A voyage in the discovery of the genre of web sites

The use of the Internet has been continuing its rapid growth and almost every day new websites are created. However, there aren’t strict studies about its genre as a particular “form of art” according to specific criteria. What I’m trying to examine is this set of conventions that forms the genre of websites. I’ve looked at two particular websites which my course-fellows have saved in del.icio.us and I’ve tried to identify their purposes and their language features.

Both English Club, a site to help you learn English or teach English as a second language, and Online Newspapers, a page where you can retrieve information from all over the world, are accessed trough hypertext or hyperlinks embedded in other files. Their starting point or opening pages, i.e. their homepages, functions as tables of contents or indexes with links to other sections of the site. They’re addressed to everyone and at the same time to no one. An intelligent human being filters through the mass of information packaged daily for our consumption and picks out the interesting, the important, the overlooked, and the unexpected.

In some way English Club is aimed at a kind of discourse community made up people that are learning English as a L2 (you understand the abbreviations, i.e. ESL or TEFL, only if you’re already familiar with them) while Online Newspapers attracts all kinds of viewers. It cannot create a community who shares their interests because it just provides a service: it gives access to a selection of the 50 most popular newspapers where one can retrieve pieces of information.

Both sites have a linguistic semiology instead of a visual one. According to Swales (1990) they’re ‘text-only version’, which nowadays are quite rare to find on the Net because they’ve been substituted by pages with a high graphical content. Only in English Club there is a couple of pictures, however they’re not effective at all.

Because we don’t have graphics, language is all we have to look at. Simple noun-phrases are found at the top of each main list; for example in the English Club homepage we find concrete noun-phrases used metaphorically, ‘ESL Learning Center’, ‘ ESL Clubhouse’, ‘ESL Teachers Lounge’, etc. while in Online Newspaper you can find just a list of proper country names where you have to click if you want to go forward. There are no complete sentences because websites use keywords as portals and they have to be self-evident.

The English Club reception area provides a site map which helps surfers to understand the complex organisation of the hypertext-linking mechanism. The presence of the site map highlights once again that the site is not a relatively new one because in recent websites these maps tend to be replaced by other useful search facilities.

The language used in both sites is similar: it is plain and easy to understand even for a non-native speaker of English. Because of their ‘text-only version’ one can define them as institutional sites - as Swales (1990) pointed out in his distinction between institutional and personal pages. They are written in an easily decoded form without any possible types of personal expressions.

It is certainly true that even these two sites make us aware of the linguistic heterogeneity of the Web: specific types of pages require different analytical frameworks.

Alice