Unit 5 (Part 2). Mediated DA

11.1. What is MDA?
1. An approach based on the study of discourse focusing on human social action rather than on texts or discourses.
  1. Language is not the only mediational means: non-verbal communication and physical objects used by an agent are mediational means as well.
2. Discourse and human action in social change are its main concerns, and MEDIATED ACTION is used as the basic unit of analysis.
3. It is interdisciplinary. Mediated discourse analysts work with social problems in our contemporary world.
11.2. Central concepts in MDA
1. 1. MEDIATED ACTION: the unit of analysis in MDA. Analysts focus on the acting of social actors.
2. 2. SITE OF ENGAMENT: the social space where mediated action occurs. The interpretation of a mediated action is located within the social practices which are related in that unique place and moment.
3. 3. MEDIATIONAL MEANS: the material means, for example, the body, dress and movements of the material actors, through which mediated action is carried out.
4. 4. PRACTICE: mediated action is only interpretable within practices. For example, having lunch at a restaurant is interpreted as a different action from having lunch at home, the difference is the practice. For example, the person who prepares coffee, the decoration, the type of kitchen, etc.
5. 5. NEXUS OF PRACTICE: the different types of practices are interrelated and linked to form the nexus of practice. So, for instance, an Italian restaurant nexus of practice would include different things such as ordering practices, eating practices, etc.
11.3. MDA as a theory of social action
11.4. Methods in MDA
1. 1) Ethnography of communication surveys of key situations and participants: concerned with problems of social change. Aims to gather info about the participants, the mediated means, the scenes or situations and the events and actions.
2. 2. Issue-based surveys of public discourse: independent analysis of the significance of topics, mediated means and mediated actions to cross check against the ethnography of communicative surveys.
3. 3. Public opinion and focus group surveys of issues and situations: determine central sociopolitical issues.
4. The data can be seen from 4 perspectives:
  1. 1) Member's generalization: we usually do X or Y (about themselves). The Xs do P or Q (about other groups). Very important source of data in MDA.
  2. 2) Individual experience: individual members may make individual disclaimers, saying they don't do everything their group does because they are different. Individual habitus vary widely.
  3. 3) Neutral/Objective data: MDA is skeptical of generalized data. So they take video recorders/cameras to provide objective third point of view.
  4. 4) Playback responses: gives an objective record of actions as well as the analysis of the observer.
11.5. Mediated social interaction: all discourse is mediated and all mediations are discursive. The difference between this approach and any other approach lies in the focus of attention, which for MDA is placed on the actions of social actors in using the texts of communication.
11.6. Interdiscipinarity: roots in Boas (not Saussure). Grounded their analysis of language in the sociocultural worlds of the people who use language (not so much in language itself). The incorporation of so many disciplines brings about problems:
1. 1) Representation and structure: tension between the study of abstract systems of representations and the study of social actors living in real time. They use Mediated action and activity theory to solve this.
2. 2) Linguistic relativity: tension between Saussarian assertion about the total arbitrariness of the symbol and the Boasian assertion that symbolic systems embed the histories of mental categorization in their users.
3. 3) Units of analysis: mediated action as unit of analysis.
4. 4) Methodology: tape recording, transcription and playback. But these really focus on linguistic data than on mediated action.
5. 5) Psychology of the social actor: what we do has no connection to our capacity to articulate our intensions or goals. So there is no well-grounded analytical basis for attributing a given action to a particular social actor.
11.7. How does MDA analyze discourse?
1. "Cup of coffee with friends at Starbucks."
  1. 1) Discourse of commercial branding: logo of Starbucks on clothes and cups. 2) Legal discourse: logo is a registered mark. 3) E-commerce discourse: website of company. 4) Consumer correctness discourse: company cares about its coffee growers (clients can call and make a donation). 5) Environmental correctness discourse: things made of recycled paper. 6) Service information discourse: printed list of products. 7) Manufacturing information discourse: info about the cup.
11.8. Geosemiotics
1. 11.8.1. Indexicality
  1. Who has uttered this? Who is the viewer? What is the social situation? Is that part of the material world relevant to such a sign? Indexicality is a universal characteristic of language and it is defined as the property of the content-dependency of signs, especially language, hence the study of those aspects of meaning which depend on the placement of the sign in the material world.
  2. For MDA it is not that important the indexicality of language as the indexable worlds, that is to say the ways in which the sign system of language indexes the other semiotic systems in the world around language.
  3. We signal our meaning by means of: 1) ICONS: signs that resemble the objects being signaled (a man beside a door at a public space). 2) INDEXES: signs which point to or attached to the object (an arrow). 3) SYMBOLS: signs which are arbitrary or conventionally associated with the object (the signs of written language).
2. 11.8.2. Central elements in Geosemiotics
  1. 1) SOCIAL FACTOR: a person who moves and acts in the physical world. 2) INTERACTION ORDER: the set of social relationships we take up and try to maintain. 3) VISUAL SEMIOTICS: the visual frame of the social action. It deals with aspects such as how the interaction order is presented visually and how placement of visual symbols affects their interpretation. 4) PLACE SEMIOTICS: any human action takes place somewhere in the physical universe. Semiotic spaces are those spaces which provide pictures and non-semiotic spaces are those spaces where signs are forbidden.
3. An analysis of how language appears in the material world. The basic principle is that a very important aspect of the meaning of all language is based on the material, concrete, physical placement of that language in the world. They to the analysis of any human action is INDEXICALITY, the meaning of signs based on their material location.
  1. All languages take a major part of its meaning from how and where it is placed.
4. Geosemiotics entails a broad analysis of discourse, and therefore not only applies to signs, or other symbols posted in different places, but also to signals and messages such as those sent off by our bodies whose meaning depends on where they are and what they are doing in place.
11.9. Example of analysis

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Unit 5 (Part 2). Mediated DA

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