Our Idea...

As a group we had a lot of ideas surrounding our topic, and all of our research pointed us in many different directions, but after much deliberating Jess came up with an idea that incorporated most of our previous research and ideas, while being more focused in one direction.

How does power work in different forms of University communication with students, and how the multimodality of texts in the context of online platforms/ 'computer mediated communication' alters the power in them.

So, we could do the question on power in the texts and then consider whether things like being able to comment on facebook versions of posters lessen the social and power distance between author and audience. This would work for newspaper and email.                      

This is based on a journal saying 'Poststructuralist views of language emerge from media and cultural studies and emphasize the broader semiotic landscape of which language forms part.

(Kramsch et al., 2000). A text, in this view, is actually a multimodal artifact that encompasses a broad array of signifiers, including typographical conventions, layout, photographs, graphs, diagrams, and other media (see Graddol, 1994). Authorship loses significance due to the unstable, partial, and multiple forms of meaning embedded in multivocal, multimodal artifacts (Nystrand et al., 1993), and readers are thus left to deconstruct the meaning of text independent of what an author may have intended. With this as a backdrop, we will now examine linguistic and semiotic interaction in three of the most popular types of Web 2.0 media—blogs, wikis, and social network sites—with particular attention to how they reshape concepts of audience, authorship, and artifact.'

SO BASICALLY TALKING ABOUT HOW POWER INEQUALITY IS LESS SET IN STONE AS CONTINUUM BETWEEN AUTHOR AND AUDIENCE IN ONLINE SOURCES.

We could also use Fairclough's ideas of:
-Power in discourse: the ways in which power is manifested in situations through language.
-Power behind discourse: the focus on the social and ideological reasons behind the enhancement of power.