24.2739, Review: Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics: Campagna et al. (2012)

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Subject: 24.2739, Review: Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics: Campagna et al. (2012)

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Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 19:47:37
From: Andrea Lypka [alypka at mail.usf.edu]
Subject: Evolving Genres in Web-mediated Communication

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-597.html

EDITOR: Sandra  Campagna
EDITOR: Giuliana  Garzone
EDITOR: Cornelia  Ilie
EDITOR: Elizabeth  Rowley-Jolivet
TITLE: Evolving Genres in Web-mediated Communication
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Insights - Volume 140
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Andrea Lypka, University of South Florida

SUMMARY

‘Evolving Genres in Web-mediated Communication,’ edited by Sandra Campagna,
Giuliana Garzone, Cornelia Ilie, and Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet, explores the
dynamic nature of web-mediated communication (WMC) that catalyzes electronic
discursive practices of various discourse communities. In the introduction,
the editors challenge traditional genre theory and argue that the hypertextual
and multimodal features of the web call for the re-examination of WMC through
alternative genre theories and analytical tools. As a result, this collection
becomes important because it examines web genres through the lens of
multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), critical discourse analysis, and
participatory agenda.

In this edited collection of papers, the authors examine the connection
between traditional print genres and emerging online genres in multiple
communities from an interdisciplinary international research perspective. This
volume of 13 case studies explores the migration from print to web of various
genres and the emergence of alternative web genres that mirrors evolving
digital technological affordances in various discourse communities, including
corporations, health care, academia, media, government, and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). For researchers interested in the latest trends in genre
evolution and technological advances, linguists looking for new types of
online language, educators and students concerned with pedagogical values, and
corporations interested in the commercial implications of virtual worlds,
these studies provide theoretical frameworks and practical insights to
integrate WMC in communication. Furthermore, these studies attempt to offer
theoretical and practical insights on WMC as a dynamic and strategic resource
for self-promotion, research, and pedagogy.

The collection is organized according to the chronological progression of the
web, starting with traditional, static websites, and moving to newer, more
participatory venues such as newsgroups, blogs, wikis, and microblogs. The
book is divided into three sections; the four chapters in the first section
address WMC from the perspectives of more traditional genres, including
websites, e-brochures, and argumentative web campaigns. The four chapters in
the second section explore the development of participatory genres, including
online laboratory protocols, wikis, memes, and newsgroups. The final five
chapters, in section three, focus on readers’ comments, academic weblogs, and
corporate twittering as specific genres that alter possibilities for
advertisers and other interested users.

The first section opens with Paola Catenaccio’s theoretical and empirical
analysis of selected structural aspects and the dynamic interconnection of web
genres of traditional corporate websites through the lens of system science.
In contrast to the classic definition of the website as a medium, Catenaccio
defines it as a “rhetorical interface” (p. 40), where textual and visual
information might not be hierarchically organized, but where different genres
are interconnected. The author describes this rhetorical interface through the
analysis of the Siemens corporate website, where traditional and web genres
mesh, and users can become content creators.  On the Siemens website, new
genres and traditional genres are interconnected because they tackle the same
topic and share the same hyperlinks, but remain controlled by the corporation.
For example, a cultural event, sponsored by the company featured on the
homepage, contains a web-streaming option of the event as well as links to pdf
documents for festival supporters, the company’s involvement in the festival,
and the official festival’s site. However, this form of social communication
and creation of content on the Siemens website is connected to institutional
interests, having a primarily self-promotional purpose.

Furthermore, from the genre analysis and critical discourse analysis
perspectives, Alessandra  Vicentini investigates particular genre features in
Italian institutional healthcare pdf e-brochures for immigrants. Results of
the study reveal a shift to one single multilingual educational/informative
e-brochure characterized by oversimplified language and content compared to
paper-based healthcare brochures for immigrants. Despite the lack of
hypertextual elements in the multilingual pdf e-brochures, the informative and
educational values for the target audience (i.e. immigrants) become central
because visuals, such as graphics, images, pictures, and diagrams are
interchangeable with textual messages. Visual messages become “the main
semiotic code through which the message is conveyed” (p. 66), while textual
messages become shorter and simpler through the use of slogans, such as “we
are with you” (p. 70), contraction, and enumeration.

