CAL Presentation: Reading the News Online
How the Internet is Changing News Discourse
Thursday, October 10, 2013 · 3 - 5 PM
Off Campus
About the Presentation
News and news work have changed significantly over the past 20 years. An increasing
number of people now get their news online and the rise of the Internet
makes for a very different way of accessing, reading, and interpreting
the news.
How has the discourse and language of news changed in the process?
Interpretation is central to the practice of news, both for those who
generate it and those who consume it.
At this informative and enlightening presentation, Dr. Bell will discuss
the Interpretive Arc as a means of understanding how we read texts such
as the news. The Interpretive Arc consists of six phases: estrangement
from a text: pre-view (the opinion or knowledge that readers bring to a
text); proto-understanding (an initial guess at what the text means);
analysis (tests the validity of alternative readings); understanding
(grasps the matter disclosed by the text); and ownership (readers come
to a new self through appropriating the text).
Dr. Bell will illustrate how the Interpretive Arc works, through examining
contrasting maps of the world. Differing orientation, centering, and
projections represent clear differences in how the world is viewed, what
is up and what is down, and what is central and what is periphery. He will then apply the Arc to understanding how we read news online.
It is now nearly a generation since the foundational studies of news
discourse appeared. How different is the online experience from
traditional reading of the newspaper? What specifically has changed?
What remains recognizably the same? Dr. Bell will concentrate in
particular on how news roles have been reconfiguring (along with the
genres of news and the ways that we as readers approach them) and
investigate by examining a range of online news texts - their
generation, reception, and interaction.
About the Speaker
Allan Bell is Professor of Language & Communication and Director of the Institute of Culture, Discourse, & Communication at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His research interests include language style (Audience Design), media language and discourse, New Zealand languages, and social and linguistic aspects of the internet. He has led several major research projects, including currently the World Internet Project New Zealand. He is Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and has published many papers and several books, including The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics, which has just appeared.
About the Speaker
Allan Bell is Professor of Language & Communication and Director of the Institute of Culture, Discourse, & Communication at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His research interests include language style (Audience Design), media language and discourse, New Zealand languages, and social and linguistic aspects of the internet. He has led several major research projects, including currently the World Internet Project New Zealand. He is Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and has published many papers and several books, including The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics, which has just appeared.