Multimodal revision techniques in webtexts

What is genre theory a theory of? This paper argues that genre theory is an inquiry into the formation of fundamental categories of interpretation in history, where even the question of whether literary and rhetorical genres are in themselves fundamental is left open. Efforts to theorize genre are therefore beset by paradox since the categories that matter at any given time may not be literary or rhetorical genres. "Mauvais Genres" explores the paradox of genre through an analysis of the historical transition from a late Neoclassical poetics based upon genre to a modern system of philosophical aesthetics based upon trans-generic categories of the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime, categories that fulfill the genre-function even as they marginalize genre as a means of classifying and evaluating texts. Principal figures are Locke, Shaftesbury, Hartley, Berkeley, Hume, Reynolds, and Baillie.

Media scholars, artists, activists, and journalists discuss how the uses of the emerging “Social Web” redefine the public sphere and influence mainstream journalism. In an age of proliferating media and news sources, who has the power to define reality? When the dominant media declared the existence of WMDs in Iraq, did that make it a fact? Today, the “Social Web” (sometimes known as Web 2.0, groupware, or the participatory web)—epitomized by blogs, viral videos, and YouTube—creates new pathways for truths to emerge and makes possible new tactics for media activism. In Digital Media and Democracy, leading scholars in media and communication studies, media activists, journalists, and artists explore the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between truth and power today: the fact that the radical democratization of knowledge and multiplication of sources and voices made possible by digital media coexists with the blatant falsification of information by political and corporate powers. The book maps a new digital media landscape that features citizen journalism, The Daily Show, blogging, and alternative media. The contributors discuss broad questions of media and politics, offer nuanced analyses of change in journalism, and undertake detailed examinations of the use of web-based media in shaping political and social movements. The chapters include not only essays by noted media scholars but also interviews with such journalists and media activists as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Media Matters host Robert McChesney, and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. Contributors and Interviewees Shaina Anand, Chris Atton, Megan Boler, Axel Bruns, Jodi Dean, Ron Deibert, Deepa Fernandes, Amy Goodman, Brian Holmes, Hassan Ibrahim, Geert Lovink, Nathalie Magnan, Robert McChesney, Graham Meikle, Susan Moeller, Alessandra Renzi, Ricardo Rosas, Trebor Scholz, D. Travers Scott, Rebecca Statzel

Digital (participatory and shareable) media are driving profound changes to contemporary politics. That includes, this article argues, important changes to the production, dissemination and reception of political ideas and ideologies. Such media have increased the number and political range of ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ promoting forms of political thought, while also giving rise to distinct genres of political rhetoric and communication. All of this is affecting how people come to be persuaded by and to identify with political ideas. In developing and justifying these claims, I draw on the Political Theory of Ideologies, Digital Media Studies and Rhetorical Political Analysis. I begin by showing how a populist ‘style’, induced by broadcast media, has been intensified by digital media, affecting ideological form and content. Next I consider, in detail, a particular example – YouTube – showing how it shapes political, ideological, communication. I then present a case-study of the UK-based political YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson. I show how the political ideology he propagates can be understood as a blend of Conservatism and Libertarianism, expressed in a Populist style, centred on the ‘revelation’ of political truths and on a promise of therapeutic benefits for followers. In a closing discussion I argue that this may be understood as a kind of ‘charismatic’ authority, and that such a political performance style is typical of these kinds of media today.

About Our Authors

This book centres on the use of the Bible within contemporary digital social media culture and gives an overview of its use online with examples from brand-new research from the CODEC Research Centre at Durham University, UK. It examines the shift from a propositional to a therapeutic approach to faith from a sociological standpoint. The book covers two research projects in particular: the Twitter Gospels and Online Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It explores the data as they relate to Abby Day’s concept of performative belief, picking up on Mia Lovheim’s challenge to see how this concept works out in digital culture and social media. It also compares the data to various construals of contemporary approaches to faith performative faith, including Christian Smith and Melissa Lundquist Denton’s concept of moralistic therapeutic deism. Other research is also compared to the findings of these projects, including a micro-project on Celebrities and the Bible, to give a wider perspective on these issues in both the UK and the USA. As a sociological exploration of Digital Millennial culture and its relationship to sacred texts, this will be of keen interest to scholars of Biblical studies, religion and digital media, and contemporary lived religion.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin claim in Remediation that 'media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other', suggesting that no medium is so individualistic that it does not somehow draw on other older - or equally new - forms of media. However, they choose to discuss media primarily in terms of style, image and layout; in short, they emphasize the visual aspects of media while not thoroughly discussing other key rhetorical aspects such as the purpose of and response to a text. These latter components (purpose and response) are key tenets to rhetorical genre theory of the last 25 years. Because rhetorical genre theory seems analogous to remediation in many ways - both theories argue that texts or mediums draw on other texts/mediums - it appears that these two theories can serve as complements to one another. This article synthesizes remediation and rhetorical genre theory to discuss the relationship of silent film intertitles to comic book captions. Using ideas from rhetorical genre theorists Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi and Carolyn Miller (among others), in addition to Bolter and Grusin, I argue that not only are early forms of comic book captions remediated silent film intertitles (boasting a similar style/layout/image), but that they are also the same genre (sharing a similar purpose and invoking comparable responses). To that end, I examine silent films such as The Flirt (1917), The Mark of Zorro (1920), Nosferatu (1924) and Sherlock Jr. (1924) and comic books published in the 1940s, including Batman, Archie and The Spirit.

