Lexical abbreviation in English texts of the Internet

This article investigates abbreviations in different Internet discourse types and genres. For the study, continuous sampling method was used to select 76 abbreviations in hypertexts from 7 Internet English-language sites. The selected units were classified into 3 basic types with further subdivisions: letter-number (figure-for-word, figure-for-word-part, contractions as a result of vowel deletion), graphical (both Latin and English) and lexical (acronyms, initialisms, shortening and partial shortening) abbreviations based on the classification adopted in this research. Among the subdivisions, abbreviations involving figures, initialisms and contractions turned out the most frequent. Most of them were found in social networks, blogs, chats and forums. Further, abbreviations were analyzed in 6 types of Internet discourse: legal, political, personal, mass media, advertising and pedagogical. Particular genres representing the types were studied: a business email, a law firm’s website, a political blog, an Instagram personal page, a network media web page, and an academic institution’s page. It was discovered that on the whole (among 57 examples), lexical abbreviations prevail over graphical ones (56% vs 44%). On the whole, 44% were graphical abbreviations, 28% – initialisms, 23% – acronyms and 5% – shortenings. However, in each discourse, the distribution demonstrated considerable variation. This means that the magnitude of the Internet discourse type effect is very high. Further studies are needed to enlarge the number of examples with the increase in the amount of genres and their samples to achieve better balance.

Political Participation by Political Bloggers in Hong Kong: A Case Study of the 2014 Umbrella Movement

Political blogs have played an increasingly more important role in Hong Kong politics. However, research on this topic remains scarce. This analysis examines how political bloggers in Hong Kong used their blogs to participate in politics through a detailed content analysis of 960 political blog articles published on two major news websites – House News Bloggers and Speak Out HK – during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. This study found that “soapbox” stood out as the most popular function hereof, as political bloggers on both ends of the political spectrum actively used their blogs to influence the legitimacy of the Umbrella Movement in the public discourse. A substantial number of blog articles from House News Bloggers also included the functions of “transmission belt,” “informing readers,” and “mobilising political action.” Finally, only a small proportion of the articles from House News Bloggers and Speak Out HK included the function of “conversation starter.”

Firepups at the Lake

This chapter examines how a social community was created and developed on a left-leaning political blog, Firedoglake; in particular, it explores how readers, as commenters, engaged each other, establishing credibility, or rhetorically speaking, acquiring and enhancing their ethos and attaining the status of a respected member of the blog’s community. All excerpted threads include pseudonyms or screen names of users and all material from the designated blogs is, of course, in the public domain. In part 2, the chapter describes how the character of the blog itself, Firedoglake, changed over time as it grew to include an increasing number of front-page posters, became generally identified as hypercritical of the Obama administration, and became an umbrella site for smaller blogs under its banner. The discussion in both parts explores identity creation and the question of community in computer-mediated communication.