TY - CHAP

T1 - Media linguistics and media studies - Communication forms and their infrastructures

AU - Meiler, Matthias

N1 - Erscheinungsdatum e-Book: 2019. Publisher Copyright:© Peter Lang AG 2019.

PY - 2017

Y1 - 2017

N2 - The concept of communication forms ("Kommunikationsformen")2 serves to describe both the evolvement of enabling conditions of communication as well as how different genres unfold their communicative purposes within them. In order to inquire these conditions empirically, it seems to be fruitful to address a theoretical concept of recent media studies (Schabacher 2013b; Parks & Starosielski 2015a) taken from science and technology studies: infrastructures and infrastructuring, respectively. (Bowker 1994; Star & Ruhleder 1996) With this concept, the notoriously vague notion of media is graspable in terms of work, i.e. as a practical and ongoing accomplishment of the enabling conditions of communication. This will allow to follow the recent tendency to reconsider communication forms in praxeological rather than typological terms, thereby making the analysis of a single communication form more reconstructive, rather than remaining on the surface by merely listing features. Especially in media linguistics, analyses of different domains, like news or science, reconstructions of such kind help to understand what (shifting) organizational conditions or, in other terms, what infrastructural work shapes communicative practices and its domain-specific and social embeddedness. The plea for interdisciplinarity also implies some methodological challenges.

AB - The concept of communication forms ("Kommunikationsformen")2 serves to describe both the evolvement of enabling conditions of communication as well as how different genres unfold their communicative purposes within them. In order to inquire these conditions empirically, it seems to be fruitful to address a theoretical concept of recent media studies (Schabacher 2013b; Parks & Starosielski 2015a) taken from science and technology studies: infrastructures and infrastructuring, respectively. (Bowker 1994; Star & Ruhleder 1996) With this concept, the notoriously vague notion of media is graspable in terms of work, i.e. as a practical and ongoing accomplishment of the enabling conditions of communication. This will allow to follow the recent tendency to reconsider communication forms in praxeological rather than typological terms, thereby making the analysis of a single communication form more reconstructive, rather than remaining on the surface by merely listing features. Especially in media linguistics, analyses of different domains, like news or science, reconstructions of such kind help to understand what (shifting) organizational conditions or, in other terms, what infrastructural work shapes communicative practices and its domain-specific and social embeddedness. The plea for interdisciplinarity also implies some methodological challenges.

KW - Language Studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85109141455&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://d-nb.info/1118748387

UR - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1049748

M3 - Contributions to collected editions/anthologies

AN - SCOPUS:85109141455

SN - 978-3-631-66752-1

T3 - Language and text studies

SP - 45

EP - 66

BT - Communication Forms and Communicative Practices

A2 - Brock, Alexander

A2 - Schildhauer, Peter

PB - Peter Lang Verlag

CY - Frankfurt am Main

ER -