Constructing Glocal Identities Through Multilingual Writing Practices on Flickr.com®

The weirding of English, trans‐scripting, and humour in digital communication

“…For example, Fung and Carter () investigated the emergence of a hybrid spoken‐written variety of English in online interactions of Hong Kong university students. From a glocalization perspective, Lee and Barton () examined how members of globalized social media like Flickr negotiate language choices in accordance with the global, local, or glocal identities they wish to project to their imagined audience. Furthermore, Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou (, p. 143) explored the glocal at a more language‐ideological level; popular discourses about English and its impact on digital literacy in local (as in Greek) contexts take at times a glocal position acknowledging the ‘dynamic negotiation between the global and the local, with the local appropriating elements of the global that it finds useful, at the same time employing strategies to retain its identity’.…”

The roles of tagging in the online curation of photographs

“…Turning to the initial study reported here, data from a study of the practices of 30 multilingual Flickr users (Lee & Barton, 2011) was reanalysed with a focus on tags and tagging and provides users' views of tagging (as reported in Barton, 2015a). Firstly, people were emphatic that they use different sites for different purposes: Flickr was often used to display and to document, and for the photos to have a lasting presence.…”

Chinese or English? Writing Practices of Users from Mainland China on Instagram

“…Moreover, the structural patterns (insertional, alternational, intraword CS) and motivations of CS have also been comprehensively and succinctly summarized in [10] and [8]. Studies conducted in different sociocultural backgrounds reveal different reasons for CS, such as language preference [11], cultural value, ethnic identities [12], [13], [14], site's affordances [15], economic concerns [3] and etc. In a broader sense, factors accounting for users' different languages choices online were concluded in [8] as "situated language ecology of individual users, imagined audience, content of post and technological possibilities and constraints".…”

“…In this stage, I identified 20 active multilingual users out of the 100 selected users and then examined each one of them by analyzing at least 100 posts with all the accompanied writing. Follow-up email interviews [14] were conducted respectively with the 20 chosen users to understand the complicated issues underpinning their writing practices (language choice/ CS). The selection criteria of the 20 users were: first, they should have at least 50 followers; second, they should contribute a lot in writing with at least 100 posts on Instagram (including profile, hashtag, caption and comments), as the posts were the primary data to be analyzed.…”