Let’s get phygital

Abstract

This paper considers the interplay of physical and digital landscaping in the Mission District (‘the Mission’), a gentrified neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Aligned with recent work on affect and people’s mediations of the linguistic landscape (Wee, 2016; Banda & Jimaima, 2015), I examine how the Mission is filtered – literally and figuratively – in a corpus of 16,756 Instagram posts. Comparing these digital remediated productions of place to the physical landscape, I demonstrate how both are structured semiotically along exclusionary lines. Contrary to the democratic and inclusive mythology of digital / social media, I show how users’ self-positionings and elitist stancetaking (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009; Mapes, forthcoming) effectively reinscribe privilege and reiterate gentrification of the Mission. As mining of ‘big data’ becomes increasingly valued as empirically ‘objective’ information, my analysis demonstrates geotagged content should not be viewed as a static indicator, but as a subjective, dynamic and – at times – problematic process.

A layered investigation of Chinese in the linguistic landscape

“…By setting out to discover new semiotic resources and their innovative uses, as van Leeuwen (2005) recommends, future study could include social media sites; the analysis of a large collection of hashtags, for example, concerning a particular sign or urban setting, could help to reveal who has interests in the contested landscape (see Lyons, 2019). Further research into reader's perception of public signage (Gorter, 2013;Shohamy, 2012) could bring together the interpretations of signs by people with different characteristics.…”

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…She presents detailed maps of the language distribution across individual signs for some streets in San Francisco (Lyons, 2020: 22-23). In another study of linguistic landscape and social media, in particular Instagram, Lyons (2017Lyons ( , 2019 has included detailed maps of topics and of the most frequent terms. Alvanides (2017, 2019) combined mapping and advanced statistical models.…”