The Interaction of Space, Place, and Linguistic Variation in Social Media
<p dir="ltr">The advent of the internet and social media should have provided social geographers new avenues in determining the relationship between offline and online communities [1]. Similarly, these new avenues can be used advance our understanding of social geography in relation...
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2024
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| Summary: | <p dir="ltr">The advent of the internet and social media should have provided social geographers new avenues in determining the relationship between offline and online communities [1]. Similarly, these new avenues can be used advance our understanding of social geography in relation to linguistic variation. Despite these developments, complex geographic concepts such <i>space</i> and <i>place</i> continue to be ill-defined within variationist sociolinguistic research [2].</p><p dir="ltr">Our research aim is to determine how social media users construct and maintain space and place identity through language-use. We will take an integrationist approach in our research design by addressing each of the three social theoretical perspectives [3]: <i>social structure</i>, <i>social action</i>, and <i>social behaviour</i>. We propose a hybrid framework to determine the interaction between space and place with linguistic variation by synthesising these three contrasting yet complementary theoretical perspectives on two social media platforms: X (Twitter) and Reddit.<br><br>Of interest to our research is the concept of <i>place identity</i> which refers to the subjective social construct to differentiate one place from another place [4]. A related concept is the <i>spatial self</i> which refers to the theoretical framework encapsulating the process of online self-presentation based on the display of offline physical activities [5].</p><p dir="ltr">With these concepts in mind, our research questions are:</p><ol><li>What is the relationship between space and place? How are these relationships reproduced on social media?</li><li>How do people construct space/place identity on social media? Can we observe spatial/placial variation in language-use?</li><li>How do people enforce space/place identity on social media? Do space-based and place-based social media platforms differ in language-use? and lastly;</li><li>How does the spatial self navigate space/place identity on social media?</li></ol><p dir="ltr">The components of our research align to the three social theoretical perspectives. The first study appeals to the theoretical perspective of social structure where fixed structures constrain individual action. We use georeferenced language data from X (Twitter) using variationist sociolinguistic approaches to determine the relationship between language-use on social media and space.</p><p dir="ltr">The second study appeals to the social theoretical perspective of social action where the process of social meaning is achieved through communicative interaction. We use language data from Reddit and developing the variationist sociolinguistic from the first study to determine language-use on social media and the construction of place. We then incorporate approaches from social network theory to determine how place is maintained.</p><p dir="ltr">The third and final study appeals to the social theoretical perspective societal behaviour where we focus on the individual behaviour and the construction and maintenance of the spatial self. The spatial self, or location-based identity performance, assumes people want to be congruent with their place identity. We use the author's personal X (Twitter) data to determine how the author's space/place identity is mediated by 'the closet' - in a space without a sense of place [6].</p><p dir="ltr">The proposed contributions of this cross-disciplinary research will support variationist sociolinguists and social theorists in: a) determining space/place identity in social media language-use; and b) reinforcing sociolinguistic approaches within Social Theory.</p> |
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