Hierarchy of Periodicity in Blogs

Abstract

This paper explores the application of hierarchy of periodicity to blogs. In countries where Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is commonplace in daily life, people routinely engage in multimodal online content creation and publication using spaces such as Facebook and YouTube. New texts, such as blogs and wikis, have also emerged. Such texts beg questions about how Systemic Functional Linguistics presently accounts for semiosis in online texts as well as how and why Systemic Functional Theory (SFT) may be extended to account for new ways of making meaning. This paper will explore blogs through an SFT lens, first by noting the commonalities between the blog, its generic predecessors (such as the journal) and websites. Taking these commonalities as a point of departure, it will then discuss the 'newness' of blogs from the perspective of Djonov's (2008) website hierarchy and system of HYPERTEXTAL DISTANCE. While blogs and websites share some features and functionality, this paper will argue that the relationship between posts in blogs is fundamentally different to that which occurs between webpages in website navigation. A new account of the nature of hierarchy of periodicity in blogs will be proposed and illustrated through the analysis of 62 blogs.