Language, Mind and Culture in the Online Global Context: An Inquiry of Psycholinguistic Blogs

Globalization and transnationalism have had great impact on communication in all of its verbal and non-verbal channels (Barton and Lee, 2013), leading to changes by means of elaboration such as intertextuality and remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). New and social media, in particular, have fostered and promoted information transmission and sharing as well as scientific and academic research and collaboration on an international level. As a result, the English language has become the lingua franca of online communication and interaction uniting standardized linguistic variations, occasional and spontaneous cultural references to the place and field of origin of those employing these social media and new terms that are typical of the language of the internet and of the professional and academic field in question (Crystal, 2003). From a sociolinguistic perspective, social networking showcases two fundamental social dynamics that are relevant in terms of cross-cultural studies: identity, or the presentation of the self that is constructed and negotiated through a set of resources, and community, consisting of the building and maintenance of networked relationships (Seargent and Tagg, 2014, Garzone and Catenaccio, 2009). Among the many available forms of social media, blogs (Bruns and Jacobs, 2007) have emerged significantly due to their user friendly and flexible structure and to their great visibility and “democratic” appeal. Interestingly, blogs also straddle the line between written and oral language and may insert themselves within a spectrum of registers and degrees of specificity, ranging from blatantly humoristic and informal to clearly professional, according to the blog’s purpose (to entertain, to inform, to support) and the degree of professionalism of the blogger and targeted audience (researcher, student, therapist, etc.) (Granieri, 2005; Miller and Shepherd, 2005; Polito, 2011). These forms of new media, as well as the inclusive approach employed within them and by means of them, are crucial for both psychology English and knowledge sharing: in fact, the language and media of psychology ESP as an individual LSP is still developing and has only recently begun to contemplate communicative structures and functions of their own. The high hybridity of both the language used in psychology in general and of the field that links the mind and language most closely, i.e. psycholinguistics, make this discipline an especially interesting one from metalinguistic and rhetorical perspectives (Jaworski and Coupland, 2014). The present inquiry will therefore analyse the multimedia structure and functionality and the language used by a variety of blogs concerning psycholinguistics between the 2014 and first half of 2015 from an empirical multimedia and CDA standpoint. Factors such as identity, community, audience designing, knowledge sharing and the presentation of research theories, studies and results (especially in light of the increasing possibility of the presence of “overhearers” as in Seargent and Tagg, 2014) will be the starting point for considerations on current trends and on possible future prospects for the development of professional and academic psychology ESP and of their online knowledge sharing and discourse communities and practices. Moreover, the branch of media psychology material focuses on communication on a multimedia level and the English language’s integration into and adaptation to social media, thus enabling a metalinguistic and metadiscoursive analysis in line with globalized communication.