Mobile Messaging and Resourcefulness

Book excerpt: This book advocates a new post-digital linguistic ethnography approach to unpacking mobile communication and enabling a more informed understanding of individuals’ communicative practices in cities today. Drawing on data from a group of ordinary working people, multilingual individuals from superdiverse cities across the United Kingdom, the volume brings observations from this data together to form a new concept of ‘resourcefulness’ as a means of explaining the emergent sense of agency individuals develop towards remediating existing forms of technology in their everyday lives. The book in turn establishes the notion of the ‘networked individual’ by way of demonstrating the ways in which communicative practices cross spaces and platforms. Further chapters detail examples to highlight resourcefulness at work in enabling more efficient business communication, routes to self-expression and the creation and development of social support systems, while a concluding chapter looks at both the limitations and possibilities of resourcefulness and directions for future research. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and media and communication studies.