 Mae'r drwy'r drweud o'r profiad yn ymddangos yma o'r uneddiadau os yng Nghymru. Rydyn ni'n ddiddorol ychydig o'r profiad ar fy rydyn ni'n ddiddorol, ac mae'r rhai oes yn ymddangos ymddangos yma o'r uneddiadau ymddangos ymdangos. Mae'n rhai oes yn ymddangos ymddangos a'r hunain. Fe wnaeth yn ymdangos ymddangos. Mae'n rhai oes yn ymdangos? Mae'n rhai oes yn ymdangos. Yn ystryd yn ystod, yw'r profi ddwyngur yn diolch, yw'r profi'r profi ddwyngur yn ddysgol seilwysau o y ffordd i wefio. Yn ystod, yw'n ddysgol sy'n ei fod yn ddysgol sydd y ffordd i wefio, yw'r profi i wefio, yw'r profi i wefio, ac yna'r cynyddu cywethaeth. Rhaid i ddweud am ychydig fod yn ddysgol yn ddysgol o'r profi i wefio, ac yna'n ddysgol i wefio, o gwybod yn ei wneud llawer i bobl yn deall i gaelio gweithio eu rhai. Yn ymdw i'w wneud i hynny o fddiwedd iawn o'r gwybod, o anaf ydy'r hynny'r newydd, am fydd yn fwybod yn ei bach i ni, am ydych chi'n iawn i gallu gyddi'n allu efallai unrhyw'n edryd yn cwyl fydd. Peen hynny'n cymdeithasensa i'w ymddiol mynd y cwyl wneud gan yllwynhau, sy'n cyfwilio ar yr hynod yng Nghymru, ond o celf Those are different depending on the characteristics of their listeners and their own self-presentation and other factors in the speech situation and in particular I am interested in how we design our otherances based on who's listening. Can you hear me? Shall we shut this? I'm interested in how we design our utterances based on who's listening and how we use our utterances to design different kinds of listeners. And most importantly how new communication technologies are changing how we understand and negotiate listenership and use it as a communicative resource. And what got me thinking about this was this message that my friend Shirley posted on Facebook, I think Martha knows Shirley as well. She posted this a few months ago sharing a life quote that had been authored for her by some algorithm. And the quote is, don't worry about what people say behind your back. There are people who are finding faults in your life instead of fixing the faults in your own life. So she took this quiz that said, give me your life quote. And they generated this life quote for her and she was like wow isn't this an appropriate life quote. So for me this message and others like it I receive on Facebook raised some fundamental linguistic questions. First, who is Shirley talking to? Is it me? Is it some other Facebook friend? Is it the people she thinks are talking behind her back? And second, who is it that's doing the speaking here? Is it Shirley or is it the algorithm that determined for her that this was her life quote? Not randomly but presumably by trolling through hundreds of messages that Shirley herself had posted on Facebook over the years. So who is the author of the quote? And it's these two fundamental questions that I'm going to be talking about today. Questions about speaking and listenership. How we design our speech for different kinds of listeners. And how we design different kinds of listeners through our speech. So if you're like me, when you first started studying linguistics, you probably were presented with a picture like this portraying speakers and hearers as these two decontextualised floating heads and communication is simply a matter of one person encoding meaning and another person decoding it. By now, however, it's widely acknowledged that the canonical dyadic model of communication predicated on the single production end and the single reception end doesn't account for the real nature of different speakers, hearers, listeners, receivers and even eavesdroppers. As Hymes famously put it, the common dyadic model of speaker, hearer, specifies too many, sometimes too few and sometimes the wrong participants. And as a consequence, a number of different models have been put forward to explain what Goffman referred to as participation frameworks. The configurations of interactional roles and responsibilities that shape our social encounters. So this is Goffman. Goffman distinguished recipients chiefly based on whether or not they were ratified. That is the degree to which they were recognised as legitimate participants in the conversation. Resulting in the identification of four main roles. Addressed participants, unaddressed participants, overhears and eavesdroppers. For Goffman, however, just because participants weren't ratified didn't mean that they were unimportant. Much of how we behave in public, he insisted, has to do with how we managed to reveal and conceal information, not just to the people we're interacting with, but also to bystanders and strangers. Building on Goffman's work, Clark imagined the model as a matter of these internested frames with different kinds of overhears, side participants, bystanders and eavesdroppers occupying frames progressively outside the main interaction. He too, however, insisted that speakers don't just design their utterances for addressees, but also to some degree with all listeners in mind. In sociolinguistics, the most famous version of this model is that put forth by Alan Bell in his audience design framework. Now Bell's major contribution to the field of sociolinguistics was his conceptualisation of style, not just a matter of casualness or formality as Labav had seen it, but as a matter of who we are talking to and what kind of person we think they are and what kind of person we want them to think we are. In his study of newsreaders at radio stations in New Zealand, he discovered that speakers have a fine-grained ability to design their style for a range of different addressees as well as for other audience members. So he conceived of these other audience members positioned in concentric circles radiating out from the speaker, going from the addressee to the auditor to the overheer and finally the eavesdropper. Usually audience design is seen in terms of communication accommodation theory as advanced by Giles and his colleagues based on the idea that communication is not just a matter of exchanging information but also of negotiating group membership. The idea is that people adjust how they speak, converging to the style of those they want to identify with and diverging from those they wish to distance themselves from. Apart from the addressee, the kind of hearer that Bell was most interested in was auditors. People that we are not talking to but whom we know are listening. And what he found was that people alter their speech not just based on who they are addressing but also based on who is auditing the conversation which he called the auditor effect. And he also posited that the further out you travel in these concentric circles the less pronounced the effect is. So we are affected most by addressees, less by auditors, even less by overheers and not at all by eavesdroppers. I said we are not at all affected by eavesdroppers. I think if I want you to take one idea away from this talk is that I really want to challenge that. A good example of audience design can be seen in the various studies that Giles and his colleagues did on traffic stops. A situation in which the way people adapt aspects of their communication styles relative to one another can be particularly consequential as social identities are negotiated based on power, race, gender and a host of other factors. The challenges for police officers as well as citizens in such cases said Giles is to balance being non accommodative which might encourage aggression with being too accommodative which might seem insincere or encourage complacency. But Giles also mentions another challenge which might come with the presence of