The case study of the Chinese government’s website by Bettina Mottura surveys
how governmental organizations exploit WMC to convey messages and collect
information from the public. The analysis of three online interviews with the
Prime Minister reveals that even when the genre shift is more pronounced
online, characteristics of traditional genres seem to coexist with emerging
genres. The author concludes that the symbiosis between bureaucratic and
journalistic genres, such as online interviews, aligns with top-down
communication flow and reinforces the legitimacy of the government because
these interviews are orchestrated by government officials and the journalists
and public are not interactive participants in these interviews. For example,
email addresses posted on the government website are not always hotlinked to
an actual email address, and the journalists who conduct the online interviews
with the Prime Minister only introduce the questions or topics. The public has
little to no license for interactive feedback during the online interviews;
therefore, views that might run contrary to the government’s agenda remain
underexposed. Mottura’s study highlights that WMC is a powerful tool to
promote political agenda and control information flow.

Using Swales’ three-level model of genre (1990) and the reading and navigating
modes (Askehave & Ellerup Nielsen, 2005), Chiara Degano’s case study analyzes
the effectiveness of online argumentative discourses of two NGO campaigns, the
‘Baby Milk Action,’ campaign geared against the marketing of infant formula,
and Greenpeace’s campaign against genetically modified food. The author
concludes that the lack of adequate textual scaffolding in the ‘Baby Milk
Action’ campaign hinders the effectiveness of these argumentative genres for
the audience because of the excess of information, and a shift from
argumentative to subjective narration style. On the other hand, Greenpeace’s
campaign exemplifies a more coherent argumentative discourse. Hierarchical
organization patterns included a general statement on the homepage, while more
specific explanations were provided through links.

Studies included in the second section frame digital communication as distinct
from face-to-face communication because Web 2.0 is an environment for
community building and cooperative information dissemination. These discourse
communities, including scientific communities, Wikipedia, social networking
sites, and newsgroups, are sometimes established ad-hoc, and in time, members
develop practices and language to engage and legitimize members in that
particular community (Kramsch, 2010). Since these web genres continue to
evolve, it remains to be seen what characteristics of traditional genre will
be incorporated in the web genre.

For instance, Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet analyzes the repurposing of
conventional scientific genres of laboratory protocols to the web, positing
that the affordances of the online medium that include options for public raw
data sharing and information dissemination, mutability, and multimodality,
create a unique informal environment for learning and collaboration. The
content analysis of the ‘Open WetWare’ website reveals that, in contrast to
print research protocols characterized by conventional, impersonal language,
web-mediated experimental procedures are characterized by informal, personal
language style (e.g. the use of the personal pronouns “I, me, my” and “we,”
spoken discourse markers “actually, now, well, so,” and capitalization to
indicate stress, such as in “HORRIBLE optics” (p. 146)). The informal learning
environment and the collective decisions to edit, remove or not remove a
protocol from the website create a sense of community and collaboration among
researchers and the public. Furthermore, through “legitimate peripheral
participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 29), this environment engages
apprentices, such as fledgling researchers, to participate in knowledge
co-construction and acquire research skills to become practitioners and
legitimized participants in that community.

Though these virtual spaces are personal and dynamic, they do not remain
completely egalitarian. Specifically, within Bakhtin’s (1981) notions of the
tensions between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of discourses,
Maristella Gatto investigates the reader-author-editor relationship,
collaborative writing practices, as well as patterns of interaction and
meaning-making in entries, by contrasting earlier and later stages of entries
posted on the cooperative online encyclopedia, ‘Wikipedia.’ One example of the
centrifugal force is the textual manipulation of the entry for “Montezuma,”
where one user commented that “the article is written like a travel guide,” a
different genre from the encyclopedia entry, while official editorial
revisions would be an example of centripetal forces.  The analysis of a sample
of ‘Wikipedia’ entries reveals that on the ‘Wikipedia’ page, reader, author,
and editor coexist; however, such online collaborative practices are
legitimized by peer and editorial review and a style manual regarding their
adherence to generic expectations.

