In the era of social media, organizations like the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust are leveraging platforms like Twitter to communicate with publics in multifaceted ways.
A fascinating case in point is how the NHS trust used Twitter to communicate about #GeordieHospital, a documentary series filmed on various of its premises and broadcast on Channel 4.
Analysing these tweets through the lens of speech act theory is a fascinating if laborious task which is of value to tackle one of the many challenges of understanding human communication in the digital age.
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| NHS digital speech acts are multifunctional (created via OpenArt) |
Breaking tweets into speech acts
Speech act theory, a cornerstone of linguistic philosophy, breaks down communication into three types of acts: locutionary (the act of saying something), illocutionary (the intent behind saying something), and perlocutionary (the effect of saying something).
In the context of the NHS trust's tweets, these acts are often intertwined, reflecting the multifunctionality of organizational tweets.
Distinguishing between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts can be challenging. While illocutionary acts are about the speaker's intent, perlocutionary acts concern the effect on the listener.
Let’s take for illustration purposes one of the prominent tweets posted early in January 2022 by the NHS trust:
“Next Monday (17 January) you can follow some of our amazing staff & patients during a shift across our hospitals as we introduce you to episode 1 of the new @Channel4 series #GeordieHospital at 8pm. Look out for the trailer from today & find out more here [LINK]”
Using speech act theory, we may argue the tweet is multifunctional in that it contains locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary functions.
The first is conveyed through the basic act of communication in the post (i.e., a new series called Geordie Hospital will air on a specific date and time, etc).
The illocutionary act is found in the sender’s directive to an imagined public to follow the staff and patients, and to look out for the trailer.
Inferring the sender's intended effect
As far as the perlocutionary act goes, one needs to imagine the impact that the tweet is likely to have on the reading public. This can be the interest and anticipation generated by the post, encouraging them to tune in on their television sets.
In the absence of direct feedback from the public, we are left inferring the perlocutionary act based on the content and context of the speech act itself. But is this inference about the intended effect or the actual effect?
The simple answer is the former and we could only know the latter by analysing the speech acts that come from the public in response to the NHS trust’s posts.
However, when we are constrained by time and other considerations to inquire upon these responses, Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding model offers a useful (if temporary) way forward so we can at least tell the difference between where the illocutionary act ends and where the perlocutionary one begins.
According to Hall, the sender encodes a message with certain preferred meanings, which the audience then decodes, potentially interpreting the message in ways that align with, negotiate with, or oppose the preferred reading.
When we analyse perlocutionary acts in a tweet and can’t immediately make sense of the responses to such post, we're essentially trying to infer the preferred reading that the sender has encoded into the message.
Navigating the Digital Communication Landscape
As we continue to navigate the digital communication landscape, frameworks like Hall's, which was intended for the analysis of television production and its reception, can help us better understand and navigate these complexities.
Of course, speech act theory has limitations in that its historical focus on textual communication calls for adaptation so it can be meaningfully applied to novel modalities of communication addressed by novel approaches.
In any case, speech act theory provides a robust theoretical framework through which the most intricate aspects of language can be unraveled, looking beyond the surface of communication to make sense of what is truly social in the increasingly complex world in which we live.
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