Digital Gaming and the Arts of Parental Control in Southern Peru: Phatic Functionality and Networks of Socialization in Processes of Language Socialization

Abstract

In this article, we offer an account of the strategy that parents in southern Peru undertake to control the “excessive” gaming of their sons. With this strategy, parents attempt to reconstruct the “networks” or “channels” through which parents and sons attend to, monitor, and are made communicatively available to each another, a strategy that requires them to—among other things—disassemble competing networks of socialization. Our analysis of this ethnographic material requires us to provide a theory of the role that the “phatic function” plays in processes of language socialization. [language socialization, phatic function, digital gaming, parenting, Peru]

Uncertain Times: Linguistic Anthropology in 2019

“…PowerPoint is at the center of his research on how assembling a presentation creates collective authority in Korean corporate settings. Questions of new media's impact on genres of parenting are explored by Smith and Barad (2018), who consider the tribulations of Peruvian parents who, seeing the negative effects of gaming on boys, attempt to disrupt their friendship networks as a means to control their socialization. At the same time, Rea (2019) considers different chronotopic figures of South Korean gamers that have arisen in light of the infrastructural changes to Internet speeds, while Robles and Parks (2019) closely analyze focus‐group and interview participants to consider the complaint genre that has arisen about new technologies—no doubt one in which we have all engaged.…”

Texting, teens, and parental challenges in practices of family socialization

“…During the past decades, studies within the field of media and communication research have, for instance, described how the diffusion of social media and the smartphone have influenced the ways in which family members stay connected during the day (Chen & Katz, 2009; Devitt & Roker, 2008; Licoppe, 2004), micro‐coordinate everyday life (Ling & Yttri, 2002), and not least, experience and manage family relationships (Livingstone & Blum‐Ross, 2020; Madianou & Miller, 2012; Miller & Slater, 2000). In the wake of such insights about family life with media, studies of language socialization have recently begun to show an interest in how digitally mediated interactions influence and render possible local and situated practices of family socialization (see e.g., Ag, 2022; Lanza & Lexander, 2019; Palviainen, 2021; Palviainen & Kędra, 2020; Smith & Barad, 2018; Stæhr & Nørreby, 2021). This article contributes to this strand of research in two ways.…”

Phatic Category as an Affirmation in the Speech of Bangka Malay Language

“…As well as some research on phatic elements in world languages, such as phatic in regional languages of Australia, the Aboriginal (Slotta, 2014); the language in Luang Prabang, Laos (Zuckerman, 2016), in Japanese language (Nozawa,2015). More recent topics on this phatic elements or phatic comunications have also been researched (see Hodge, 2015;Wang, 2016 ;Maíz-Arévalo, 2017;Smith, Barad,Ashley, 2018;Duffi, 2019).…”