COMUNICAZIONE E INTERAZIONE DISCORSIVA IN RETE: IL CASO DEI BLOG POLITICI

Blogs belong to those genres which are native to the Web. These “frequently modified webpages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological order” (Herring et alii: 2005: 143) were started in 1998 and were a mixture of “links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays” (Blood 2000). The hybrid nature of blogs - which combines linkfilter and personal diary - makes them a remarkably efficient political tool which can be exploited at crucial moments like presidential elections. This study explores political blogs from a generic perspective and focuses both on their rhetorical function and on their formal characteristics and features. In order to carry out this analysis, a corpus consisting of forty American blogs was created; all the collected material was published on-line during the 18 weeks before the US presidential elections of 2008 and in the following two. This examination involves a reflection upon the methodologies which can be used to analyze blogs. As a matter of fact, due to the affordances of the electronic medium, blog pages are profoundly different from those of printed documents. The study considers the possibility of adapting already existing tools in order to examine this webgenre, and proves that traditional models and categories are not in themselves inadequate but require some adjustment to the new environment. This work also addresses the issue of the textual nature of blogs and verifies how the seven standards of textuality identified by de Beaugrande e Dressler (1981) manifest themselves on-line. The final part of this research consists of a case study which analyzes the specificities of the blogs written by citizens and by members of the political parties .