Abstract
The growing body of pragmatics research on smartphone communication has primarily focussed on intentionally-conveyed propositional information. Building on his earlier cyberpragmatics framework together with Relevance Theory (RT), in this volume Yus adds the communication of emotions as an essential element to analyse smartphone-based, app-mediated discourses, developing a unique model for understanding how the interfaces of different apps and users’ personal attributes influence smartphone communication.
The book comprises 13 chapters. The introductory Chapter 1 illustrates the ubiquity of smartphone communication and outlines the main aims of the book: first, to describe the issues involved in production, communication and interpretation of discourse on smartphones, and to provide a theoretical, (cyber)pragmatic account of the kinds of interaction that are sustained through apps; and, second, to explain why people find smartphone communication so interesting and even prefer it to face-to-face interaction. Much information on smartphones, which is typed and devoid of adequate contextual information, requires greater effort from users to achieve the intended interpretation compared to face-to-face interaction. Yus argues that contextual constraints and non-propositional effects are key to the understanding of these cyber discourses.
The first part provides the theoretical foundation for the whole book. Chapter 2 presents the basic ideas of RT, Internet pragmatics and cyberpragmatics. While inferential gap-filling activities occur in both face-to-face interaction and smartphone communication, studies on the latter should highlight the ‘altered or blurred interactions in virtual medium’ (p. 23) of the Internet. Chapter 3 proposes that non-propositional information such as users’ feelings, emotions and affects in human communication are essential to understanding the appeal of smartphone communication. Chapter 4 delineates the interface usability in smartphone interaction, namely ‘the extent to which a product can be used by specific users to achieve specific goal with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specific context of use’ (p. 43). The author argues that both user-centred and interface-centred contextual constraints should be taken into consideration when analysing interface usability.
The second part of the book focuses on various forms of smartphone communication. Chapter 5 is devoted to the interpretation of text messages, claiming that users complement plain text through discursive strategies that convey further contextual information such as, including text alteration and visual support such as emojis. Chapter 6 discusses synchronous calls, highlighting the importance of their unique mutual manifestness: as smartphone communications blur public and private spaces, users can establish mutuality by phone calls almost anytime, anywhere. Chapter 7 revolves around new digital narratives on the Internet. By examining the discourse of users’ storytelling or experience-sharing through smartphones, the author argues that users increasingly resort to apps to construct identities or to please viewers with the aim of being relevant.
Part 3 of the book, including Chapters 8 and 9, discusses the specific qualities of images, selfies, videos and animations. The author not only introduces the explicit and implicit meaning smartphone images can convey, but also proposes a dual model (first-order and second-order) of video-centred interactions: the former refers to the initial act of video communication, while the latter takes place when users share or forward the video and trigger further text-based comments and interactions.
Part 4 is concerned with the interrelation between online and offline environments in smartphone-mediated interactions. Taking Twitch as an example, Chapter 10 discusses different kinds of interactions (streamer/audience, audience/streamer and audience/audience interactions) that take place on livestreaming platforms, in which both streamers and viewers tend to use multimodal approaches to build a feeling of community membership. By discussing locative apps on smartphones such as Facebook check-ins, Chapter 11 shows how they generate (ir)relevance to users through connection between the physical and the virtual, and discusses motives for sharing location – self-disclosure and self-management being among the most important. Chapter 12 focuses on social networking apps on smartphones. The author examines their specificity and proposes that identity shaping, self-expression, social bonding and searching for audience’ validation are the main reasons for users’ engagement in smartphone social networking.
Chapter 13 sums up the book with a proposal for 17 additional issues for future cyberpragmatic research, including the pragmatics of virtual agents, big data and their impact on users’ interactions, online polylogues, cross-cultural issues on smartphone communication, etc. Theoretically guided by RT and cyberpragmatics, the book manages to demonstrate the uniqueness of smartphone users’ interaction by addressing both contextual constraints and non-propositional effects in cyber discourses. This is a complement to previous studies which mostly focus on the linguistic aspect of cyber communication. In addition, considering that the convergence of private and public spaces in cyber discourses not only enables users to interact co-presently and almost simultaneously through various apps, but also challenges the etiquette required for face-to-face communication, the book’s adoption of the relevance-theoretic notion of ‘mutual manifestness’ well explains why people prefer to establish mutuality and construct their identities in cyber discourses.
The book also has some shortcomings. For instance, in Chapter 1, the author assumes that in the interface between online and offline environments, users are expected to remain the ‘same unique person’ (p. 8) in both environments. However, in cyber space, users may expect to gain (ir)relevance by constructing some identity they actually do not possess. The possibility is actually more in line with the aim of the book to explain why users gravitate toward smartphone communication rather than the face-to-face one. Nonetheless, the book offers thought-provoking findings on how to interpret smartphone communication from both the linguistics dimensions and the user-related dimensions. It will serve as an important reference for readers interested in pragmatics, discourse analysis and digital communication studies.