Internet-mediated Communication Research Articles

Pragmatic Meaning of Cigarette-Related Hoax on Social Media: Cyber-Pragmatic Study

The relationship between hoaxes and the internet is really intricate and impactful. There are varieties of hoaxes spread in the internet. With their accelerated spread, ease of creation, virality, anonymity and pseudomity, hoaxes have easily provoked the public. As we know, hoaxes are described in such detail even the intrinsic function of language is not properly used. The language which is supposed to deliver ideas and communicate has been used improperly by irresponsible people who are tyring to deceive or cause concern and fear. Hence, this research aims at increasing the awarness of hoaxes on social media especially the hoax of cigarette related news by understanding the pragmatic meaning of cigarette hoaxes spread in internet. By implementing the cyber-pragmatics perspective, the writer tried to describe the virtual external context in order to find the meaning of the hoax utterances. Cyberpragmatics is an analysis of Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics (Yus, 2011). The data were taken from social media, such as facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok and online news by implementing the note taking technique. All data which have been gathered were then analyzed by distribution analysis method with forward expansion technique (Rahardi, 2020). From the analysis of the data, there are 8 meaning of cigarette –related hoaxes found as follow; 1. influencing ; 2. defaming; 3. satirizing; 4. propagandizing; 5. questioning; 6. spreading commotion; 7. validating and 8. harrassing. By this research, public is expected to increase the critical awareness toward hoaxes spread in the internet so that they just don’t accept all the information without any consideration.

Representation of Medical Content in Online Discourse

Introduction. The article discusses issues of representing medical information in online communities. Much attention is paid to modern areas of research on network discourse. Particular emphasis is paid to studies related to the problems of the terminology of the area. In this regard, the article presents different points of view on the typology and classification of texts in Internet-mediated communication. The area of interest for this study is medical content presented in Internet-mediated communication. The work specifies the concept of “medical content”. Methodology and sources. A study corpus is formed in accordance with the aim – to analyse the features of presenting medical information in English-language online discourse; methods of analysis are determined depending on the aim. The following criteria are used to analyse the study corpus material: pragmatic, media, structural-semantic and stylistic-linguistic parameters. The research corpus includes texts published in English, presented on the Reddit website within communities discussing issues of healthy lifestyle, health care, and pathological conditions. Results and discussion. Based on pragmatic parameters (type of addressee/type of addresser) and the topic of published information, the research material can be conditionally divided into several groups, the description of each group is given in the paper. The results obtained allow suggesting that medical content within the online community is aimed at two main population groups - healthcare professionals and lay people who are interested in issues related to the medical area. The medical information is presented based on a pragmatic and thematic principle. In terms of pragmatics, the main functions of presenting medical information are informative, ascertaining, phatic, expressive. Conclusion. The content of the research corpus consists of verbal texts with varying degrees of creolization – zero, partial, complete. They are characterised by all the features of the oral and written language typical of Internet-mediated communication.

Conventional metaphorical scenarios of humor in Romanian

Abstract The way humorous verbal communication is construed in a linguaculture can be analyzed within the framework of cognitive metaphor theory and its more discursive and cultural developments. Cognitive/conceptual metaphors are instrumental for framing humor as a communicative form which goes beyond mere aesthetic experience. This article focuses on the conceptualization of verbal forms of humor in Romanian. The examples are retrieved mainly from internet mediated communication, backed by corpus analysis, and compared to older literary examples (19th–early 20th century). The examples illustrate the stability of various metaphorical scenarios in the Romanian linguaculture. The analysis reveals that several conventional metaphorical scenarios exist in parallel, displaying what are the functions of humor in an emic perspective. In the case of the Romanian examples, the list comprises the disciplinary, aesthetic, and therapeutic functions. The main metaphorical scenarios are subsumed to (physical) aggression, food, and health domains. The scenarios associated with each domain emphasize a certain function: for example, the disciplinary function of humor relates to physical aggression, while the aesthetic function relates to food. However, the conventional scenarios also show combinations between these functions.

