Talking Text and Talking Back: ‘‘My BFF Jill’’ from Boob Tube to YouTube GrahamM. Jones Bambi B. Schieffelin
by Graham M. Jones & Bambi B. Schieffelin
[2009. Jones, Graham M., and Bambi B. Schieffelin. “Talking Text and Talking Back: ‘My BFF Jill’ from Boob Tube to YouTube.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (4): 1050–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01481.x. ]
Points & Quotes:
“In this article, we discuss these commercials as metalinguistic meditations and examine the further metalinguistic commentary their widespread circulation—in the media, on the Internet, and people’s talk—has occasioned. In particular, we examine these videos have elicited since migrating from television—the ‘‘boob tube’’—to YouTube, a website whose commenting feature has allowed texting aficionados to voice their metalinguistic views, at times in direct confrontation with language prescriptivists.” (1051)
“Most positive assessments of the commercials in the media and online emphasize how ‘‘funny’’ they are, leading us to analyze them here as instances of speech play” […]
Generally speaking, humor depends on the performative violation of expectations or conventions, often providing a publicly acceptable occasion for expressing latent tensions, frustrations, or fears (Beeman, 1981, 2000). In this sense, jokes often vehicle serious meanings or perform serious functions […]
On one hand, proponents of what Cameron (1995) calls ‘‘verbal hygiene’’ can point to the commercials as evidence of the danger teenage texting poses to Standard English. From this perspective, text-like speech is a kind of verbal contamination, resembling Mary Douglas’s (2002, pp. 44–5) famous description of dirt as ‘‘matter out of place.’’ […]
On the other hand, the positive reactions of young fans to the commercials suggest a different way of conceptualizing the same scenes of linguistic category confusion—in terms of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. (Bakhtin 1984, p. 10)
(1052-1053)
The Commercials
“the commercials paint a somewhat equivocal picture. They imagine the texting craze as a source of verbal anarchy with the potential to radically transform language and undermine communication between parents and children. At the same time, they clearly delight in the generativity of texting conventions and the infectious new forms of speech play that texting enables.” (1058)
“The phrase ‘‘IDK, my BFF Jill?’’ achieved a kind of free-standing iconicity, circulating widely in young people’s talk. The availability of the commercials for viewing on video sharing sites such as YouTube encouraged open-ended, asynchronous, discussion about their form, content, and linguistic implications in online forums.” (1058)
Just as news programs … “decontextualized” and “recontextualized (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) materials from the ‘‘Beth Ann’’ ads to construct narratives about the evolving language of texting, other sources indicate that young people across the United States extracted and performed key phrases from the commercial in everyday communication, establishing different “relations of intertextuality” (Spitulnik, 1997, p. 162). In her study of the circulation of the reception of mass media in Zambia, Spitulnik explores the way “phrases and discourse styles are extracted from radio broadcasting then recycled and reanimated in everyday usage, outside of the contexts of radio listening.” Spitulnik focuses on the way “detachable” elements of media discourse provide iconic cultural reference points that accompany the formation of speech community. (1059)
YouTube
“Commercials recorded from television by individual fans have been a popular upload item, making advertising itself an object of what Henry Jenkins (2006, 2008) calls the new “participatory culture” of fandom.” […]
but it is in the written comments about the three commercials themselves where the most dynamic metalinguistic dialogue unfolds.” (1061)
“We consider the YouTube dialogues about the emergent language of texting especially significant given Herring’s assertion that “mainstream media commentators interpret new technologies and youth practices in normative, moral terms, a process that reinscribes youth as ‘other,’” (2008, p. 71) and that young people have proportionally”‘fewer rights and opportunities to participate in public discourse” (p. 76) about their own practices.” (1062)
“Through the examination of a recent convergence between advertising, technology, and slang, we explore a timeless relationship fundamental to human language: the nexus of poetic language and metalanguage. In his famous distinction between the six dimensions and corresponding functions of language, Jakobson (1985) defines a verbal message that calls attention to its own construction as poetic, and a verbal message about language itself as metalingual (i.e., metalinguistic). […]
The original AT&T commercials are brilliantly crafted artifacts of speech play that assemble elements of everyday language in highly artificial but eminently entertaining verbal performances. These performances, in turn, provide not only resources for further verbal play, but also an impetus for metalinguistic commentary and assessment. In short, we argue that there is a direct, if not causal, connection between the ads’ poetic deployment of texting language and the critical discussions about texting language they have occasioned.” (1074-1075)
“It is clear that young people are actively consuming and producing YouTube content. What is particularly impressive to us is the attentiveness to language, both as a medium for verbal play and as stylistic marker of group membership subject to careful scrutiny, evident in the dialogues around the commercials. This leads us to conclude that the verbal ingenuity associated with texting — and talking text — should be viewed not as evidence of linguistic decline, but rather in terms of the reflexive, metalinguistic, sophistication it necessarily presupposes and potentially promotes.” (1075)
Terms:
speech play— ‘‘the manipulation of elements and components of language in relation to one another, in relation to the social and cultural contexts of language use, and against the backdrop of other verbal possibilities in which it is not foregrounded.’’ (Sherzer 2002, p. 1)
Abstract:
Exploring the close relationship between poetic language and metalanguage, this article analyzes both a series of 2007-8 U.S. TV ads that humorously deploy the language of text messaging, and the subsequent debates about the linguistic status of texting that they occasioned. We explore the ambivalence of commercials that at once resonate with fears of messaging slang as a verbal contagion and luxuriate in the playful inversion of standard language hierarchies. The commercials were invoked by monologic mainstream media as evidence of language decay, but their circulation on YouTube invited dialogic metalinguistic discussions, in which young people and texting proponents could share the floor with adults and language prescriptivists. We examine some of the themes that emerge in the commentary YouTubers have posted about these ads, and discuss the style of that commentary as itself significant.
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