5Online Text Types
Abstract: Online text types are of particular interest for text linguistics due to the option to analyze developing discourse traditions and emerging text types and genres. First, this can be observed in formulated guidelines, the netiquette. Second, applying text linguistic theories established before the creation of the world-spanning net of web pages to analyze online text types helps to describe their key characteristics, i.e., hypertextuality, interactivity, fluidity, and multimodality. At the same time, emerging boundaries of these theories are discussed and new approaches presented, for instance the importance to extend text linguistics to include multimodal and typographic aspects or the notion of shortness. Third, it is shown that an increased fragmentation of written texts and the dissolving frontiers between text types require new classifications. One possible option lies in analyzing text genres instead of the broader categories of text types.
Keywords: fragmentation, multimodality, netiquette, online text types, text linguistics
1Terminology
The World Wide Web (WWW) as an immense world-spanning net of web pages offers countless options to present content, to find information, and to communicate with others. Since the 1990s, written documents have been transferred to this virtual world, adapted, and modified. New forms of communication have been invented, rejected, or developed further. Some of these text types have been around since the early 1990s, e. g., e-mails, chats, and blogs. Others, like social networks, microblogging etc. were only introduced in the 2000s. All text types are defined as forms of communication and can be distinguished from one another by formal and technical characteristics.54 The categories are number of participants, mediality, degree of synchronicity, and sign limitation. Ermert introduced this definition with the term Kommunikationsform or form of communication; the idea has been adopted by Brinker and developed further (cf. Ermert 1979; Brinker 1997). Within a text type, a variety of text genres can be applied and used for specific communicative needs and functions. Hence, a text type comprises a group of texts in the same format without considering the pragmatic and the situational embedding. A text genre, however, is in addition to formal aspects clearly defined by both inherent and external features. Inherent features are semantic sequences, cohesion elements and deictic references; external features that have to be taken into account are the situation of the communication, the roles of the participants, and the purpose of the communication. These genres are routines developed in communities to facilitate recurrent communicative needs. In every Romance language there are different discourse traditions and accordingly diverging genres. Text linguistics has to take into account these varying genres which can form the foundation for emerging text genres online. Since online communication is not restricted to users’ offline speech community, comparative studies of the differences in online communication between Romance (and other) languages are needed.
2The linguistic research framework of online text types
A common feature of all the online text types is the medium. A medium is an instrument or a device that enhances, produces, stores, and reproduces signs. In the case of online texts the medium is “tertiary”, because an electronic device, i.e., a computer or a smartphone, is needed both for production and reception (Dürscheid 2005, 2). Internet technology offers specific features for communication that users adapt, transform, change, or reject for their communicative aims. Thus, the text types and the emerging communicative routines are not only defined by technical settings; they emerge rather as a mutual negotiation between social and communicative purposes and the formal options (cf. Pentzold/Fraas/Meier 2013, 86; Holly 2011). This negotiation is designated by the term affordances. This term, deriving from the field of psychology of perception, stands for the fact that technical possibilities support and boost specific applications and communicative habits while preventing and inhibiting other options.
The digital environment of the online text types differs in some points from that of offline text types. The distinctive features which emerge from the technical disposition of the medium itself are hypertextuality, interactivity, multimodality, and fluidity. None of these aspects were introduced or invented with the development of Internet technology, but the technical possibilities support and boost their importance for online text types.
2.1Hypertextuality
A widely discussed question in text linguistics is whether the online text types and the various online text genres can be described and analyzed with the same categories and theories as the offline texts. This is especially important for the notion of hypertext. This structured principle is characteristic of the WWW and consists of units of information that are connected by links (cf. Burger 2014, 448ss.). The idea of hypertext goes back to an idea developed by Vannevar Bush in 1945 to store and organize knowledge (cf. Eckkrammer/Eder 2000; Seitz 2008). It was used in text types even before the rise of the Internet, like dictionaries, scientific articles, and encyclopedia. In contrast to traditional books and texts, the online text types contain a lot of hyperlinks that can be directly accessed by selecting and thus activating the link. In text linguistics, the question arises if the hypertext is a form of text that possesses the same characteristics as a paper-based text (cf. Endres 2004; Storrer 2000). This matter has been answered by distinguishing between hypertext as a structure of the WWW and a specific hypertext document (cf. Endres 2004, 40). The hypertext structure cannot be considered a form of text; it rather presents an organization system. A digital document or text, like a personal homepage, is divided into different pages that are linked via hypertexts and usually accompanied by a navigation bar on the side of each page. Each of these documents presents a self-contained text unit and can be described with the established categories for offline texts (cf. Eckkrammer 2002, 41; Endres 2004, 38). The discrete text parts, however, are not related by cohesive means; the links refer to other text parts by thematic or intertextual relations. These cohesive means and their typographic realizations deserve further study since links are increased in online text types and present a wider range of relations than links in paper-based encyclopedias or scientific articles.
