Sociolinguistics

The Innovative Internet

The world we exist in is dynamic. Constantly shifting and advancing, everything observed in our lives reflects the rapidity with which information is transmitted and trends rise to popularity. The internet is a large contributor to this speed, and allows for instant communication and advances that have enabled the growth of Western society. 

Since its inception, the internet has marked itself as a necessity — vast, collaborative, and informative — it is able to interweave itself into our daily lives. It has paved the way for innovative forms of communication, networking, and socialization; social media as an entity exists solely due to the impact and presence of the internet. 

One such social media platform that has gained enormous popularity is YouTube, a web-based service that allows users to both create and view videos online. If you have access to the internet, you have access to the billions of videos that are housed on YouTube. Viewers are able to utilize this in a plethora of capacities, whether that be for educational, motivational, or entertainment purposes (and these are only three basic categories in which people are able to interact with these videos). Content creators (people who record, edit, and post videos) are able to construct YouTube Channels, which act as a centralized location for all of their videos. They are able to design their own aesthetics and target specific audiences and populations through the videos they post. While there are many facets to creating popular content (performing certain acts, including other YouTubers in videos, interacting with viewers and outsiders, making specific types of videos such as lifestyle or beauty), it is through utilizing specific language and editing styles that these creators are able to attract their audiences and impact viewers’ lives. 

What do we know about vlogs?

To narrow down our investigation, we decided to focus on one video form: the vlog. While there are at least a dozen genres that exist on YouTube, we anticipated that nearly every college-aged student would have had exposure to vlogs in some way or another. 

First, we started off by finding a basic definition of vlogs, which we found in a study by Heather Molyneaux, Susan O’Donell and Kerri Gibson (2009):

“‘Vlogs,’ also known as video blogs, are video web logs[… ]Vlogs are a form of online publishing, allowing everyone with web access[…] to create and post content. Most vlogs are authored by individuals and focus on personal themes.”

This further proves our idea that multitudes of youth have connections to these types of videos, as they are created with the intention of fostering personal connections and sharing intimate details of a vlogger’s life. 

Yet settling on this genre of video is not narrow enough in its scope to truly observe any sociolinguistic phenomena. To rectify this, we decided to specify a target population — to identify not only a type of vlog, but also a similar group of vloggers. 

It is evident that YouTube is a social media platform where hundreds of millions of videos are posted telling or portraying the image of women (Molyneaux et al. 2009). Vlogging videos are not only showcasing women, but also influencing the women watching these videos. When focusing on the context of storytelling, there are certain methods vloggers use to keep their audience interested. In scientific terms, vloggers use a participation framework and language that reflects audience design through things like terms of address, questions, and directed language (Frobenius 2014). This basically means that vloggers produce their speech to create an environment where the viewers aren’t actually speaking but are still a part of the conversation. In a sense, there is an audience involvement resembling a face-to-face conversation, and more specifically, a storytelling conversation. When a vlogger tells a story, there is a lack of turn taking since the viewer isn’t actually able to reply, which is what frames the way vloggers speak (Frobenius 2014). If a viewer frequents a certain vlogger’s video, then a community-based knowledge system is formed, which results in a mutual understanding on many topics. In this situation, the fanbase becomes acclimated to the vlogger’s language variants, and may adapt these variants into their own speech. This is how we came to the conclusion that the linguistic variants displayed by these content creators must influence the conversation styles of young adults. Our study will help reveal the impact vloggers (strangers who feel like virtual friends) have on their audience. We were most interested in observing the speech trends in the young women of today. To do this, we needed to evaluate the effects the internet has on not only stylistic and linguistic changes among a specific population, including its reach, speed, and popularity, but also on the use of these variants in people’s lives outside of the internet.

How did we do it?

