Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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“like” and “share” Zuckerberg’s update are in fact Facebook employees 

deliberately attempting to increase its visibility. We can guess, but we simply do 

not know. What we do know for sure, however, is that as a consequence of a first 

level of uptake – people liking and sharing the post – there are further and 

further levels of uptake, as other users witness this liking and sharing activity 

(some of it may already be showing in the figures here), and consequently make 

inferences about the meaning of the post itself, but also about the person(s) in 

their network who reacted to it. Further layers of contextualisation are thus 

added to the original post which may have an influence on the uptake by others. 

Different social media platforms offer similar activity types: YouTube users can 

“view” videos and “like” them, as well as adding “comments” to them and adding 

videos to a profile list of preferences; Twitter users can create “hashtags” (a form 

of metadata-based “findability” of text, Zappavigna 2011: 792) and “retweet” 

tweets from within their network; similar operations are possible on Instagram 

as well as on most local or regional social media platforms available throughout 

the world. Each time, we see that specific activities are made available for the 

rapid “viral” spread of particular signs, while the actual content or formal 

properties of those signs do not seem to prevail as criteria for sharing, at least 

not when these properties are understood as denotational-semantic or aesthetic 

in the Kantian sense. We shall elaborate this below. The ace of virality after the 

first decade of the 21

st

 century is undoubtedly the South-Korean music video 

called Gangnam Style, performed by an artist called Psy: Gangnam Style was 

posted on YouTube on 15 July, 2012, and had been viewed 2,065552172 times 

on 18 August 2014. Competent as well as lay observers appear to agree that the 

phenomenal virality of Gangnam Style was not due to the intrinsic qualities, 

musical, choreographic or otherwise, of the video. The hype was driven by 

entirely different forces. 

The point to all of this however, is that we see a communicative phenomenon of 

astonishing speed and scope: large numbers of people react on a message by 

expressing their “liking” and by judging it relevant enough to “share” it with huge 

numbers of “friends” within their social media community. At the same time, in 

spite of Zuckerberg’s message being textual, it was not read in the common sense 

understanding of this term. The “like” and “share” reactions, consequently, refer 

to another kind of decoding and understanding than the ones we conventionally 

use in text and discourse analysis – “meaning” as an outcome of denotational-

textual decoding is not at stake here, and so the “liking” and “sharing” is best 

seen as “phatic” in the terms discussed above. Yet, these phatic activities appear 

to have extraordinary importance for those who perform them, as “firsting” and 

“astroturfing” practices illustrate: people on social media find it very important 

to be involved in “virality”. People find it important to be part of a group that 

“likes” and “shares” items posted by others. It is impossible to know – certainly 

in the case of Zuckerberg – who the members of this group effectively are (this is 

the problem of scope, and we shall return to it), but this ignorance of identities of 

group members does seem to matter less than the expression of membership by 

means of phatic “likes” and “shares”. What happens here is “communion” in the 

sense of Malinowski: identity statements expressing, pragmatically and 

metapragmatically, membership of some group. Such groups are not held 

together by high levels of awareness and knowledge of deeply shared values and 

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functions – the classical community of Parsonian sociology – but by loose bonds 

of shared, even if superficial interest or “ambient affiliation” in Zappavigna’s 

terms (2011: 801), enabled by technological features of social media affording 

forms of searchability and findability of “like”-minded people. 

We need to be more specific though, and return to our Facebook example. 

“Liking” is an identity statement directly oriented towards the author of the 

update – Zuckerberg – and indirectly inscribing oneself into the community of 

those who “like” Zuckerberg, as well as indirectly flagging something to one’s 

own community of Facebook “friends” (who can monitor activities performed 

within the community). Patricia Lange, thus, qualifies such responsive uptake 

activities (“viewing” YouTube videos in her case) as forms of “self-

interpellation”: people express a judgment that they themselves belong to the 

intended audiences of a message or sign (2009: 71). “Sharing”, by contrast, 

recontextualizes and directly reorients this statement towards one’s own 

community, triggering another phase in a process of viral circulation, part of 

which can – but must not – involve real “reading” of the text. Also, “liking” is a 

responsive uptake to someone else’s activity while “sharing” is the initiation of 

another activity directed at another (segment of a) community. So, while both 

activities share important dimensions of phaticity with each other, important 

differences also occur. These distinctions, as noted, do not affect the fundamental 

nature of the interaction between actors and signs – “sharing”, as we have seen, 

does not presuppose careful reading of the text – but there are differences in 

agency and activity type.  

This is important to note, because existing definitions of virality would 

emphasize the absence of significant change in the circulation of the sign. Limor 

Shifman (2011: 190), for instance, emphasizes the absence of significant change 

to the sign itself to distinguish virality from “memicity”: memes, as opposed to 

viral signs, would involve changes to the sign itself. We shall see in a moment 

that this distinction is only valid when one focuses on a superficial inspection of 

the formal properties of signs. When one takes social semiotic activities as one’s 

benchmark, however, things become more complicated and more intriguing. We 

have seen that significant distinctions apply to “liking” and “sharing”. In fact, we 

can see both as different genres on a gradient from phatic communion to phatic 

communication: there are differences in agency, in the addressees and 

communities targeted by both activities, and in the fundamental pragmatic and 

metapragmatic features of both activities.  

To clarify the latter: “sharing” an update on Facebook is a classic case of “re-

entextualization” (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996) or “re-

semiotization” (Scollon & Scollon 2004). Re-entextualization refers to the 

process by means of which a piece of “text” (a broadly defined semiotic object 

here) is extracted from its original context-of-use and re-inserted into an entirely 

different one, involving different participation frameworks, a different kind of 

textuality – an entire text can be condensed into a quote, for instance – and 

ultimately also very different meaning outcomes – what is marginal in the source 

text can become important in the re-entextualized version, for instance. Re-

semiotization, in line with the foregoing, refers to the process by means of which 

every “repetition” of a sign involves an entirely new set of contextualization 

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