2.2Interactivity
Interactivity is becoming a more prominent feature with the evolution of the WWW. Users are not only able to access information, use services to communicate, or choose their way along the hyperlinks, but they can themselves create content and publish it online (cf. Pentzold/Fraas/Meier 2013, 89). This changes modern societies radically, because the small number of journalists producing news and mass media content are not the gatekeepers of the information anymore. On the Internet, everybody can contribute and publicly announce a personal point of view. Bruns created the term produser for this development to show the dissolution of the frontiers between producers and users (cf. Bruns 2008, 21). This also allows for different or new text types to be used in public spaces and to enhance the textual variety in the digital world. Furthermore, a growing number of web pages contain an option for commentaries. This feature enables discussions between readers and author(s) of a text and seems to have become the most important text genre on the Internet (cf. Mishne/Glance 2006; Schulmeister 2010). Moreover, messages can be sent via Internet technology virtually instantaneously. This contributes to the interactivity in virtual texts and online communication.55
The increased interactivity can also influence the notion of authorship. Internet technology allows for the creation of intertwined and linked texts which can have repercussions for further communication. Information or opinions can be published referring to an article, a discussion or a video by including a hashtag or a hyperlink to the source. The option to share content via embedded linking allows for the introduction of a video or an audio file, even a whole post, into the text of another person. The option to share content is already implemented in a number of services. Questions of authorship can follow, because even if links and trackback are provided for all the content from other sources, the texts present a hybrid collage or mix of various elements (cf. Miles 2006, 221). The author of this new text does not actually create new content; they rather choose and combine already existing elements to create a new text. Does this have an impact on the notion of authorship? On the one hand, the collection of content can be seen as a personal filter for the mass of information on the WWW, which can help the audience find the most relevant content. In this case, however, the person sharing the content cannot be considered the author. On the other hand, the arrangement of information in a different context and creative collage technique can also be viewed as a totally new text and thus a new content provided by the author.
On Twitter, retweeting a post, i.e., sharing the tweet of another person and adding the abbreviation RT followed by the name of the author, can cause problems with the attribution of this tweet (cf. Yus Ramos 2010, 163s.). First, the retweeted messages can become ambiguous, because users tend to resume or shorten the original tweet to fit the 140 sign limitation. The users in many cases do not know the original message and what parts the other author added or altered. Second, the retweet includes the source or the original author of the tweet. If a tweet has been retweeted more than once, some users tend to cite only the person the tweet has been taken from, the most recent one or the whole chain or retweets (cf. Boyd/Golder/Lotan 2010). In brief, the technical possibilities of the medium influence and alter the notion of authorship and the attribution of content to its owner. It is important for text linguistics to account for these changes and to analyze the collage techniques evolving through sharing and embedding text, audio and video files.
2.3Multimodality
Multimodality, being the third major category, refers to the fact that online texts not only contain writing but consist of different signs, i.e., writing, images, and embedded audio and video files (cf. also ↗11 Analyzing Multicodal Media Texts). This is – as in the case of hypertextuality – not a new characteristic of texts. Written language has always been combined with images or arranged in typographical structures to reinforce meaning. Examples of such combinations can be found in medieval manuscripts, children’s literature, poems, advertisement, and newspaper articles or flyers. Computer technology, however, simplifies the inclusion of written text, images, audios or videos on the same screen surface.
