Remediating Conference Speeches: the Role of Authoriality in Live Twitter Entries

This paper focuses on new forms of rewriting and remediation that have been introduced within the context of new media and have now become extremely popular. Specifically, it investigates the practice of live-tweeting, i.e. engaging “on Twitter for a continuous period of time with a sequence of focused Tweets”(<https://dev.twitter.com/media/live-tweeting>), which has become increasingly common thanks to the rapid spread of Internet and mobile phone-mediated communication. Significant public speaking events such as, for examples, political speeches, business presentations and conferences are now almost routinely live-tweeted about. In particular, the latter have been attracting more and more “live-tweeterers” as microblogging provides an excellent tool for the diffusion of content: this “enabled backchannel” (Ross et al. 2011) gives all Internet users the possibility of virtually attending academic talks and presentations. One of the reasons underlying the quick growth of conference live-tweeting has to do with the fact that it boosts interaction and allows users to attract public attention as well as gain new followers, which means that this practice can be turned into a tool of academic self-promotion (Ebner / Rheinahart 2009). For this to happen, however, conference tweeterers have to be able to post entries in which their own academic identity emerges and not solely the voice of the speaker whose presentation they are reporting about. As a matter of fact, live-tweeterers do not normally limit themselves to simply reproducing the presentation they are listening to so that it can be broken down into language “chunks” that can fit the tweet format (140 characters), but they also re-write the text of conference speeches and present it to a different, “networked” audience (Boyd et al. 2010). That is why it can therefore be affirmed that the original wording of presentations undergoes a process of reformulation and remediation. In live-tweets the voices of conference speakers and conference live-tweeterers are combined with the result that the concept of authoriality becomes very difficult to define. As a matter of fact, differently from what happens in a conference presentation where speakers’ authoriality emerges in the speech clearly and unchallenged, in conference live-tweets it is oftentimes hard to establish the participation role of the tweeterer. This study aims at identifying the ways in which the identity and authoriality of conference speakers and live-tweeterers are blended together in tweets. In order to tackle this issue I collected a corpus of about 2,000 tweets posted in the course of eight Applied Linguistics Conferences held in 2012. The collected tweets were investigated with the help of the methodological tools provided by Goffman’s Frame Analysis. As suggested by many studies on Internet genres (cf., among others, Coupland N./Coupland J. 2000; Marcoccia 2004; Garzone 2007; Aarsand 2008) Goffmanian taxonomies can only be applied to Internet- and mobile phone-based communication to a certain degree, so this study also intends to verify whether new, ad hoc categories should replace older ones or if the latter can still be legitimately utilized, as long as they undergo a process of adaptation to the Internet environment. The Goffmanian concepts of animator, author and principal are applied to conference live-tweets to examine how these roles are performed and what language resources can be associated with them. The second and final part of the study focuses instead on the discursive construction of the textual self of the conference live-tweeterer as well as on those devices that Goffman considers “the interesting and analytically relevant point” of the speaking event and that allow presenters to alter their alignment with the audience (i.e. non-literal meanings, text brackets and parenthetical remarks). References Aarsand, André P. 2008. Frame Switches and Identity Performances: Alternating between Online and Offline. Text & Talk. 28 (2), 147-165. Boyd, Danah / Golder, Scott / Lotan, Gilad. 2010. Tweet Tweet Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences HICSS-43, IEEE: Kauai, HI. <http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf>. Ross, Claire/ Terras, Melissa / Warwick, Claire / Welsh, Anne 2011. Pointless Babble or Enabled Backchannel: Conference Use of Twitter by Digital Humanists. 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