In addition to collaborative spaces, a community may be developed through
fluid user-generated online verbal and nonverbal symbolic forms, like Internet
memes, which can be a hyperlink, an unusual picture, or an intentional
misspelling  of a phrase or word that might mean an ironic message. Enrico
Grazzi focuses on the pedagogical implications of using social networking,
such as blogs, message boards, discussion groups, and memes in English
language teaching and learning in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
setting. Using Wenger’s community of practice framework (1998), which
considers the social aspects of learning integrated in the concepts of
participation, practice, and identity in a professional community, the author
suggests that English teachers should integrate memes in their foreign
language curriculum to expose non-native speaker learners to alternative forms
of learning and the authentic use of EFL and to empower learners to actively
participate in a wider online community.

Elisa Corino and Cristina Onesti focus on agreement and disagreement
strategies and discourse development in a newsgroup. In this online
environment, users express their opinion and back up their arguments; their
interactions are subjected to Netiquette and informal rules of the discourse
community. Specifically, based on a sample taken from a subset of the NUNC
(NewsgroupUseNet Corpora) suite of multilingual corpora, the authors analyze
pragmatic and textual characteristics of interactions, levels of agreement and
disagreement (including partial and total agreement and total disagreement),
and quoting mechanisms for textual coherence in online discourses. Their study
finds that users adopted different agreement and disagreement strategies while
interacting online, and that quoting became pivotal not just for textual
coherence, but also as a strategy for users to avoid face threatening
interactions. Specifically, in disagreement and agreement discourses,
newsgroup users preferred to adopt less face threatening language by using
‘would’ and other conditional forms, as well as connectives, such as ‘but’ and
‘however,’ emoticons and ‘if’ clauses as delay devices, and quoting.

Studies included in the third section build on the social nature of Web 2.0.,
conceptualizing readers’ online comments on news, academic weblogs, corporate
blogs, and microblogs as popular participatory social media genres. These
online interactions are characterized by hybridized informal genres and the
creation of a new language in different modalities, with the goal being to
create, manipulate, document, and synthesize information, as well as to learn
and reflect.

Within the wider phenomenon of genre migration, Giuliana Garzone defines
weblogs as being native to the web, along with emails, websites, Facebook, and
having the following characteristics: entries organized in chronological
order, frequent updates, and links to other websites. Through the case studies
of the news blog ‘The Huffington Post’ and the corporate blog of  Kodak’s, the
author defines blog as a macrogenre that hybridizes informal diary and formal
journalistic genres into emergent context- and purpose-dependent communicative
formats, featuring short posts and Internet initialisms, including laugh out
loud (LOL), that align with the institutions’ agendas. Specifically, the
analysis of editorials in ‘The Huffington Post,’ an online news outlet,
reveals that online stories align with the inverted pyramid style reporting in
print news. Furthermore, perhaps because these stories are published on a more
interactive and dynamic platform, and include visuals and hyperlinks, these
online stories attract more viewers and comments compared to news reports in
newspapers. Similarly, the blogs managed by the company Kodak also take
advantage of the interactive, individualistic properties of blogging for
advertising and marketing purposes.

However, these seemingly free-form practices, including participatory
journalism, are governed by external factors like style guides and editorial
boards. Specifically, Sandra Campagna’s analysis of linguistic and stylistic
features of readers’ online comments on ‘The Economist’ article on ‘Banning
the Burqua’ suggests that contributors’ comments on news editorials are
conditioned by editors’ newsworthiness criteria, communicative and rhetorical
styles, and editorial norms. Specifically, in this controlled forum, readers’
brief comments include citations and the development of counter-arguments
regarding the editorial. For example, an author named Res Publica quotes
Voltaire in his or her counter-editorial comment: “As Voltaire might have
said, “I disapprove of your dress, but I will defend to the death your right
to wear it” (p. 259). Other readers, like mdoaleh, include personal stories as
his or her counter-argument: “The issue of banning the Burqa is most
hypocritical. My daughter one time decided freely to don the Hijab during her
first year in university. The second year she took it off and donned a diamond
nose stud” (p. 259).These commenters’ communication strategies align with the
mixing of informal and formal registers used by the editor, bringing to light
the generic integrity of readers’ comments.