passengers which might put drivers in a kind of stylistic bind having to perform both for the officer and for their friends who in some cases might think less of them for being too accommodative to authority. So this is a good example of the auditor effect. It's a kind of image that he gives us as teenagers driving in the car. They got stopped by the cops. Who are you actually talking to when you're talking to the cops? Are you talking to the cop or are you performing for your friends? Are you talking to the cop? Such negotiations of course don't happen in a vacuum. In a series of studies Giles and his colleagues found that the degree to which drivers were willing to accommodate to police officers and to which officers were willing to accommodate to drivers had a lot to do with the ethnicity of the driver and the degree of trust they had in the police. And so micro negotiations of style both reflect and reproduce larger societal attitudes. Police and drivers were not just constructing their utterances to fit different interlocutors but designing their interlocutors based on personal and societal biases. Nowadays, with the increasing use of cell phone cameras, those auditors might not even be physically present as passengers. They might be watching this interaction on YouTube. And the question I'm going to ask later is how people in such situations adapt to these electronically mediated auditors. How do they adapt to the cell phone? As for Bell, he also took into account non-present audiences which he called referees. Though in his case he wasn't talking about people who might watch videos we post on social media. He was referring to the fact that we often design our utterances with some sort of reference group in mind as a way of showing ourselves to be particular kinds of people. The most important things I think we can take from the work inspired by Bell's idea of audience design are first the realization that audience design is not just responsive but also initiative. That we don't just design our utterances to fit our audiences but that we also use our utterances to design our audiences. To position them in particular recipient roles and in relation to particular reference groups. And the second is that audience design is never static. It's dynamic, it's a strategic process, not just of responding to situations and relationships but of creating situations and relationships moment by moment by designing roles for our interlocutors. As interaction progresses speakers may become adressees, adressees may become auditors and auditors might even end up being overhearers and eavesdroppers. But it's these two categories, overhearers and eavesdroppers that receive the least attention in Bell's model and by those inspired by it. With very few exceptions there's very little attention to the role of overhearers in the literature. One of these exceptions is Herbert Clark who along with his college such as Thomas Coulson working in the area of speech act theory argued that overhearing has an important effect on how we understand how people do things with words. Many utterances they argued are not just single speech acts issued to the adressees but double speech acts which also have the effect of informing whoever happens to be listening to the first speech act that's taken place. And that sometimes who is positioned as the hearer and who is positioned as the overhearer might be ambiguous or unstable. Clark and Schaefer used an example invented by Searle. Suppose at a party, Searle posited, a wife says it's really quite late with this single utterances she might simultaneously be objecting to the host that it's late and asking her husband to take her home. Her husband is the overhearer of the objection and the host is the overhearer of the request. Even less attention has been paid to eavesdroppers. In fact, Bell, as I said, went so far to argue that eavesdroppers, sorry, that eavesdroppers being unknown by definition cannot affect a speaker's style. But nowadays eavesdroppers are becoming more and more difficult to ignore. They seem to be everywhere on the streets in our workplaces on our social media feeds. You never know who might be watching you. And if you don't take this into account, you might end up like puppy poo girl. The Korean woman who let her dog poo on the sole underground unaware that passengers were filming it with their mobile phones. A film that ended up going viral on YouTube, making her life and that of her puppy intolerable. Which brings me to my main question today, which is how mediation affects the roles of auditors, overhears and eavesdroppers and creates new opportunities for audience design. Joshua Merowitz argued that media are basically information environments, configurations of walls and windows that work by altering the ways people can monitor each other and avoid being monitored. One way they do this is through the way they shape participation frameworks, channeling participants into different roles and offering different possibilities for people to shift or change their roles strategically, as well as different ways for people to design interactions with possible overhears or with possible eavesdroppers in mind. Over the years, there's been some work on how electronic media makes salient the role of overhearer and eavesdropper. In television studies, for example, Berger has talked about how people on TV chat shows construct audiences as overhears through what he called multiple addressing. Work in film studies talks about the layering that happens in film dialogue, so the audiences are constructed sometimes as auditors, sometimes as overhears and sometimes as eavesdroppers. In the field of interactional sociolinguistics, Cynthia Gordon has a very, very interesting article on how participants in linguistic research orient towards tape recorders as overhears. Hayworth studied how police officers in interrogations design their utterances both for the immediate situation and for future audiences in courtrooms that might be listening to tape recordings of them interrogating the suspect. When it comes to new media, there have been a number of studies on how people design utterances for different audiences on Facebook, such as those by Andrew Stoffelis and Tagg and Sargent. And a number of scholars have looked at audience design on YouTube, including myself, in a study of the It Gets Better project, in which I argue that these stories told by gays and lesbians that have been bullied work by positioning audiences simultaneously as witnesses, as judges, as potential victims, and even as potential bullies. One of the points I also make in that study is that digital media doesn't just help us create different roles for hearers and overhears, but also different roles for speakers as principles of their audiences, body authors of them, animators of them, and even objects of them. At the same time, one of the most important things to remember about all of these technologies is that they're not just ways of mediating hearing and overhearing, but they're also ways of preserving what has been heard, thus making it available to a range of other hearers and overhears across time and space. So that's the sort of theoretical background of my talk. Now I'm going to give you some data. So I'd like to explore the different ways media makes salient the roles of auditor over here and eavesdropper by talking about three examples. The first is citizen videos of police traffic stumps. The second is those quizzes that people annoyingly post on Facebook, like my friend Shirley. And the third is the practice of stalking as it is engaged