VERBAL DEVIATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

The harnessing development of technology has drastically modified languages that people are using in all corners of the world. It is out of the question that world languages are constantly evolving to meet the needs and requirements of the society. Nowadays social media platforms have undoubtedly become an indispensable part of daily communication. Undeniably various platforms of social media attract millions of people with different ethnic, linguistic, racial and religious backgrounds to interact and take part in various discussions in blogs, microblogs, chat groups, discussion boards, forums, etc. Over the last 20 years Internet mediated communication has generated many grammatical structures and lexical items that need to be studied and redefined. With the advent of new technologies new linguistic deviations have emerged in social media platforms. It is no wonder that scientists are holding opposing thoughts and conflicting viewpoints of the same or similar phenomena. Being the most prevalent language of social media and having the highest frequency of usage on the Internet domain the English language has underwent large-scale changes and alternations. These non-standard forms are noted in all levels of language. Over the time linguistic deviations have the tendency to become standard forms. The latter may lead the English language to changes. The current article discusses the marked variations of English verbal system in contemporary English social media platforms.

Politeness and Impoliteness Strategies in Lecturer-Student Communication Within Cyberpragmatic Chats

This qualitative research on Cyberpragmatic attempts to explore the application of politeness and impoliteness principles in student-lecturer internet-mediated communication in English and Indonesian languages at two faculties of Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Salatiga. The native speakers' perceptions of those strategies and principles as applied in the online chatroom were also elicited to confirm the descriptive analysis of the utterances. Pragmatic data were taken, categorized, and selected from Whatsapp conversation and email correspondence screenshots between lecturers and students in eight (8) online English Language classes and six (6) classes on Ushul Fiqh subjects at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Salatiga. Additionally, as demonstrated in the screenshots, an online questionnaire was used to elicit data on students' and lecturers' perspectives on the cyberpragmatic activities. The descriptive analysis shows that the students considered the principles of politeness as a prominent aspect of their communicative actions and managed to appropriately applied it in their cyberpragmatic activities. Additional pragmatic features of religious expressions were also used to amplify the politeness effect. Nevertheless, there were some cases where impoliteness principles were used by the students, regardless of their awareness of their pragmatic consequences. The acceptability judgement questionnaire confirmed the level of politeness and impoliteness strategies previously described. Consequently, future research may benefit from this study by exploring other aspects of cyberpragmatics such as ethnicity, gender, and other socio-political aspects, from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Pragmatic Analysis of Impoliteness in the Context of Online Business

Impoliteness is an important research issue in pragmatics. The popularity and development of computer-mediated communication (CMC) or internet-mediated communication (IMC) makes the impoliteness phenomena in the online context play an increasingly important role in the pragmatic studies. However, the previous pragmatic studies on impoliteness phenomena mainly focus on traditional issues, and there is still a large room for research on impoliteness phenomena in the context of online business. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the adoption of impoliteness strategies by subjects of commercial activities in the context of online business and its characteristics, in order to provide a new way for the contemporary study of impoliteness phenomena. Using the dialogue between merchants and consumers on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao as linguistic data and adopting the qualitative analysis method, this paper analyzes the selection of impoliteness strategies and its characteristics in online business context based on Culpeper and Bousfield’s theories of impoliteness. It was found that the choice of impoliteness strategies in online business contexts is diverse, including direct impoliteness, positive impoliteness (negation of the other party and intentional non-cooperation; insults), negative impoliteness (threats), mock politeness, and interruption/avoidance; in addition, speakers also adopt non-verbal impoliteness strategies, such as repeated use of punctuation marks and emojis, with the former predominating with punctuation marks that express strong emotions, such as exclamation marks. Based on the analysis of linguistic data above, this paper proposes that there emerge three obvious characteristics of impoliteness in online business contexts: the asynchronous nature of time and space exacerbates impoliteness; the virtual nature of tone reinforces impoliteness; and the conversational subjects tend to use multiple impoliteness strategies, including the repeated use of the same impoliteness strategy and the combination of multiple impoliteness strategies. This study sheds new light on the study of impoliteness in online contexts, enriches the study of impoliteness phenomena and further promotes the development of internet pragmatics.

