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Globalization, mass mobility, and economic and transcultural flows are changing the experience of diversity in many contemporary societies and communities. This is encapsulated in the notion of ‘superdiversity’, the growing complexity of what ‘diversity’ means, when new combinations of ethnicity and other variables, mobility, belonging, and identification intersect in complex, less predictable ways (see Creese & Blackledge 2010: 550–552; Blommaert & Rampton 2011). Also, the world of association football (soccer, henceforth ‘football’) is radically transformed by such processes of globalization (Giulianotti 1999; Giulianotti & Robertson 2009; Kytölä 2013). The mobility of ‘actors-in-the-field’ – professional and amateur football players, coaches, media, audiences, fans, and the like – has always been essential to football culture, but recent decades have accelerated such mobilities, leading to a complexity of patterns and outcomes of ‘diversities’ unparalleled before. Discussions of such issues in the context of football culture from the perspectives offered by superdiversity research are therefore timely and justified (Kytölä 2017).
This chapter discusses the role of multilingualism and multisemioticity as key resources in communication in contemporary interest-driven social media. We approach social media as translocal arenas for social interaction and (trans)cultural activities (Leppänen 2008, 2012; Kytölä in press) which complement and intertwine with participants’ offline realities in different ways. In particular, we show how the investigation of such activities can benefit from a multi-dimensional framework drawing on insights from several fields, including online ethnography, the study of multimodality, and research into computer-mediated discourse (CMD).
This article explores the ways in which ‘gangsta’ English features are deployed, evaluated and adopted in two types of social media, the web forum and Twitter, within the domains of hip hop culture and football (soccer) culture, from the dual perspective of authenticity and normativity. Empirically, we aim to break new ground by investigating the intricate interconnections between two social media formats and combining two highly popular but previously seldom connected cultural forms—football and hip hop. Our theoretical aim is to contribute to the current debate on authenticity, normativity, popular culture and social media, and the complex ways in which they are connected. We focus, first, on the Twitter writing of the Finnish footballer Mikael Forssell, specifically his uses of non-Standard English and references to hip hop culture and rap music, and second, on the ways in which Forssell’s stylized writing elicits normatively oriented metapragmatic commentaries, i.e., meta-level discussion, on a major Finnish football discussion forum. Of particular interest here is the emically emerging category of ‘gangsta’ English and its perceived (in)authenticity—when used by Forssell and two other (‘White’) middle-class Finnish footballers. Drawing on the frameworks of authenticity and sociolinguistic superdiversity, we foreground the tension between purist normativity and playful appropriation online. Our discussion highlights the unpredictability of the connections between language use, (popular) cultural forms, ethnicity, country of origin, and the complexity of mediation across online and offline sites of social action.
The focus in this volume is on social media discourse, (dis)identifications and diversities. It demonstrates how particular ways of mobilizing verbal, discursive and other semiotic resources serve as means for identity work (Bucholtz, 2003; Blommaert, 2003), involving acts, processes and practices of (dis)identification as essential aspects of sociality in social media. It will also illustrate how such social action also increasingly engages with a range of diversities in social media.