Every part of a text, i.e., every sign, contributes to the main message and to the understanding of the text as a whole. Hence, a multimodal approach has become indispensable for text linguistics, a discipline that concentrated essentially on the writing and less on images and typographic presentation of texts. Recently, there have been big efforts in the fields of semiotics (cf. Kress/van Leeuwen 22006) and text linguistics (cf. Stöckl 2004) to combine the analysis of writing and non-written signs. The importance of multimodal approaches, and the inclusion of picture analysis in linguistics, clearly show the efforts to establish a Bildlinguistik [‘image linguistics’] (cf. Diekmannshenke/Klemm/Stöckl 2011, title of the collection). The necessity for a multimodal approach in text linguistics to describe online text types is becoming more and more evident with the evolution of the social web.56 In contrast to chat, e-mail, and forum conversations which are mainly based on writing, online services, like social networks, microblogging, photo and video sharing applications contain a variety of signs. Research interests lie in particular in the relationship of writing and images in a text, the typography, i.e., the arrangement of the signs on the screen, and specific picture conventions that are developing, e. g., the selfie.57 Typographic composition, which also plays an important role in offline press publications, is indeed relevant, because the flow and volume of information has increased enormously and even written texts are arranged in such a way to capture the attention of the readers and to convey a message. Schmitz confirms this: “Typography catches, wording is subordinated”58 (Schmitz 2003, 246). The textual arrangements and visuality of the whole text play an important role, because users are offered huge amounts of information in a short time. This implies that users first catch a glimpse of the pictures and typographic design before starting to read a text or watch a video.
2.4The creation and evolution of online text types and text genres
Text genres are not invented; they emerge and evolve in a speech community or a society slowly over time to facilitate both communicative routines for recurring situations and production as well as reception of a message. With the massive use of online communication, the question arises whether traditional text genres are simply transferred to the digital world, transformed there into something else, or are entirely new ones created. In the case of the early web, it can be observed that a lot of conventional text genres can be found, but they were adapted and modified in regard to their new embedding. This indicates that text types in the WWW develop from discourse traditions in a speech community more or less continuously to form new and independent types and genres. In the following, three examples of text types will show the different forms of evolution of online text types and text genres.
2.4.1E-mails
In the case of e-mails, the paper-based letter is seen as the model for this type of communication as also indicated by the designation itself (cf. Cusin-Berche 1999; Elspaß 2002; Panckhurst 1998). This view is not shared by every linguist, however. For example, López Alonso (2006) does not see e-mails as an evolution of the paper-based letters, but rather as its own and independent genre.59 Nonetheless, common features of paper-based and digital mail are salutation and goodbye formulas, a signature and an address. Attention was drawn to functions that differentiate the digital from the paper-based mail, as for example the subject case, the option to write and respond easily to one or many persons, to attach documents, and to create a dialogue by introducing answers and text fragments in the received text that are marked by angle brackets. Since the sending and receiving of a message only takes a few seconds, a dialogue similar to chat conversations can build up. The rapidity of this form of communication in comparison to the slow exchange of paper-based letters has an influence on the various letter text genres evolving in the e-mail environment. Commercial correspondence, cover letters, and official invitations still follow the same established conventions in a society as before the rise of the WWW. Inappropriate style or spelling mistakes in formal letters (cf. Panckhurst 1998, 49ss.) are rather due to the rising speed of communication and the novelty of this form of communication than to a real change in the text genre of the official letter. In a more private setting, however, e-mail messages can become shorter, show more interactive features and are sent within shorter time lapses than traditional letters and converge with text messages or chat conversations. Personal and private paper-based letters have not disappeared; the practice of the text forms has differentiated. Thus, paper-based letters have acquired a higher status and are reserved for private communication purposes with longer texts that are thoughtfully structured and elaborated.