Фактор речевого контекста при определении прагматической направленности вербализованной агрессии в интернет-опосредованной коммуникации

Research on aggressive speech behavior, realized through Internet mediated communication, faces with the problem of highlighting messages that are truly aggressive, that means a person has intention of doing harm to other person (in case of written communication on social network sites, it is psychological harm). The task of identifying a real aggressor turns even more difficult once a response to speech provocation is presented in form of responsive aggression. In this case the respondent's intention differs from the desire to do harm. Since speech provocation and speech response are given in the same form, from a bystander's perspective, both actions are perceived as aggressive. It may seem that the attacker and the victim alternately play the role of the aggressor. To solve the problem of identifying the true aggressor by speech production, it becomes significant to reconstruct the framework of a particular communicative situation. The present research project focuses on the distinction between verbalization of offensive (provocative) and defensive (responsive) types of aggression, which makes it possible to fix the scheme of interaction between interlocutors while switching the roles of the aggressor and the victim. In the course of an experiment on written verbalization of aggression realized on the social network site VKontakte, based on perceptual method and linguistic pragmatics approaches, 20 respondents evaluate stimuli material (10 samples in Russian language without textual context and with pre- and post-textual contexts). It was revealed that the narrow context surrounding a speech message is significant in defining the aggressor: namely, the presence of textual pre- and post-contexts in the form of messages provoking the verbalization of defensive aggression.

Linguistic Capacity as a Factor of Communicative Behavior in the Internet Space: the Findings of Experimental Research

The paper focuses on the potential of linguistic capacity as one of the key adaptive mechanisms of a communicant in the Internet-mediated communication. The methodological platform of the research is the autopoiesis theory developed by Chilean scientists U. Maturana and Fr. Varela which allows to model communication as an interaction between a communicant and his/her niche. It seems that the process of adaptation, its orientation and nature are primarily determined by the adaptive mechanisms that a communicant employs such as linguistic capacity. Receiving stimuli from the niche, a communicant chooses a response strategy in terms of the hierarchy of factors, and then uses one or more adaptive mechanisms to implement it. Linguistic capacity of a communicant plays a significant role both in the process of perception and understanding of the original message, and in the formulation of a response. Within this format, it seems relevant to study the features of communicants’ behavior with a certain level of linguistic capacity and identify plausible patterns of their communicative behavior. This paper puts forward a hypothesis about the influence of linguistic capacity on the perception and further communicants’ behavior, dwells on an experimental research aimed at identifying the specifics of the influence of linguistic capacity on communicative behavior. The participants of this experimental study are Russian-speaking bilinguals and native English-speakers. The study has unveiled some features of the influence of the level of linguistic capacity on the perception and understanding of the original message as well as the choice of a strategy for a response. The revealed discrepancies appear to be culturally-based which confirms the hypothesis and acts as a basis for further investigation.

Facts Do Care about Your Feelings: The “Assertive Turn” in Emergent Attributes of the Contemporary U.S. Public Sphere

After the January 6th, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, it seemed clear that the public sphere in the U.S. was being challenged by political extremists. Yet, existing public sphere normative theories provide unsatisfying tools for explaining why the riots occurred. Participants in the contemporary U.S. public sphere do not seem to recognize the legitimacy of their political opponents, and there is an increasing turn toward raw assertion instead of rational deliberation. In this essay, we discuss these shortcomings, focusing on how internet-mediated communication makes basic assumptions about legitimacy and rationality untenable. We settle on the concept of an “assertive turn” in the public sphere and analyze how anti-rationalism is becoming dominant in political discourse. We then argue for a scholarly reckoning with the social reality of 21st century U.S. politics—mainly that there are significant gaps in normative theory when it comes to addressing the assertive turn in the U.S. public sphere.

