I just read Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet by Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon (New York: Routledge, 2004). It was recommended to me by someone on the AoIR list, after I had sent an email asking what people knew about discourse analysis on web pages.

After reading about 150 pages of what was more a research biography than a research methodology, although it was really interesting, I found the most useful stuff way back in the appendix.

I have to say it confused me a lot for a while, and I think it’s because it’s not a book about discourse analysis, or about the Internet. There was a chapter on how the Internet changes how discourses take place, but the example they used was when CMC entered their unviersity in the early-mid 1980s. Hardly the Internet we know today.

It’s more a book about where to place discourse analysis when looking at new media technology and social change. The experiences from which they draw their knowledge are working with indigenous populations in Alaska, which made it a great read, if you weren’t looking for stuff in particular. I found the pictures of shoes and mooses really unhelpful.

But they do posit a theory that new media shape social interactions, and we can study them by identifying a nexus of practice, where three elements meet: the historical body of the participants in the social interaction (i.e. the assumptions, values, experiences, beliefs and motivations that shape their knowledge of their role in the social setting), the interaction order (i.e. the way the relationship is structured in the environment, who’s got authority to do what and say what and stuff), and the discourses in place (i.e. the multitude of messages and texts that are present, and which discourses are made prominent or foreground, compared to those that are in the background).

I took this stuff and applied it the best I could at 2am on a Monday morning to EC blogs. I have a meeting tomorrow morning with my supervisor and I’m sure he’ll ask “what will you do with it?”. Of course, I’ll reply, “Shred it and make a pillow. Sleep and then tape it back together.” Before I shred it, it’s online here if you want something to make a nice cushion out of.

I started reading hoping it would give me a set of tasks, or questions to ask, when starting a discourse analysis. It didn’t give me much of that at all. But it offered me a framework to set the analysis in, which is actually better than what I expected. Still, I need a good book on analysing media texts. I have one in front of me by Andrew Burn and David Parker, called “Analysing Media Texts”. I might give it a try.

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