ATWA

In the meantime, I wanted to share this video from the channel Freedom in Thought, on 1984 and linguistic determinism, the hypothesis that language determines what you can think. It’s a pretty cool look at the topic and gets into some of the science behind it! If you want more discussion on linguistic determinism, take a look at our video, too - it covers some of the same information, but also some of the other research that’s been done, as well!

i hate languages

— International Mother Language Day

In another activity, regarding the environment, I assigned my students with homework on linoit.com in a canvas I had made for the respective lesson. In stead of following the traditional way of paper and pencil, they searched on Google facts about Alternative Energy Sources and posted their answers in this platform. So, I provided them with the link and since they clicked, they had all the instructions on the surface. The activity was neat, reflecting how they enjoyed it. Some of them, found the way to also include gifs, videos and images! It was really amazing.

Twitter is another online infrastructure that allows users to express, publish and sometimes creatively illustrate their own views upon continuous or past matters. Political events such as the argumentation concerning the name issue of FYROM could not miss and are much discussed from simple citizens to politicians.         The above image A depicts practices of online political discourse, maintained by civil participation. More specifically, a Skopjian user posts his caption along  with a sarcastic image, making an allegory of the EU - FYROM relationship to that of a love relationship. The post was published earlier this day, at 12:33 am.         Zoran Zaev, FYROM’s prime minister, is portrayed and sneered for being a less nationalistic figure, whose claims and negotiations foresee the country’s potential for EU membership by changing the region’s name. Thus, the person who is in contrast with such an attitude and writes this post, expresses himself in order to make an impact to the audience. Yet, this is an example of virtual political engagement because “chatting politics online provides an illusion of political engagement”.         On the other hand, picture B, a photo depicting demonstration of Greek protests to a potential Greek compromise of Greece agreeing to Skopje using the word Macedonia in its official name, is a real political engagement, where people are physically acting (February 4, Athens central).

Nowadays, people, and especially the iGens love hashtags and other internet-specific language features so they use it in their everyday life and feel part of the society. This is the core of how they operate in the world. Organisations and companies take advantage of such technological influences to launch their products or to promote their actions and verge on youth.

The above post depicts an instance of abusive online behaviour in the form of flaming. Two texts are shown in the image as a diatribe between supporters of President Trump (text A) and Obama (text B), respectively. My interest of analysis concerns the insulting comment (text B) which is a vicious verbal attack, on one hand to the interlocutor above it (text A) and on the other hand, to the President of the US D. Trump. Since the user does not have the opportunity to show paralinguistic features like facial expression, tone of voice etc, he is using graphic devices such as punctuation (…), (!!!!), (- -), as equals.  The act of his aggression is also revealed through swearing language. We could definitely agree that this is a harmful context since different linguistic forms of swearing are very profound; cursing expletive (Fuck tRUMP), pre-modifying intensifying  negative adjective (poor , pitiful, lusted Ivanka), (small, pathetic monodic TROPHY-HUNTING sons), adverbial booster (as COWARDLY as their DRAFT-DOGGING court jester father…) and other negative adjectives (idiot). Apart from this typographical features, another linguistic resource i.e capitalisation is very prominent. The user is repeatedly capitalising most of his phrases to mark his aggression, to increase the impact of his bad words to the reader or to compensate the luck of his yelling. However, in his intention to devalue Mr. President’s power, he is writing the initial letter of the name with small ’t’ (tRUMP) and then continues his whole phrase in capitals (Fuck tRUMP, the DIDDLIND, INSCESTUOUS, DEVIANT DIRTY OLD MAN…). 

All of the websites mentioned above share some norms of behaviour e.g. moderators, and practice eg. insider lingo. There aren’t any sites that I use and I do not feel part of the specific community it involves. I am usually an active user if I am meant to visit and utilise a platform. However, my visits are very short in the sense of duration. 

ASSIGNMENT 4 - Ioanna Asanakidi Instagram is a social network site where I maintain a personal profile to continue my connections with other users, mostly friends of mine. A screenshot of my account will help us elicit a brief analysis of my online identity. Specific aspects of my social ID are provided, whereas more personal details are omitted. My profile picture displays my sister and me hugged in a happy moment, besides all of my photos depicting myself are circled around such a happy mood. Since self-presentation in social media is more selective than f2f situation, my bio is empty apart from a word provided, “atwa”. The latter stands for an acronym of the phrase All The Way Alive, also one of my favourite bands’ song’s title. I use this motto to express myself most of the times, so in one hand someone could assume that aspects of personal ID such as my attitude is provided while another one could argue that I tend to conceal basic info in my bio. My closest friends and family are aware of this acronym and the ways/ reasons I am connected to it since the JH, so for them it is obvious that a serious part of personal ID is included in this section. Other master identities i.e education, generation, age, religion and geographical region are missing. However, some interactional activities are highlighted, such as one of my hobbies (amateur photography) ascribed in a provided link that leads to my portfolio, as well as my love for travelling depicted in the posts (a few shots of some of my trips abroad). For the most part, I do not claim to follow a specific strategy concerning my online identity on Instagram since I do not highly regard my profile. I just upload whenever and whatever I have a preference for at that current moment. Mostly, I incline towards photos taken by me, places where I have had wonderful memories, people who I love. Nonetheless, I have a quite low number of posts even though the intended audience is very broad/general. Simultaneously I present myself in ways which target certain individuals/groups (my friends, amateur photographers) and exclude others (acquaintances, professional audience). Apart from visually contracted, aspects of my ID are also dialogically performed, in the comments under my photos; Code switching between Greek, English and Arabic language is performed, so implications about my willing to disclose social aspects of ID are allowed. 

love me, love me not | credit

This text is one of my earliest posts on Instagram Stories that demonstrates my practice of code-switching among the Arabic, Greek, English and (minor) French language. The linguistic content is shaped by the intended viewers, real friends of mine. My motivation to switch is the extra-situational background that we share (colleagues in Arabic sessions, speakers of all the 3 languages, native Greeks ) and the content which is about our trip to Egypt. At fist, as I am aware of the fact that everyone speaks English, I use formal English (capital “NOPE”) as a bold indication of a disagreement I have on one of our conversational topics.Then, I continue using solely Arabic because I prefer to keep a distance from the general audience (viewers who do not speak Arabic) concerning some details I relate to in this paragraph. An interesting point is the inclusion of an Arabic adverbial written in Latin letters (“fi”). There is no particular reason for doing so, just the keyboard changed automatically and I was bored to fix it, as I can recall. I the following paragraph I initiate my phrase with English “hate u”, again for formality but also for stylistic reasons. I wish to sound more like I’m kidding. Then greeklish appears! The function of switching to my native language is for my convenience in phrasing the specific syntactic order appropriately. In Arabic, I would need more time to think, prepare and then post it. An additional reason is that I want to sound more serious and a bit of angry with them. However, I do include the Arabic word “صورة ” meaning photograph in order to break the ice again. I conclude with my speech mostly in greeklish with the intervention of the French “pardon” which conveys more expressiveness than a plain “sorry”.  (The extract is a sequel to our group call on Skype, that happened minutes before the post.) Ioanna Asanakidi