Online Discussion and Interaction: The Case of Live Text Commentary

Jan Chovanec (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)
Copyright: © 2010 |Pages: 251
EISBN13: 9781609603403|DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-863-0.ch012
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Abstract

This contribution discusses linguistic aspects of discussion and interaction in a new genre of journalism?live text commentary?that has recently come into existence thanks to new communication technologies, most notably the Internet. Live text commentary is a professional journalistic text that is produced online contemporaneously with the event that it describes. The technology enables the text’s consumers to provide instant feedback to the author, thus enhancing interpersonal interaction. Structurally, the resulting texts contain elements of discussion because readers’ comments are used to co-construct the texts, while also manifesting numerous linguistic features of reader-oriented interactiveness. Live text commentary is viewed as an instance of mediated quasi-interaction. This is because the readers interact in a virtual space, discursively enacting their membership in an imaginary community, rather than participating in a real interpersonal interaction. Using material from live text commentaries of sports events, this contribution provides an analysis of such online discussion and interaction from the perspective of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
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