Try to prove me wrong: Dialogicity and audience involvement in economics blogs

Early studies on web discourse focused on the impact of the medium on the hybridization of spoken and written discourse. It is now the time to look more closely into the extended participatory framework of the Web. This paper looks at blogs as public arenas for knowledge construction and knowledge dissemination at the same time, focusing on how experts may interact at different levels with different types of audiences. The hypothesis is that web-mediated communication is particularly apt to developing simultaneous conversations within and without the scientific discourse community. Using a small-scale study of comparable texts produced by well known economists who write for the academia as well as for the media, the paper looks first at how they develop different dialogues in the different communicative contexts (focusing on posts and news columns). The analysis centres on the intense dialogicity of posts, often presented as part of an ongoing conversation, and on the dialogic structure of blog threads. These turn out to be not just polylogues or multi-party conversations, but “interwoven polylogues”, addressing the interests of different types of participants simultaneously, on separate planes. These interwoven polylogues engage participants in parallel conversations, some of which are more clearly oriented to sharing views, while others aim at knowledge dissemination and others still at knowledge construction proper.