Language and identity in the digital age

Abstract

Technology in the twenty-first century has transformed the world in multiple, exciting and unanticipated ways. Facilitating the rapid flow of information, capital and services across the globe, it has dramatically revolutionised the way we work, communicate and interact with one another. More affordable travel, mobile communication devices, social media and online connectivity have enabled new patterns of movement and forms of social participation. In this digitally connected world, people move fluidly across online and offline spaces, blurring the boundaries of time and space and transforming notions of public and private domains (Gee and Hayes 2011). The concept of space has become more embedded in people’s imaginations, leading to new identifications, allegiances and relations (Warriner 2007). As technology continues to permeate all aspects of human life and transform the social order, it has impacted on language and identity in significant ways. The digital revolution has transformed language by triggering an explosion of new vocabularies, genres and styles and by reshaping literacy practices. By developing a mode of communication where writing approximates speaking, instant messaging (IM) and texting have facilitated the production of new words and styles that bridge the interactive nature of speech and the documental capacity of writing (Warschauer and Matuchniak 2010). The constant evolution of new media has also spurred the growth of multimodal affordances, enabling people to assemble texts that integrate language with visual, aural, gestural and spatial modes. Constructing new spaces of language acquisition and socialisation (Ito et al. 2010; Lam 2013), social media capabilities have facilitated cross-language interaction (Luke 2003; Warschauer 2009) and fertilised transcultural and translingual practices (Canagarajah 2013). Online users are not only able to produce and share texts with greater ease, but also get immediate feedback to remediate these texts, making people active creators in a society of reflexive co-construction (Cope and Kalantzis 2010). By transforming language, the digital also transforms identity. Weedon (1987: 21) asserts that language is ‘the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity is constructed’. Identity is constituted in and through language (Norton 2013), and we use language to articulate ideas and to represent ourselves and our social relations. Drawing on Weedon, Norton (ibid.: 4) definesidentity as ‘the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relation is constructed across time and space and how the person understands possibilities for the future’. Because a person’s sense of self and relation to the world continuously shifts, identity is dynamic, multiple and even contradictory. As the digital provides multiple spaces where language is used in different ways, learners are able to move across online and offline realities with greater fluidity and perform multiple identities. As the digital reshapes language and identity, language learning also continues to evolve. Learners participate in the new spaces of socialisation afforded by the digital and continue to discover and engage in new ways of representing themselves through language and other modalities. For Norton (2013: 4), when learners speak, they not only exchange information, but also reorganise ‘a sense of who they are and how they relate to the world’. As they navigate multiple contexts of power, they perform different identities and continually negotiate a legitimate space where they can claim the right to speak. At the turn of the century, Castells (2001: 3) forewarned however that the inability to participate fully in technological networks can lead to ‘one of the most damaging forms of exclusion’. How learners are able to gain digital access and the literacies necessary to assert their place in an increasingly technologised world is thus an important concern for language teachers, researchers and scholars. As a social practice, learning is implicated in relations of power (Norton 2013), and the classroom, together with other learning contexts, can reproduce the inequalities of larger, institutional structures. How learners position themselves and are positioned by others shapes their investment in the language and literacy practices of these diverse contexts. Recognising how technology has dramatically transformed language, identity and learning in the twenty-first century, this chapter aims to outline the seminal ideas and issues in language and identity research that have emerged from a perpetually shifting digital landscape. This chapter seeks to address the following questions:• How have new linguistic structures evolved from digitally mediated communication? • What new mindsets, literacies and strategies do learners need to develop as they navigatethese spaces? • What new means of representing and performing identities have become possible becauseof the digital? • How does technology develop new modes of inclusion and exclusion for learners of differ-ent social positions?