Social Media
This chapter is devoted precisely to the constraints that social media impose upon traditional pragmatic research.
Abstract
A generally accepted view of pragmatics is that it studies human-to-human communication and how hearers (or readers) turn what speakers (or writers) code (e.g. an utterance, a text, a multimodal discourse) into meaningful interpretations with the aid of contextual information. In a prototypical situation, hearers will try to trace (i.e. metarepresent) speakers’ underlying communicative and informative intentions and access the intended amount and quality of contextual information, so as to reach an adequate interpretive outcome. However, as the socalled cyberpragmatics addresses (Yus, 2010, 2011a) and as will be briefly commented upon below, Internet alters this prototypical situation due to a number of factors including the cues-filtered quality of some discourses, or the fact that there are cognitive rewards and environmental constraints that play a part in the eventual quality of understanding (Yus, 2011b) and are not so prominent in face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, in the case of social media, concepts such as “author”, “reader” or “discourse” shift into innovative forms of communication on the Net. This chapter is devoted precisely to the constraints that social media impose upon traditional pragmatic research.