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1 Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent SUSAN C. HERRING Indiana University Bloomington 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 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, for example, the chapters in Thurlow and Mroczek 2011), systematic consideration of the implications of Web 2.0 for computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) as a whole is lacking. Does discourse in these new environments call for new methods of analysis? New classificatory apparatuses ? New theoretical understandings? In this chapter I attempt to address these questions. After defining Web 2.0 and reviewing its development over the past decade, the 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, I introduce a three-part classi- fication of Web 2.0 discourse phenomena: phenomena familiar from older computermediated 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 ” versus “emergent” genres, but with a focus on discourse, rather than genre. 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 1 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 emergent categories are especially attractive in that they present new phenomena and raise special challenges for analysts of CMD, I argue that researchers should not neglect what appears familiar in favor of pursuing newness or novelty: all three categories merit research attention, for different reasons. Background The World Wide Web itself is not new. It was pitched as a concept by physicist Tim Berners-Lee to his employers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1990, implemented by 1991, and attracted widespread attention after the first graphical browser, Mosaic, was launched in 1993.1 The early websites of the mid1990s tended to be single-authored, fairly static documents; they included personal homepages, lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs), and ecommerce sites. The late 1990s saw a shift toward more dynamic, interactive websites, however: notably blogs (Herring et al. 2004) and online newssites (Kutz and Herring 2005), the content of which could be—and often was—updated frequently and which allowed users to leave comments on the site. These sites foreshadowed what later came to be called Web 2.0. What Is Web 2.0? The term “Web 2.0” was first used in 2004 when Tim O’Reilly, a web entrepreneur in California, decided to call a conference he was organizing for “leaders of the Internet Economy [to] gather to debate and determine business strategy” the “Web 2.0 Conference” (Battelle and O’Reilly 2010; O’Reilly 2005). At the time, the meaning of the term was vague—more aspirational and inspirational than descriptive . As a business strategy, Web 2.0 was supposed to involve viral marketing rather than advertising and a focus on services over products. One of O’Reilly’s mantras is “Applications get better the more people use them” (Linden 2006). Today the term refers, according to Wikipedia (2011b) and other online sources, to changing trends in, and new uses of, web...

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