We took inspiration from an interesting prior study – a content analysis of vloggers, and audience response to these vloggers (Molyneaux et al. 2009). In this study, the subjects, who were all in their teens to 20s, were given a demographic background check and shown a few vlogs. A survey was then conducted to investigate insight into the influence of gender. We employed their survey method to collect and analyze data on the variable of speech variants. Our survey was distributed it to our peers online (through email, Facebook, and other social media), polling students on their personal demographic information as well as their entertainment preferences online. We also provided key phrases that exemplified the linguistic variants we investigated and asked that they self-report how they first came across the phrases, and how frequently they estimate their use weekly. In order to make our survey interesting, the second portion included fun stills and clips of the variants we were investigating in order to ensure the self-reported data was an accurate reflection of the variants (this way participants would be aware of which motions and phrases we were explicitly asking about, and could then compare to their own behaviors). We expected that the responses to the second part of our survey would garner more explicit and clear results exemplifying the variants in question. Here are some of the variants that we observed in vloggers, and used in our survey:

1. 1. Okay so…

1. 2. You know?

1. 3. Hand gestures

1. 4. The ‘welp’ expression

1. 5. Repeating words

1. 6. Pause and awkward smile 

What did we find?

Utilizing the data from our survey, we were able to generate the following figures that summarize results to key questions. As seen in Figure 1, all participants indicated they tell stories at least once a week, with over 60% reporting casual story-telling on a daily basis. This information is useful as it ensures the data we collected is actually applicable to our study. 

Additionally, Figure 2 also helps validate our results as it shows that all participants watch YouTube videos at least once a week. These statistics are crucial for our analysis as they confirm that students who responded to our survey are representative of our target population.

Some of the most used variants, as indicated by survey participants, include hand gestures, saying “you know” and “okay so,” using the ‘welp’ expression, and smiling awkwardly for effect. The total percent usage of each variant is summarized in Figure 3. 

In an effort to acquire more reliable data (as self-reported information can easily be inaccurate or falsified), we also analyzed recordings of people telling stories offline as well. We counted all instances in which the variants in question appeared in these exchanges and generated a frequency chart, as seen in Figure 4. This analysis revealed that the most commonly utilized variants offline include hand gestures, making faces, repetition, and smiling awkwardly for effect. 

A comparison of the trends observed from survey responses and the video recordings shows that overall, the most popular and widely-used variants are saying key phrases such as “okay so” and “you know,” giving an awkward smile, and using hand gestures and facial expressions. 

The big picture

The apparent growth of YouTube’s content creators and their following base led to our hypothesis that linguistic variants are used by YouTubers to draw and influence their audience. Our results support our hypothesis that linguistic features associated with popular YouTubers are utilized by our sample in their own personal conversations. First, the sample data indicates that almost the entirety of respondents (94.5%) engage in storytelling at least multiple times a week. Building on this, the entire sample watches YouTube at least once a week. The combination of these results imply that our sample was a strong representation of YouTube viewers, such that the respondents are evidently influenced to some degree by YouTube content. This combination of results also aligns with Zappavigna’s assertions (2012) regarding the substantial influence of internet content in our lives, since our sample’s frequency of watching YouTube is roughly the same as the frequency of their story-telling. In other words, our respondents spend almost as much time being influenced by YouTube content as they do influencing others with their own personal content.

Our results continue to illustrate the interaction between YouTube viewing and personal story-telling, and show that respondents often use linguistic variants associated with vloggers. The usage of each linguistic variant across our sample is at least 25%, with usage rates above 50% for seven out of the 12 variants. When compared to the frequency in which variants were used in the casual conversation recordings, each variant was used at least once, with three variants appearing at least 10 times. In sum, people do not just use vlogger linguistic variants in their own personal conversations, they use them frequently.

