Electronic Discourse
Human communication is considered to be both interactional and transactional. In online communication, however, the former is minimized due to the fact that online communication, from the very beginning, was not designed for social purposes but for data retrieval. Nevertheless, language, typed or verbal, is believed to help its users communicate and express their needs and emotions. From a linguistic perspective, these tools and software are designed to imitate communicative codes and intents of their users. As a result, I want to determine how users make use of available tools and software to build their relational and interactional communication, and how successfully these tools and software help them achieve this purpose.
Another area within electronic discourse that intrigues me is comprehension and multimodality. A website usually contains several webpages its owner designs to display ostensibly coherent content. Quite often, there are links that help viewers maneuver around a website. Content displayed on websites is encoded into text, graphics, image, video, or a combination thereof, resulting in different communicative modes and channels within one webpage or a sequence of webpages. This helps users interact with and comprehend the content better.
I also want to see how internet users comprehend content presented in multimodal codes, make use of multimodal codes, interact with them, and connect them in order to facilitate their own comprehension. The content and multimodal codes designed to present the content are what web owners believe to be topically or thematically relevant and should be consumed by internet users in a specific order, but this may be different from what the users think and do. I want to investigate more closely how culture impacts on website design and layout and how content is conveyed by multimodal webpages.
Another area within electronic discourse that intrigues me is comprehension and multimodality. A website usually contains several webpages its owner designs to display ostensibly coherent content. Quite often, there are links that help viewers maneuver around a website. Content displayed on websites is encoded into text, graphics, image, video, or a combination thereof, resulting in different communicative modes and channels within one webpage or a sequence of webpages. This helps users interact with and comprehend the content better.
I also want to see how internet users comprehend content presented in multimodal codes, make use of multimodal codes, interact with them, and connect them in order to facilitate their own comprehension. The content and multimodal codes designed to present the content are what web owners believe to be topically or thematically relevant and should be consumed by internet users in a specific order, but this may be different from what the users think and do. I want to investigate more closely how culture impacts on website design and layout and how content is conveyed by multimodal webpages.