Marina Bondi
Abstract
This contribution presents a wider study of how the development of digi-tal technologies has influenced knowledge production, distribution, and use. Blogs, for example, are shown to provide opportunities for the dis-semination and the construction of knowledge, as well as for taking posi-tion on controversial issues in public debate. Different dimensions of variation can be explored: types of expert sources (individual/institu-tional), communicative strategies adopted, orders of discourse involved. Keywords: knowledge dissemination, digital discourse, blogs.
1. Introduction
Digital tools have greatly influenced communication, cognition and hu-man relations in general (Baron 2008). In the fast-changing environment of the Web, the development of digital technologies has influenced the way knowledge is produced, distributed, and used. Digital media – web-sites, blogs, open source materials, wikis, tweets, and other social media – are increasingly used by researchers in the process of knowledge con-struction and dissemination (cf. Salvi in this volume). These new media have helped researchers to extend their network with colleagues from all over the world and to open up knowledge to wider audiences.
Web genres have become the focus of increasing attention in dis-course studies and applied linguistics (Garzone et al 2007). Different fea-tures have become prominent, most notably perhaps remediation – “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 273) – and the nature of genres on the Internet (Giltrow and Stein 2009). More recently, great attention has also been 1 Research financed by the Italian Ministry for the University (PRIN 2015 no.2015TJ8ZAS)
paid to the extended participatory framework of the Web (Herring et al. 2013) and its influence on language choice and communicative practices. Virtual communities are communities of practice, rapidly created, ex-tended and maintained through shared knowledge and forms of commu-nal bonding (Yus 2011: 110). On the Web, the context creates the genre and the genre determines the community, rather than counting on a pre-existing community (Mauranen 2013:30).
The Modena unit of the PRIN project on knowledge dissemina-tion is currently studying different digital environments, websites and blogs in particular. The discourses involved are thus multiple, in that we look at the interplay between academic discourse (cf. Gotti in this vol-ume) and both institutional and media discourse: expert communication originates from research but often reaches the audience through the me-dia or institutional websites. Economists, for example, often disseminate their research through blogs that are supported by the websites of institu-tions or newspapers.
We consider six domains: three “soft” domains, representing the humanities and the social sciences (art, business and economics, law), and three “hard” domains, including technology (engineering and archi-tecture), science (physics) and health (medicine and biology).
Websites are explored for intercultural and intergenerational is-sues. When focusing for example on legal knowledge dissemination in digital texts for children, the aim is to describe popularization strategies associated with the dissemination of legal knowledge for children. This means considering the needs of multiple audiences (children and parents) with their identities (gender, national etc.).
Blogs are explored in their relation to other forms of expert writ-ing, such as academic papers. Starting from an overview of the nature of blogs, we focus here on the role they appear to play in specialized com-munication and on the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the design of corpora for the study of digital communication (in relation to print publications).
Blogs – personal, regularly updated web spaces with posts linked to rel-evant material and open to readers’ comments (e.g. Myers 2010: 2-7) – have certainly attracted the attention of applied linguists right from the beginning for their peculiar combination of subjectivity (the conspicuous position of the blogger) and dialogic interactivity.
The significant role of the writer’s self has drawn attention to the phraseological realizations of explicit subjectivity. The evaluative nature of blogs’ posts and comments has suggested analyses of their use of evaluative language (Bondi and Seidenari 2012; Bondi and Diani 2015; Luzón 2012). Among the language features studied, first person pro-nouns and adjectives have an important role (Bondi and Seidenari 2012), with their linguaculture-specific phraseology (Bondi and Diani 2015). Interactivity also becomes prominent, with concessive patterns (Bondi and Diani 2015) suggesting that blogs are particularly interesting for the study of writer/reader interaction. Puschmann (2013: 87-101) also men-tions deixis (contextual reference to a specific time, space or person), ad-dressivity and audience design (“the way bloggers integrate their concep-tualization of the readership into their style”) and relative freedom from politeness minimizing face-theatening acts.
Blogs have had significant impact on academic communities, providing opportunities for both the dissemination and the construction of knowledge (Mauranen 2013), as well as for taking position on contro-versial issues in public debate.
Knowledge dissemination typically requires adjusting informa-tion to different knowledge backgrounds and informainforma-tion needs, focus-ing on the relevance of recontextualized knowledge (Luzón 2013). The context of the Web inevitably changes the nature of expert writing, which should not only account for different reading purposes, but also for the different language and cultural backgrounds of a widely undeter-mined audience. The reader’s interpretations, reading sequences, inter-ests and background knowledge are hardly predictable in conditions of “context collapse”, i.e. “the loss of a definitive separation between audi-ences and discussants” (Puschmann 2015: 32).
This unpredictability and the reader’s possibility to comment and engage in conversations with the writers determine the need to establish room for negotiations and predictions and to foster a higher sense of community (Yus 2015).
Academic blogs can also become sites for knowledge construc-tion. Academics engage in debate with other academics and the wider audience, who “may participate in co-constructing research debates” (Mauranen 2013: 30-31). Researchers engage in new collaborative prac-tices, somehow blurring the distinction between science and public sci-ence, between internal communication and external communication. 3. Preliminary focus: language variation
Within this framework, the aim of the project is to explore different dimensions of variation.