in by my students at the University of Reading. So the first example is a video taken of a police traffic stop in the U.S. by an Uber driver who also happens to be an attorney. As you probably know, practices of citizens filming police has become extremely popular in the United States and has been responsible for bringing to light numerous cases of police brutality and wrongful shooting, especially of African Americans, like, for example, the case of Philando Castile, whose murder by an officer during a routine traffic stop was caught on video by his girlfriend and live streamed on Facebook. Abdicacy groups have formed to instruct people of their rights to film police and even police forces have taken to issuing body cameras to officers, though it is still unclear the degree to which the auditor effect of the camera actually changes the behavior of the police. What I'm more interested in here is how citizens strategically use the cameras to construct different kinds of auditors, and how these different kinds of auditors function to open up different kinds of speaking roles for officers and for citizens. So I'll just start by playing you a couple of minutes of the video. The whole video is about 11 minutes in its entirety, but I'm just going to play part of it for you here. My passenger is getting arrested. I'll keep recording. Thank you. This is my ride. I will look. You're a police officer on duty. I can record you. And if you come to this side of the airport, I can keep recording. I can keep recording. For recording, I'm sitting in my car holding my phone. What is the law? What are you arresting me for? I'm sitting here in my car just recording in case anything happens. I'm surrounded by five police officers. I'm scared right now. I'm not being a jerk. I'm recording it because anything happens. They're not searching my car. You're not searching my car. I don't care, man. I know my rights. I know the law. I know the law. I'm an attorney, so I hope I know the law. I know what we're doing. Hear me. You want my bar card? Okay. Good. The conventional way to address this situation is to see the camera as an auditor collectively monitoring interactions in which the police officer is the speaker and the driver is the addressee. Or in which the driver is the speaker and the officer is the addressee. What I want to argue is how the camera gets designed as an auditor is much more complex and has consequences on how the speaker and recipient roles of the driver and the officer get constructed. So there are two important things to mention first about digital video cameras in the hands of citizens as mediators of auditing. First is the ability to monitor both sound and moving image. That is, it's multimodal affordances. And the second is its mobility. The way the user can change what's being monitored by changing the direction in which it is pointed. That means the camera can be constructed as auditing the officer, the citizen or other aspects of the scene. Now, these may seem like rather obvious points, but they play an important role in terms of how citizens and officers are able to orient to the camera as an auditor. So in this example there are at least four ways the driver orients to the non present audience created by his phone. Two are primarily verbal and two are primarily visual. The first is verbal commentary. He speaks directly to his audience. The second is non verbal commentary in which he covertly communicates with his audience using glances and facial expressions. The third is what I call display in which he communicates with his audience by pointing the phone at different parts of the scene. And the last is performance in which he engages with the officer in conversation which is designed to be overheard through the use of a variety of linguistic and metalinguistic techniques. So the most obvious way that the driver orients to his camera as audience is by, as auditor, is by looking straight at it and narrating the situation. I'm driving an Uber and my passenger is being arrested. In such cases of course the camera is no longer really just an auditor. It's an addressee, a participant in the conversation. That is often designed for the police officer to overhear. Another way the driver can orient towards the camera as auditor is by turning it around and showing the audience what's happening in the environment, what I call display. In such cases the camera is constructed more as an objective auditor, a witness of what's going on. But it has to be remembered that what is being witnessed is still being controlled, being designed by the driver. When this is done overtly the presence of the camera pointing at him also presumably has an effect on the officer who is being audited. But sometimes this occurs covertly as in these shots where the driver has put his camera on his lap so the officer is unaware of it, in which case the camera functions as an eavesdropper. A third way that the driver might orient towards the camera is through nonverbal commentary where he shares with his audience side long glances and facial expressions that are obviously intended to include them as what golfman calls the wise. Participants who understand what he's going through without him having to actually tell them. Head shaking is a common tool for this in this video. I think I have an example of that here. Now what's important in these cases is that the audience is constructed not just as an auditor but as a kind of co-conspirator in a conversation in which the officer is ostentatiously excluded. The final and maybe the most effective way the driver orients towards the camera's auditor is through what I call performance in which he often attempts to design his utterances not just to be heard by the officer but also to be overheard by the camera. Such performed conversations are often marked by a large degree of meta-discourse interactants talking explicitly about the ground rules of their interaction. As in this case where the driver and the officer argue about the presence of the auditor. The camera officer says, hey bud turn that off. Driver says, no I'll keep recording, thank you. It's my right. Officer says don't record me. Driver says I will, you're a police officer on duty. Driver says I'm sitting in my car. I'm just recording in case anything happens. I'm surrounded by five police officers. Officer says you're being a jerk. Of course these performances depend on both parties performing. And one recourse the officer here has is to simply refuse to perform to simply disengage from the conversation. Another thing the officer has recourse to is to put on his own performance with another interlocutor for the benefit of both the driver and the camera, the auditor. As when the officer gets on his radio and calls for drug sniffing dogs to be deployed onto the scene. In some cases the officer goes along with the performance designing his own utterances for the benefit of the auditor. So here's an example of a more successful officer designing his utterance for the camera. Here we are. I came out in the smell. If they do an indication, if not, they can be on the floor. I mean if you threw something under the seat, there's nothing to do with me. I'm not seeing it as anything to do with you, sir. I've never said that to anyone. No, I feel like someone's going to be under the car and we're going to say I'm the driver, it's my vehicle, I'm responsible. I've never said that to you. Can you understand my frustration? I absolutely do. Good cop. So in this situation the presence of the camera is made explicit and even in the opening of the performance the