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As kindergartens and schools closed down during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, two hashtags emerged on Twitter: #CoronaEltern (#CoronaParents) and #CoronaEltern­Rech­nenAb (#CoronaParentsDocumentTheCosts). In this paper, we examine the positioning practices around both hashtags as expres­sions of "digital activism" (Joyce 2010: VIII). One characteristic of the hashtag campaign is that political demands are hardly ever made di­rectly. Rather, the participants resort to five main linguistic patterns: (1) they address different target groups; (2) they refer to different protagonists; (3) in the subcorpus #CoronaEltern specifically, they constitute themselves as a collective through (4) the recurring use of first-person narratives; (5) and generalization and typification. Our findings show that #CoronaParents are not just parents in times of a pandemic: #CoronaParents are only those who see themselves as such, participating in an evolving, at times misunderstood commu­nity.

This study offers a contribution to the reception analysis of TV doc­umentaries by focusing on viewer opinions expressed on social me­dia. It analyses German and English comments from YouTube and Facebook in order to find out what aspects of documentaries the audience comments on. More specifically, it describes how the viewers evaluate strategies that the producers use for simplifying complex content while still creating an appealing and entertaining media product. The results imply that most viewers appreciate informative shows that are entertaining at the same time. They also show that viewers tend to focus on the music and image, rather than on the spoken text, and that documentaries where nature plays an important role are judged more positively than science and history documentaries.

This paper investigates situations in French videogame interactions where non-players who share the same physical space as players, participate in the gaming activities as spectators. Through a detailed multimodal and sequential analysis, we show that being a spectator is a local achievement of all co-present participants - players and non-players.
Our argument is twofold. Firstly, we focus on three gaming interactions and connect the different configurations to the non-players' participation practices. We analyse the development of the game, watching, commenting, gaze and body movements of players and non-players, as well as the configuration of the spatial environment are intertwined. Three different "ways of spectating" are identified: doing being a couple, doing being friends and doing being a supporter. Additionally, we describe a selection of embodied practices used to locally achieve these "ways of spectating", indicating that spectatorship is co-constructed.

This study explores how 'gatherings' turn into 'encounters' in a virtu­al world (VW) context. Most communication technologies enable only focused encounters between distributed participants, but in VWs both gatherings and encounters can occur. We present close sequential analysis of moments when after a silent gathering, inter­action among participants in a VW is gradually resumed, and also investigate the social actions in the verbal (re-)opening turns. Our findings show that like in face-to-face situations, also in VWs partici­pants often use different types of embodied resources to achieve the transition, rather than rely on verbal means only. However, the tran­sition process in VWs has distinctive characteristics compared to the one in face-to-face situations. We discuss how participants in a VW use virtually embodied pre-beginnings to display what we call encounter-readiness, instead of displaying lack of presence by avatar stillness. The data comprise 40 episodes of video-recorded team in­teractions in a VW.

This study analyzes how participants playing VR games construct co-presence and shared gameplay. The analysis focuses on in­stances of play where one person is wearing the VR equipment, and other participants are located nearby without the ability to directly interact with the game. We first show how the active player using the VR equipment draws on talk and embodied activity to signal their presence in the shared physical environment, while simul­taneously conducting actions in the virtual space, and thus creates spaces for the other participants to take part in gameplay. Second, we describe how other participants draw on the contextual config­urations of the moment in displaying co-presence and position themselves as active and consequential co-players. The analysis demonstrates how gameplay can be communicatively con­structed even in situations where the participants have differential rights and possibilities to act and influence the game.

In so called Let's Plays, video gaming is presented and verbally commented by Let's players on the internet for an audience. When only watched but not played, the most attractive features of video games, immersion and interactivity, get lost – at least for the internet audience. We assume that the accompanying reactions (transmitted via a so-called facecam) and verbal comments of Let's Players on their game for an audience contribute to an embodiment of their avatars which makes watching a video game more attractive. Following an ethnomethodological conversation analytical (EMCA) approach, our paper focusses on two practices of embodying avatars. A first practice is that Let's Players verbally formulate their actions in the game. By that, they make their experiences and the 'actions' of avatars more transparent. Secondly, they produce response cries (Goffman) in reaction to game events. By that, they enhance the liveliness of their avatars. Both practices contribute to a co-construction of a specific kind of (tele?)presence.

Playing videogames is a popular social activity; people play videogames in different places, on different me­dia, in different situations, alone or with partners, online or offline. Unsurprisingly, they thereby share space (physically or virtually) with other playing or non-playing people. The special issue investigates through different contexts and settings how non-players become participants of the gaming interaction and how players and non-players co-construct presence. The introduction provides a problem-related context for the individual contributions and then briefly presents them.

The paper presents research results emerging from the analysis of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) log data. Based on the assump­tion that media and data, as part of practice, are produced and used cooperatively, the paper discusses how IPA log data can be used to analyze (1) how the IPA systems operate through their connection to platforms and infrastructures, (2) how the dialog systems are de­signed today and (3) how users integrate them into their everyday social interaction. It also asks in which everyday practical contexts the IPA are placed on the system side and on the user side, and how privacy issues in particular are negotiated. It is argued that, in order to be able to investigate these questions, the technical-institutional and the cultural-theoretical perspective on media, which is common in German media linguistics, has to be complemented by a more fun­damental, i.e. social-theoretical and interactionist perspective.

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This contribution is interested in the interactional management of mobile phone use in face-to-face encounters. Early observational studies of mobile phone use have emphasized the tension between the participants' presence in "public" spaces and their "private" activities on mobile phones. This assumed dichotomy and possible conflict between different communication involvements will be revisited by using a conversation analytic approach to mobile phone use in video recorded everyday encounters among friends and family members. Three examples of self-initiated text messaging or calling will illustrate how and on which sequential (or other interactional) grounds participants frame their mobile phone use for co-present others. More specifically, the analysis will discuss how participants format and respond to announcement sequences or their absence, and how they can orient to the phone users' accountability.

In the present article we argue that all communication is medial in the sense that every human sign-based interaction is shaped by me­dial aspects from the outset. We propose a dynamic, semiotic con­cept of media that focuses on the process-related aspect of media­lity, and we test the applicability of this concept using as an example the second presidential debate between Clinton and Trump in 2016. The analysis shows in detail how the sign processing during the debate is continuously shaped by structural aspects of television and specific traits of political communication in television. This includes how the camerawork creates meaning and how the protagonists both use the affordances of this special mediality. Therefore, it is not adequate in our view to separate the technical aspects of the me­dium, the 'hardware', from the processual aspects and the structural conditions of communication. While some aspects of the interaction are directly constituted by the medium, others are more indirectly shaped and influenced by it, especially by its institutional dimension – we understand them as second-order media effects. The whole medial procedure with its specific mediality is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of meaning-making. We distinguish the medial procedure from the semiotic modes employed, the language games played and the competence of the play­ers involved.