Some limitations to the conclusions of our study are based on potential ambiguity of our survey questions and influences from our respondents’ social backgrounds. The first question about story-telling frequency may be confusing to respondents, causing some to indicate more or less than they actually tell stories. This may explain the group of respondents that only tell stories once a week, or the group that tells stories multiple times a day. Additionally, some respondents may identify with social groups that frequently use linguistic variants that happen to overlap with the variants used by vloggers. For instance, our sample consisted of UCLA students, and UCLA language culture may have similar variant usage to vloggers. In this case, respondents are influenced by at least two separate entities, but the amount of influence from each entity varies. That is not to say that those respondents are not influenced by vloggers, but that the influence is possibly less than the results suggest. Overall, the limitations of our study may show that the influence and draw of vloggers’ linguistic variants are less than the results suggest, though still present.

Future research on this topic could focus on the influence of vlogger language variants on those who identify as men. A study focused on the differences in vlogger influence based on gender may reveal some factors that gender identity have on certain linguistic variant uses. Another topic that could be explored further is the growing influence of vloggers relative to traditional celebrities (e.g., actors, musicians, models). Influence on viewers may be stronger with vloggers due to relatability, but the extent of this effect should be investigated. Finally, the ability to which a popular vlogger can use their influence to market products may reveal that vloggers have more responsibility than they think.

 

Bibliography

Bestdressed, director. My last weekend in LA…. YouTube, 24 Oct. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcJEMAOJA4&t=53s.

Center for Health and Safety Culture. (2011, January). Validity of Self-Report Survey Data. Retrieved from https://www.minnetonkaschools.org/uploaded/Documents/Dist/Tonka_Cares/Reveal_What%27s_Real/Validity_of_Self_Report.pdf

Frobenius, Maximiliane. “Audience Design in Monologues: How Vloggers Involve Their Viewers.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 72, 2014, pp. 59–72., doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.008.

Frobenius, Maximiliane. “Beginning a Monologue: The Opening Sequence of Video Blogs.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 43, no. 3, 2011, pp. 814–827., doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.018.

Molyneaux, H., O’Donnell, S and Gibson, K. (2009). YouTube Vlogs: An Analysis of the Gender Divide.

Ur Mom Ashley, director. Forcing a GLOW UP the Day before College (FAST Transformation). YouTube, 8 Sept. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YCM-Gj1b4w&t=50s.

Ur Mom Ashley, director. My first week of college VLOG *junior year*. YouTube, 13 Sept. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZr4k_Z6APw&t=124s.

Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web.

Introduction

We have all been interrupted by others while saying something. Being interrupted is a universal experience, but have you ever thought of what factors affect how we interrupt? In the following, our team will present to you in what ways dynamics in negotiations can be reflected through the use of interruptions under familial and political contexts. 

By comparing U.S. politicians to American families of Asian descent, we will first examine which type of interruptions (power, rapport, or neutral) people prefer using in these two situations respectively. We assume family members may mainly use interruptions to build rapport, while politicians interrupt for the purpose of exerting power. 

After taking a closer look at the composition of each interruption, we are going to analyze the cultural background of why some interruptions emerge in the conversations to search for potential generalizations about the connection between contexts and the use of interruptions. We hope that by considering the influence of individualistic/collectivistic culture (American vs countries like Korea and the Philippines), we can understand why certain interruptions occur. 

Background information

Conversation is usually organized in a way, such that only one person speaks at a time. Speakers take turns talking, and use a wide range of linguistic cues indicating the end of their turn (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974 p.670). However, norms of turn-taking can be violated when a speaker “starts up in the midst of another’s turn at talk[ing]” as well as “disturbs his/her finishing” (Jefferson 1984 p.16). 

Interruption in turn-taking has been regarded as a sign of possessing power over others in past literature. Natale et al.’s discovery in 1979 shows the more confident a person is about his/her position with regard to the conversation partner(s), the higher the rate of successful interruptions he/she imposes (p.874). Besides displaying social power, interruptions can serve other functions. According to Goldberg’s study (1990), interruptions are not only acts of conflict but also acts of collaboration. On some occasions, the speaker interrupts so as to demonstrate that he/she understands the conversation and relates to his/her listeners. Yet, there are interruptions that neither aim at building rapport nor displaying power — neutral instances where “repair[s], repeat[s], or clarification[s] of the prior, interrupted utterance” take place (p.888). Building on Goldberg’s findings (i.e., how to identify three main types of interruption), our team finds the relationship between interruptions and contexts is worth further discussion.