Furthermore, the participatory nature of social media may also empower
bloggers to construct an online identity (Lam, 2000). Malgorzata Sokol’s study
conceptualizes academic weblogs, more popularly known as blogs, as spaces for
information dissemination and publication, as well as for scholar-bloggers’
identity negotiation in academia. Using linguistic analysis and Hyland’s model
of metadiscourse (2005), Sokol investigates authoring strategies, in
particular, academic bloggers’ professional identity legitimization through
the use of self-mention, self-promotion, and citation on English blogs of
humanities scholars. The analysis of the blog entries reveals the prevalence
of using the personal pronoun “I” versus “we,” as well as self-reference
expressed through multimodal discourses, through the use of visuals, such as
PowerPoint presentations, links to word documents on conference presentations,
and hypertextual links to references, to establish authorship. This study
reconfirms that academic blogs might strengthen bloggers’ academic identities
because they are platforms for self-publishing, and they adhere to scholarly
norms and norms established by the blogger community.

The authors in the last two studies, in section three, argue that the genre of
microblogging, featuring real-time exchanges and updates characterized by
short sentences, individual images, or video links, take the user experience
to the next level. These studies focus on Twitter as a viable and effective
marketing and branding genre that complements traditional advertising genres
because short, real-time informal updates engage consumers in discourse that
is relevant to the content creator. For example, Giorgia Riboni’s study
examines the potential of corporate promotional tweets to recruit prospective
customers from an imaginary global audience. Using Goffman’s (1981) concepts
of animator, author, and principal, through the case study of the Twitter
profile of ‘Whole Foods Market,’ the author analyzes communication and
participation strategies in corporate tweets, replies, and retweets. The
results suggest that most tweets employ informal language and are used as a
promotional tool, while replies are mainly used for customer care. The
persuasive power of retweets has been a challenge because of the difficulty to
identify the author of retweets.

In a similar vein, Maria Christina Paganoni posits that the technological
advances and the features of social media, including multimodality and
interactivity, transform approaches to advertising and branding. When several
(micro)blogging genres, such as blogs and tweets, are integrated on a
corporate website, they seem to enhance the corporate aim “to promote a
holistic perception of the product as a choice of lifestyle obtained through
faithful consumption” (p. 324). For example, the blogpost on the ‘Coca-Cola
Conversations’ blog on the corporate website about the 1936 China Paper
Poster, known as Chinatown because it was designed for the Asian audience in
the US, can be defined as informational, entertaining, and promotional.
Paganoni’s case study of the company website and the branding potential of
official tweets of the ‘Coca-Cola Company’ concludes that social networks are
different from traditional marketing tools because they allow for meaningful
community building between content creator and consumer.

The findings of the last two studies on the web-mediated promotional genre of
corporate tweets enhance our insights of the persuasive power of the social
media platform, Twitter. Even though Twitter might be destined to play a key
role in corporate communication, analyzing and unpacking the promotional genre
of corporate tweets seems to be a challenge because of the emerging nature of
Twitter and the lack of research in this field.

EVALUATION

Recent technological advances have irrevocably altered communication
practices, allowing for faster and more responsive communication.  The
synchronous nature of WMC allows for knowledge co-construction and information
dissemination among experts and non-experts in real time; this communication
is dynamic, live, and ongoing, thus blurring the boundaries between real and
virtual worlds. The characteristics of WMC, such as hypertextuality,
non-linearity, and multimodality, raise questions about the emergence of a
virtual self, issues of authorship, boundaries, ethics, privacy, and web genre
development through hybridization of text, image, audio, and video.

The strength of the studies in this volume lies in the thorough
contextualization of digital genre development as a dynamic and complex system
and the web as a medium where virtual world and reality collide (Kramsch,
2010). In this online world, digital genres expand upon traditional print
genres, evolving into meaningful and dynamic social practices that have yet to
be contextualized. However, their flexibility in format and language and their
permanence stimulate knowledge co-construction between expert and non-expert
users, as well as the construction of the self in dialogue with others. Even
though studies suggest that emerging genres seem to challenge existing norms
and practices in professional communities, the authors of the above-mentioned
studies suggest that  evolving nature of web genres as well as web genres’
coexistence with traditional genres might suggest a deeper transformation in
communication practices.

