Genres In The Internet

This volume brings together for the first time pragmatic, rhetorical, and literary perspectives on genre, mapping theoretical frontiers and initiating a long overdue conversation amongst these methodologies. The diverse approaches represented in this volume meet on common ground staked by Internet communication: an arena challenging to traditional ideas of genre which assume a conventional stability at odds with the unceasing innovations of online discourse. Drawing on and developing new ideas of genre, the research reported in this volume shows, on the contrary, that genre study is a powerful means of testing commonplaces about the Internet world and, in turn, that the Internet is a fertile field for theorising genre.

This book examines the expanding world of genres on the Internet to understand issues of science communication today. The book explores how some traditional print genres have become digital, how some genres have evolved into new digital hybrids, and how and why new genres have emerged and are emerging in response to new rhetorical exigences and communicative demands. Because social actions are in constant change and, ensuing from this, genres evolve faster than ever, it is important to gain insight into the interrelations between old genres and new genres and the processes underpinning the construction of new genre sets, chains and assemblages for communicating scientific research to both expert and diversified audiences. In examining scientific genres on the Internet this book seeks to illustrate the increasing diversification of genre ecologies and their underlying social, disciplinary and individual agendas.

This book provides an analysis of persuasive genres in the domain of media, ranging from traditional to new media genres on the internet. Kathpalia provides a layered analysis of a family of persuasive genres at the functional, semantic, and linguistic levels and a reconceptualization of genres as empowering rather than constraining, enabling rather than binding, and dynamic rather than static. The book leads readers to an understanding of genre that accounts for the way we interpret, respond to, and create genres in different settings whilst shedding light on how genres change and how they evolve into new and unique forms to meet the ever-changing needs of society. This book would be of interest to those studying or researching the topic of genres, and those interested in reconceptualizing the way in which we interpret and understand genres from linguistic and discourse perspectives.

`A highly topical, interesting and lively analysis of ordinary internet use, based on both theoretically competent reflections and sound ethnographic material′ - Joost van Loon, Reader in Social Theory at Nottingham Trent University Internet Society investigates internet use and it′s implications for society through insights into the daily experiences of ordinary users. Drawing on an original study of non-professional, ′ordinary′ users at home, this book examines how people interpret, domesticate and creatively appropriate the Internet by integrating it into the projects and activities of their everyday lives. Maria Bakardjieva′s theoretical framework uniquely combines concepts from several schools of thought (social constructivism, critical theory, phenomenological sociology) to provide a conception of the user as an agent in the field of technological development and new media shaping. She: - examines the evolution of the Internet into a mass medium - interrogates what users make of this new communication medium - evaluates the social and cultural role of the Internet by looking at the immediate level of users′ engagement with it - exposes the dual life of technology as invader and captive; colonizer and colonized This book will appeal to academics and researchers in social studies of technology, communication and media studies, cultural studies, philosophy of technology and ethnography.

Internet research spans many disciplines. From the computer or information s- ences, through engineering, and to social sciences, humanities and the arts, almost all of our disciplines have made contributions to internet research, whether in the effort to understand the effect of the internet on their area of study, or to investigate the social and political changes related to the internet, or to design and develop so- ware and hardware for the network. The possibility and extent of contributions of internet research vary across disciplines, as do the purposes, methods, and outcomes. Even the epistemological underpinnings differ widely. The internet, then, does not have a discipline of study for itself: It is a ?eld for research (Baym, 2005), an open environment that simultaneously supports many approaches and techniques not otherwise commensurable with each other. There are, of course, some inhibitions that limit explorations in this ?eld: research ethics, disciplinary conventions, local and national norms, customs, laws, borders, and so on. Yet these limits on the int- net as a ?eld for research have not prevented the rapid expansion and exploration of the internet. After nearly two decades of research and scholarship, the limits are a positive contribution, providing bases for discussion and interrogation of the contexts of our research, making internet research better for all. These ‘limits,’ challenges that constrain the theoretically limitless space for internet research, create boundaries that give de?nition to the ?eld and provide us with a particular topography that enables research and investigation.

Departing from the premise that ‘being ordinary’ is brought into the discourse and brought out in the discourse and is thus an interactional achievement, the contributions to this edited volume investigate its construction, reconstruction and deconstruction in media discourse. Ordinariness is perceived as a scalar notion which is conceptualised against the background of both non-ordinariness and extra-ordinariness. The chapters address its strategic construction across media genres (public talk, Prime Minister’s Questions, interview, radio call-in, commenting) and discursive activities (tweets, social media posts) as done in various languages (American English, Austrian German, British English, Chinese, French, Finnish, Hebrew and Japanese) by professional participants (e.g., politicians, journalists, scientists) and by ordinary people participating in media discourse (e.g., ordinary citizens, viewers, members of the audience). Discursive strategies used to bring about (non/extra) ordinariness include small stories, quotations, conversational style, irony, naming and addressing as well as references to the private-public interface.

A translation of recent essays by the eminent literary critic, Tzvelan Todorov.

Approaches to Specialized Genres provides a timely update of the field of genre studies, with 14 cutting-edge contributions split into five sections using and integrating an exceptionally wide variety of methods and perspectives (such as ESP genre research, corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, ethnographic and multimodal research) to analyse genres in written, spoken, visual and auditory modes across a multiplicity of pedagogic, professional and digital settings. It highlights and illustrates the growing trend of a multiperspective and inter-theoretic approach to genre studies and demonstrates how such methodological rigour can extend our knowledge of language, in general, and genres, in particular. It also examines a rich variety of underexplored genres such as the digital genre of synchronous videoconferencing, instructional slides, video ads, engineers’ training log book entries, the narrative story genres, fundraising letters and retraction notices. It demonstrates not only the prominent value of genre research, but wide applications of genre knowledge in various educational and professional domains. The book brings together experts spreading across the world, including countries in South-East Asia, Europe, America, West Africa and South America. Accordingly, it will appeal to readers of diversified socio-cultural backgrounds working in all the aforementioned inter-related fields of applied linguistics and communication studies.