driver reminds the officer that he's being held accountable by reading his name from his badge. So the officer says Mr Bright and the driver says yes, Mr St Pierre. Mr St Pierre. But later the officer takes charge of the performance offering meta-discursive commentary on what has been said and what has been meant. Officer says I'm not saying that. It has anything to do with you. Never said that, sir. I asked you, driver says I feel like something's going to be under the car and you're going to say I'm the driver and I'm responsible. Officer says negative, sir. I've never said that to you. Now let's look at another example. One that doesn't turn out quite so well for the driver. Let's pull this over. Now I'm being perceived as a threat because we're being pulled over for absolutely no reason. Am I being placed under arrest? I'm asking for it. The reason why we're being pulled over is that you have still felt identified why you pulled this over. You pulled this over. Why are you pulling me out of my car? Sir, take a minute and talk to me. I have not did nothing. I have not did nothing. I have no weapons. You have no reason to pull me out of the car. This is a soft. You see this? You see this? Excessive force. Obviously not an attorney. So again, the citizen here designs the auditor as a witness through his verbal commentary. Narrating for the camera what's going on as it happens. We're being pulled over for absolutely no reason I'm being perceived as a threat. You have still felt to identify why you pulled this over. Why are you pulling me out of my car, sir? I have no weapons. Interestingly and maddingly for this citizen, the officers articulate a counter narrative in which they deny that any of this is actually happening. Saying things like you're not under arrest. I'm not pulling you. Spoken as the officer is pulling him from his car. He's aiming the right of the powerful to arrange the relationship between the visible and the sayable. To the point that the citizen's only recourse is to turn to the camera and say you see this? You see this? Sometimes this verbal narration of the visible can be particularly consequential. And this is the case in the shooting of Philando Castile which I mentioned before. Now, I'm not going to show you the video of the shooting of Philando Castile because it's just too disturbing. But I will play you a short audio sample of this interaction. We got pulled over for a bus that's held right in the back. And the police just, he's covered. He didn't kill my boyfriend. He's licensed, he's carried, so he's licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID in his wallet out his pocket and he let the officer know that he was... he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm. We're waiting for that. I will, sir, no worries. I will. He just shot his arm off. We got pulled over on Mark Burner. Told Docs Reid's friend and told him to get his hand out. He had to tell him to get his ID, sir. His driver's license. Please don't tell me you did. Please don't tell me my boyfriend just went like that. Okay, I'll stop it. I'll stop it there. So, in this case, auditing the policemen's actions is not just about the girlfriend pointing the camera at her bleeding boyfriend. It's about her using linguistic strategies to provide a direct commentary of the situation. And then to talk to the officer in a way that simultaneously communicates with him and with the potential overheers on Facebook where the video is being streamed and to elicit talk from him that documents what actually occurred before the phone camera was turned on. So she says you just shot four bullets into him. Sir, he was just getting his license and registration. Sir, making explicit what has happened. The officer, of course, uses the same strategy performing both for her and for the non-present audience. His excuses. I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out. So there's a big difference, of course, between these two examples and the first one I showed in terms of the kinds of literacies that are available to and expected of the drivers. Jan Blomart in his analysis of asylum literacies talks about pretextual gaps which he defines as conditions of sayability and differential distribution of access to these conditions and social evaluations attached to such differences create these kinds of gaps. In this case, it's not just a matter of what certain people can say in different circumstances, but also what certain people must say in different circumstances. A white Uber driver can say I'll continue to film you. It's my right. But the black woman whose boyfriend has just been shot must say I will keep my hands where you can see them. Sir. These pretextual conditions are captured in lists of advice African Americans share with one another online and advice that black parents give their kids. Of course, the real gap between what is recognized and what can be produced is that even when expectations are complied with, even when the literacy event is satisfactorily performed, as in the case of Philando Constiol who spoke politely to the officer who informed him that he was legally carrying a firearm who explained everything he was doing as he did it, you still get shot. Because the pretextual conditions govern that the white officer is right to be fearful of a black man with a gun. So the point I'm trying to make here with these examples is that the auditor effect in such situations is not just a matter of the camera affecting the behavior of the officer or of the driver, but that the camera becomes an interactional resource that the driver uses to position the officer in particular participant roles and to align himself in different ways to different potential audiences. Anticipating how interpretations of the incident might change as it's relocated in the spatial and temporal context of the social media where it's uploaded and shared. Using this resource to construct utterances that may become meaningful and valued in different ways in that different text trajectory that it travels across. But the way this resource can be used and the consequences of his use also depends upon the pretextual conditions as Blomart puts it in his essay. He says, speakers' personal baggage and assessments of what is meaningful in the interaction combine with their capacity to anticipate what is required and hence what will be recognized as meaningful and valued in the ongoing trajectory. That potential audience in that sort of ongoing trajectory that these videos travel across is itself rather complicated. And this brings me to my second example how people design audiences for the most things on Facebook. This example won't be quite so heavy. So Facebook, of course, is really based on indirect communication. We don't just send things to communicate with specific addresses. We post things to be seen by a wide range of hearers and overhearers and lurkers and trolls. Our friends on Facebook and Facebook itself constantly surveil us and engaging with Facebook is often about designing ourselves to be suitable audiences for surveillance, which brings me back to Shirley's post and the questions I began to talk with. First, who is Shirley talking to? And second, who is doing the talking? So first, who is Shirley talking to? Of course, when we post things to social media we usually have a particular audience in mind. But our posts are also served up on the timelines of people that we may not have had in mind. People we might call overhearers. And different people who read the post, of course, respond in different ways. Some ignoring it, some liking it, others