Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent

Introduction From controversial beginnings, the term Web 2.0 has become associated with a fairly well-defined set of popular Web-based platforms characterized by social interaction and user-generated content. Most of the content on such sites is human discourse, via text, audio, video, and/or static images. It is therefore, in principle, of theoretical and practical interest to scholars of computer-mediated discourse. Yet although discourse-focused studies of individual Web 2.0 environments such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube are starting to appear (see, e.g., the chapters in Thurlow and Mroczek 2011), systematic consideration of the implications of Web 2.0 for computer-mediated discourse analysis as a whole is lacking. Does discourse in these new environments call for new methods of analysis? New classificatory apparatuses? New theoretical understandings? This paper is a preliminary attempt to address these questions. After defining Web 2.0 and reviewing its development over the past decade, the computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) paradigm developed by the author (Herring 2004) is briefly reviewed, with the ultimate goal of determining whether-and if so, in what ways-it needs to be revised in light of Web 2.0. As a heuristic to address this goal, a three-part classification of Web 2.0 discourse phenomena is introduced: phenomena familiar from older computer-mediated discourse (CMD) modes such as email, chat, and discussion forums that appear to carry over into Web 2.0 environments with minimal differences; CMD phenomena that adapt to and are reconfigured by Web 2.0 environments; and new or emergent phenomena that did not exist-or if they did exist, did not rise to the level of public awareness-prior to the era of Web 2.0. This classification is loosely inspired by Crowston and Williams's (2000) broad classification of web pages into 'reproduced' vs. 'emergent' genres, but with a focus on discourse, rather than genre. For each category of phenomena, the challenges that it raises for CMDA are discussed. In concluding, I suggest that this three-way classification can provide insight into why particular discourse phenomena persist, adapt, or arise anew in technologically-mediated environments over time. In so doing, I invoke technological factors such as multimodality and media convergence, social factors at both the situational and cultural levels, and inherent differences among linguistic phenomena that make them variably sensitive to technological and social effects. Suggestions are also made of practical ways in which the classification might guide researchers to frame their studies and select certain methods of analysis. While the reconfigured and …