Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants

Matthias Meiler (Siegen)

Weblogs as Academic Communication Practice

The talk will present a general view of a Ph.D. project that analyzes scholarly communication in weblogs. The focus lies on weblog communication between scholars and their typical linguistic practices of controversies which Ehlich (1993) called Eristic Structures. In this the main question is if the specific mediation of weblogs changes the controversial acts that are used to establish a (new) epistemic unit in the scholarly discourse. Said question is to be raised because the semiotic potential (Jäger 2008) of weblogs differs from classical Forms of Communication (Holly 2011) used by scholars (such as journals that have to be taken into account comparatively). Hence it can be assumed that eristic acts of communication are not only executed linguistically but with multiple semiotic resources.

Interwoven with this complex are the institutional specifics of that ›new‹ Form of scholarly Communication. Scholarly acting, in its most common forms, is shaped by institutional frames. Recent shifts in the landscape of academic publication system (first and foremost: Open Access) and the increasing economization of universities (Kieser 2010) possibly provide weblogs with a newly shaped field in academic communication that could turn out to be fertile ground. Apart from that, it has to be inquired in what way weblogs are also new forms of exercise for academic novices.

Matthias Meiler studied German Studies with focus on Communicational Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology. His Bachelor and Master theses dealt with communication in public space and the question of how media aspects shape communicational practices. The Ph.D. project at the DFG postgraduate program Locating Media (University of Siegen) broadens that question in light of praxeology in media theory and investigates the media practices which are constitutive conditions for communicational practices.

meiler@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de

Recent Publications

2013a: “Kommunikationsformenadressen oder: Prozeduren des Situationsvollzugs am Beispiel von Weblogs,” in: Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 2/2013 (in press).

2013b: “Geoberg.de – ein wissenschaftlicher Weblog. Kommunikationsform und institutionelle Position,” in: Navigationen 13/2 (in preparation).