Diary or Megaphone?The pragmatic mode of weblogs

Cornelius Puschmann, PhDHeinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf

cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

http://ynada.com/

Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and IdeologiesUniversity of Washington, Seattle, WA

4 September 2009

Context

● I'm a postdoc researcher in English linguistics at the University of

Düsseldorf

● PhD thesis “The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-

mediated communication” (in press, Göttingen U Press)

● interested in pragmatics, genre/register studies, CMC, corpus

linguistics

An sample of prior research on blogs

● linguistics: Herring, Hendricks

● ethnography: Nardi et al, Gumbrecht

● sociology/social psychology: Schmidt, Döring

● individual (trait) psychology: Nowson, Pennebaker

● less attention from linguists than synchronous CMC

● continuation of blogs and blog research in microblogging

● new direction of research (not just on blogs): status reporting, “trivial

tweeting”, communicative ambience

Research questions

Three research questions arose in the course of my PhD project:

1) What factors shape the linguistic form of blog entries?

2) What linguistic features of blogs are constituting/universal?

3) How can the relationship between blogger and (implicit) blog reader

be described?

RQ 1: What factors shape the linguistic form of blog entries?

Channel

● asynchrony

● permanence

● open multiplicity

● interactivity

RQ 1: What factors shape the linguistic form of blog entries?

Genre

● antecedent genres (diary, journal, log book, editorial, ...)

● discourse community (teenagers, lawyers, mothers, linguists, ...)

● communicative purpose (artistic expression, political debate,

celebrity gossip, personal knowledge management, ...)

Situation

● availability of metadata (time of utterance, identity of the speaker)

● diachrony (back-reference via self-linking)

RQ 2: What linguistic features of blogs are constituting/universal?

● blog deixis: blogs entries encode a deictic center (Bühler)

● discourse roles assigned by blogger => personal pronouns (I, you)

● fixation of time and place => temporal and spatial expressions

(tomorrow, last week, here, there)

Assigning discourse roles (1PP, 2PP) is canonical in blogs

RQ 2: How can the relationship between blogger and (implicit) blog reader be described?● audience design (Bell): blogger and blog reader are not cospatial

or co-temporal, therefore the blogger constructs his audience

● but...● ...most blog entries go uncommented● ...52% of bloggers state they write mostly for themselves (Lenhart & Fox 2006)

● my claim: blogs are not considered conversations primarily because

they are interactive, but because of their linguistic form

Information structure and cooperation in blogs with different audience designs

speaker-centric blogging:

“time wont let anyone forget the past, nor the sorrows... one could

only hide it deep within... n hope the pain will nv surface again [...]”

hearer-centric blogging:

“When I teach trademark law classes, I always advise that students

select strong protectable marks, and the class invariably balks

because they want to select marks that suggest or connote something

about the goods or services at issue [...]”

The pragmatic mode of blogs (idealization)

● recording device

(speaker-centric)

● non-cooperative

● conceptualized listener is self or

familiar

● a publishing platform

(hearer-centric)

● cooperative

● conceptualized reader is non-

familiar

Moving beyond blogs...

Misunderstanding online communication

● a recent study by Pear Analytics classified 40% of Twitter

communication as “pointless babble”

● we heard similar criticism of blogging when it first emerged

● does is the mismatch between expectations (of some people) and

actual use explicable?

A cognitive approach to online communication

● our interaction with digital information is a highly symbolical process

● problems such as information overload, transgression of

private/public borders etc are often the result of conceptual mismatch,

i.e.● if the Net is “a digital library” who makes sure only “quality content” goes in?● If the Net is a series of tubes, can't the tubes get clogged sometimes?● If what we put online is public, doesn't that mean that everybody will see it?

● how can we describe online communication without relying on

metaphor?

Changing metaphors?

Object Web

● alternative physical space filled

with objects (cyberspace,

information superhighway)

● is entered from the outside (log

in/out)

● is used to move symbolical

representations of information

around (email, files)

● discourse is conceptually written

● we're alone there

Discourse Web

● people in perpetual

communicative situation(s)

([social] networks)

● always on

● extension of physical (and social,

cultural) reality

● things there are “locationless”

(Google Wave, cloud computing)

● discourse is conceptually oral

● we're not alone there

The way forward: semi-synchronous, open, “ambient” communication?

● not one finite discourse event, but countless potential discourse

configurations (Google Wave, Twitter) and (therefore) interpretations

● both conceptualized and actual participants are dynamic and shifting

● non-lexical (syntactic, pragmatic, paralinguistic) information is

“technologized”, i.e. indicated by technological means

● the speaker anticipates a listener and reception from the message

● the hearer infers a speaker and intention from the message

● BUT both are aware of the diffuse and unstable communicative

situation

Thanks for listening!

Diary or Megaphone?The pragmatic mode of weblogs

Cornelius Puschmann, PhDHeinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf

cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

http://ynada.com/

Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and IdeologiesUniversity of Washington, Seattle, WA

4 September 2009