Communicating Professions Via Blog: An applied linguistics approach

In today’s highly digitalised and communicative world, information is no longer produced and presented as a product to be merely consumed: rather, it has become a negotiated flow that is adapted based on the needs of a determined professional “community of practice”. As Bruns and Jacobs point out, the current age is one in which individuation, personalisation and customisation are leading to interaction, interactivity and intercreativity (2007). The role of communication - and in particular that of computer mediated communication and its texts - in the workplace has been greatly emphasised in the light of globalisation, the dematerialisation and mobilisation of the workplace, and the development of new sectors, services and media around the world. As far as workplace communication genres are concerned (Bazerman and Paradis 1991; Zanola 2010), they may consist in the online remediation of traditional ‘paper’ genres or in the use of 2.0 genres, such as blogs and podcasts, in and for the workplace. This expansion in work-related channels has contributed to an ongoing democratising change in power of and over discourse concerning both traditional and emerging professions, as testified by the increasing use of new and social media, which have become an important tool for companies, employers and employees alike. On the one hand, online communication may be used to boost company value and legitimacy by promoting its activity through advertisements, strategic self-presentations and a variety of social media accounts and their multimodal content. On the other hand, it could be perceived as a promising and empowering tool for employees and hitherto marginalised professional figures who can now voice their own needs and stories (Garzone and Catenaccio 2009). This voicing, and the possible resulting dialogue, connects the work environment to socio-semiotic theories of communication, in which members of a cohesive community “are able to contribute to common purposes by dealing productively with constantly new cultural, semiotic and social problems by designing, representing and communicating their suggested solutions to them” (Kress 2010: 18). Such an ongoing change in online discourse and discourse communities enacts important community and identity-related changes both on a personal and collective level (Sergeant and Tagg 2014): as regards the former, knowledge that is conveyed through blogs and other forms of online professional social media becomes a means of increased self-awareness, individualism and empowerment, for the user, who may also be a professional or a non-expert in search of professional advice or interpersonal communication (Turnbull 2013), is now aware of problems, solutions, methods and places or people to turn to in cases of need. Bloggers present themselves as helpful and friendly experts who put their knowledge and experience at other people’s disposal, thus providing necessary immaterial know-how and skills (Nardi et al. 2004). The latter level, i.e. the collective one, consists in the potential sense of group identity that could link a user with an alternative online community in addition to, or in substitution of, his/her everyday offline professional community of practice. Blogs are a place where one reads of other situations to reflect on an immaterial but always present reservoir of security, information and empathy (Koester 2010). Proof of this may be found in the creation of a specific lexicon and a growing repertoire of shared knowledge (e.g. guidelines, how-to, self-help and do’s-and-don’ts articles, recommendations, invitations) and diverse informative multimedia material (references, essays, slides, manuals, videos, PDF exercises) and necessary networking connections aimed at introducing and forming new members and at sharing information and advice among peers. It has been proven, in fact, that the new power of an online audience concerns their enhanced level of information seeking and distributing. The present study consists in a collection of applied linguistics studies on blogs and their varying contribution to professional identity and discourse: they range from the innovation of traditional professions (office workers), to the emergence of professional branches in search of an identity and validation among non-experts (media psychologists), to the selective dissemination of values within an international yet elitist professional and discourse community (the military). Each profession was chosen due to its peculiar use of and potential for growth thanks to the development of professional blogs that have taken on a certain form based on its individual pre-existing communicative patterns and genres which emerge in a new and more comprehensive digital form that retains the values, work ethics and points of discussion that are typical of the profession. By comparing three professions and the idiosyncratic features of their online discourse, it is possible to detect trends and changes in the profession and elaborate multimodal and discursive frameworks thanks to which online professional discourse may be conveyed and interpreted.