Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 168

Vanessa Isenmann:
My emphasis was not on the communication form, but on the informal con-
texts in which communication in these spaces takes place. We do not have a
sizeable amount of research on informal communication contexts in Iceland
yet. This is why I tried to make clear in the title and throughout the thesis
that my research tries to bridge this gap. I think that the informality aspect
plays an important role with regard to everyday language use, so I wanted
to highlight that. The term “informal” thus also refers to the general audi-
ence that is addressed in social media. For example, in status updates on
Facebook people do not communicate with institutions but with people
they know and with whom they have more informal relationships. This sort
of communication can be contrasted to more formal contexts such as com-
municating with the authorities or a superior. Also, the term “informal” is
used in the sense of “non-standardized” as opposed to other written lan-
guage examples, such as for example in mass media outlets.

I also want to address the topic of how we prefix or label the objects we study
— in this case media. I think labelling is important because we as researchers in
this way participate in discursively constructing how we and other people per-
ceive the objects we study. Throughout the dissertation Vanessa is not com-
pletely coherent when prefixing the term “media”. The dissertation uses the
terms “digital” (2), “social” (24) and “new” (6) when describing media (and tech-
nology). On page 27, Vanessa writes a bit about newness: “New literacies are
new in two senses. Firstly, they are new in the sense of technology”. I would like
to challenge Vanessa’s argumentation a bit, by asking the following two ques-
tions:
For how long time can we carry on calling Facebook new? (I know that it was
new once, but still today?)
If you should pick one coherent terminology/label as an appropriate prefix
for “media”, what would it be? And why?

Vanessa Isenmann:
I would not call Facebook “new” in the sense that it is something we have
not seen before or that it has been around for only a short time. But the lit-
eracy practices applied on Facebook and other social media sites are still
quite new. At least they are new in comparison to the literacy practices peo-
ple apply in offline settings.

In my thesis I have used the terms “new media” and “digital media” inter-
changeably even though I am not too fond of the former term myself. I used
“new media“, however, to emphasize the contrast between media based on
Andreas Candefors Stæhr168