Language and New Media

Not content with just using his mobile phone to text and take selfies, Miles Klee put it to work tracking his sex life. One of the apps he used was called Love Tracker, which includes a function that allows users to measure the duration of their lovemaking. ‘Here’s the thing, though,’ he writes, ‘…figuring out … More Mediation, Ontology and Sex

In the lecture last week, when asked if your critical essay has to deal with ‘language’ I said something like ‘yes, but I take a pretty broad view of language’. I wasn’t just trying to be cute. In the past several decades linguists have become increasingly aware that language is more than just words. It … More Creepy Multimodality

If you’re like me, you sometimes get friend requests from people that you don’t know on Facebook or other social media platforms, people whom you may even expect are not really ‘people’ What the f**k is Oldman Oldfish? A cat? A fish? A bot? But there are also friend requests that are much more convincing, … More Who the f**k is Oldman Oldfish?

The point I was trying to make in my lecture about emojis is that if we treat them  the as words in the conventional sense we sort of miss the point. The important thing about emojis is not there semantic meaning but their pragmatic function, the way they help us to create the metamessages in … More Emoji compatibility

I need to start off by admitting that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But sometime last year or the year before I noticed that a large proportion of the digital communication my niece and nephew were engaging in consisted of the exchange of animated gifs (which, by the way, is pronounced  /dʒɪf/  … More Gif Wars

I never thought much about reading as a physical activity until I was diagnosed with cervical radiculopathy, a narrowing of the vertebrae in my neck which impinges on the nerves leading to my hands, making it painful to type or to hold a book (one of the reasons this post is a bit late). The … More Reading as a Physical Activity

I have a confession. I’m addicted to Donald Trump. I go to bed every night thinking about him, and every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is check my phone to find out what he tweeted when I was asleep. My days are punctuated with little bursts of outrage caused by … More Addicted to Trump

Most of us have spent a lot of time in the course of our lives staring at progress bars like this one, whether we are waiting for some content to download, waiting for an app to install, or waiting for some online process to be completed. Most of us probably take the ‘meaning’ of progress … More Who is mediating whom?

This is the excerpt for your very first post. … More Welcome