PHATIC TALKS OF JAVANESE WOMEN IN INTERNET-MEDIATED-COMMUNICATION: A CYBERPRAGMATICS PERSPECTIVE

Javanese women perform peculiar strategies in conducting phatic talks in internet-mediated communication (IMC). The Javanese cultural norm boundaries influence the strategies of phatic speech act and their politeness strategies in IMC. Therefore, the types of phatic talks and the politeness strategies attached to each type of phatic talk are interesting to explore. The source of data for this qualitative research was the five WhatsApp Group (WAG). The data were 252 phatic talks taken from the IMC virtual texts of Javanese women. The respondents were 66 Javanese women aged between 20-50 who are members of the WAGs. The observation method is applied to collect the data. The virtual texts with the virtual tokens that occurred were transcribed for textual analysis. The Cyberpragmatics approach along with the Javanese politeness maxims was implemented for data analysis. The types of phatic talks found in IMC are classified into greetings, congratulations, compliments, condolences, supports, and jokes. Politeness strategies performed by Javanese women in IMC have specific characteristics based on the traditional Javanese politeness maxims of Kurmat (Respect), Tepa Selira (Tolerance), Andhap Asor (Humility), Empan Papan (Self-Awareness), and Grapyak (Friendliness). The IMC phatic talks among Javanese women are the strategy to maintain a social bond. To this extent, the phatic talks are not only a strategy of ice-breaking but also an expression of personality identification of Javanese women who ought to be friendly and caring in all circumstances. Therefore, the phatic talks in IMC might not only a means for social networking but also a strategy to preserve the cultural identity of Javanese women.

Social Interactivity in Live Video Experiences Reduces Loneliness.

BackgroundLoneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one's quality of life. However, positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video communication platforms (eg Zoom and Twitch) may offer an engaging and accessible medium to deliver such social experiences to people at scale. Despite these platforms' widespread use, there is a lack of research into how their socially interactive elements affect users' feelings of loneliness and connection.ObjectiveWe aimed to experimentally evaluate whether socially interactivity in live video experience improves loneliness-related outcomes.Materials and MethodsWe recruited participants from an online survey recruitment platform and assigned half to participate in a socially interactive live video experience with 6–12 strangers and the other half to a non-interactive control experience that was designed to be identical in every way but not socially interactive. Participants completed several baseline self-report measures of psychosocial wellbeing, participated in the hour-long video experience (an entertaining astronomy lesson), and then completed some baseline measures again. Four weeks later, we followed up with participants to evaluate their change in trait loneliness since baseline. We Pre-registered our hypotheses and analysis plan and provide our data, analysis code, and study materials online.ResultsTwo hundred and forty-nine participants completed the initial study and met inclusion criteria, 199 of whom also completed the 4-week follow-up. Consistent with our predictions, we found that directly after the more socially interactive experience, participants' feelings of connectedness increased more (p < 0.001), positive affect increased more (p = 0.002), feelings of loneliness decreased more (p < 0.001), social threat decreased more (p = 0.006), and negative affect decreased more (p = 0.003) than they did after the less interactive experience. However, change in trait loneliness between baseline and 4 weeks later did not differ between conditions (p = 0.953).ConclusionsIncluding socially interactive components in live video experiences can improve loneliness-related psychosocial outcomes for a short time. Future work should explore leveraging these benefits toward longer-term prosociality. Future work can also identify if the effects we observed generalize across different populations and kinds of online experiences.

Thank you, sorry and please: English politeness markers in Polish

The aim of this study is to analyse the use of the English politeness markers thankyou,sorryand pleasein Polish. My initial hypothesis was that the politeness markers have already been incorporated into the mental lexicon of Polish speakers, and are thus understood and accepted by them, but they do not have the prospect of replacing their Polish equivalents because they lack the necessary pragmatic force. Previ-ous studies (Terkourafi 2011; Peterson &amp; Vaattovaara 2014) show that pragmatic borrowings are unlikely to do so. However, this corpus study finds a context in which a borrowing is used increasingly, namely sorryin the collocation with ale (ʻbutʼ). It seems to have started replacing its Polish equivalents in this context, as it constitutes 25% of all collocations of apologetic behaviour with alein the National Corpus of Polish. However, the majority of the occurrences of the analysed politeness markers in the corpus are restricted to Internet-mediated communication.

Conceptualizing an inquiry-based lingua-cultural learning through telecollaborative exchanges.

In recent years, telecollaboration has been gaining popularity among scholars, teachers, and students engaged in foreign language education because it facilitates the use of Internet-mediated communication tools to connect language and culture learners in geographically distant locations. Telecollaboration, as currently viewed in academic and classroom settings, places greater emphasis on the development of learners' intercultural communicative competence. The problem with this approach is that this process may not consider the possibility that learners engaged in online intercultural exchanges could have limited or no knowledge about certain aspects of their own lingua-culture. We argue that, for learners to effectively share lingua-cultural knowledge with their online peers abroad, there must be a framework that supports the construction of learners' own intra-cultural knowledge to provide a solid foundation for intercultural learning and communication. In this paper, we develop an inquiry-based model of telecollaboration incorporating both inquiry and online exchange based on the inquiry cycle, which includes engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation. This paper builds a case for the application of inquiry-based telecollaboration in a real classroom environment, which could not only help learners obtain and eventually share more authentic, deeper knowledge about their lingua-culture, but also promote informed intercultural exchange.