The analysis of the relationship between traditional genres and newer web
genres are contextualized in each study from a sociocultural stance.
Technology-driven changes revolutionize the migration of traditional genres to
the web and open opportunities for collaborative information dissemination.
Communication in professional communities needs to be reframed in this
hypertextual environment, where text, still images, video, and audio coexist,
and where technological affordances act as catalyzers in emerging genres.
Arguably, as the editors and authors suggest, these existing analytical tools
and theories also need to be fine-tuned, and new analytical tools are needed
to properly define and analyze emerging online genres.

Overall, a thorough discussion on theoretical frameworks and literature
reviews characterize studies on more established genres, like websites and
blogs. For instance, Giuliana Garzone eloquently showcases the concepts of
web-genre migration and the genesis of blogging through the case studies of
‘Huffington Post’ and three Kodak’s blogs, ‘Grow Your Biz,’ ‘Plugged In,’ and
‘A Thousand Words’, and Bettina Mottura effectively contextualizes the WMC
between the Chinese government and the public through the analysis of the
government website and online interviews with the Prime Minister. Enrico
Grazzi’s study stands out from the other studies because it ambitiously
proposes to tackle the pedagogical implications of using social networking
sites and memes in an EFL setting from the teacher’s perspective. While the
author provides insights to second language acquisition theories and models,
such as communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), Sociocultural Theory and the
Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1962), and highlights concepts, such
as digital identity, NNS, and cross-cultural communication, the links between
theories and concepts could be more detailed. Furthermore, perhaps because of
the lack of research on memes and the author’s ongoing research at the time of
the publication, the author does not provide an analysis of contemporary
relevant studies that focus on this phenomenon. In some studies, a thorough
presentation of the research methods, including study design, instruments,
data collection procedures, and interpretation of results, as well as a
discussion of practical implications in light of the conducted study would
increase the replicability of the study and would be invaluable for both
researchers and English teachers interested in using social media in their
English language classes.

Furthermore, in-depth discussions on relevant studies are missing, especially
in the studies on Twitter, perhaps because this platform is still emerging and
there is not an abundance of research in this area. While this book reviews
theories and literature on WMC in detail, the methodology sections in most
studies fail to provide much in-depth discussion on study design. For example,
in the article by Sokol, theory and literature take up four pages, and the
analysis takes up six pages, while the methodology is only briefly mentioned.
The lack of methodological rigor, perhaps because of limited space, makes
these studies harder to replicate. Even though these works lack methodological
rigor, they still provide theoretical frameworks and practical insights on
genre evolution and technological advances.

Overall, the chapters offer descriptive examples to highlight the interactive
and participatory nature of WMC and the effects of digital literacy and
interactive online communication. While most studies showcase how corporations
and governments exploit WMC to legitimize their power and agenda, few studies
explore how grassroots organizations and citizens form online communities.
Furthermore, with technological advances, more research should address the
effects of social media on society (i.e. privacy and copyright). Further
studies should focus on the newest trends in WMC, such as ‘Pinterest,’
‘Instagram,’ and ‘Google +,’ in different sociocultural contexts. Similarly,
such studies should provide practical implications on how these online
platforms, including gaming platforms and virtual worlds like ‘Second Life,’
might influence impact society and culture.

REFERENCES

Askehave I., Ellerup Nielsen, A. (2005). Digital genres: A challenge to
traditional genre theory. Information Technology and People, 18(2), 120-141.

Bakhtin, M. M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (No. 1).
Austin: University of Texas Press.

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.

Hyland, K. (Ed.). (2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing.
Continuum International Publishing Group.

Kramsch, C. (2010). The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images. The Grammar or Visual
Design. London: Routledge.

Lam, W. S. E. (2000). L2 literacy and the design of the self: A case study of
a teenager writing on the Internet. TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 457-482.

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings.
Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Mental
Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrea Lypka is a second year PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition
and Instructional Technology (SLA/IT) program at the University of South
Florida(USF). Her research interests include identity, multimodality, and
individual learning differences.








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