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GENRE AND PERSONA IN ACTIVIST WEBSITES

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Date Issued:
2004
Abstract/Description:
This study examines six activist websites in terms of genre and persona to identify electronic-text conventions and forms that must be recognizable to site visitors in order for digital activists to effectively communicate. Activist websites already use a number of text forms and visual rhetorical elements to cue the site visitor; many of these text forms are common to the activist websites examined for this thesis and may constitute an identifiable and distinct genre.In terms of persona, this study examines the electronic "public self" of activist websites. The arena becomes a metaphor for the virtual world; the rhetors are the activist sites; and the digital discourse is the intertextual debate--the conversation--that occurs among website users, activist sites, and targets. By categorizing activist sites in terms of their primary activities (helping, protest, and revolutionary), we determine which elements of genre repeat according to categories and we ultimately gauge the intensity and type of the outcome that the website rhetor hopes to create in the user. Designers and owners of activist sites have goals which can only be reached by means of effective, well-considered, digital genre and persona.Because many technical communicators and students of technical communication first experience the profession through service-learning for a nongovernmental organization--often an activist organization--this study will help those technical communicators to reconsider their own assumptions about genre and persona and may lead those students to understand the importance of privileging genre and persona when designing and redesigning digital texts. This study provides both experienced and new technical communicators a framework that they can apply to documents in order to (1) cue site visitors to the meaning of electronic texts and (2) construct effective public personas in the digital forum.
Title: GENRE AND PERSONA IN ACTIVIST WEBSITES.
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Name(s): Boreman, Margaret M.F., Author
Bowdon, Melody A., Committee Chair
University of Central Florida, Degree Grantor
Type of Resource: text
Date Issued: 2004
Publisher: University of Central Florida
Language(s): English
Abstract/Description: This study examines six activist websites in terms of genre and persona to identify electronic-text conventions and forms that must be recognizable to site visitors in order for digital activists to effectively communicate. Activist websites already use a number of text forms and visual rhetorical elements to cue the site visitor; many of these text forms are common to the activist websites examined for this thesis and may constitute an identifiable and distinct genre.In terms of persona, this study examines the electronic "public self" of activist websites. The arena becomes a metaphor for the virtual world; the rhetors are the activist sites; and the digital discourse is the intertextual debate--the conversation--that occurs among website users, activist sites, and targets. By categorizing activist sites in terms of their primary activities (helping, protest, and revolutionary), we determine which elements of genre repeat according to categories and we ultimately gauge the intensity and type of the outcome that the website rhetor hopes to create in the user. Designers and owners of activist sites have goals which can only be reached by means of effective, well-considered, digital genre and persona.Because many technical communicators and students of technical communication first experience the profession through service-learning for a nongovernmental organization--often an activist organization--this study will help those technical communicators to reconsider their own assumptions about genre and persona and may lead those students to understand the importance of privileging genre and persona when designing and redesigning digital texts. This study provides both experienced and new technical communicators a framework that they can apply to documents in order to (1) cue site visitors to the meaning of electronic texts and (2) construct effective public personas in the digital forum.
Identifier: CFE0000087 (IID), ucf:46073 (fedora)
Note(s): 2004-08-01
M.A.
College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
This record was generated from author submitted information.
Subject(s): digital discourse
genre
persona
activist
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0000087
Restrictions on Access: campus 2014-01-31
Host Institution: UCF

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