Digital first-order place, velocity and chronotope in globalized communication

Abstract

With an interactional, sociolinguistic and social practice approach to discourse, social media are here revealed to be a place and, more precisely, a category of place in relation to other media. The concepts chronotopic layers, which captures the social and ideological dimensions of a given place-time configuration, and sociolinguistic scales, which involves understandability, are applied to video data containing a story, i.e. the type of narrative with a recognizable structure and a narrative logic. Included in the analysis are the time and place of the witnessed event, of the representation of that event and of the ‘sharing’ of the film. An emphasis on the cultural aspects of digital communication reasserts that place is shaped by time in its various facets, among them, velocity. It is argued that place and time, mutually influencing each other, must be viewed in terms of historicity as well as degrees in the local-global scope.