Conceptualizing an inquiry-based lingua-cultural learning through telecollaborative exchanges

In recent years, telecollaboration has been gaining popularity among scholars, teachers, and students engaged in foreign language education because it facilitates the use of Internet-mediated communication tools to connect language and culture learners in geographically distant locations. Telecollaboration, as currently viewed in academic and classroom settings, places greater emphasis on the development of learners’ intercultural communicative competence. The problem with this approach is that this process may not consider the possibility that learners engaged in online intercultural exchanges could have limited or no knowledge about certain aspects of their own lingua-culture. We argue that, for learners to effectively share lingua-cultural knowledge with their online peers abroad, there must be a framework that supports the construction of learners’ own intra-cultural knowledge to provide a solid foundation for intercultural learning and communication. In this paper, we develop an inquiry-based model of telecollaboration incorporating both inquiry and online exchange based on the inquiry cycle, which includes engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation. This paper builds a case for the application of inquiry-based telecollaboration in a real classroom environment, which could not only help learners obtain and eventually share more authentic, deeper knowledge about their lingua-culture, but also promote informed intercultural exchange.

Conceptualizing an inquiry-based lingua-cultural learning through telecollaborative exchanges.

In recent years, telecollaboration has been gaining popularity among scholars, teachers, and students engaged in foreign language education because it facilitates the use of Internet-mediated communication tools to connect language and culture learners in geographically distant locations. Telecollaboration, as currently viewed in academic and classroom settings, places greater emphasis on the development of learners' intercultural communicative competence. The problem with this approach is that this process may not consider the possibility that learners engaged in online intercultural exchanges could have limited or no knowledge about certain aspects of their own lingua-culture. We argue that, for learners to effectively share lingua-cultural knowledge with their online peers abroad, there must be a framework that supports the construction of learners' own intra-cultural knowledge to provide a solid foundation for intercultural learning and communication. In this paper, we develop an inquiry-based model of telecollaboration incorporating both inquiry and online exchange based on the inquiry cycle, which includes engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation. This paper builds a case for the application of inquiry-based telecollaboration in a real classroom environment, which could not only help learners obtain and eventually share more authentic, deeper knowledge about their lingua-culture, but also promote informed intercultural exchange.

What drives global science? The four competing narratives

ABSTRACT Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledge flows and collegial collaboration and has partial autonomy. Four different interpretive frameworks (narratives) have evolved to explain global science: science as an expanding cross-border network; science as an arms race between competing nations; science as a global market of competing ‘World-Class Universities’; and science as a centre-periphery hierarchy in which emerging countries are permanently constrained by Euro-American dominance. The paper reviews each narrative in relation to the literature, especially in scientometrics, and empirical tendencies in global science, tracked in secondary data derived from bibliometric collections. While each narrative contains at least a grain of truth, each also conflicts with the others and each is radically insufficient. A better explanation of the drivers of global science combines (1) flat open networked relations with (2) the inequalities and closures shaped by global hegemony, arbitrarily modified by (3) national governments and specific resources.

Features of Text Research in the Age of Internet-Mediated Communication

The current paper is focused on the research of Internet-mediated text as a special kind of oral-written discourse. The Internet has spawned an entirely new form of communication at the intersection of its conventional forms – a "written spoken language" which differs both from standard written speech and standard oral speech. Social network discourse as a result of Internet-mediated communication is characterized by a set of variant and invariant parameters that appear in the verbal and paraverbal characteristics of the digitally processed written text. The text as a product of the intellectual activity of a particular person is a complex structural formation with the laws of relations. The transition to a digital personality significantly affected the process of transmission and formation of the final digital product: text – intertext – quasi-text as a product of multi-stage processing of the initial version of the text. The main factors that characterize social network discourse presented in the article are reflected in the specifics of the texts generated in its process and which are considered as the result of the newest type of Internet-mediated communication. The article presents a paradigm change of linguistic expertology in relation to digital content, considers traditional and the newest approaches to estimating the key linguistic parameters that would allow to solve profiling issues on the basis of Russian speech.