On the one hand we aim to see how these issues vary across blog types by comparing individual and institutional blogs. What are the dif-ferences in managing an individual blog and an institutional blog? Are different identities at play in the process of identity management when this is individual (e.g. the blog of a famous volcanologist) or institutional (the National Science Foundation)? What changes in the way com-menters participate?
On the other hand, we aim to look at comparing strategies asso-ciated with the dissemination of knowledge in blogs with the strategies used in research genres. Is academic discourse on the web still “aca-demic”? How far does the extension in the participation framework in-fluence the nature of discourse?
The corpora developed within the project are modular and allow different types of analyses. For each domain we look at two individual blogs and two institutional blogs and we build a comparable module rep-resentative of academic and professional print publications. This allows us to study authorial voice, dissemination strategies and argumentative techniques across genres and types of participants (individual bloggers, institutional bloggers and the whole range of commenters).
Preliminary studies of two major American economists (Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen) have provided interesting results in profiling different genres they have produced – research articles, columns, blogs (Bondi 2018, in press). The analysis has shown that research genres of-ten take dialogic debates as their starting point and thus contextualize the internal argument within the debates that involve the expert community. The emphasis is on epistemic evaluation and values such as generality,
simplicity and novelty. The use of inclusive we emphasizes alignment between expert writer and expert reader.
Knowledge dissemination genres, on the other hand, recontextu-alize expert argument in a wider participation framework. Columns tend to highlight the authoritative stance of the author by presenting a self-contained representation of the argument, using first-person reference and second-person pronoun you, often in the representation of potential counter-discourse. Blog posts present themselves as opening moves in polylogues, addressing the interests of different types of participants. They certainly give great prominence to the writer’s voice, but also use the reader as partner in an ongoing dialogue. Their dialogicity appears to be clearly based on forms of self-mention and reader’s engagement ex-plicitly suggesting actual turn-taking and highlighting their persuasive and argumentative structure. The presence of organizational units man-aging textual interaction on matters of epistemic or attitudinal evaluation is in line with the need for greater explicitness that characterizes commu-nication with an undefined audience.
5. References
BARON, NAOMI,2008, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile
World, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
BOLTER, J.D. and GRUSIN, R. 2000, Remediation: Understanding New
Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
BONDI, MARINA (2018), “Dialogicity in Written Language Use: Varia-tion across expert acVaria-tion games”. In E. Weigand and I. Kovecses (eds), From Pragmatics to Dialogue, Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp.137-170.
BONDI, MARINA, (2018), “Try to prove me wrong : Dialogicity and audi-ence involvement in economics blogs”. Discourse, Context & Media, 24, 33-42. 10.1016/j.dcm.2018.04.011.
BONDI, MARINA and DIANI, GIULIANA, 2015, “I am wild about cabbage: evaluative ‘semantic sequences’ and cross-linguistic
(dis)conti-nuities”, Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES), 14(1), 116-151.
BONDI, MARINA and SEIDENARI, CORRADO, 2012, “and now i’m finally
of the mind to say i hope the whole ship goes down…: markers of subjectivity and evaluative phraseology in blogs”, in Mukherjee J. & Huber M. (eds), Corpus Linguistics and Variation in Eng-lish, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 17-27.
GARZONE, GIULIANA, PONCINI, GINA and CATENACCIO, PAOLA (eds) 2007. Multimodality in Corporate Communication. Web genres and dicursive identity, Franco Angeli, Milano.
GILTROW, JANET and DIETER STEIN (eds), 2009, Genres in the Internet:
Issues in the Theory of Genre, Benjamins , Amsterdam.
HERRING, SUSAN, STEIN, DIETER & VIRTANEN, TUJA (eds) 2013.
Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, DeGruyter, Berlin.
LUZÓN, MARIA JOSÉ, 2012. "Your Argument is Wrong: A Contribution to the Study of Evaluation in Academic Weblogs”, Text & Talk, 32 (2), pp.145-165.
LUZÓN, MARIA JOSÉ 2013. “Public communication of science in blogs: Recontextualizing scientific discourse for a diversified audi-ence”. Written Communication, 30(4), pp.428-457.
MAURANEN, ANNA, 2013. “Hybridism, edutainment, and doubt: Science blogging finding its feet”, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 13(1), pp.7-36.
PUSCHMANN, CORNELIUS 2013. “Blogging”, in: Herring, S., Stein, D., Virtanen, T., (eds) 2013. Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, Berlin, DeGruyter, pp.83-108.
PUSCHMANN, CORNELIUS 2015. A digital Mob in the Ivory Tower? Con-text Collapse in Scholarly Communication Online, in: Bondi, M., Cacchiani, S., Mazzi D. (Eds.) Discourse in and through the Media, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, pp.22-45.
YUS, FRANCISCO, 2011. Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated
YUS, FRANCISCO, 2015, “Interactions with Readers through Online Spe-cialized Genres: Specificity or Adaptability?”, in: Gil-Salom, L., Soler-Monreal, C. (eds) Dialogicity in Written Specialised Gen-res, Amsterdam, Benjamins, pp.189-208.
