This chapter investigates the normative impact of UX writers’ language work by discussing how they craft particular audiences through their work. As such, this chapter turns to the textual products that UX writers create. My analysis focuses on a particularly impactful example of this work, the texts produced for cookie consent notices. Examining the kinds of audiences and addressees that surface in and through these texts, I suggest, can help scholars consider how digital media entail not just traditional notions of audience design but also a more explicit and active crafting of audiences, whereby some people are constructed as audiences and others not. Specifically, I discuss how automated participant roles, the stylization of users, as well as the design of imposed interaction lead to an encoding of both specific participant roles as well as particular social identities in software interfaces. Ultimately, I suggest that this may be understood as a form of symbolic violence, whereby the software interface is used as a means to impose not just an interaction order but also a particular social order onto users.

Early CALL researchers focused primarily on the technical aspects of language learning, such as computer program design and the use of multimedia. However, over time the field has evolved to encompass a wider range of pedagogical and psychological considerations. For example, researchers have investigated the efficacy of different teaching approaches, such as task-based language learning and communicative language teaching through technology. They have also explored the role of learner motivation in technology-mediated language learning, as well as the impact of technology on learners’ attitudes toward language learning. In terms of research design and settings, CALL studies have become increasingly diverse. While early studies often relied on small-scale, laboratory-based experiments, more recent research has taken place in real-world educational settings, such as classrooms and online learning environments using a wider range of research methods, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Overall, while there have been significant developments in CALL research over the past four decades, there are still many questions that remain unanswered. As technology continues to evolve, it is likely that researchers will continue to explore new avenues for integrating technology into language education and addressing the challenges that arise along the way.

In Chapter 1, I explain how the book can be read and used in a nonlinear fashion, providing affordances for further exploration, comparable to the way the book approaches the creation and experience of works of art. The chapter proceeds to present a detailed advance organizer in the form of a point-by-point overview of the main messages and ideas of this book, providing a framework for the way the book can be read and used.

This chapter addresses the need for clarity of definition and identifies the various fields in which hybridity operated in the Greek world. Recent work in monster theory emphasizes the role of monsters in policing the borders of what is normative. Monsters have repeatedly been interpreted as threats to the order created by classification. Hybrids are better understood not as threats to order, but as expressions of anomaly. As a mode of cultural production hybrids are a means of coping with that which defies neat classification. This may veer towards the monstrous, as in the case of the demonic female figure, the gorgon, but equally it can tend towards the curious and the wondrous, like Pegasos alighting at the Peirene Fountain in Corinth or the horses of Achilles grieving for the death of Patroklos. In trying to understand how and why the Greeks generated hybrids in their mythology it may seem that we are putting the Greeks on the psychiatrist’s couch, but Freud’s conception of the Uncanny sheds some light on how hybrids function. They represent the challenge of the anomalous.

This chapter focuses on the power of words and images. It introduces basic concepts that are pivotal in verbal, visual, and multimodal communication. First, it discusses writing in the digital age and explores the media linguistic mindset that is required in rapidly changing digital environments. Furthermore, a set of sixteen key practices of focused writing and writing-by-the way in the newsroom and beyond are presented. The second part of the chapter covers theoretical concepts of visual communication by addressing different approaches to reading images. One pivotal approach is social semiotics – a grand theory that can be applied to all kinds of semiotic material used for communication. This approach is complemented with concepts from other semiotic traditions as well as rhetorical and critical theories about images and their effects on the users. In addition, certain questions related to multimodal communication and related key concepts are discussed. The chapter concludes with the main message that all forms of human communication are multimodal.

