The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer ... - Oapen

A classification of blogs following Herring 39
liteness. The use of blogs is not purely an attempt to communicatively redress
companies as individuals and associate them with idealized notions of interpersonal
communication, but is also intended to communicate a degree of humility.
Since communication between blogs (via quoting and linking) is communication
among equals, a corporate blog is the ideal tool to demonstrate communicative
parity between a corporation and its clients. The same is not true of other, predigital
genres that (sometimes) perform similar functions: individuals cannot
generally issue press releases or print brochures, even if they have communicative
needs that would warrant using these genres. The use of blogs with the
awareness that they can act as the common man’s megaphone can therefore be
regarded as a conscious politeness strategy.
The stylistic ideal propagated by bloggers, blog consultants and (self-proclaimed)
blogging experts elevates the affective and social dimensions of self-expression,
which have long been (and, in some cases, continue to be) regarded as anathema
inside many forms of discourse, particularly in written genres, and recasts
them as highly positive. There are several possible explanation for this idealization
of a subjective, personal and individuated style. Firstly, a style that
suggests objectivity and detachment by being deliberately free of social and affective
information (e.g. use of first and second person pronouns, private verbs,
tag questions, hedges) and by avoiding any reliance on context as a necessary
source of information (via the avoidance of deictic expressions) is typical of
institutionally-mandated communication as it takes place in academic and legal
contexts. The opposite end of the scale – subjective, emotive and contextuallycentered
language typical of blogs – is therefore furthest away from these genres
of objective discourse in which some abstract entity (facts, statistics, the text
itself), not the writer, makes an argument and therefore the reader interacts
not with the author, but with that abstract entity. Whether this perception is
objectively verifiable is entirely another question, but blogging evangelists vehemently
propagate the stylistic ideal of individuated writing because they realize
that readers associate a particular style with a genre or a family of genres and
that in this case the association with organizational genres is not desirable.
If the reader’s subconscious approach to genre recognition is at least fundamentally
similar to that of the genre analyst, then the association of certain
stylistic features with the specific purposes and communities is likely. If readers
have an initially negative view of corporations and their motives, this association
is hardly in the interest of corporate communicators. Of course, company
blogs can generally be identified as organizationally mandated by being part of
the corporate website and authored by those identified with their function in
the corporate hierarchy. But what is suggested to the reader by the stylistic
emulation of “normal” blogs is that companies are changing, that they are becoming
more open and more empathic, and that they are generally acquiring
the characteristics of a socially competent individual (in contrast to the frequent
characterization of large companies as arrogant, aloof and out of touch).
S6: Activity
Although both the range of activities (or purposes) in blogs as such and in
corporate blogs varies, the scope is markedly narrower in corporate blogs. Corporate
blogs may vary significantly in topic, language or target audience, but
their central objective must always be to further organizational goals, whether