Language play as resistance: Navigating digital censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic

IF 1.3 2区文学 Q2 COMMUNICATION

Language & Communication Pub Date : 2024-11-01 DOI:10.1016/j.langcom.2024.10.008

Yiran Xu, Jiajun Liang

引用次数: 0

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, increased measures of information control were implemented in China to manage the flow of sensitive information that may contradict the official narrative of national sacrifice, perseverance, and triumph. Building on previous scholarship on the subversive potential of translanguaging practices, the present study analyzes key moments during the initial outbreak of the pandemic, when Chinese netizens creatively combined linguistic and semiotic symbols to circumvent censorship measures. It demonstrates how these practices highlight the innovative and multimodal nature of netizens’ linguistic tactics and illustrate how translanguaging and trans-semiotizing both enabled and profoundly disrupted the process of meaning-making. This article shows that the use of creative code-meshing strategies is a powerful means of challenging the centralized governance of social media spaces in pursuit of freedom of expression.

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语言游戏作为抵抗：在 COVID-19 大流行期间游走于数字审查制度之间

在 COVID-19 大流行期间，中国加强了信息控制措施，以管理可能与官方关于民族牺牲、坚韧和胜利的叙述相矛盾的敏感信息的流动。本研究以以往关于翻译语言实践的颠覆性潜力的学术研究为基础，分析了疫情爆发初期的关键时刻，中国网民创造性地结合语言和符号象征来规避审查措施。文章展示了这些实践如何凸显网民语言策略的创新性和多模态性，并说明了转译语言和跨符号化如何既促成了意义生成过程，又深刻地破坏了这一过程。本文表明，在追求言论自由的过程中，使用创造性的代码组合策略是挑战社交媒体空间集中管理的有力手段。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language & Communication Multiple-

CiteScore

3.40

自引率

6.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： This journal is unique in that it provides a forum devoted to the interdisciplinary study of language and communication. The investigation of language and its communicational functions is treated as a concern shared in common by those working in applied linguistics, child development, cultural studies, discourse analysis, intellectual history, legal studies, language evolution, linguistic anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, the politics of language, pragmatics, psychology, rhetoric, semiotics, and sociolinguistics. The journal invites contributions which explore the implications of current research for establishing common theoretical frameworks within which findings from different areas of study may be accommodated and interrelated. By focusing attention on the many ways in which language is integrated with other forms of communicational activity and interactional behaviour, it is intended to encourage approaches to the study of language and communication which are not restricted by existing disciplinary boundaries.