This chapter studies small things that were neither expensive nor finely crafted, but were cherished by their owners, drawing on trials for theft at the Old Bailey and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Small items such as buttons, thimbles, needles, and handkerchiefs were easily pilfered by thieves, and appear frequently as stolen goods that women and men sought to recover through the courts. In both the courthouse and the playhouse, thieves and victims agreed that small things could be recognized by their original owners. Trial testimony shows how owners recalled “remarkable” details about their possessions, describing tiny marks known only to them and discerned via repeated handling and viewing over time. In this way, these remarkable details, through their emphasis on sight, offer alternative ways to comprehend the affordance of things in the eighteenth century. Such personal marks prove troublesome to the thieves of Gay’s ballad opera, whose operations depend on small things being made unfamiliar in order to circulate in the secondhand marketplace. Nothing was too small or too commonplace to be reclaimed by someone. Remarkable details held out the promise that small things could be returned and that no thing was too commonplace to be missed by someone.

Chapter 14 begins with a general discussion of how the affordances and constraints of media affect their adoption and use, and conversely how they affect social interaction, language use, culture, and social structure.It then discusses the particular affordances, constraints, and effects of classes of media, beginning with language itself.

This chapter discusses stimulus evaluation theories (SETs), which foreground a process of stimulus evaluation (or appraisal). A first brand, called evaluation-first SETs, include appraisal theories in psychology and (quasi-)judgmental and perceptual theories in philosophy. Theories in this brand differ in the role they confer to stimulus evaluation (constituent-only, causal-only, constituent-causal), the granularity of the output of this process (molar, molecular, molar-molecular), and the system required to produce it (in terms of representational format and Attitude, operations, and operating conditions or automaticity). The transition from stimulus evaluation to the other components is accounted for by evaluation-response links that are innate—in the biological version—or learned—in the non-biological version. The latter version splits again in a summary and elemental sub-version. A second brand, called embodied SETs, postulate that stimulus evaluation acquires its heat after bodily responses set in, or they assume an indivisible evaluation-response connection. SETs outperform the previous theories in their capacity to account for the (world-directed) Intentionality of emotions. Most of them can also account for ontogenetic and phylogenetic continuity (except judgmental theories), phenomenality, bodily aspect, heat, control precedence, and irrationality. Molar SETs deliver discrete emotions, purely molecular SETs do not. Empirical research that tests SETs is discussed.

In the present chapter, we outline some key assumptions about the development of creativity from a sociocultural perspective. This perspective emphasizes the dynamic and interdependent nature of the creativity–culture relationship, especially when considering the two developmentally. We unpack here the elements of the reciprocal relation between creativity and culture by using the 5 As framework. Within this framework, creative actors learn how creativity is defined and how to develop their creative abilities within their specific cultural context. They acquire those actions and activities that are crucial for participating creatively in their culture; appreciate why being familiar with a wide range of artifacts, created by previous generations, matters for their own creativity; consider the role of others in mediating both culture and creativity; and, last but not least, discover how material constraints foster creative expression. We end with a few reflections on why a life-course approach to creativity ultimately requires a sociocultural understanding of this phenomenon.

We explore different modes of experience in performance, including various experiences of flow, heedful performance, and habit. In contrast to conceptions that take habit to be automatic or a more-or-less rote repetition of behavior, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty consider habit to be a general bodily responsiveness to the world. Dewey's conception of intelligent habit involves a thoughtful attitude of care and attunement to the parameters of the task. Merleau-Ponty likewise describes habit as being both motor and perceptual. Habit is an open and adaptive way in which the body learns to cope with familiar situations in ways that involve some degree of heedful performance. The deployment of a motor habit, for example, adapts to the specific contour of the situation – different situations make different demands on how the habitual task, here and now, ought to be achieved. This conception of habit meshes well with ecological affordance-based accounts of action and perception.

Emotions are deeply embedded into the social contexts in which they occur. Emotional responses differ largely among various cultures, but also among various social subgroups and individuals. At the same time emotions typically include crossculturally stable bodily and behavioral features and have homologs in other animals like the facial expression in anger or the release of adrenaline in fear. This article will focus on the interplay of bodily responses and social structure that brings about emotions, habits, and skills and their interrelations. Emotions are constituted by a complex pattern of bodily responses that prepare one for action. The relevant bodily responses are tied together through a complex process of socialization in a way that produces typical emotional reactions in certain types of social scenarios that are of relevance for the individual. These social scenarios can be described as affordances that together make up a social structure to which individuals habitually respond.