[Webinar] Genres of disclosure: Legibility and Digital Surveillance

Genres of disclosure used in digital surveillance, while sharing some similarities with analogue genres of disclosure, are unique in a number of ways. Genres such as chat platforms, search engines, shopping sites, and social media sites, like older genres of disclosure, are designed to reproduce particular configurations of people, technology and practice that yield identifiable and socially meaningful forms of interaction and information disclosure. The main difference is that digital genres of disclosure rely less on the texts that people create and more on the interactional ‘residue’ (or metadata) they leave behind when creating these texts. In this section I will use the principles from genre analysis explained above to analyze a range of representative digital genres of disclosure such as permissions dialogues for websites and apps, social media sites (in particular, Facebook), and online quizzes and surveys that gather marketing information.

At the end of the presentation I will consider the future of genres of disclosure in digital environments, especially those that engage users in more multimodal forms of communication (such as Instagram and FaceTime), considering how visuality contributes to the development of new generic conventions and complicates algorithmic efforts to ‘read’ user generated texts.

Rodney H. Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Reading. His research interests include language and digital media, health communication, and language and sexuality. He has published thirteen books and over eighty journal articles and book chapters. Among his recent publications are Spoken Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Language and Media: A resource book for students (Routledge, 2020). He is also the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity (Routledge, 2016). He is particularly interested in the ways media are changing norms and practices around visuality, sexual intimacy, and surveillance.