10 February 2016

Rodney Jones (University of Reading)

‘Have you swiped your Nectar card’: Pretextuality and practices of surveillance

Pretextuality is a key concept in discourse analysis, through it perhaps has not received the degree of analytical attention that it deserves. It is usually defined as the set of expectations we bring to texts and the situations of which texts are part that help us to understand the purpose of the text and the goals of its author. As Widdowson (2004) argues, ‘All texts are designed to be understood pre-textually…it is the pretextual purpose that we bring to texts that controls how we engage with them and regulate the focus of our attention.’ Whereas Widdowson’s focus is on pretextuality as an interpretive tool, Maryns and Blommaert ( 2002:14) view it more from the perspective of discourse production. For them, pretexts constitute ‘conditions of sayability’: the ‘socially preconditioned meaning assessments, textuality resources and entextualisation potential’ that that allow certain people to say certain things in certain situations. In their analysis of migration stories told by asylum seekers, for example, they show how pretextuality functions to deny discursive resources to particular kinds of people. For ‘social engineers’ (Hagnagy, 2011) and ‘con-men’ involved in things like identity theft, pretextualtiy has a rather different meaning: ‘Pretexting’ is the practice of creating an invented scenario (a pretext) to engage a targeted victim in revealing sensitive information about themselves. While Maryns and Blommaert’s concern with pretextuality focuses on the way it can deny speech to certain individuals, social engineers are more interested in the way it functions to compel speech.

This paper will consider pretexuality in the the context of digital surveillance of the kind regularly engaged in by internet companies (like Facebook and Google), software developers, and retail firms in order to gather consumer data. The question I will be asking is: what are the discursive strategies such entities use to compel users to engage in ‘discourse producing activities’ that result in ‘capta’ (‘captured’ data about users identities, their mundane activities, and their preferences and predilections). The analysis focuses on three ‘case studies’ of ‘pretexting”: 1) online quizzes (such as ‘What Shakespearean character are you?’) of the type often encountered on Facebook; 2) mobile apps which gather information from your smartphone (including your location, your contact list, and your communication with others); and 3) retail loyalty cards such as the ‘Nectar card’ which promise benefits to shoppers who are willing to reveal details about their purchasing behaviour. The analysis will combine all three of the definitions of pretextuality discussed above: Pretextuality as a matter of communicative conventions (or ‘frames), as a function of social power and regimes in inclusion and exclusion, and as an a social practice, an interactional accomplishment dependent on the form and structure of different kinds of ‘conversations’. Understanding pretextuality in the context of digital surveillance, it will argue, requires not just an analysis of of texts and the social contexts in which they occur, but also of the moment by moment unfolding of the social interactions (involving both humans and algorithms) in which texts and contextualization cues are deployed and relationships of power and inequality are constructed.

References
Hadnagy, C. (2011). Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Maryns, K. and Blommaert, J. (2002) Pretextuality and pretextual gaps: On de/refining linguistic inequality, Pragmatics 12 (1)

Widdowson, H. G. (2004). Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Rodney Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics and New Media and Head of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. His latest monograph is Spoken Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2016). He is currently working on a book entitled A Sociolinguistics of Surveillance (to be published by OUP in 2017).