Dear friends and colleagues,
The calendar says that it’s summer … and even the weather seems to comply – if somewhat grudgingly at least here in Northern Europe. On behalf of the editorial board of “Language at Work – Bridging Theory and Practice”, we – the editors – are proud the present you with the summer 2010 edition of your magazine. This issue of the magazine features three articles all dealing with the theme of language and / on the new media; yet they do so from very different and very interesting angles.
In her article “Control Freaks: How Online and Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Contact” Naomi S. Baron (American University, Washington DC, USA) deals with the issue of control in relation to new media in general and mobile phones in particular. An excerpt from the article reads: “Control has long been a critical aspect of human interpersonal communication. We cross the street to avoid people with whom we do not wish to speak, and we procrastinate in responding to problematic letters. However, with the development of teletechnologies (that is, technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone, and now computers and mobile phones – see Baron 2000), our opportunities for exercising control are scaled up.” Apart from discussing these aspects of our use (and dependency on) new media, Baron shares with us the insights gained from a study on the use and appreciation of mobile phones in a large-scale survey encompassing university students from Sweden, the US, Italy, Japan, and Korea. As you will be able to read, the survey presents some interesting data “regarding where and how they used mobile phones, along with their attitudes concerning the device’s virtues and vices.”
In “Web 2.0 under the light of free software”, Rosanna Mestre (University of Valencia, Spain), first invites us to take a look at the history of free software. Then – and this is the main content of the article – Mestre puts forward the argument that: “When we are sharing intellectual information, we do not lose what we had, but rather we increase our intellectual heritage. Creation cannot be only its authors’ property or, less than that, their intermediaries’. Creation (ideas) cannot be confused with its container (book, DVD, CD…). Culture, knowledge, information…belongs to the world.” In addition, following up on her statement that “Web 2.0 makes possible other patterns of creation and communication”, Mestre presents different principles of how to not only ‘talk the talk’ but how we may also ‘walk the walk’, as it were.
In the article by Lisbeth Klastrup (IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark) “Professionally Social: Using Social Media for Professional (Research) Communication”, Klastrup focuses on “what I consider the important characteristics, opportunities and challenges presented to us by social media when used for professional communication purposes”. In a theoretical discussion of the hybrid nature of social media communication, Klastrup states that: “I would like to emphasise that social media communication is a hybrid of, on the one hand traditional monologic web communication (such as company homepages) in which the sender communicates to an audience without any interest in engaging this audience in a conversation; and on the other hand “social interaction” genres like newsgroups or discussion fora, in which everybody present in the group discuss a common topic of interest on equal footing, in “threads” following a topic.”. These insights are followed by elaborations on how and why we may (and maybe should) use social media communication professionally.
We hope that you will enjoy reading these articles as much as we have enjoyed editing them. On behalf of Language at Work – Bridging Theory and Practice, we wish a wonderful summer!
Peter Kastberg, Ph.D., Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Annelise Grinsted, Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Southern Denmark, Denmark |