commenting on it. And others using the opportunity to engage Shirley in a kind of side conversation to which all of the other participants become overhearers. And each time someone does this they construct themselves as an audience for Shirley. And as an addressee, a certain kind of audience for Shirley. Maybe as an addressee, maybe as an overhearer and maybe as an eavesdropper. Or maybe as a performer in a conversation that's going to be overheard by others. But of course there's a whole other conversation behind this post as well. A conversation that Shirley had not with her Facebook friends but with a company called NameTests.com which initiated this conversation with Shirley by asking her what is your life quote? Which is actually not a question but an offer to generate a quote for her. Maybe many of you have received messages like this on your Facebook. In exchange, so they're going to generate a quote for her, sharing with them her Facebook profile information and email addresses and implying that based on this information they could magically mine her deepest thoughts and come up with the absolute most appropriate quote. If you ask me they probably just generate random quotes about being yourself and never giving up that nearly everybody would want to claim them. NameTests also has some other quizzes like what's your motto and who is the peanut butter in your jelly in which they ask to access your entire friends list and find the face that looks like yours in which they perform facial recognition on all of the photos in your photo album. Of course all of this is just a scam isn't it? It's just a scam to get our information to then sell it to advertisers. So in the case of NameTests.com it simultaneously inhabits the role of a ratified participant engaging surely in a conversation about her life quote and as an eavesdropper covertly gathering all of her data off of Facebook. So when you think about it the speaker is not really surely but NameTests.com even more important NameTest is also the main listener here but that's okay it's good for surely who gets to engage her friends in a conversation about her favorite subject herself it's good for surely's friends who get to feel connected with her share something about themselves and most of all it's good for Facebook who is the ultimate recipient of all the information generated by all of the different participants in the conversation. So why do surely who is quite a smart person and so many others fall for this one of the main reasons I want to argue is not just that these tricks allow us to design our friends as certain kinds of auditors but also that they allow us to design ourselves as being overheard. What makes quizzes like what's your life quote so appealing is that they automatically generate positive messages about me which are attributed to me but not authored by me in the little blurb here it says that it tries to convince me that to post this message on Facebook and the company assures me that this quote is a reflection of the fact that I'm a born fighter who never loses sight of my goals absolutely true. And of course I'm happy about that yeah it's definitely something I want everyone to know but of course it's not something that I would post on Facebook of my own accord I'm not going to write I'm a born fighter it seems a bit vain to do that yes but it's somehow okay if name test does it for me. That's great So if you think about it in terms of Goffman's production roles it turns out that the algorithm has done all the work it's animated the message it's authored it I suppose I'm the principal but not really since the quote has come from some database of random quotes not from the sum of my personal experiences as the company wants me to think at least I get to take the credit for all of these roles I get to be known as a born fighter and so in this way internet companies like name test.com and Facebook use our own attempts to design certain audiences for our utterance to design us as certain kinds of performers another example can be seen in those quizzes there are ones that promise to reveal what kind of pasta you are can you guess I'm bowtie pasta of course yes or how you would die in game of thrones I would be decapitated but that's only because I'm well intentioned and loyal to a fault and so what is the purpose of these quizzes is more than just to reveal to me deep secrets of my personality it's to get me to submit to market research by answering questions on the quiz like what's your biggest fear what would your last meal be useful for restaurants who might want to advertise to me which do you consider heaven useful for travel agents and tour operators who would you rather sleep with now here you're getting into some pretty personal information about my sexual orientation and finally what kind of alcohol I drink useful of course for beverage companies so not only do I give them all of this valuable information about myself which under normal circumstances I probably wouldn't give to some marketing researcher who's stopped me on the street I also help them to get other people to give their information by posting my result on Facebook because for some reason I want to brag about being decapitated a couple of years ago there was a really popular quiz on Buzzfeed called how privileged are you the quiz asked a range of questions very personal questions about your race your sexuality your gender identity your finances your mental health like have you ever attempted suicide and even about terrorist tendencies airport security lines and in the end they give you a privilege score I got 52 52 out of 100 points which I think is great I mean it's above average so I get to feel privileged but it's not so high that I've got to feel guilty about being privileged or go out and look for some under privileged people to help I hit a kind of a sweet spot there yet I'm quite privileged and best of all I can now share this on Facebook I have an excuse to tell my friends that I'm quite privileged something that I might want to tell people but again it's not the kind of thing that you just walk up to people and say and I get to be one of those people who cares deeply about privilege who doesn't take it for granted who's sensitive aggressive check your privilege it's always white models that are wearing these shirts though and so what such quizzes allow me to do is to design myself as being overheard to indirectly say look at me I'm quite privileged or I'm well intentioned and loyal to a fault in a way that doesn't make me seem gauche or narcissistic in other words it gives me a pretext to produce utterances about myself which otherwise might violate social norms by producing my audience not as addresses but as overhears and the last thing I want to talk about now is stalking which in a way is kind of the ultimate act of eavesdropping but I don't want to talk about stalking in its kind of traditional negative sense but rather as a socially acceptable practice that my students engage in when they use the dating app Tinder and other social media sites secretly eavesdropping on people's social media field feeds or facebook stalking as they call it is something that they all do here's a quote from a focus group I had with my students one says I kind of feel we all do it so another says I remember I matched with a guy and we're going on a date and literally my friends were like have you checked who he is on facebook and I was like no and they were like well I'm going to do it and it was fine so they do my stalking for me then I don't feel bad another says I always stalk the