2.4.2Online newspapers
Traditional paper-based newspapers rapidly established online appearances and homepages for their readers. In the late 1990s, most of the print articles were uploaded to the website without adapting or changing either the content or the presentation (cf. Yus Ramos 2010, 95). Burger states that the potentials of the hypertext structures were not adequately exploited and the multimodality was scarce (cf. Burger 2014, 483ss.). Over time, the articles and other elements of the online newspapers changed and became cross-media products. Consequently, the content is divided into smaller parts to fit the computer screen. Images and videos supplement the texts and the first page contains only teasers with hyperlinks to access the articles. Moreover, the hyperlinks can also direct users to sources, different articles, and other information (cf. Burger 2014, 490). The interactivity has steadily increased with commentary functions for each article instead of a section with letters to the editors, online polls and options for readers to add their own pictures, or for sharing and tweeting articles. The anthology by Cardon (2006) treats especially the mutual influences of weblogs and webzines as well as online and traditional journalism (cf. Pledel 2006; Mancera Rueda 2011). Meanwhile, in addition to homepages with options to download the print version of the newspaper and online adapted articles, many publishing companies offer specialized services (so-called apps) for portable devices such as tablets and smartphones. The content can be presented on each device with different key aspects and time lapses. The mobile versions of articles for tablets and smartphones, for example, contain less text due to the smaller screens and are updated more frequently than the online articles.
Meanwhile, the Internet has also altered the pace of news publishing. Instead of publishing an article about an accident or the result of a football match a few hours after the event, the format tends to become a live ticker where new information is published every few minutes. This fluidity and changing of the published information has significantly increased with the evolution of smartphones and provides the readers with nearly instantaneous updates of the news in the entire world. The evolution of the distribution and presentation of information is omnipresent and has repercussions on the print versions of the newspapers. As in the online news articles, the texts in the print versions become shorter and more clustered; the information is structured for accessibility and attracts readers with visual content. In brief, pages do not contain mainly text and a few images, but rather images with different boxes that contain the textual information arranged to present a visual idea of the content.
2.4.3Weblogs
Even if weblogs60 have been claimed the only unique digital text type (cf. Blood 2002, xi), they still have predecessors that share some of the features and serve as sources of inspiration. On the one hand, there are not only print genres, but online text types that have been replaced by the blog type. The personal homepage and the electronic guest book are two early online text genres that disappeared with the emergence of blogs, especially with the introduction of blogging tools and platforms that simplified and facilitated the creation and maintenance of content (cf. Klein 2001). The blog concept is more dynamic due to the inverted chronological order, the growing blogging community and its archive and tagging systems. Blogs enable participation through commentaries, blogroll, private messages or even chat functions that were beforehand restricted to the external guest books (cf. Yus Ramos 2010, 119). On the other hand, in the text type blog, a wide range of different blog genres has evolved (cf. Orihuela 2006). The blog itself constitutes only a technical structure that can be used for multiple purposes (cf. Couleau/Hellégouarc’h 2010; Primo et al. 2013). There have been various proposals as how to define the different blog genres and to distinguish them from one another. Topic based categories are abundant; for instance Herring et al. (2004) divide blogs into the most popular categories, “filterblogs”, “personal journal”, and as a third category “k-blog” or “knowledge-blog”. The sociologist Klein (2007) proposes a typology based on the work of Cardon/Delaunay-Téterel (2006) that focuses on the relation between author and content and between author and audience. These distinctions offer a first approach, but do not account for the text genres used in the blog types. Studies show that even in the blog of one person a variety of text genres are used for the blog posts, for instance the paper by Primo et al. about Brazilian blogs (2013), Lehti (2011), Soumela-Salmi (2009) on blogs of French politicians and Wenz (2017) about French personal blogs. A blog therefore presents rather a bricolage of posts. This indicates that a text linguistic approach has to tackle at the level of a single blog post rather than on the blog as a whole (cf. examples of different text genres presented in Rouquette 2009).
3Divergent text types and dissolving differentiations
Online text types are distinguished by a number of categories; the most important are the number of participants, the interactivity, the mediality, the degree of synchronicity, and the sign limitations (cf. Anis 2003). This differentiation helps to get a first understanding of the text types. With the continuing development of Internet technology, the frontiers between the text types are becoming less and less clear.
The number of participants, for instance, can change from two people in an e-mail, a private chat or a private message in a social network, to a one-to-many conversation in blogs, through tweets from a politician with thousands of followers and e-mails, to a many-to-many conversation in chat rooms or twitter comments evolving around a topic. The interactivity is extremely high in all the online text types because of the commentary function, the option to share content and the “like” buttons. The degree of synchronicity is especially high in chat communication, but does vary considerably in all the text types depending on the situation and circumstances. Sign limitation is only a distinctive feature of microblogging services.
