Language workers and the challenge of digitalisation

The increasing digitalisation of communication has not gone unnoticed by the US military. The teaching of communication takes place at the Defense Information School (DINFOS), providing professional instruction to US military members, civilian personnel and allies from around the world. With the emergence of social media and the increasing significance of user-generated content, the teaching of communication, even more so than previously, prioritises the collaboration of academic researchers, practitioners and industry leaders in digitalised media for professional development. Viewing the collaboration as an example of transdisciplinary practice (McGregor, 2014McGregor, S. L. T. (2014). Introduction to special issue on transdisciplinarity. World Futures, 701, 161–163. ), this paper seeks to gain insight into their thoughts on social media messaging and management for developing themes (Perrin & Kramsch, 2018Perrin, D., & Kramsch, C. (2018). Transdisciplinarity in applied linguistics. AILA Review, 311, 1–13. ) for research and practice, as well as for teaching language learners to be language workers (Koller, 2018Koller, V. (2018). Language awareness and language workers. Language Awareness, 27(1–2), 4–20. ) in a digitalised mediated world. The analysis of the social media workshop from 2017 is inspired by content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.) Sage.). Through the analysis, the themes of “Community”, “Content” and “Conduct” are created based on a series of 23 lectures for practitioners by senior officers, academic researchers and persons from social media companies like Twitter and Instagram. The analysis shows, among other things, that the technological dimension of social media may constrain and enable language use in unpredictable ways. For research, practice and learning, the themes may function as a “shared language” for more effective language use towards the increasing digitalisation of communication. The paper concludes by reflecting on two concerns within transdisciplinarity, specifically transdisciplinary identity (Augsburg, 2014Augsburg, T. (2014). Becoming transdisciplinary: The emergence of the trandisciplinary individual. World Futures, 70(3–4), 233–237. ) and the link between process and impact (Hansson & Polk, 2018Hansson, S., & Polk, M. (2018). Assessing the impact of transdisciplinary research: The usefulness of relevance, credibility, and legitimacy for understanding the link between process and impact. Research Evaluation, 27(2), 132–144. ).