Metaphors of the Web 2.0

This study is an attempt to semantically decompose the most popular metaphorical expressions associated with two particular Web 2.0 practices: social networks and folksonomies. What is a friend on a social networking Web site like MySpace and StudiVZ? Is it polite to poke strangers on Facebook and give them fives on hi5? How can we subscribe to RSS feeds, if we don't pay subscription fees? Do we really broadcast ourselves on our YouTube channels? These and other similar questions are dealt with from the perspective of the referential and the conceptual approaches to meaning, i.e., what these words stand for (referential/extensional approach) and which concepts they signify (conceptual/intensional approach). Thus, from the referential point of view, a friend on MySpace is only a hyperlink directing to a profile page of another MySpace user. But from the intensional point of view, a friend is a subscriber to the content generated by the profile owner.

Autorentext

The Author: Alexander Tokar, born in 1980 in Kursk (Russia), holds degrees in English and German philology from the Universities of Kursk (2002) and Düsseldorf (2005). In December 2008 he obtained his Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Düsseldorf. Since 2006 he has worked at the Department of English Linguistics of the University of Düsseldorf as a research assistant.

Inhalt
Contents: Web 2.0 Internet Metaphor Social networks Folksonomies Registration Profile Friend Poke Tagging Subscribe Channel Tag cloud Social bookmarks Search engines Homepage RSS Facebook MySpace StudiVZ hi5 YouTube Flickr Delicious Metonymy Cognitive linguistics Semantics Pragmatics Grammar Sociology.