RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND VIRTUAL, EDUCATIONAL, PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES

University Co-ordinator

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - ()

Research Unit Leader

Lucia Marconi

Description

Adolescence and youth are nodal points of the growth of the individual, moments in which, through continuous adjustments and reflections, one builds his/her own identity.

The language depicts, influences and changes this process greatly. When one uses the language, one expresses a representation of one’s own experience based on one’s own perceptions of the world, one ‘tells’ one’s own map of the world.

The popularity of the Internet among young generations is well-known; the use of the Web is increasing more and more, both at school and at home; in particular, blogs, which are like diaries, are a very popular virtual space where young people write and publish their experiences to share them with other ones.

Which spin-off do technological tools such as blogs, chats and forums provide for teenagers? Which can be the effects of telling about oneself through a blog, of expressing one’s own map of the world by writing in the Internet? How the modalities of communication have changed among young people in consequence of the coming and spreading of the Internet? How is the language evolving and changing through the use of these new means?

The use of these new means of communication calls for psychological, linguistic and sociological analyses.

What is a blog?

A blog is a hierarchy of texts, images, multimedia objects and data, structured chronologically, which can be displayed by a HTML browser (Winer, 2003).

‘blog’ is a crasis of ‘web’ (net) and ‘log’ (register – on which events are noted), it reflects a “logbook” – a definition, this one, emphasizing the chronological criterion of its structure – in which it is possible to note thoughts, moods etc., its peculiarity is the fact of being able to be easily published on line.

Among the most widespread typologies of blog, we find the following ones1:

“personal blog” – It is the most widespread typology. Its author write his daily experiences, poems, stories, wishes, discomforts and protests. Its readers’ comments are generally very appreciated and start very personal discussions. This type of blog is often used by high school or university students and is characterized by a great number of crossed connections with other blogs.

“topical blog” – A lot of journalists use blogs to voice their opinions on topical subjects or news stories or, in a simpler way, to express their opinion on issues that daily are given no space in the newspapers for which they write. Other persons use blogs to comment news read in newspapers or Web sites.

“thematic blog” – Every human being has a hobby or a passion. This type of blog often becomes a meeting point for people with common interests.

In general, a blog is formed of a heading, a central body and one or two lateral columns; for our linguistic and psycholinguistic investigations we have decided to focus on the central body exclusively.

The central body, by its nature, is developed according to a vertical directrix with the author‘s (blogger’s) statements (posts) ordered chronologically, from the top to the bottom, from the most recent to the most remote.

In the central body the author can give space to some comments, usually displayed at the end of the post itself, as well as to other elements, such as tags and labels, namely a sort of key-words identified by the author to mark out the theme of the post.

Objectives
The objectives of this research are to explore and compare the writing modalities of young generations in different environments, to identify the characteristics of the language used in writing texts intended for the Web and of the ones of the language used in school essays and point out their similarities. Moreover, its focus is steered towards the provision of a methodology for the verification, from a psycholinguistic point of view, of the social building of the self by means of the (auto-)narration through blogs.

To achieve the objectives mentioned above, the Research Unit expects to realize a repository formed of texts produced by secondary school students and of the documents excerpted from the most widespread typologies of blog (diary-like, thematic, topical and literary blogs).

Phases and Aims of the Research

The Research Unit will identify the criterions for the choice of the most representative sample of blogs of the selected typologies.
Some schools will be identified, selected and contacted in order that they can collaborate within the activity relating to the documents produced by children. For each school selected, a space will be located in a Web server where, in coordination with the teachers, essays or short texts written (individually and/or collectively) by the pupils will be collected. Moreover, in agreement with the teachers, from time to time the theme on which the students will have to express themselves will be decided, which should reasonably be of the same type of the one considered in the sector of the blog in question (for instance: of environmental, personal, literary type etc.). Finally, the texts drawn up by the children will be inserted by themselves in appropriate forms together with additional information (concerning, for example, the school of origin, the year of birth etc.) to be used in the phase of the sample data processing.

With regard to the writing of blogs, in building the sample some criterions will have to be privileged to the detriment of others. A fundamental requirement for the choice of the blogs to be inserted in the repository will be the age of the authors (stated by themselves in their profiles), who should belong to two distinct clusters: the first one – including users with an age ranging from 14 to 19 years – in order to compare the essays written by different children; the second one – including users with an age ranging from 20 to 35 years – in order to investigate how children’s language, interests, way of relating to the others etc. change during their getting on in years. Moreover, the Research Unit will consider the possibility of resorting statistical software (such as ShinyStat, for instance) in the Web, using statistics based on links among blogs (such as, for example, the ones provided by Wikio) or favouring different analyses to retrieve the blogs most updated and modified. Finally, to structure the sample in the best way, aprioristic analyses of providers of blog services (among which Splinder, Bloggers, ilCannocchiale, Iobloggo, Blogger o Typepad, blogitalia.it, Blogbabel etc.) will be carried out.

With the intention of identifying dissimilar uses and different words of the language through various means of communication and verifying how children’s vocabulary is being enriched and how their perception of the self is evolving, the Research Unit will proceed in two distinct ways.

The first way will consist in retrieving and analysing the individual posts in the different typologies selected (diary-like, thematic, literary blogs etc.) in order to effect analyses and comparisons:
within the different typologies of blogs in the different age groups;
among each typology of blogs belonging to the age group “14-19 years” (for instance, with an environmental theme) with the whole of texts produced by the children belonging to the same group.

The second way will consist in retrieving and carrying out the analysis of the language of diary-like blogs, for the telling of the self, according to the theory of connective knowledge by De Kerchkove, as well as in proceeding with a complete analysis of the central body of the blog (namely of the posts, the comments, the blogger’s replies to comments and the dates of publication), with the intention of verifying whether and how children’s vocabulary is changing and is being enriched. Finally, by carrying out an aimed search of terms revealing processes of generalization, erasing and distortion in diary-like blogs, we expect it is possible to retrieve information on how the perception of the self is evolving and changing within the blog itself. By comparing these results with the frequencies of lexicons (such as CoLFIS and Lessico Elementare), the Research Unit will carry out preliminary analyses of possible modifications in the language and, as a result, of the possible enlargements and/or restrictions of the map of the world used by the blogger to express himself.