RWDA2024

Although the internet can be a fountain of knowledge for you to educate yourselves on past and present news events, it can have detrimental impacts due to the freedom that people have to create fake news which can infect your personalised algorithms (filter bubbles). Pariser (2011), an internet activist, coined the term ‘filter bubble’ as an explanation of why and how a user’s ability to view certain information is based on their previous internet usage. The more that you, an individual user of digital media, involve yourself with certain ideologies or pieces of potentially fake news, there will be an increase in similar pieces of fake news that you will be shown due to the algorithm you have created. Filter bubbles appear in digital communication due to personalised algorithms which limit a user’s access to information based on past behaviour (Pariser 2011). Algorithms, “a finite list of precise steps for executing a particular task” (Jones and Hafner 2012), originate from maths – ...

Online blogs have created a seemingly new genre in the world of communication. By genre, I mean a conceptual tool for research on writing, reading, and language in our current digital age (Heyd 2016). Georgakopoulou (2006: 552) describes digital genre as ‘orienting frameworks of conventionalised expectations and routine ways of speaking and (inter)acting in specific sites and for specific purposes.’ Therefore, in Swales’ (1990: 58) definition of a genre, which focuses on functionality, blogs are a genre in themselves. They have followed the process of  remediation : ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’ (Bolter & Grusin 2000: 273). Hence, blogs are an example of a remediated hybrid genre as they incorporate both new and old media norms (Herring et al. 2005). Blogs have the ability to create a relationship between their writer and their audience as they offer personal stories, opinions, and thoughts, all in the interest of entertaining the reader. O...