Cover not available
Article published In:
X-Scapes: New horizons in Linguistic Landscapes
Edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kellie Gonçalves
[Linguistic Landscape 5:2] 2019
► pp. 179–197

Let’s get phygital

Seeing through the ‘filtered’ landscapes of Instagram

| University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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.

Keywords: semiotic landscapes, digital media, Big Data, data mining, gentrification, San Francisco, interdisciplinary methods, digital humanities
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.In the news: The Mission as a mediatized place
  • 3.‘What the signs say’: The Mission as a mediated place
  • 4.‘Filtered’ landscapes: The Mission as a remediated place
  • 5.Conclusion: Seeing through Big Data
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.18025.lyo
References
Agha, A.
(2007) Language and social relations. Number 24. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Banda, F. and Jimaima, H.
(2015) The semiotic ecology of linguistic landscapes in rural Zambia. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(5): 643–670. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. L.
(1990) Poetics and performances as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual review of Anthropology, 19(1): 59–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R.
(1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, E.
(2012) The invisible weight of whiteness: the racial grammar of everyday life in contemporary america. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(2): 173–194.Google Scholar
Burgess, J.
(2010) Remediating vernacular creativity: Photography and cultural citizenship in the Flickr photo-sharing network. In T. Edensor, D. Leslie, S. Millington & N. Rantisi (Eds.), Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy (pp. 116–125). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cobley, P. & Haeffner, N.
(2009) Digital cameras and domestic photography: Communication, agency and structure. Visual Communication, 81: 123–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Glass, R.
(1964) Aspects of change. In Brown-Saracino, J. (Ed.), The Gentrification Debates: A Reader. Routledge.Google Scholar
Gonçalves, K.
(2019) The semiotic paradox of street art: Gentrification and the commodification of Bushwick, Brooklyn. In A. Peck, C. Stroud & Q. Williams (Eds), Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscape (pp. 141–158). London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Hill, J.
(1998) Language, race and the White public space. American Anthropologist, 100(3): 680–689. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hooks, B.
(1992) Black looks: race and representation. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Howell, O.
(2015) Making the mission: planning and ethnicity in San Francisco. University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ivkovic, D. & Lotherington, H.
(2009) Multilingualism in cyberspace: conceptualising the virtual linguistic landscape. International Journal of Multilingualism, 6(1): 17–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaworski, A.
(1993) The power of silence: Social and pragmatic perspectives, volume 1 of Language and Language Behaviors. Sage Publications. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015) Globalese: a new visual-linguistic register. Social Semiotics, 25(2): 217–235. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C.
(2009) Taking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction. In A. Jaffee (Ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 195–226). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, R. H.
(2010) Cyberspace and physical space: Attention structures in computer mediated communication. In Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (Eds.), Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space, 151–167. Continuum.Google Scholar
Kiesling, S.
(2001) Stances of whiteness and hegemony in fraternity men’s discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1):101–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, P.
(2013) The anthropology of an equation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3): 33–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lefebvre, H.
(1991 [1974]) The Production of Space [trans. D. Nicholson-Smith). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lou, J. J.
(2016) The Linguistic Landscape of Chinatown: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, K.
(2017) From Street to Screen: Linguistic Productions of Place in San Francisco’s Mission District. PhD thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Retrieved March 15, 2019 [URL]
Malinowski, D.
(2010) Showing seeing in the Korean linguistic cityscape. In E. Shohamy, & Barni, M. (Eds.), Linguistic Landscape in the City, 199–218. Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mapes, G.
forth.). Mediatizing the fashionable eater: Orders of elitist stancetaking in “throwback Thursday” Instagram posts. In Cynthia Gordon & Alla Tovares Eds. Identity and Ideology in Digital Food Discourse: Social Media Interactions Across Cultural Context London Bloomsbury
Marwick, A.
(2013) Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Ní Dhonnacha, E., Wade, K. & Kallen, J.
(2015) Online linguistic landscapes: Discourse, globalisation, and enregisterment. Linguistic Landscapes International Workshop 7.Google Scholar
Office of Historic Preservation
(2007) City Within a City: Historic Context Statement for San Francisco’s Mission District. Report prepared by City and County of San Francisco Planning Department; Retrieved March 17, 2019. [URL]
Papen, U.
(2012) Commercial discourses, gentrification and citizens’ protest: The linguistic landscape of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(1): 56–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sheller, M. & Urry, J.
(2006) The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 381: 207–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, M.
(2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3–4): 193–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A.
(2010) Silence is golden: Linguascaping, anti-communication and social exclusion in luxury tourism representations. In A. Jaworski & C. Thurlow (Eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Image, Text, Space (pp. 187–218). London: Continuum.Google Scholar
(2014) ‘Two hundred ninety-four’: Remediation and multimodal performance in tourist placemaking. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(4): 459–494. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2011) Banal globalization? embodied actions and mediated practices in tourists’ online photo-sharing. In Thurlow, C. & Mroczek, K. (Eds.), Digital discourse: Language in the new media, 220–250. Oxford. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trinch, S. & Snajdr, E.
(2017) What the signs say: Gentrification and the disappearance of capitalism without distinction in Brooklyn. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(1): 64–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wee, L.
(2016) Situating affect in linguistic landscapes. Linguistic Landscape, 2(2): 105–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 13 other publications

Castro Font, Sara Isabel
2023. Hipsters and drunks, tourists and locals. Linguistic Landscape. An international journal 9:3 ► pp. 247 ff. DOI logo
Chang, Hanbit & Bas Spierings
2023. Places “for the gram”: Millennials, specialty coffee bars and the gentrification of commercial streets in Seoul. Geoforum 139 ► pp. 103677 ff. DOI logo
Due, Brian L. & Thomas L.W. Toft
2021. Phygital highlighting: Achieving joint visual attention when physically co-editing a digital text. Journal of Pragmatics 177 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Jaworski, Adam & Li Wei
2021. Introducing writing (in) the city. Social Semiotics 31:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Joseph Theng, Andre
2021. Precarity and Enterprising Selves: The Resemiotization of Neon Language Objects. Discourse, Context & Media 39 ► pp. 100462 ff. DOI logo
Malinowski, David
2020. Linguistic landscape. Linguistic Landscape. An international journal 6:1 ► pp. 23 ff. DOI logo
McInerney, Erin
2023. Performing Parisian. Gender Performances, Elite Discourse and Multimodality on Instagram. ILCEA :51 DOI logo
Mohr, Susanne
2022. Investigating English in Multilingual Contexts Online: Identity Construction in Geotagged Instagram Data. Frontiers in Communication 6 DOI logo
Rosendal, Tove, Helle Lykke Nielsen, Johan Järlehed, Tommaso M. Milani & Maria Löfdahl
2023. Language, translocality and urban change. Linguistic Landscape. An international journal 9:2 ► pp. 181 ff. DOI logo
Smith, Sean P.
2024. Review of Virdis, Zurru & Lahey (2021): Language in Place: Stylistic Perspectives on Landscape, Place and Environment. Linguistic Landscape. An international journal DOI logo
Strange, Louis
2022. Covid-19 and public responsibility. Linguistic Landscape. An international journal 8:2-3 ► pp. 168 ff. DOI logo
Yao, Xiaofang
2023. Metrolingualism in online linguistic landscapes. International Journal of Multilingualism 20:2 ► pp. 214 ff. DOI logo
Yao, Xiaofang & Paul Gruba
2020. A layered investigation of Chinese in the linguistic landscape. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 43:3 ► pp. 302 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.