The fast and profound changes that have taken place with the emergence of new internet affordances and web developments over the last decades have brought about numerous and significant issues, together with a growing academic interest from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints. A major development has certainly been the shift towards Web 2.0 participatory practices: while the Web 1.0 can be said to be predominantly marked by information distribution and retrieval, the Web 2.0 is characterized by (active) participation in social networks, media-sharing websites, wikis, and blogs, by user-generated content and sharing practices that are often integrated and hybridized in these digital environments (for example Androutsopoulos 2011; Herring 2013). Within a discourse analysis perspective, textual forms are deeply influenced by hypertextuality/hypermediality and multimodality in terms of non-linearity, not least in reading modes. Furthermore, the expansion of Web 2.0 social networking environments has strongly impacted upon the previously distinct roles of (active) ‘author/producer’ and (passive) ‘receiver/user’, which in new online communicative practices mingle and overlap, can be single or multiple, bearing significant repercussions on the mechanisms of text construction and coherence, too. These deep changes, together with other characteristic traits specific to web-based genres, entail that previous conceptual frameworks and analytical tools have to be redefined in order to accommodate to the dynamic nature of communicative modes in digital contexts, with genres that have been created anew or, in the migration to the web, with ‘older’ ones that have been transformed by, and by means of, the affordances of the new medium, not least in linguistic terms.
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Paola Vettorel (2014) studied this question.