Modern discourse developmental trends

Abstract

The paper deals with discourse development tendencies determined by social, economic, cultural and historic characteristics of our present existence, on the one hand, and modern technologies of distant communication, on the other hand. The material analyzed comprises texts taken from network and media discourse as presented in the Internet and Russian contemporary oral and written speech card-catalogue compiled by the authors. The model of our study includes four components of a communicative situation: subjects, texts, chronotops and organizational characteristics. We argue that modern discourse is characterized by the following properties of its participants: expansion of self-presentation, juvenile manner of communication, critical attitude to information, communicative over-saturation. Semiotic properties of modern discourse characterize the texts used in various types of communicative interaction, they include significant growth of multimodal content in all the types of written communication (it corresponds to predominant usage of visual information transmitted by electronic media), vulgarization of speech, and oral and written texts diffusion in distant communication. Chronotopic properties of oral discourse consist in the communicative compression of messages we exchange, in acceleration of our life and shrinkage of communicative turns, and in new demands to everyday habitual existence which makes it a vital necessity to have the access to the Internet in every home. Organizational properties of modern communicative practice may be defined as emerging of inter-discursive hybrid types of communication concerning media and network discourse, diffusion and merging of personal and institutional and private and public communication, and formation of new rituals which are mostly realized in gestures or clips.