Emotions of COVID-19: Content Analysis of Self-Reported Information Using Artificial Intelligence.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted human societies around the world. This public health emergency was followed by a significant loss of human life; the ensuing social restrictions led to loss of employment, lack of interactions, and burgeoning psychological distress. As physical distancing regulations were introduced to manage outbreaks, individuals, groups, and communities engaged extensively on social media to express their thoughts and emotions. This internet-mediated communication of self-reported information encapsulates the emotional health and mental well-being of all individuals impacted by the pandemic.ObjectiveThis research aims to investigate the human emotions related to the COVID-19 pandemic expressed on social media over time, using an artificial intelligence (AI) framework.MethodsOur study explores emotion classifications, intensities, transitions, and profiles, as well as alignment to key themes and topics, across the four stages of the pandemic: declaration of a global health crisis (ie, prepandemic), the first lockdown, easing of restrictions, and the second lockdown. This study employs an AI framework comprised of natural language processing, word embeddings, Markov models, and the growing self-organizing map algorithm, which are collectively used to investigate social media conversations. The investigation was carried out using 73,000 public Twitter conversations posted by users in Australia from January to September 2020.ResultsThe outcomes of this study enabled us to analyze and visualize different emotions and related concerns that were expressed and reflected on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, which could be used to gain insights into citizens’ mental health. First, the topic analysis showed the diverse as well as common concerns people had expressed during the four stages of the pandemic. It was noted that personal-level concerns expressed on social media had escalated to broader concerns over time. Second, the emotion intensity and emotion state transitions showed that fear and sadness emotions were more prominently expressed at first; however, emotions transitioned into anger and disgust over time. Negative emotions, except for sadness, were significantly higher (P<.05) in the second lockdown, showing increased frustration. Temporal emotion analysis was conducted by modeling the emotion state changes across the four stages of the pandemic, which demonstrated how different emotions emerged and shifted over time. Third, the concerns expressed by social media users were categorized into profiles, where differences could be seen between the first and second lockdown profiles.ConclusionsThis study showed that the diverse emotions and concerns that were expressed and recorded on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic reflected the mental health of the general public. While this study established the use of social media to discover informed insights during a time when physical communication was impossible, the outcomes could also contribute toward postpandemic recovery and understanding psychological impact via emotion changes, and they could potentially inform health care decision making. This study exploited AI and social media to enhance our understanding of human behaviors in global emergencies, which could lead to improved planning and policy making for future crises.

The Role Of Discourse As A Phenomenon Of Language In Studying Internet-Mediated Communication

This article is dedicated to the role of discourse and discourse analysis in the process of the linguistic study of Internet-mediated communication. The article analyses the meaning of the concept of "discourse" in linguistics and modern approaches to this phenomenon. The main properties of the Internet discourse and the boundaries of its discursive space are described.

Possibilities and pitfalls? Moderate drinking and alcohol abstinence at home since the COVID-19 lockdown

The global ‘lockdowns’ and social distancing measures triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought about unprecedented social changes, including the sudden, temporary closure of licensed venues and significant modifications to leisure and drinking practices. In this piece, we argue that these changes invite researchers to consider the short and longer-term consequences in terms of continuities and changes to the practices and symbolism of alcohol consumption both within and beyond domestic spaces. We do this by drawing on illustrations from our emergent qualitative research involving internet-mediated semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 20 participants from the UK (aged 26–65) concerning experiences of drinking in and beyond ‘lockdown’. In sharing these early findings, we hope to highlight themes relevant to understanding drinking behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic and to stimulate dialogue for immediate research priorities in this area. Key topic areas in our data appear to concern; variability in heavy/moderate/light/non-drinking practices while drinking at home, lockdown as an opportunity to reassess relationships with alcohol, and the symbolic role of alcohol in internet-mediated communications and interactions. Longstanding policymaker and practitioner concerns with managing public drinking and public order may have been unsettled by a growth in home-based drinking, although, as we argue, such changes were in motion before the global pandemic. We propose that a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities the pandemic presents for (re)negotiating relationships with alcohol may offer wider lessons around how individuals and communities might be supported via innovative policy measures to change their relationships with alcohol both during and beyond lockdown.