Professor Graham Jones (MIT)
Evidential Sociabilities: The Poetics of Secondhand Knowledge in US and Chinese Social Media
The ability to cooperate in gathering, interpreting, and disseminating information is key to the survival of our species. Language makes it possible to share knowledge with people removed in both time and space, but secondhand reports pose unique epistemic challenges. With social media platforms providing unprecedented networks for spreading rumor and manipulating belief, linguistic anthropological research on evidentiality is more relevant than ever. Through the comparative analysis of examples drawn from English (US-based) and Mandarin (China-based) social media, this paper develops a perspective on the publicity of evidence that emphasizes the social indexicality of evidential language. First, through qualitative and quantitative analysis of digital networks of UFO investigators and skeptics, I describe how linguistic markers of hearsay dramatically amplify the circulation of evidence in a scientific controversy. Second, drawing on a collaborative study of Chinese internet fandom, I describe how a speech genre associated with online celebrity gossip—referred to in Mandarin slang as “melon eating”— becomes a mode of scalar social inquiry against the backdrop of politically restricted speech. I argue that participants in both online epistemic communities enact contextually appropriate norms of evidentiality and culturally specific forms of evidential sociability.
On Zoom by invitation