Central to rhetorical genre theory is the notion of ‘rhetorical situation’ (Bitzer, 1968), which emphasizes context as sociohistorically situated. In the analysis of academic genres, this notion helps us to think of the contexts that genres respond to as dynamic, varying across time and space, rather than as stable and unified disciplinary discourse communities. From this social perspective, academic disciplines are theorized as including a great number and range of rhetorical situations (Paré, 2014), and the idea of genre variation becomes of increasing scholarly interest. In this study, rhetorical genre theory and the concept of ‘rhetorical situation’ provide a framing for the analysis of a recurrent discursive event. The event is the design studio ‘crit’, a weekly presentation and review of students’ in-progress design ideas and artifacts, through which the teaching and learning of architectural design is enacted in the academy. In a professionally-oriented discipline such as architecture, curriculum genres often need to negotiate tensions between the academy and the profession. Applied to such settings, a rhetorical genre approach invites us to think about whose values and knowledge dominate, and who has the authority to adapt the genre to suit its changing needs. This paper reports on interviews with five design teachers (one senior academic and four professional practitioners). The interviews reveal how the teachers take up the crit genre in diverse ways, including what counts as knowledge and competence in the design studio and how this knowledge is best taught, learnt and assessed. The paper concludes that students would benefit from a genre pedagogy that focuses on genre variation, its sources and its consequences, as well as genre conventionality.

It is an honour to contribute the afterword to a book which takes its inspiration from my dear friend Dan Schiller’s powerful concept of digital capitalism. Schiller developed the idea in a book by this title (2000) which carefully demonstrates that capitalism is alive and extending its hold on the world. However, the adjective “digital” was now useful because the processes of production, distribution, and exchange were increasingly reliant on digital technologies to build the chains of accumulation essential for global capitalism. Scholars of media and information technology are indebted to Schiller for describing how digital media is vital to the commodification process, including its expansion into what were once primarily public institutions, such as education and healthcare. Moreover, he explains, digital technologies are themselves the objects of commodification, now an industry vital to capitalism. In a global capitalism system increasingly shaped by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and other firms that emerged with the digital world, it is hard to argue with Schiller’s central points. It is also good to see that he has deepened the ideas and the empirical analysis in his 2014 book Digital Depression.

Purpose Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is now much to be gained by giving renewed space to the formal and thematic sides of genre as well, granting the concrete utterances, making up particular genres, equal weight in the theory and analysis of genre. The purpose of this shift is emphatically not to take anything away from current Genre Studies; I admire what is being done in genre research today and want to add to it and expand it by demonstrating some of the possibilities enabled by a modified approach. Findings Current Genre Studies, as encountered in RGS, is an impressive and highly organized body of knowledge. By re-introducing literary and high rhetorical subject matter, which has been under-studied in RGS, into it, the chapter demonstrates some of the complexities involved when Genre Studies confront genres whose utterances are more complex than the “homely discourses” usually discussed in RGS. Formal and thematic features play a far too significant role in literary works to be explicable simply as derivations from function alone. But this is not limited to works of literature. The chapter finds that though more complex genres, literary and high rhetorical, most consistently invite utterance-based interpretations, other genre-based studies can benefit from them as well. Originality/value The chapter offers a perspective on genre which gives renewed weight to formal and thematic interpretations of genre, by allowing the utterances themselves to re-enter center stage. This enables an improved understanding of complex genres. It also revives close reading as a viable approach to understanding genre and thus to inform the rhetorical, linguistic, and sociological perspectives dominant in current genre scholarship. Finally, it improves our understanding of genre in both a systematic and a historical perspective. The chapter demonstrates, thus, that an understanding which puts as much weight on a genre’s utterances, as it does on its function is viable as an interpretation of genres, and is fruitful as an approach to them.

