Complaints about technology as a resource for identity-work

Abstract

This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a ‘bemoaning’ speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies ‘mean’ to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe. (Complaints, accounts, stance, technology, discourse analysis, identity)*

Perpetuating ableist constructions of the “real world” through complaints about new communication technologies

“…As Thurlow (2006) stated about computer-mediated discourse (CMD), 'CMD offers itself as a focal point-an idée fixe-for a range of public discourses about other issues ' (p. 689). Complaints are one discourse type that may be viewed as innocuous or even meaningless, but can actually be used for positive self-presentational social functions (see Robles and Parks, 2019); however, as we will show, they can also have a more insidious and negative side. People's complaints about changing technological environments can discursively accomplish construction of an individual or social group's moral superiority and perpetuate beliefs about how technology can and should be used, reflecting cultural biases about diverse values and ways of being (Carbaugh, 2007;Sillars & Gronbeck, 2001).…”

Uncertain Times: Linguistic Anthropology in 2019

“…Questions of new media's impact on genres of parenting are explored by Smith and Barad (2018), who consider the tribulations of Peruvian parents who, seeing the negative effects of gaming on boys, attempt to disrupt their friendship networks as a means to control their socialization. At the same time, Rea (2019) considers different chronotopic figures of South Korean gamers that have arisen in light of the infrastructural changes to Internet speeds, while Robles and Parks (2019) closely analyze focus‐group and interview participants to consider the complaint genre that has arisen about new technologies—no doubt one in which we have all engaged.…”