Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación (Nov 2019)
Analysing the Digital World and its Metaphoricity: Cybergenres and Cybermetaphors in the 21st Century
Abstract
The World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionised the field of communication, to the extent that it has become the most preferred medium. The Internet itself has wrought a transformation driving the digital environment forward, from a repository of information where static published content remains to information that can be uploaded and downloaded. The Internet has had a huge impact in recent years, significantly affecting the linguistic field since the virtual world has instigated scholars to explore users’ interaction with Cybergenres (Girón-García & Navarro i Ferrando, 2014; 2015). Accordingly, in Cognitive Linguistics, some authors have suggested that frames and other types of Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs) already active in the users’ conceptual system may guide online navigation patterns, resulting in new forms of literacy (i.e. ‘Digital Literacy’). Accordingly, social networks and webpages tend to display words and expressions such as “pin”, “board”, “friend”, “gift card”, “shopping cart”, etc. which since the beginning of the Internet era have been used in a new sense. These words and expressions represent mental models that have been transferred from traditional domains onto digital domains (i.e. the Internet domain). This study aims to describe and analyse how these previous cognitive models give coherence to different types of cybergenres in English - e.g. social networks, MOOC, Cybertask, weblog, and ‘marketplace’ web pages. In particular, this paper recognises the metaphorical models that are used in the digital context (i.e. Cybergenre), and describes and classifies conceptual connections between the source domain (i.e. ICMs) and the target domain (i.e. the Internet). With that objective in mind, certain social networks (e.g. ‘Pinterest’, ‘Facebook’, ‘Instagram’) and ‘marketplace’ web pages (e.g. ‘Amazon’, ‘eBay’) are analysed to test the hypothesis that metaphorical models give coherence to their organization and structure. In this vein, the description and classification of those conceptual projections may unveil a link between the digital world and traditional conceptual representations. The results obtained from this analysis may help us to understand the connection between the previous cultural representations and the digital environment; as well as helping virtual users to develop their Digital Literacy in this virtual context.