Another question we would like to answer is why certain groups use certain interruptions. Our potential explanation will be based on the collectivism-individualism theoretical framework. The framework classifies cultures into two categories: individualist (e.g., the U.S.) and collectivist (e.g., China, Korea, and the Philippines). The former prioritizes individual attainment above team goals, creating a sense of competition among people. In collectivist cultures, on the other hand, people place more focus on achieving group goals than satisfying personal desires (Triandis and Gelfand 2012 p.513). 

Indeed, some research provides empirical evidence to support the idea that culture plays a significant role in determining the occurrence of interruptions. For instance, Li mentioned in his study that Americans use more intrusive interruptions in conversations than Japanese (2001 p.261-262). We therefore aim to extend people’s understanding of the relationship between contexts and interruptions by applying the cultural theory of individualism and collectivism. 

Methods

Investigating interruptions within a familial situation, two of our group members voice-recorded a couple of (around 5-10) negotiations in casual dialogue between the parent and children in those families. In both the Filipino and Korean households, our group members left their recording devices in the rooms where each family negotiated about their certain topics. The members then uploaded the recordings they collected to Youtube and pinpointed the exact times that interruptions occurred in the conversations. They transcribed all the labeled interruptions (as well as a few utterances and spoken sentences before/after the interruption) for future analysis. 

In order to explore interruptions within a political environment, we analyze the 2016 presidential debates. This debate featured Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The debates’ transcripts that we based on and added more details into can be found here.

With the data we gathered, we identified all interruptions occurring in the negotiation. Then, we categorized them into three types of interruptions: power, rapport, or neutral interruptions. To see whether or not our hypotheses could be justified, we not only counted the frequency of each type of interruption but also a conversational analysis that examines the influence of culture and context on the use of interruptions in a negotiation.

Results

 

Figure 1 reflects the percentage of each interruption type (i.e., power, neutral, and rapport) occurring in political and familial contexts. We discovered 50 interruptions within the families and throughout the debates from the political aspect respectively. Among the politicians, 68% of interruptions is used to exert power while 32% of them belongs to neutral interruption; in the extreme, no rapport interruption could be found. Unexpectedly, the most frequently-appeared type of interruption in familial context is power (25 out of 50). Rapport interruption only accounts for 14% of the total interruptions in familiar negotiation, and the percentage of neutral interruption exceeds it by 22%.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most significant difference between political and familial negotiation is the frequency of rapport interruptions. As you can see in Table 1, the data that we have collected from the political dialogue only had power and neutral interruptions. It means rapport interruption did not occur in the political negotiation. On the other hand, we can find all three types of interruptions in the familial negotiation. We initially assumed that family members mainly use interruptions to build rapport; meanwhile, politicians interrupt for the purpose of exerting power. Yet, now it seems like what we assumed is not the case in reality.

Discussion and Conclusions

As mentioned earlier, we discovered that family members and politicians interrupt for the purpose of exerting power most times. But unlike politicians, family members occasionally use interruptions to build rapport. So why is there such a difference? Let’s try to answer this question by first looking at this excerpt adapted from one of the audio recordings that depicts a negotiation among family members:

1  S:   I don’t drink mom (0.8) or smoke (0.3) so you’re good.

2  S:   I don’t do neither of those

3  S:   I know better than that

4  M:   We don’t:::

5  D:       [Can I chaperone mom?=

6  M:   =Eh that’s if you go with him

7  D:                         [Yes, I will go with him

8  S:   (1.0) To drop me off (chuckles)

9  D:   I, I

10 M:      [we::ll

11 D:           [I:: will spy on him 

12 M:                  [then you’re gonna leave him

13 D:   No I won’t leave him

In this negotiation, the 17 year-old boy (S) is trying to convince his “strict” mom (M) to let him go to a birthday party. The mother is hesitant and skeptical of letting her son go due to the family’s upbringing and cultural background. When the mother is giving a lecture to the son, the daughter (D) interrupts the mother and offered if she could chaperone her brother to the party. Her suggestion created a middle ground between the worried mother and the son who wants to go to the party. What the daughter did is an example of rapport interruption in familial context.

