Abstract

This contribution aims to describe privacy, publicness and anonymity as essential dimensions for doing media linguistics. These dimensions are not inherent in and predetermined by the technical features and forms of communication, but are used by the participants as an orientation grid for shaping their online and offline practices in and with mobile media. Considering both mobile media use in the public realm and the dissemination of increasingly private content in social media (which is said to lead to ‘blurred boundaries’ between the private and the public), this paper provides a brief overview of the main developments in mobile media research. Studies adopting various approaches — e.g. sociological-ethnographic, linguistic and media studies — illustrate how privacy, publicness and anonymity are actively shaped and brought about by mobile media users. These observations indicate that the concepts of privacy and publicness have not lost their meaning but media linguistics should study the emergence of new multimodal practices by which they are framed and accomplished.