people another says I do it too I always think like you can see if you've got any mutual interest or things you both like talk about I definitely do that I was facebook stalking somebody I was going on a date with and I saw their cover photo on their facebook was Fleetwood Mac and I was like I love them too so I was like we can have a talk about that on the date so we did this new socially acceptable version of stalking is even the subject of internet memes which construct stalking as perhaps embarrassing if you get caught but other than that as altogether normal and sometimes even flattering this practice has given rise to all sorts of meta discourse about it online instructions on how to stalk someone or to find out who might be stalking you and as with the other literacies I've talked about so far stalking is tied up with claims and imputations of identity so the way you show yourself to engage in the practice of stalking makes the difference between whether you are perceived as a creep or just a user there's lightweight stalking there are degrees of stalking yeah you can for example be classified as an average joe stalker an ex stalker meaning that you're not a former stalker but that you're stalking ex boyfriend or girlfriend the psycho stalker and of course there are online quizzes to help you to find out what kind of stalker you are isn't that great and as with other literacies okay yeah so this whole idea that anything you put online is potentially available to eavesdroppers is actually quite a common notion among my students even with chat programs like WhatsApp there's the assumption of the presence of an eavesdropper so one of my students told me literally half of what I send on WhatsApp are screenshots of conversations I'm having with other people I asked another for clarification about this practice I asked so some guy is having a conversation with you and then you take a screenshot and send it to your friend and the student says yeah it's easier than copy and paste and I said well yeah but this guy doesn't know that there's another person involved in this conversation and the girl said well I think guys just assume that they're being screenshot it so that's the practice of screenshoting it's even something that people engage in in groups this stalking and they say something that they automatically expect will happen if they have a presence on social media so this is another quote from a focuser I know so many guys who are amazing Facebook stalkers I was in the library and I saw like six rugby league lads and they were all on Tinder like oh do you know this girl and it was literally like oh let's find her on Facebook got her name looked at her mutual friends what societies is she in does she have likes on Facebook they were looking through her like groups that's impressive I've sort of accepted that it's going to happen I have duplicate slides there so the interesting thing is that none of them seem to think this is a problem in fact they sometimes actively design their utterances on social media to be read by stalkers or eavesdroppers sometimes using the affordances of the technology available them to get others to eavesdrop on them so one of my participants this was actually in Hong Kong had a crush on this guy who was very into indie music turns out she didn't really like indie music didn't know really anything about indie music she liked pop music like kanto pop top 40 very uncool so she joined Spotify this music social network where your friends can see what you're listening to and whenever she left the house she would set the program on her desktop computer to play indie playlists while she was gone so this boy would get a stream of messages on his news feed that she was listening to this or that cool indie song and since she was listening to the same songs he was Spotify's algorithm started to make her activity appear more prominently on his news feed and it worked after a while he friended her on facebook and now they are going out and so here's a piece of software which is itself an eavesdropper collecting information about its users being used by a user as a communicative resource in order to generate text to be overheard by other users stalking can even become an advertising technique last year you probably saw these ads last year Spotify launched these really creepy ads in London in which they turned the data that they had gathered about users into billboards this one says dear person who played sorry 42 times on valentine's day what did you do so when I show this to my students they were mostly delighted it was like that is so cool they said imagine if that were you that's so cool and so when you see auditor design as an interactional accomplishment you start to see eavesdropping not as something that needs to be avoided but as something that needs to be cleverly managed we can design our eavesdroppers and the utterances we want them to hear of course all of this is not new to the internet anyone who's seen or read Othello has witnessed how clever Iago is at designing conversations in which Othello is positioned as an eavesdropper on utterances that are essentially designed for him to hear if Iago were around today he would no doubt own an internet quiz company asking people like Othello questions like who is the peanut butter in your jelly and using that information to sell him olive oil but the information architecture of new technology introduces all sorts of new possibilities for auditor design possibilities that allow us to position ourselves in different ways in regard to our own utterances and so if we return to Bell's concentric circles we see that they don't really accurately represent the kinds of situations I've described in this talk first of all the idea that we pay progressively less attention to the people in the outer circles is not necessarily true sometimes utterances are designed more for overhears or eavesdroppers than they are for address ease and second different participant roles do not just affect how speakers design their utterances they are used as communicative resources with which speakers are able to position their different audiences in relation to each other even Goffman's model becomes problematic particularly the whole idea of ratification in environments like Facebook and Tinder you can have ratified eavesdroppers and unratified address ease with new technologies in more and more of our interactions there is the assumption of being overheard or being eavesdropped on this is the default assumption and so theories of language and interaction that ignore overhearing and eavesdropping can't really account for how we design our utterances the most important thing to remember about these new opportunities for auditor design however is that the ultimate beneficiaries of many of these technologies are not us and not our friends even the people who are talking behind our backs but internet companies who are the ultimate eavesdroppers who get us to use our own strategies of auditor design to make ourselves compliant objects of surveillance but there's also a kind of social dimension to this because there is some positive aspects to auditor design that are not necessarily available in the same way to everyone so another thing we have to come to terms with is that in many situations like this one the resources for auditor design are unequally distributed it's not that the technological tools are missing what's missing is something more fundamental what's unevenly distributed is the right to look I take this idea of the right to look from Nicholas Mirzoff who argues that visuality