But in political context, none of the interrupters empathizes with the interruptee and/or the speech content. Before explaining why this is the case, take a look at the following excerpt (a modified version of the original transcript):

1  W:   Hold on [hold on wait Hold on, folks.

2  T:           [nono that

3  W:   Because we… this is going to end up getting out of control
        Let’s (0.2) try to keep it quiet so 

4  W:   (0.5) for the candidates and for the American people=

5  T:   =So just to finish on the borde[rs

6  W:                                  [Yes

7  T:   She wants open borders (0.2) People are going to pour into 
        our country 

8  T:   People are going to come in from Syria. She wants 550 
        percent more people than Barack 

9  T:   <Obama, and he has> thousands and thousands of people
        They have no idea where they come from...

This excerpt shows an example of neutral interruption in political context. The moderator Wallace (W) acted as a participant who held a neutral stance, and tried not to let candidates like Trump (T) move away from the topic throughout the negotiations. We all noticed that the role that Wallace played in the negotiation is moderator, a role that requires him to adopt a neutral stance.

Not only was the stance that he can adopt restricted but also his use of interruption types was limited to neutral and power. On the contrary, the daughter in the familial context was inclined to maintain harmonious relationship among the two participant who were in a direct confrontation. Being a mediator, she could pick side and choose to help the son to persuade the mother for letting him to go to the party. Factors like this play a significant role in creating situations where certain type of interruption happens (more frequently) in one context but not the other.

Moreover, the fact of being raised in a collectivistic culture does not affect a person using more rapport or neutral interruptions than power interruptions. Rather than cultural reasons, other factors (such as carrying out self-perceived role in a negotiation) contributed much more to the occurrence of our findings. Therefore, in the future, if we are given a chance to continue our study, we will identify more factors behind the way of how political and familial contexts affect speakers’ preference in which type of interruptions they use. And hopefully, we will seek another theoretical framework to explain all the differences we discover.

References

Clayman, S., & Heritage, J. (2002). The News Interview: Journalists Public Figures on the Air, doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511613623. Cambridge University Press.

Clayman, S., & Heritage, J. (2010). Talk-in-Action: Identities, Interaction and Institutions. Journal of Language and Politics, 320.

Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 87-100. doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145828

Goldberg, J. A. (1990). Interrupting the discourse on interruptions. Journal of Pragmatics, 883–903.

Jefferson, G. (1984). Notes on some orderliness of overlap onset. Discourse analysis and natural rhetoric, 11- 38.

Li, H. (2001). Cooperative and Intrusive Interruptions in Inter and Intracultural Dyadic Discourse. University of Northern British Columbia. 20. 259-284. doi: 10.1177/0261927X01020003001

Natale. M., Entin, E., & Jaffe, J. (1979). Vocal interruptions in dyadic communication as a function of speech and social anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 875. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.37.6.865

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn‐taking in conversation. Language, 50, 696 – 735. doi: 10.17323/1728-192X-2015-1-142-202

Schegloff, E. (2001). Accounts of Conduct in Interaction: Interruption, Overlap, and Turn-Taking, 287-320. doi: 10.1007/0-387-36274-6_15

Schenkein, J. (1978). Identity Negotiations in Conversation. 57-78. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-623550-0.50009-4.

Triandis, H., & Gelfand, Michele J. (2012). A theory of individualism and collectivism. Handbook of theories of social psychology, Vol. 2 498-520. doi: 10.4135/9781446249222.n51

Zimmerman, D., & West, C. (1975). Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation, 211. doi: 10.1075/cilt.125.12zim