1,721,026 research outputs found
Constructing Syriza: The Greek Elections in British Online Newspapers and Blogs
No full textThe steps taken by the EU towards increasing political and economic unification, together with the recent advances in communication technologies, have contributed to making what happens in one of the member states extremely significant for the whole union, thus blurring the border between what is nationally and what is internationally relevant. As a consequence, one cannot underestimate the role of online newspapers, which can be easily accessed throughout the EU and which have incorporated genres native to the Web such as blogs.
At the end of January 2015, the electoral victory of Syriza, a Greek political party which heavily criticizes the idea of Europe vehiculated by the Union’s institutions and its recently-adopted austerity measures, did not simply have national relevance, but aroused interest and generated a lively debate across all member countries as different European notions and narratives entered into play, often conflicting. Quite expectedly, online mass media had a strategic role on this occasion; editorials and journalistic blogs played a big part in the discussion as they presented and promoted their authors’ views. News stories also contributed to orientating the public opinion by conveying covert ideological messages in favour or against Syriza and its idea of Europe.
Drawing on the theoretical premise that news discourse can never offer a value-free representation of the world as news is the result of a process of discursive as well as social construction (cf., among others, Fowler 1991; Fairclough 1995; Jäger 2001), this study sets out to investigate the online media coverage of the recent Greek elections in the United Kindgom. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the discursive representation of the electoral outcome, its significance on the international and local political scenario as well as of its protagonists so as to highlight the different ideological stances at play and the concern over the possible future of the EU.
A combined approach is adopted which integrates Critical Discourse Analysis with Corpus Linguistics: the former activates a “useful synergy” when utilized with the rigorous, data-based tools of the latter (cf. Stubbs 1996; Garzone/Santulli 2004; Baker et al. 2008). The analysis is carried out on an ad hoc-built corpus consisting of news stories, editorials and blogposts posted on the online versions of three British newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times).
It was decided to focus on the UK’s online press as this country seems representative of a specific as well as controversial attitude towards the notion of Europeanness: it still uses its own currency and has joined the EU at a later stage, revealing an insular, often self-isolating culture which holds itself unique and different from the rest of the Continent
Media and Public Perception of Opioid Use: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Analysis
No full textAcademic Writing on Twitter: How Microblogging Becomes an Empowering Tool for Researchers
No full textThe relatively recent emergence of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) represents a confluence of trends: the spread of constructivist-based approaches to teaching and learning, the increasingly felt need to provide students with more engaging learning environments, and the development of new digital tools that facilitate the sharing and creation of knowledge and expertise through both teacher/student and peer interaction (Resta/Laferrière 2007: 65). Thanks to its affordances which allow for potentially ubiquitous and synchronous communication, microblogging can be turned into a very efficient CSCL medium. Drawing on recent studies on microblogging interaction (see, among others, Zappavigna 2012; Puschmann 2013), this paper focuses on the textual and rhetorical features of the microblogging platform Twitter as an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching/learning tool. Specifically, it explores affiliation and interaction between expert members of the academic community and novices like PhD students, as well as among the latter. The main features of the discourse of scientific instruction on Twitter are explored from a qualitative as well as a quantitative perspective: the combination of the close reading of the tweets and a corpus-based approach arguably represents the best tool to both investigate the online academic identities of PhD students and advisors and identify what is “central and typical” (Stubbs 1996: 233) of their exchanges.
A corpus consisting of tweets hashtagged #acwri (Academic Writing) has been collected and analyzed in order to study the discursive construction of the identity of the academic microbloggers collaborating on Twitter and the rhetoric and language strategies they adopt to enhance both “ambient affiliation” (Zappavigna 2011) and “ambient intimacy” (Reichelt 2007). The last two expressions refer to “a new form of sociality [made possible by the social media environment and] in which language maintains a pivotal role” (Zappavigna 2011: 789).
Preliminary results show that expert academicians portray themselves as facilitators rather than transmitters of knowledge (in line with the constructivist paradigm) as indicated by the frequent use of the terms such as “whisper” or “chat” to refer to the online exchanges they participate in. At the other end of the communication process, PhD students, who often suffer from the isolation, stress and uncertainty that are typical of academic research and writing (Percy 2014), appear to express their gratitude for finding valuable resources and being able to interact in a virtual environment which, differently from the physical one, allows them to be productive as well as to de-stress
Introduction
No full textMedia and politics have always been mutually influential. The media plays an important political role of its own in promoting and discussing policies, as well as conveying representations of power and ideology. On the other hand, media outlets are themselves subject to political forces that have an impact on their editorial line. This mutual influence comes to light not only in journalistic practices, but also in how news is constructed and conveyed.
This volume explores the relations between politics and various types of media as expressed in different areas of the world, namely Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East.
