Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media

Chapter 4. “My English Is So Poor . . . So I Take Photos”: Metalinguistic Discourses about English on Flickr

73 4 “My English Is So Poor . . . So I Take Photos” Metalinguistic Discourses about English on FlickR CARMEN LEE Chinese University of Hong Kong FLICKR (www.flickr.com) is a photosharing site that allows people to upload, display, and share photos. Although photographs are often perceived to be the central element of Flickr, members of Flickr also interact in various writing spaces; they provide titles , captions, and tags (or keywords) for their photos as well as comment on one another ’s photos. These writing spaces form a cross-modal cohesive tie between the posted photos and surrounding text. Each Flickr member also has a profile page, on which many people write short autobiographies detailing where they come from, what Figure 4.1 A Flickr photo page with bilingual writing.1 cameras and lenses they use, and their passion for photography. Flickr is basically a public and global online platform (although users can control access to their photos), so its users vary geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Users who do not use English as their dominant language in their offline lives may still choose to create written content in English in addition to their native language. Figure 4.1 shows a page by a Chinese-speaking user, with a bilingual title “autumnter ,” and tags in Chinese and English, surrounding the uploaded photo. This chapter draws upon data collected as part of a larger study of the multilingual literacy practices associated with Flickr. The broader study (Lee and Barton 2011) focuses on the ways in which people creatively deploy their language resources in new online spaces and how these practices shed light on current understanding of vernacular literacies (Barton and Lee 2012). Although the study originally sought to observe anddescribemultilingualactivities,theparticipantsoftenrevealedtheirattitudestoward different languages without prompting.These metalinguistic attitudes about language, collected from people’s self-generated contents on Flickr and follow-up email interviews , often centered on Flickr users’ perception of the functions of English and their knowledge of the language in relation to their online participation. Many scholars have acknowledged extensive use of languages other than English in web spaces (such as Danet and Herring 2007; Herring et al. 2007), but the initial findings of ongoing research on Flickr show that English is still seen as a common language by international participants (Lee and Barton 2009), which is in line with traditional claims about the dominant role of English online (such as Garland 2006; Luke, Luke, and Graham 2007). The importance of English, especially to those whose primary language is not English, is often reflected in the participants’ explicit self-evaluations of their English proficiency level on their Flickr profile page, photo captions, and comments, as shown in the following examples by two users from France and Germany, respectively. Sorry to write in French but my English is too poor to express my feelings (lefete, French) My English is limited and not so well as it should be :(. (Berta, German) It is these self-assessments of English on Flickr that inspired this study. This chapter focuses on the ways in which metalinguistic discourses about English are constructed on Flickr and the social meanings associated with them, through addressing three interrelated questions: 1. How do people who do not use English as their primary language talk about their knowledge of English on Flickr? 2. What are the motivations behind such discourses? 3. What is the relationship between such discourses and participation on Flickr? Drawing on a textual database of 1,292 statements of self-evaluation of English pro- ficiency and interview data from ten participants, I identify various types of metalinguistic discourse about English on Flickr. In addition, I use data from online interviews to explain why such discourses exist on Flickr. My understanding of the 74 CARMEN LEE data was mainly informed by the analytical framework of stancetaking (Jaffe 2009), which is a useful approach to understanding how Flickr users’attitudes regarding their own linguistic skills are discursively constructed. Using Gee’s (2004) concept of affinity spaces, I also show the ways in which such seemingly self-deprecatory comments serve to encourage social networking, widen participation, and support informal learning. Metalinguistic Discourse and Folk Linguistic Attitudes Online Sociolinguists have long been interested in investigating nonlinguists’ beliefs, attitudes , and theories of language—an area that is often referred to as folk linguistics (Niedzielski and Preston 2000). Widely adopted in perceptual dialectology and research on spoken language (for...