This systematic literature review explores the growing phenomenon of viral news and its influence on judicial processes, focusing on how institutions respond to public aspirations voiced through online media. The study aims to identify the mechanisms through which viral news affects trial outcomes and institutional decision-making, while also examining the societal and legal implications of this trend. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research synthesizes data from the last five years to analyze patterns, gaps, and theoretical frameworks. Preliminary findings suggest that viral news amplifies public pressure, often leading to accelerated or altered judicial responses. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of media influence on legal systems and offers policy recommendations for balancing public aspirations with judicial integrity. By addressing the intersection of media, law, and public opinion, this research holds significant implications for policymakers, legal practitioners, and media scholars.

Women's History and Digital Media: Uniting Scholarship and Pedagogy Shelley E. Rose (bio) Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar. "Black Women Suffragists."Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000. Alexander Street Press. ISSN 2164-537X (Basic Edition); ISSN 2164-5361 (Scholar's Edition). http://wass.alexanderstreet.com. P. Gabrielle Foreman. Colored Conventions Project. http://coloredconven-tions.org/. "History of Women's Struggle in South Africa."South African History Online. http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-womens-struggle-south-africa. In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Journal of Women's History( JWH), historian Claire Bond Potter asks, "Has the Internet made a difference to the practice of women'shistory? If so, what difference has it made?" 1Potter emphasizes the potential and challenges of a range of digital resources for women's and gender history, focusing on matters of access, creation of community, and the role of such "traditional" academic arenas as print journals and the standard of sole authored works in the process. This digital media review essay marks the beginning of a new JWHinitiative, connecting the traditional and digital realms of publishing while enhancing a sense of community among scholars of women's and gender history from diverse backgrounds and career paths. The Journal of Women's Historyjoins such peer-reviewed journals as the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, Western Historical Quarterly, and Bulletin of the History of Medicinein vetting digital media. In a timely intervention, the historian Cameron Blevins calls for historians to seize and shape the current wave of reviews. He observes that peer-review of digital projects ranges from informal Twitter dialogues and blog posts to print journals and, in his analysis, falls into three general categories: pedagogy and public engagement, academic scholarship, and data and design criticism. 2Limiting a digital media review to only one or two of these categories, however, potentially obscures a major contribution of digital projects. 3This review therefore focuses on the primary strength [End Page 157]of digital media projects: the ability to bridge the gap between scholarship and pedagogy. Currently, many digital media reviews reinforce a false dichotomy between scholarship and pedagogy. The Journal of American History( JAH), for example, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, began publishing "web site reviews" as early as June 2009 in collaboration with the educator resources site History Mattersjointly sponsored by American Social History Project and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The JAHeditors explicitly name educators as their primary review audience. 4The American Historical Association (AHA) creates a similar separation between digital media scholarship and pedagogy. In 2016, the AHA Todayblog launched the excellent "Teaching with #DigHist" series, edited by historian and high school teacher John Rosinbum, which discusses the use of a range of digital projects in the secondary and university-level classroom. In terms of scholarship, Alex Lichtenstein's 2016 introduction to American Historical Review's "AHR Exchange: Reviewing Digital History," characterizes the AHR'sstrategy of pairing digital media reviews with responses from digital editors as an "opportunity to defend their approach and to clarify how the digital medium made it possible for them to push scholarship in new interpretive directions." 5This distinct focus on scholarly contributions in the traditional journal aligns with the AHA "Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians," released in June 2015, where the terms "teaching" and "pedagogy" do not appear in the main section "Forms and Functions of Digital Scholarship." 6On the AHA website, however, these scholarship guidelines are found under the site heading "Teaching and Learning," which indicates the need for more focused discussions in the historical profession on the role of digital media projects in scholarship and teaching. Digital media consumers represent a broad audience, including academics who identify strongly with both scholar and educator communities. Early adopters of digital media, furthermore, are cognizant of statistics that reveal significant numbers of K-12 educators utilizing primary and secondary sources made available through large scale projects like German History in Documents and Images( GHDI) and the Library of Congress's American Memory. 7Data from...

