The Language of Pick-Up Artists; Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry by Daria Dayter & Sofia Rüdiger instant download

The Language of Pick-Up Artists; Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry by Daria Dayter & Sofia Rüdiger instant download

This book explores language use on digital platforms populated by ‘pickup artists’ (PUAs), a community that learns and practices speed-seduction for short-term dating and sex. PUAs are very active online, which is where most of the data for our research originates. The analysis also includes internet-transmitted offline activities such as YouTube video recordings of seduction encounters and expert lectures. The datasets used in this book comprise online forums, social media, informational websites, and YouTube videos that pick-up artists use as virtual locations for their community of practice. As linguists, we focus on the verbal practices of pick-up artists. These include, among others, terminology-heavy language that works to present pick-up as a genuine science, narrative framing techniques, and linguistic innovation through borrowing from military and sports domains. Mastery of a complex technical vocabulary of terms and abbreviations is inherent to ‘The Game’, as pick-up artists call their activities. The communicative strategies applied by the PUAs in interactions with women resemble the cold-calls by salespeople and rely on unequal conversational power achieved through covert aims, topic control, and linguistic choices associated with powerful interactants. This book will appeal to students and scholars in such disciplines as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, computer-mediated communication, and language and media, as well as those interested in the study of language use online.