Expanding the field of discourse analysis
Paradoxically, now that the field of discourse studies has high visibility, the universe from which discourse
studies emerged is vanishing. New communication devices subvert the very distinction between orality and
writing, and so we have to rethink many categories: textuality, speaker, addressee, utterance, memory,
storage, circulation, etc. We can no longer consider technology as just an element of the “context”: it now
needs to be considered as a true actor in the communication process. Such a transformation relates to the
data – since the Internet offers new kinds of semiotic productions – but also to the very conditions of
research, which depend increasingly on sophisticated programs and data bases. The problem is that most
discourse analysts seem to live in a world where traditional face-to-face talk is still the norm of
communication. If we consider the handbooks and the articles published in the field, a peripheral role is
given to corpora produced by new technologies, except if they can be tackled by using the toolkit of Conversation Analysis. This is particularly the case with chats, forums, emails, phone text-messages and so
on. As the focus of discourse analysis is not on the most important aspects of the Web, its study belongs
mainly to specialists from other fields. The Discourse Reader (Jaworski and Coupland, 1999) does not
mention the Internet. But, surprisingly, this is also the case 13 years later in The Routledge Handbook of
Discourse Analysis: the introduction does not mention the existence of new communication technologies
and none of the 46 chapters deals with this topic.
https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201758, acessado em 25/08/18.