One of the main concerns of scholars working in the field of EAP over the last 2decades has been raising the awareness of EAP students and publishers of genreconventions in academic journals. In line with the above concern, many studies haveaimed at exploring the general characteristics of research articles (RAs) in the field.Among these features, it seems that the generic moves and textuality have drawn theattention of researchers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was twofold: (1) tocompare and contrast the Iranian local ESP journals with their internationalcounterparts in terms of the given features by drawing upon existing research, and(2) to develop a more inclusive model for the analysis of moves and lexical cohesionpatterns (LCPs) in the Discussion sections of ESP RAs. Results showed that theDiscussion sections in the international ESP RAs tended to have a more cyclicalevaluative move mechanism compared with their Iranian local counterparts.Findings also revealed that the organizational patterning and use of the LCPs inconsolidating the Results sections of the RAs have a dual intrinsic relationship.Translation of such findings provides a better chance for nonnative EAP writers topublish in international journals.

Purpose/Thesis: The article presents the possibilities of using the interdisciplinary theory of genres, developed in the study of linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, philosophy, psychology and other disciplines, in library and information science (LIS). The article argues the application of genre theory to LIS offers a new and interesting interdisciplinary perspective.Approach/Methods: A critical analysis of the literature on the subject introduces the basic premises of the interdisciplinary theory of text/information genres in its historical development in the world and in Poland. A similar method was used to present the most important directions genre theory opens to LIS.Results and conclusions: Before genre theory was first applied to LIS, it was developed in disciplines such as linguistics, literature, rhetoric, communication and media, discourse analysis, sociology, pedagogy and others and in many countries on all continents (mainly in the USA, Australia, Brazil and Scandinavian countries). The theory’s success is a result of its interdisciplinary development, beginning from linguistic and classical rhetorical genres approach and problems of categorizing texts to “de facto genres” and their function in everyday communication activities (social/rhetoric approach). Applied to LIS, it frames information objects as social constructs whose meaning is constructed in social discourse, driven by genre knowledge. The library and other information systems should be treated as a social communication activity in the recurrent situation of organizing and retrieving information. It means that the work of a librarian (or other information organizers) involves rhetorical activity of creating information objects, as does the work of other information creators, e.g. authors of scholarly publications. The functioning of information system, i.e. production and organization of textual information should be investigated using methods applied in other disciplines, especially humanities and social sciences, as it allows for a broader research perspective.Originality/Value: The article describes the possibilities of applying genre theory in LIS research, which still do not receive the attention they merit. A wider knowledge of the genre theory would make possible collaborative research involving scholars of other disciplines such as linguistics and sociology.

One of the possible ways to explore contextualization is through external discourses referencing the pragmatics of the discourse in question. These are known as metapragmatic discourse. The purpose of this article is to theoretically integrate the concept of metapragmatics into genre analysis and apply metapragmatic tools to the analysis of specific genres. Five YouTube videos together with their accompanying comments exhibiting metapragmatic properties were analyzed. Methodologically, the analysis relies on the textually oriented content analysis. The results indicate that placing discourses nominally relying on one and the same generic form into a certain genre may be predicated on contextual variables that may have nothing to do with said form per se. These variables, however, may be verbalized by the original author and by their audience in the form of metapragmatic markers. This may mean that for the final addressee, the “effect” of the original discourse will depend on the attribution of this discourse, based on the metapragmatic markers, to one of the “competing” genre variations emerging, as it were, in an ongoing exchange between the author and his audience. A case in point are sponsored and “honest” review genres. A second observation resides in the realm of hybrid genres. An example here is integrating sponsored content into one of the “legitimate” lifestyle-genres (“hot tips”, vlog, etc.). A fraction of the discourse community seems to view this as delegitimizing the discourse and the genre in question, while others see it as an “unfortunate insert”, which does not, however, change the genre’s overall value. This leaves the question open whether such genres should be considered new and full-fledged genres, with sponsored content being one of their integral features.

How are siblings who were conceived using the same sperm or egg donor making connections in the absence of legal support? What is it like to discover you are part of a 50+ donor sibling group? How are donor conceived adults using new technologies to connect with genetic family and explore their identity? This edited collection considers the donor linking experiences of donor conceived adults and children, recipient parents, and donors in a global context. It includes contributions from legal academics, social workers, sociologists, psychologists, and policy makers who work in the assisted conception field. As a result, it will be of particular interest to scholars of reproductive law, sociology, and digital media and reproductive technologies. It will also engage those following the debate around donor linking and the use of do-it-yourself technologies, including direct-to-consumer genetic testing and social media.