Blogs have been classified according to their discussion of external events (i.e. filters, Blood 2002) and to the impact and influence bloggers may have as citizen journalists (Lasica 2002, Gillmor 2003), public intellectuals (Park 2003) and opinion leaders (Delwiche 2004). Other studies focus on the sociodemographics of bloggers’ and individuals’ motivations for using a specific medium (Papacharissi 2004, Herring et al. 2005a, 2005b, Kaye 2005, Nowson and Oberlander 2006, Li 2007, Sanderson 2008). Blogs have been also variously defined, but what most definitions have in common is that they include posts published in inverted chronological order and that they need technical affordances to be aggregated. Research literature has amply discussed social and verbal aspects in blogging and also multimodal properties to some extent, but no systematic attempt has been made so far to take into full account the many resources that come into play in blogs. This paper sets out to fill this gap, also trying to capture the textual and semiotic transition from macro-‐blogging to micro-‐ blogging in English, here defined as blogEng (Sindoni 2013), that is holding sway in the contemporary mediascape. The process of transition from macro-‐blogging to micro-‐blogging can be explained in terms of genre analysis, i.e. the evolution from web genres characterized by more static formats (i.e. single webpages and websites in the form of personal journals) to more fluid web genres, incorporating commenting activities in web-‐based platforms, video/media sharing communities and social networks. What used to be a full-‐length entry, akin to conventional pieces of writing but in digital formats, has now been turned into a quick and concise form of digital writing, in some cases blurring into spoken-‐like models of communication, for example in status updates in Facebook or tweets in Twitter. Status updates and tweets are both examples of how blogging is being transformed in the digital mediascape. On a sociosemantic level, Thibault maintains that blogs can and should be studied in broader terms, also because the possibility of hypertexting in digital media has reshaped language, and in particular written language (2012). The research questions that this paper addresses are: does it still make sense to distinguish between speech and writing in the digital domains? How is spoken and written discourse changing in blogs? And also: assuming that web-‐based environments are made up of ensembles of complex semiotic resources, how to tackle such diversity and complexity?
BlogEng: Variation across Speech and Writing in Blogs
SINDONI, Maria Grazia
2014-01-01
Abstract
Blogs have been classified according to their discussion of external events (i.e. filters, Blood 2002) and to the impact and influence bloggers may have as citizen journalists (Lasica 2002, Gillmor 2003), public intellectuals (Park 2003) and opinion leaders (Delwiche 2004). Other studies focus on the sociodemographics of bloggers’ and individuals’ motivations for using a specific medium (Papacharissi 2004, Herring et al. 2005a, 2005b, Kaye 2005, Nowson and Oberlander 2006, Li 2007, Sanderson 2008). Blogs have been also variously defined, but what most definitions have in common is that they include posts published in inverted chronological order and that they need technical affordances to be aggregated. Research literature has amply discussed social and verbal aspects in blogging and also multimodal properties to some extent, but no systematic attempt has been made so far to take into full account the many resources that come into play in blogs. This paper sets out to fill this gap, also trying to capture the textual and semiotic transition from macro-‐blogging to micro-‐ blogging in English, here defined as blogEng (Sindoni 2013), that is holding sway in the contemporary mediascape. The process of transition from macro-‐blogging to micro-‐blogging can be explained in terms of genre analysis, i.e. the evolution from web genres characterized by more static formats (i.e. single webpages and websites in the form of personal journals) to more fluid web genres, incorporating commenting activities in web-‐based platforms, video/media sharing communities and social networks. What used to be a full-‐length entry, akin to conventional pieces of writing but in digital formats, has now been turned into a quick and concise form of digital writing, in some cases blurring into spoken-‐like models of communication, for example in status updates in Facebook or tweets in Twitter. Status updates and tweets are both examples of how blogging is being transformed in the digital mediascape. On a sociosemantic level, Thibault maintains that blogs can and should be studied in broader terms, also because the possibility of hypertexting in digital media has reshaped language, and in particular written language (2012). The research questions that this paper addresses are: does it still make sense to distinguish between speech and writing in the digital domains? How is spoken and written discourse changing in blogs? And also: assuming that web-‐based environments are made up of ensembles of complex semiotic resources, how to tackle such diversity and complexity?Pubblicazioni consigliate
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