Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness A Post-digital Ethnography

This book advocates a new post-digital linguistic ethnography approach to unpacking mobile communication and enabling a more informed understanding of individuals’ communicative practices in cities today. Drawing on data from a group of ordinary working people, multilingual individuals from superdiverse cities across the United Kingdom, the volume brings observations from this data together to form a new concept of ‘resourcefulness’ as a means of explaining the emergent sense of agency individuals develop towards remediating existing forms of technology in their everyday lives. The book in turn establishes the notion of the ‘networked individual’ by way of demonstrating the ways in which communicative practices cross spaces and platforms. Further chapters detail examples to highlight resourcefulness at work in enabling more efficient business communication, routes to self-expression and the creation and development of social support systems, while a concluding chapter looks at both the limitations and possibilities of resourcefulness and directions for future research. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and media and communication studies.

Introduction Post-digital ethnography and the networked individual Mobile resourcefulness Polymedia repertoires Sharing in mobile conversations Conclusion

Caroline Tagg is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK. Her research into language and digital technologies rests on the understanding that digital communication practices are deeply embedded into individuals’ wider lives. She is author of Taking Offence on Social Media (with Philip Seargeant and Amy Aisha Brown, 2017) and Message and Medium (with Mel Evans, 2020). Agnieszka Lyons is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research employs multimodal and mediated discourse analytic as well as ethnographic approaches to explore the discursive construction of embodied identity in polycentric migrant environments. She has published on issues related to migration and mobility in Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics and Social Semiotics, among others.