Essays on the dynamics of linguistic marketplaces

Abstract

In three interrelated essays, this thesis looks at some of the dynamics of content creation and consumption in the linguistic marketplaces of digital journalistic content. It starts by conceptualizing news as digital objects and then focuses on their distinctive role in content creation and consumption dynamics in each essay. To use the analogy from literature, the first essay foregrounds ‘the text,’ the second on ‘the author,’ and the third on ‘the reader.’ The first essay looks at digital news objects as a type of epistemic consumption object. It explains how vernacular content creators use various narrative techniques to create a multitude of news objects. Using Bourdieu’s theory, it proposes that attention economy logic supports the expression of their vernacular habitus, and the objects become carriers of the linguistic-cultural capitals. The second essay takes an intraprofessional view of the journalism field. It delineates the various boundary work practices digital and mainstream journalists engage in. Here, consistent with the paradoxical view, I find that the boundary work between the two groups is contingent, each trying to keep their epistemic authority over content creation. The resultant practices are both collaborative and competitive, utilizing digital news as boundary objects. The third essay concentrates on text-paratext interactions, where the author presents the text (YouTube video) to readers, and their response in the paratext (‘comments’ section) affects subsequent videos. Using Lyotard’s utterances and language games, I propose that the journalist’s ‘epistemic authority’ is an ongoing paralogical process that involves seven phases of the text-paratext or reader-author negotiation resulting in the episodic co-creation of the text.