The mediality can present a category to differentiate some, but not all of the online text types, as the following examples demonstrate. Video-sharing websites enable users to view, share, or upload videos. There are also written elements, like titles, descriptions, and commentaries, but the videos are the main focus of these websites. Photography and images are the most important part of social network sites. Chat, e-mail, digital encyclopedia, and microblogging services are foremost composed of written signs. However, pictures can be included and are becoming increasingly important.61 Nevertheless, text types like social networks, and weblogs, cannot be categorized by their multimodality. The weblog setting allows for blogs to include only writing or to create rich media blogs including images, writing, audio, and video files (cf. Miles 2006). Social network sites also allow the embedding of pictures, videos, written text and links to other pages. In addition, these sites combine a variety of already existing text types. First, members can, next to the publicly displayed friendships and messages on the wall, engage in chat conversations or send private messages that resemble e-mails. Second, photo albums can be created and published. And third, the social networks can be used in a similar way to a blog.62
Summing up, the categories to distinguish the online text types tend to lose viability, because all the text types allow a flexible use and a wide range of functions. Furthermore, more recent text types, like social networks, converge various ways of communicating that were beforehand separated and restricted to individual text types. The degree of multimodality shows the most significant differences between the existing forms of communication; still, this does not suffice for a classification. One problem of the approach seems to be the focus on solely formal categories of the text types. The content and the numerous usages that evolve in each text type separately, as well as throughout different text types, are not considered. Even if different services belong to the same group, they can be used for various purposes: One service is not only used to share pictures, but has a lot of social network features. Another service focuses more on the presentation of high quality and nearly professional photography. Accordingly, social networks are used more for close and private relationships, while other networks enable maintaining and establishing business contacts. It becomes clear that a text linguistic classification cannot stop on the text type level but has to include the communicative routines and text genres evolving within every text type.
Instead of drawing attention to text types, in fact a possible path in text linguistics is to consider text genres that are not bound to a singular text type and are used throughout different text types. One example is the commentary, which is included in nearly every text type. Several scholars have analyzed the world of online comments and conversations that depend on the content of the main text (cf. Fiorentino 2011; Pano 2008; Schulmeister 2010; Wenz 2017). Status updates can be found in blogs, microblogging, and in social networks, and the existing results could be deepened and compared (cf. Moraldo 2012). Internet phenomena, like macro images, originally published and distributed in image boards, have acquired such popularity that they are shared through all possible communication canals.63 These are only a few examples of text genres that can be found in various online text types and could be examined to acquire a more detailed understanding of the textual conventions building in the WWW.
4Fragmented and hybrid texts
The observation that online texts contain less writing than similar paper-based texts depends less on the hypertext structure than on the screen format and the way content is presented and consumed. For easy accessibility, the whole text is adapted to fit the screen. The different sizes of the used devices, i.e., laptops, tablets, and smartphones demand different arrangements. The smaller the screen the less information, and thus written text can appear for the users to read. Other aspects that stimulate the creation of shorter text forms are the acceleration of communication and the increased visuality, as discussed in the anthology Testi brevi, which revolves around short texts and the fragmentation of texts in digital environments (cf. Held/Schwarze 2011). The various articles show that scarcity is manifest in various offline and especially online text genres.
Another important aspect creating hybrid texts is the fluidity. Online newspapers or blogs that are updated daily, or even more frequently, contain mostly fragments of texts. Combined, these text parts, for instance in a live ticker, can provide all the information on a specific topic. The information is released in small fragments and does not necessarily form a whole cohesive unit. Alternatively, a text is updated to include more recent information without changing the title or indicating the changes. For text linguistics, this fluidity represents a challenge to define a text as a research object. An analysis would have to include a diachronic point of view to take into account all possible changes from the first publication up to the moment of the assembling of a corpus. In addition, texts can present a hybrid mix of different conventional text genres. The online text genres do not only adapt already existing text genres to the new medium and communicative needs, but combine patterns from various genres to create new digital text genres. This shows that comparisons to conventional text genres can be valuable, but it is imperative to also consider the new text genres as independent and unique (cf. López Alonso 2006). This way, the analyses focus more on the specific communicative aims and the emerging conventions in the digital world.
