Indirectness in the Age of Globalization: A Social Network Analysis

Clearly, a lot more empirical work is needed to test and further elaborate this hypothesis with new empirical evidence specifically from the point of view of globalization. An interesting question in this regard is whether the hypothesis presented here can help explain prevailing modes of directness or indirectness found in digitally mediated communication. Contrary to the received view that digitally mediated communication (DMC) is characterized by anonymity and hence limited mutual availability of common ground between interlocutors, it is probably more accurate to acknowledge that common ground in DMC can be domain specific and is often interest-driven, as shared among, for instance, members of a fraternity, leisure or professional group: members of an online group of amateur car mechanics or baby-wearing Baby-wearing refers to carrying a baby in a sling or other fabric carrier attached to one's body. moms can share a lot of common ground specifically about the activity that brings them together, while coming from different walks of life and being different in many other respects. How does that affect the emergence of default indirectness online and our capability for inference in online environments more generally? A reasonable prediction here is that the existence of domain-specific common ground will enhance chances of default indirectness and our ability for more accurate inference pertaining to that domain only, while if we shift to a new domain the interactional advantages afforded by this common ground are lost. This is a prediction that can be empirically tested in future research.

The analysis presented here also has some implications for theory building which are worth highlighting. Commenting on their corpus findings from 19^th c. British English, Culpeper and Demmen (2011: 51) argue that: “the individualistic emphasis of Brown and Levinson is not simply a synchronic cross-cultural peculiarity of English but a diachronic cross-cultural peculiarity within the history of English”. Their comment is reminiscent of an earlier remark by Goffman (1971), who noted that:

If we examine what it is one participant is ready to see that other participants might read into a situation and what it is that will cause him to provide ritual remedies of various sorts [...], then we find ourselves directed back again to the core moral traditions of Western culture. And since remedial ritual is a constant feature of public life, occurring among all the citizenry in all the social situations, we must see that the historical center and the contemporary periphery are linked more closely than anyone these days seems to want to credit. (Goffman 1971: 184--5)

The lesson to be learnt from all this is that the surrounding socio-historical context of our own research inevitably influences the theories we end up building: like language use itself, theory-building is also situated. Brown and Levinson's theory, which has been criticized for its emphasis on face as an individual's wants, was rooted in a Foucauldian way in the cultures of its proponents. This is not to deny that they also analyzed cultures other than their own but simply to highlight that in doing so they analyzed them through the lens of their own cultures rather than through the lenses of those cultures themselves. In our quest for theoretical generality, our best line of defense is to analyze empirical data from different parts of the world in close conjunction with their socio-historical contexts as a way of widening our theoretical toolkits and the frameworks we can use them to build. If our goal is to study human nature in all its possible expressions, emic explanatory analyses by analysts who are themselves practitioners of the practices they analyze are sorely needed.

Acknowledgements:

This article materialized out of plenary presentations at the conferences on “Globalizing sociolinguistics 2” (Leiden University, December 2018) and “Multilingual Urban Space (Moscow Higher School of Economics, April 2019). I would like to thank Dick Smakman for the original invitation to develop this talk and the audiences on these occasions, as well as the two anonymous referees, for their insightful questions. All remaining errors are my own.

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