is a medium for the transmission and dissemination of authority certain people have the right to look and certain people don't Mirzoff's book is about slavery and its persistent legacies and how in this context claiming the right to look is an act of emancipation the right to look is not the same as the legal right to video record police the digital camera is a mediational means through which the right to look is claimed, negotiated and sometimes denied but it's not the only thing that's required as Mirzoff puts it claiming the right to look means requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place from which to claim rights and determine what is right it is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable so I like that last part of this end I'm going to repeat it it's the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable it's not just the right to point the camera at what the camera is seeing it's the right to say you see this it's the right the right to look is fundamentally connected to the ability to design auditors designing auditors is really consequential being able to say do you see this depends on having an auditor to see it so why do we need auditors to claim the right to look well people in power in fact auditors like the body cams that police are sometimes required to wear are often perceived as threatening their right to look but for the less powerful the ability to design witnesses to our encounters with authority is a potentially powerful tool because even in cases where it actually doesn't change the power relations on the ground and your boyfriend does end up dead the images remain to be circulated through the public consciousness and so in a way Philando Castile's girlfriend's claim to her right to look depends on others those who are normally spared the necessity of looking at scenes like this it depends on people like that to look it depends on us looking not as voyers not as stalkers not as followers not as Facebook friends or quite privileged people but as citizens realizing that sometimes being called upon to be an auditor is a responsibility of citizenship and that the right to look can only be claimed collectively the right to look is not about seeing it begins at a personal level with a look into somebody else's eyes expressed friendship solidarity or love that look must be mutual each person inventing the other or it fails as such it is unrepresentable the right to look claims autonomy not individualism or voyerism or stalking but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity thank you thank you very much for that very interesting talk we have some time for questions ok great so I was a bit longer than I thought yes sorry thank you Robin wonderful really lovely to hear this incredible research you touched on many many points I like and I'm really happy to see the power brought up more explicitly at the end because I think that was a very poor issue but I was wondering whether you know of any research or you've done some of yourself about group or cultural differences so I think that there was a time when people used to laugh in London about loud Americans because people would go around saying oh yeah they want us to hear of course there are individual differences between people who are loud and not so loud who want to hear so I think that the issue of cultural differences is an interesting one especially when you go around the world you know in some places they don't want to speak to you they don't want to be heard I think the whole idea of cultural differences is really interesting because I think there is in some cases the feeling that one is being forced into a position of being an overhearer when one doesn't want to overhear and maybe British people feel that way when they listen to me I think I've got a lot of Americans on the bus because I do talk quite loudly like most Americans or many Americans people on the bus with a mobile yeah people on the bus with a mobile which is another but I think what's actually quite interesting is that in some ways people have become desensitized in public about overhears that they speak loudly on their mobile phone being conscious that other people can overhear them so that's quite interesting in this particular research that I've been doing on police stops I have also been looking at I've also been looking at other kinds of cultures other kinds of contexts of police stops and see if I have an example of here we are so this is Hong Kong this is so you saw the ones I showed in the stage and in different kind of situations how the police reacted to being filmed this is how the Hong Kong police reacted to being filmed I can't seem to play it but you can read the sometimes what the F are you filming yet lost with kind of no concern at all that that's going to go on YouTube which is quite interesting because I think although in the US cops have been filmed behaving badly like that it's not something that they would this is quite frequent this is like the normal way some cops react to being filmed and there's no kind of concern that that's inappropriate so that kind of display of power is seen as completely appropriate and documented and sort of no problem put it on Facebook can I ask one little one before this is about the interpretation by different people of videos like this there is a great variation I wonder what audience design are the whole idea of the interpretation is also another layer because as I said they go through these kinds of trajectories of discourse and they end up in different contexts they end up on Facebook they end up on your WhatsApp feed they may end up in a courtroom as well so I wrote a paper about a police video about beating in Hong Kong during the protests and how it travelled through different Facebook pages and how the story of the visual was narrated completely differently on different Facebook pages and there's a lovely article by Goodwin, Chuck Goodwin about a professional scene where he talks about the Rodney King video and how the lawyers in the Rodney King video were able to cut it up in the way that it seemed like Rodney King was really dangerous it should have been beaten sorry, next person I was going to say the cell phone example is interesting because you will sometimes be an overhearer and then you become a deliberate eavesdropper because you get irritated or it's very interesting and the idea that these roles can move between deliberate and deliberate even under a seat you can be an under a seat and be deliberately involved in what the speaker is doing and the task or not that you're brought into it in a sense and so the factor of whether it's you're deliberately intentionally involved or not I think is also interesting to mention the other, just to add one more for the point the other thing is that you have an aspect to them that is not actually speaking and people forget about it and they forget and much of what they're doing with their cell phones is actually writing and presenting pictures that are not actually speaking that's right, it makes it even more common I wrote an article many years ago about people having cyber sex and what's interesting about cyber sex is there is audio right? but people didn't like to use audio so they liked to type so they're completely silent and typing like the grown-ups it's quite interesting great presentation just one issue which I would like to see add to this element of research and it's kind of informing your research but I'd like you to be a bit more explicit in a wider kind of normative and prescriptive aspect an example that I would give