TY - UNPB
T1 - Existential challenges and interactional sociolinguistics/linguistic ethnography
AU - Rampton, Ben
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - Artificial intelligence is certainly changing our lives, but wherever there is an interest in the ongoing interaction of people, culture, economy and environment, where different kinds of discourse, person, organism, object, technology and habitat negotiate the unpredictably unfolding present, there’s a significant role for interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (‘IS/LE’). Although this commentary is written without any specialist expertise in digital discourse, it first sketches the kinds of contribution IS/LE can make to AI-influenced communication, and then cites coloniality and the climate emergency as additional factors raising big existential questions for us all. But if these are all wicked problems, problems that “that cannot be solved, but must instead be re-solved and renegotiated, over and over again” (Grundman 2016), then IS/LE can still be useful, side-stepping “hope or despair?” with its insights and modestly consequential practical activity, guiding our students past the traps of AI in the process.
AB - Artificial intelligence is certainly changing our lives, but wherever there is an interest in the ongoing interaction of people, culture, economy and environment, where different kinds of discourse, person, organism, object, technology and habitat negotiate the unpredictably unfolding present, there’s a significant role for interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (‘IS/LE’). Although this commentary is written without any specialist expertise in digital discourse, it first sketches the kinds of contribution IS/LE can make to AI-influenced communication, and then cites coloniality and the climate emergency as additional factors raising big existential questions for us all. But if these are all wicked problems, problems that “that cannot be solved, but must instead be re-solved and renegotiated, over and over again” (Grundman 2016), then IS/LE can still be useful, side-stepping “hope or despair?” with its insights and modestly consequential practical activity, guiding our students past the traps of AI in the process.
M3 - Working paper
T3 - Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies
BT - Existential challenges and interactional sociolinguistics/linguistic ethnography
CY - KCL
ER -