5Netiquette
The creation of text types and the emergence of communicative routines and text genres within these online text types cannot be viewed as the result of a continuous process of negotiation between the users, their aims, and the attributes of the medium. These negotiations or discussions present an interesting subject of analysis since potential conventions and norms for emerging text genres are discussed.
The question of how to behave in a certain online situation can be debated and decided by different actors. On the one hand, there are groups where every interested user can contribute to the negotiation by proposing rules for the behavior and for the style of the messages. Often, users who have been part of an online community for a long time and earned respect and popularity among the group have a higher impact in establishing a norm or a rule. These negotiations emerge in the dynamic of the group; the conventions can change over time until the group agrees on a set of guidelines. On the other hand, in some communities hosts and moderators observe the communication and warn or even punish users’ misbehavior, for instance by restricting access to the community. The rules or advice for social behavior, textual and graphic conventions, politeness, and style are called netiquette in French or cibermaneras in Spanish (Yus Ramos 2010, 276). They can be implicitly respected by the members of a group or be expressed in a special section for everybody to view. Of course, these guidelines also influence the structure, the style, and the content of the text genres used in a chat community or on a blog platform. The discussions on text genres are particularly of interest in the discussion boards of the Wikipedia community (cf. Bruns 2008, 101ss.; Levrel 2006). The users debate the characteristics of encyclopedia entries, i.e., an objective point of view, or references to sources in order to maintain a certain standard and quality of the articles. Nonetheless, negotiations around the netiquette can be found in various text types (cf. Große 2012, 154ss.; Strätz 2011, 64s.).
Furthermore, textual conventions are building over time in and through text types. On microblogging sites, for instance, textual patterns do not only concern the structure, the orthographic conventions, and the style but also the time of publication. Some posts are only published on a specific weekday and have received a designation. The first to emerge was the “Follow Friday”, when users recommended their followers other accounts. This time-based convention has been extended to “Transformation Tuesday” to publish pictures of people who have transformed themselves or their lives and “Throwback Thursday” to commemorate childhood memories (cf. Moraldo 2012; Boyd/Golder/Lotan 2010). Another important feature is the hashtag, which has become standard in many text types.64 By searching the keyword, all the entries and information tagged with this word can be found. This means that hyperlinks or trackbacks are no longer required in order to take part in an ongoing discussion around a topic. Thus, this convention can influence and change textual patterns in an online environment.
6Conclusion
The main focus in text linguistic research lies in exploring specific characteristics of the medium of the online texts, i.e., hypertextuality, fluidity, interactivity, and multimodality. Especially multimodal aspects of text types and text genres have to be analyzed in more detail and included in the text linguistic framework. Another important aspect has been the categorization of the existing text types. Since classification relies heavily on technical and formal characteristics, an understanding of the developing text genres within a text type cannot be accounted for. The investigations focusing rather on text genres that emerge within and throughout online text types provide useful insights in these communicative routines. Most of the analyses concentrate on one Romance language; thus, in further research, comparisons of the Romance text genres and communicative conventions should be pursued. It seems that the creation of a world-spanning net of web pages results in a global unification. Does this globalization also have an impact on the creation and use of the same text genres and styles that emerge in each of the Romance languages?
For the study of the first text types and text genres in the WWW, the comparison of the new textual forms with the conventionalized paper-based text genres proved valuable describing the online text worlds. Meanwhile, online communication has evolved further, so that analyses should rather focus on the specific situation and the function of the online communication without comparing the new text types to the paper-based text types. The introduction of new categories or notions, e. g., the concept of “shortness” as proposed by Held/Schwarze (2011), can be necessary for an adequate description. Similar to the text linguistic research of paper-based text genres, problems arise also regarding the online text types and text genres due to the denominations of the users on the one hand and the desire to establish a linguistic classification of text genres on the other. Despite the manifold text types and genres that have emerged in the digital era, text linguistics can help gain a deeper understanding of this multimodal communication.
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