would be not from the US police example but from the UK which is a slightly different kind of framework but nonetheless expresses what the problem is and that is that in the UK we've had many decades of problems associated with narratives of problems associated with stop and search and it's you know constantly providing explanation from the police and the most recent explanation we've had from the police and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner is that when they do stop and search one in three cases produces a positive affirmation but what I would suggest is that within this model that you're providing what we would need to look at is how stop and search as an instance could be executed across the board, across and throughout society, throughout our institutions and then assess the percentage of positive results so suppose we had stop and search in the banking sector and they suddenly discovered all sorts of cocaine or stop and search in Parliament it could have been a pioneer for the MP's expenses scandal whatever the case may be but the point is that it's the asymmetric placement that gives rise to the camera need and from that we need to have a wider normative prescriptive model for what can be done Yes, yes I mean when I search for videos of police search police stops 95% of African American 95% and of course 90 African Americans are more likely to be arrested for drug possession because they're more likely to be searched for drugs I think that similar kind of thing if the cops went into my nephew's white suburban high school they would find just as many but the fact is if my white suburban nephew got caught with a bag of marijuana he's not going to go to jail no way is he going to go to jail absolutely impossible but the same kid of the same age at a black high school in inner city Baltimore he'll go to jail for five years and that'll totally alter his life so absolutely and that's got to I think in this kind of research that kind of awareness and that seeing that that's the problem that we're solving for me I'm very interested in these linguistic problems and problems of audience design and you know concentric circles and all that stuff yeah that's really important to me but I think in this particular moment in this particular moment in our history the most important question all of us need to be asking is how to be a citizen in this kind of world that we're living in with Trump and Brexit thank you for the talk it was very wide ranging and really interesting all of your examples seem to be drawn from modern western Chinese urban settings and I wonder if you're talking about small scale situations little villages or whatever where everybody knows everybody they know exactly what everybody else has been doing and so on whether that would change the you know the kind of analysis quite a number of years ago Michael Walsch writing about Aboriginal communities in Australia he talked about broadcast use of language and what happens there is early in the morning when the sun is coming up people just stand up and they say no there is no address C it's actually everybody has an over hero oh that's really interesting it's Michael Walsch WAL sounds really interesting yes and one thing that we have to remember is that this kind of this kind of deterioration of privacy is actually a kind of deterioration of something that is in itself quite new right but I still think quite precious because in some ways privacy is a very important kind of political tool but it is a kind of fluid thing and so when I see my students having a different idea about privacy than I do I I don't necessarily think on the world is any or something is going wrong because privacy is always a kind of fluid thing and it has been very very fluid throughout history and I think you would find that even in these small communities media is changing how they are doing things I have a colleague Anna Dumart down in South Africa and I work on gossiping in townships using mobile phones and how that gossiping and shaming and that sort of thing so there are internet websites and whatsapp groups about who did what and why they are bad can I give you an anecdote from a colleague that worked in Indonesia he discovered that people there were using facebook through mobile phones and what they were doing was setting up fake identities in order to have assignations with one another and the whole thing kind of blew up when a guy turned up from an assignation and it was his wife and it was the other person I thought you had a person I think it was me I did actually thank you very much for the talk my question was about the quizzes the buzzfeed quiz and the game of thrones quiz when you're presenting your research do you know that those answers are going to advertisers or do you just suspect that and how do you present that assumption so this is actually you hit on something that's very it's the most difficult thing doing research on internet surveillance is that the practices of these companies are a black box their algorithms are a black box and their practices are a black box all I can say all I can observe is the kind of advertisements that suddenly appear on my facebook page after I said that my favorite poison is wine and suddenly I have wine appearing on my facebook page all of us have had those experiences because it's not a secret that they're doing and that is the economic model of the internet that's how the internet works that's why everything's free but there are consequences to that surveillance is the economic model of modern technological capitalism that's how people make money by surveillance and if we want to change that we need to really graphically rethink how we use the internet and are we willing to pay for google and that sort of thing and it's a really good writer American writer named Geron he was the guy who invented the whole idea of virtual reality and he wrote a book called Who Loans the Internet which is about the kind of economic model of the internet and how it's really unsustainable if we want to preserve if we want to preserve democracy human dignity and stuff like that it sounds a little bit like yeah well that's a impressive name has anyone got another question very quickly we've got about two minutes perhaps are you about able to say on that? I am yes absolutely we generally go over to the issue of edification and continue the discussion more did you have a quick comment? I think it's interesting you were talking about changing expectations and so on there was a video circulating on youtube a few months ago about the girl who gets invited on a date and all of her friends go on to all that stalking they couldn't find the guy so he became incredibly scary so actually having privacy becomes a problem it's actually quite difficult nowadays to get a job if you have no social media presence people will search for you on Facebook if you're not there they think I'll sell all of these guys it's not just a job I just applied for a US visa they'll ask you for a social media program for you on a US visa that is at the moment it's optional at the moment it's optional it's optional he can still search your phone when you come into the how do you use VPNs here? yes I'll just jump over here yeah I was going to say we can talk about more in the barb perhaps it's the radio system of our work it's the language documentation and when we are videoing people who is it for the role of language archives that's right that's right we also have to think of ourselves as sociolinguists as involved as implicated deeply implicated we do that thank you very much