[Xmca-l] Re: Vygotsky and texting

[Glassman, Michael]

Hi Greg,

In my current reading abbreviation is central to Vygotsky’s argument. Inner speech is pure predicate (at least mature and much of the time). Written speech is heavily contextualized and would not trust abbreviation. Verbal speech is abbreviated because we are with the interlocutors, sharing the experience. We talked about written abbreviations in our class. Generally, pre-social media it was only done if it was preceded by a close social relationship with a verbal history.

Thanks why this is so interesting.

Michael

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> On Behalf Of Greg Thompson
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2019 11:26 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Vygotsky and texting

McCulloch, Gretchen (2019). “Emoji and Other Internet Gestures.” In Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. New York: Riverhead Books.
NB: I'm not so sure that abbreviation hasn't always been around in writing too.
-greg
p.s., do you think the fact of abbreviation in writing makes much difference to Vygotsky's argument?


On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 7:55 AM Glassman, Michael <glassman.13@osu.edu<mailto:glassman.13@osu.edu>> wrote:
So I am reading Vygotsky with a class. The first time I am reading his work in a few years. We are starting with chapter 7 of thinking and speech, thought and word because – well I wanted to and I am the instructor (can’t beat the perqs). I run across something really interesting that would not have had much meaning pre-Internet – well meaning (or sense, I don’t know), but not as much as today. He is talking about the different forms of communication and he talks about how we abbreviate in verbal speech (our we move inner speech out to social communication) but not really in written speech. This was mostly true the first time I read it. But this time it made me think of blogging and especially micro-blogging. We tend to abbreviate all the time, more than in normal verbal communication, but it is written communication. In class we of course discussed space limitations but it seems more than that. Somebody brought up the example of sub-Reddits some of which have a great deal of abbreviated communication. We also got in to a big discussion of emojis. I mean people use them, but really why do we have them and why do people use them so easily (they were originally organic and then tech companies began standardizing them. It made me wonder, is micro-blogging and blogging actually a new and different form of mediated communication, different from both verbal and formal written communication.  Does anybody know of any work on this. I am having my students do their blog assignments this week using abbreviations and emojis and memes.  I am really interested to see what happens.  Anybody know of any research on this?  Have any thoughts? (I would do an emoji to end but I am really bad at them. But I will say I was pwnd by my students in class when discussing this).

Michael




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Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
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