Such a complex landscape calls for a multiplicity of analytical tools and cannot ignore specific socio-political, geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts which may be overlooked when approached from a global perspective. In this volume, a combination of senior scholars and young experts from a wide range of disciplines, such as discourse analysis, international relations, and cultural studies, come together in a conversation which recognizes the media as a global phenomenon without neglecting its local specificities
Remediating Conference Speeches: the Role of Authoriality in Live Twitter Entries
No full textThis paper focuses on new forms of rewriting and remediation that have been introduced within the context of new media and have now become extremely popular. Specifically, it investigates the practice of live-tweeting, i.e. engaging “on Twitter for a continuous period of time with a sequence of focused Tweets”(), which has become increasingly common thanks to the rapid spread of Internet and mobile phone-mediated communication. Significant public speaking events such as, for examples, political speeches, business presentations and conferences are now almost routinely live-tweeted about. In particular, the latter have been attracting more and more “live-tweeterers” as microblogging provides an excellent tool for the diffusion of content: this “enabled backchannel” (Ross et al. 2011) gives all Internet users the possibility of virtually attending academic talks and presentations. One of the reasons underlying the quick growth of conference live-tweeting has to do with the fact that it boosts interaction and allows users to attract public attention as well as gain new followers, which means that this practice can be turned into a tool of academic self-promotion (Ebner / Rheinahart 2009). For this to happen, however, conference tweeterers have to be able to post entries in which their own academic identity emerges and not solely the voice of the speaker whose presentation they are reporting about. As a matter of fact, live-tweeterers do not normally limit themselves to simply reproducing the presentation they are listening to so that it can be broken down into language “chunks” that can fit the tweet format (140 characters), but they also re-write the text of conference speeches and present it to a different, “networked” audience (Boyd et al. 2010). That is why it can therefore be affirmed that the original wording of presentations undergoes a process of reformulation and remediation. In live-tweets the voices of conference speakers and conference live-tweeterers are combined with the result that the concept of authoriality becomes very difficult to define.
As a matter of fact, differently from what happens in a conference presentation where speakers’ authoriality emerges in the speech clearly and unchallenged, in conference live-tweets it is oftentimes hard to establish the participation role of the tweeterer. This study aims at identifying the ways in which the identity and authoriality of conference speakers and live-tweeterers are blended together in tweets. In order to tackle this issue I collected a corpus of about 2,000 tweets posted in the course of eight Applied Linguistics Conferences held in 2012. The collected tweets were investigated with the help of the methodological tools provided by Goffman’s Frame Analysis. As suggested by many studies on Internet genres (cf., among others, Coupland N./Coupland J. 2000; Marcoccia 2004; Garzone 2007; Aarsand 2008) Goffmanian taxonomies can only be applied to Internet- and mobile phone-based communication to a certain degree, so this study also intends to verify whether new, ad hoc categories should replace older ones or if the latter can still be legitimately utilized, as long as they undergo a process of adaptation to the Internet environment.
The Goffmanian concepts of animator, author and principal are applied to conference live-tweets to examine how these roles are performed and what language resources can be associated with them. The second and final part of the study focuses instead on the discursive construction of the textual self of the conference live-tweeterer as well as on those devices that Goffman considers “the interesting and analytically relevant point” of the speaking event and that allow presenters to alter their alignment with the audience (i.e. non-literal meanings, text brackets and parenthetical remarks).
References
Aarsand, André P. 2008. Frame Switches and Identity Performances: Alternating between Online and Offline. Text & Talk. 28 (2), 147-165.
Boyd, Danah / Golder, Scott / Lotan, Gilad. 2010. Tweet Tweet Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences HICSS-43, IEEE: Kauai, HI. .
Ross, Claire/ Terras, Melissa / Warwick, Claire / Welsh, Anne 2011. Pointless Babble or Enabled Backchannel: Conference Use of Twitter by Digital Humanists. Journal of Documentation. 67(2), 214-237.
Coupland, Nicholas and Coupland, Justine (2000). Relational frames and pronominal address/ reference: The discourse of geriatric medical triads. In Sarangi, Srikant / Coulthard, Malcolm R. (eds.), Discourse and Social Life. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 207–229.
Ebner, Martin / Rheinhart, Wolfgang 2009. Social networking in scientific conferences –Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientificcommunity. .
Garzone, Giuliana. 2007. Genres, Multimodality and the World Wide Web: Theoretical Issues .In Garzone/Poncini/Catenaccio (eds), 15-30.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms Of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Marcoccia, Michel 2004. On-line Polylogues: Conversation Structure and Participation Framework in Internet Newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics. 36(2004), 115-145.
“Live Tweeting Best Practices”, Twitter, <https://dev.twitter.com/media/live-tweeting
Constructing Syriza: the Greek elections in british online newspapers and blogs
No full textAt the end of January 2015, the electoral victory of Syriza, a Greek political party which heavily criticizes the idea of Europe vehiculated by the Union’s institutions and its recently-adopted austerity measures, did not simply have national relevance, but aroused interest and generated a lively debate across all member countries as different European notions and narratives entered into play, often conflicting. Quite expectedly, online mass media had a strategic role on this occasion, contributing to orientating the public opinion by conveying ideological messages in favor or against Syriza and its idea of Europe.
Drawing on the theoretical premise that news discourse can never offer a value-free representation of the world as news is the result of a process of discursive as well as social construction, this analysis sets out to investigate the online media coverage of the recent Greek elections in the United Kingdom, a country which seems representative of a controversial attitude towards the notion of Europeanness and reveals an insular, often self-isolating culture which holds itself unique and different from the rest of the Continent. The study examines an ad hoc-built corpus consisting of news stories, editorials and blogposts posted on the online versions of three of the most popular British newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times) and focuses on the discursive representation of the electoral outcome, its significance on the international and local political scenario as well as of its protagonists, so as to highlight the different ideological stances at play and the concern over the possible future of the EU.
A combined approach is adopted which integrates Critical Discourse Analysis with Corpus Linguistics: the former activates a “useful synergy” when utilized with the rigorous, data-based tools of the latter. The analysis reveals the presence of a common, hegemonic, and simplified framing of the general election (i.e. that Syriza's victory represents a reaction to the austerity measures implemented in Greece). Such simplified framing can be found across all the newspapers examined, which makes it difficult for the British public to challenge its validity. A clear tendency towards the personification of news also emerged in the investigation of all the online newspapers and blogs
- …
