Суспільно-політична неолексика в Інтернет-комунікації: структурно-функційний аспект (original) (raw)

Суспільно-політична неолексика в Інтернет-комунікації: структурно-функційний аспект

2020, Лінгвістичні студії

Over the past fifteen years, the Internet has triggered a boom in research on human behavior. As growing numbers of people interact on a regular basis in chat rooms, Web forums, listservs, email, instant messaging environments and the like, social scientists, marketers and educators look to their behavior in an effort to understand the nature of computer-mediated communication and how it can be optimized in specific contexts of use. This effort is facilitated by the fact that people engage in socially meaningful activities online in a way that typically leaves a textual trace, making the interactions more accessible to scrutiny and reflection than is the case in ephemeral spoken communication, and enabling researchers to employ empirical, micro-level methods to shed light on macrolevel phenomena. Despite this potential, much research on online behavior is anecdotal and speculative, rather than empirically grounded. Moreover, Internet research often suffers from a premature impulse to label online phenomena in broad terms, e.g., all groups of people interacting online are "communities"; 1 the language of the Internet is a single style or "genre". 2 Notions such as "community" and "genre" are familiar and evocative, yet notoriously slippery, and unhelpful (or worse) if applied indiscriminately. An important challenge facing Internet researchers is thus how to identify and describe online phenomena in culturally meaningful terms, while at the same time grounding their distinctions in empirically observable behavior. Online interaction overwhelmingly takes place by means of discourse. That is, participants interact by means of verbal language, usually typed on a keyboard and read as text on a computer screen. It is possible to lose sight of this fundamental fact at times, given the complex behaviors people engage in on the Internet, from forming interpersonal relationships (Baker, 1998) to implementing systems of group governance (Dibbell, 1993; Kolko & Reid, 1998). Yet these behaviors are constituted through and by means of discourse: language is doing, in the truest performative sense, on the Internet, where physical bodies (and their actions) are technically lacking (Kolko, 1995). Of course, many online relationships also have an offline component, and as computer-mediated communication becomes increasingly multimodal, semiotic systems in addition to text are becoming available for conveying meaning and "doing things" online (cf. Austin, 1962). Nonetheless, textual communication remains an important online activity, one that seems destined to continue for the foreseeable future. It follows that scholars of computer-mediated behavior need methods for analyzing discourse, alongside Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis