchable empirical topic (Rampton, 2016, pp.314-324).So, it is not hard, for example, to imagine a series of IS/LE studies of people interacting with Chat-GPT itself, not just probing its naturalness or its ideological leanings, but also exploring the form and sustainability of communicative relationships where there is none of the potentially consequential tension between the felt and the sayable that inhabits lots of talk among actual people (McDermott & Tylbor, 1986;Rampton, 2013).Turning to interaction between humans themselves, it is usually still possible to pick out the shifting influence of digital media in the dynamic contingencies of
Source: Journal of Sociolinguistics
DOI: 10.1111/josl.12685
Author: Ben Rampton
Institution: King's College London
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,730
OpenAlex ID: W4404220092