Les photo-discours WhatsApp : éléments d’analyse d’une affordance d’une application mobile

• Main Author: Yosra Ghliss
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO 2019-09-01
• Series: Corela
• Subjects: WhatsApp; extimacy; affordances; conversational images; Discourse analysis
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corela/8480

This paper aims to analyze the affective implications of digital affordances (Paveau, 2012) observed through an authentic corpus of exchanges by WhatsApp. The notion of affordance, defined in the field of social psychology (Gibson, 1979) as the set of potentialities of action offered by the environment, will be observed in linguistic perspective and captured as a key concept to analyze. the spoken word (Moirand, 2015). Thus, the present study on WhatsApp interactions will apprehend the affordances of the mobile object (smartphone) in parallel with those of the application interface. WhatsApp gives users the ability to converse a photo in writing to their correspondent while communicating in real time. This sharing of "conversational images" (Gunther, 2014) constitutes, on the one hand, a trace of the affordance generated by the mobile application and, on the other hand, an observable of a composite discursiveness (Paveau, 2017), which puts the technical gesture of a written and photographic enunciation on the same level. Based on the corpus analysis I propose a typology of "conversational images" by emphasizing that this exchange of photos of oneself-or of one's environment-often betrays a "desire for extimacy" (Tisseron, 2011) where the one explodes with regard to the other fragments of the intimate self in order to have them validated by them.