Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Side 174

likes on her Facebook timeline. A few days later, Valdís posts again in
Icelandic thanking everybody for all the congratulations, likes, and phone
calls she received. While she receives more likes and congratulatory com-
ments on this post, a non-Icelandic contact comments and asks for clarifica-
tion about what had happened. The comment says something like “You
should explain this in English, because it looks like you are up to something
pretty cool”. Valdís’ language choice in this post is indirectly criticized as it
leaves a big part of the audience out while non-Icelandic contacts have
noticed that the event was a rather important one in Valdís’ life.

The next point I will raise is related to Vanessa’s use of the notion of “context
collapse”. On page 138, Vanessa writes:
As described in section 3.5, context collapse occurs wherever members of
formerly different social contexts come together. A user’s SNS network can
bring together family members, friends, colleagues, and close acquaintances
who all have different expectations as to what is genuine and appropriate
behavior for the user. Hence, context collapse causes one of the main com-
municative challenges in SNS. (emphasis added, ACS)
I want to call attention to the description of context collapse as one of the “main
communicative challenges” on social networking sites. I am aware that other
scholars share this view, but what I want to address is that this description (in my
opinion) does not chime with your data and analysis. To me the analyses of audi-
ence design and language choice, describe language users who are more than
competent in maneuvering between different (imagined) audiences on Facebook
and capable of dealing with the linguistic diversity of their Facebook friends.
Thus, in my opinion, your analyses actually form the basis for a more critical
view of the notion of “context collapse”, which you do not exploit in the disser-
tation. Based on this I ask the following questions:
Where in your data do you see context collapse as a communicative challenge?
And would you be willing to explore a more critical approach to this notion
in future work?

Vanessa Isenmann:
In my understanding context collapse describes the situation in which the
users of SNS find themselves, that is the different audiences that they must
satisfy simultaneously. Context collapse, in my opinion, has nothing to do
with whether or not users know how to navigate those contexts and
whether or not their strategies are successful. It is the situation itself, the
fact that the users’ networks consist of members from formerly separate
contexts and the fact that the entire network can view a user’s status update.
Andreas Candefors Stæhr174