An Integrative Approach

As LoL players share with each other the practice of LoL gaming, it is reasonable to assume that they are all members of a community of practice. In line with this view, it comes naturally that I will touch upon the issue of identity and relational work with the help of the community of practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; among others) earlier

discussed in Chapter 2. In this framework, the purpose of the present study is to see how investigation into the community members’ “shared repertoire” (See Section 2.1.3) could

provide clues as to identity and intersubjectivity and thereby prove the value of such community-based sociolinguistic research. In particular, I believe that language, linguistic forms and meanings, as a part of the shared repertoire is one of the most enlightening ways to examine the meaning negotiation process occurring within a virtual community of practice.

This is exactly why discourse analysis is the focal point in relevance to the virtual identities in my research. Employing an ethnographic approach to communities of practice, I present the discourse analysis through descriptions of social meaning in terms of player communications. The analysis will include what happens in the virtual setting of gameplay and, more importantly, how the events make sense of the social relationships and relative memberships among the community members. That is, the discursive effects of the utterances are stressed in order to unveil the social consequences brought to the gaming culture.

To explore the relationships between the use of language and identity, I make reference to the idea of stancetaking as a mediated process by which the speaker reminds the addressee of a possible link between the utterance and particular social meaning specific to the community of practice. Such social meaning is often a claim to membership in the

community or specific roles within the members, or what I call “identity.” This sense of identity is successfully delivered owing to the fact that it is part of the community’s ideology (i.e. the participants’ belief that the sets of repeated stancetaking moves could stack up as

particular social identities within the community). The reason why I focus on the concept of

stance instead of footing, position, and other relevant terms is that its emphasis on point of view and action best describes constructionist sociolinguistics’ retreat from an essentialized view of identity and suits an empirical study of ethnography.

Based on the assumption that acts of stances index identities, I apply the analytic tool of tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, 2005) (See Section 2.1.2) to stancetaking moves in order to reveal the identity relations maintained or claimed by the conversants.

Upon realizing that identity emerges from discourse where participants make meaning to each other, a look into intersubjectivity process is essential for better understanding of what identity really means to the speaker and hearer. I organize the interrelationships among the theoretical approaches I adopt for the study in Figure 3 below:

Figure 3. Interrelationships among community of practice, stancetaking, and tactics of

In Figure 3, words in italics are the theoretical concepts I resort to, including community of practice, stance(taking), and (tactics of) intersubjectivity; arrows symbolize the processes of indexing. As the figure illustrates, my whole analysis rests upon the framework of community

of practice. Within this paradigm, any acts of speech during interaction could be interpreted as taking particular stances, according to the speakers’ evaluations toward the contexts where

the utterances take place, including certain objects and co-participants. This realization of utterances as stancetaking comes from our interpretation of language as expressing certain pragmatic functions such as committing to its degree of certainty, passing evaluative judgments, and showing emotions. Such stancetaking could then be further connected to social meanings of identity and relational work in the local community, as a result of the community’s cultural model. To explore the connection between stances and identities, I use

members’ respective stances. Based on the idea of intersubjectivity, only when the participants’ subjective orientations to the world are displayed relative to each other can their

identity relations be perceived.

One more thing to add to my analytic model is the adjustment I make to the tactics of intersubjectivity proposed by Bucholtz and Hall (2004, 2005). One of the pairs of complementary identity relations is authentication and denaturalization concerning realness and artifice. However, when it comes to the process of denaturalization, the authors raise two examples that both involve disruptions of the authentic but are actually very different from each other in terms of their social meanings: one’s inconsistent self-presentation (See Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p. 501 for the instance from Barrett, 1999) and challenge to an

authenticity of an identity (See Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p. 501 for an instance of nerd identity), respectively. While the former is to show the “the creative power of individual identity work,” the latter is to underline the “the rupture of dominant ideologies” (Bucholtz & Hall,

2004, p. 501). Due to this distinction, it is better that we divide the opposite polarity against the tactic of authentication (i.e. the original denaturalization) into subcategories for the sake of clarity. I, therefore, subcategorize it into two: The new denaturalization and

de-authentication. I define the new denaturalization as incorporating only the “self

inconsistence” aspect of the original denaturalization. That is, it is enacted only when a sense of dissonance is created in between a person’s self-presentation, such as his/her ambivalent

stancetaking acts. De-authentication, on the other hand, means to challenge or question a person’s (usually others’) established authentication of a certain identity. Note that, by this

minor adjustment, I do not mean to overthrow the prior organization; it is only for the comprehensibility of my analysis.

To sum up, I suggest that an integrative approach of community of practice, stancetaking, and tactics of intersubjectivity could tap into online identities as situated in a virtual communication platform. There should be no doubt as to their integration because they all share the discursive view of identity as well as the view that micro actions could be given social meaning in relation to the macrostructures where they are taken.