Analysing the digital world and its metaphoricity: Cybergenres and cybermetaphors in the 21st century

Abstract

The Internet has significantly affected the linguistic field since the virtual world has instigated scholars to explore users’ interaction with Cybergenres (Girón-García & Navarro i Ferrando, 2014; 2015). In Cognitive Linguistics, some authors have suggested that Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs) already active in the users’ conceptual system may guide online navigation patterns, resulting in new forms of literacy. Accordingly, social networks and webpages tend to display words and expressions, which since the beginning of the Internet era have been used in a new sense, as they represent mental models that have been transferred from traditional domains onto digital domains. This study aims to describe and analyse how these ICMs give coherence to different types of cybergenres in English-e.g. social networks, MOOC, Cybertask, weblog, and ‘marketplace’ web pages. In particular, this paper recognises the metaphorical models that are used in the digital context (i.e. Cybergenre), and describes and classifies conceptual connections between the source domain and the target domain. With that objective in mind, certain social networks and ‘marketplace’ web pages are analysed to test the hypothesis that metaphorical models give coherence to their organization and structure. The description and classification of those conceptual projections may unveil a link between the digital world and traditional conceptual representations. Results may help us to understand the connection between the previous cultural representations and the digital environment; as well as helping virtual users to develop their Digital Literacy in this virtual context.