iSchool will host Web 2.0, computer-mediated communication, convergence scholar Susan Herring Nov. 2

Susan C. Herring will speak at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) on Monday, Nov. 2, at noon in the Katzer Room, Room 347 of Hinds Hall. Her lecture, “New Analytical Lenses for New Media: Web 2.0 and CMCMC,” is part of the iSchool’s ongoing Brown Bag Presentation Series.

Herring is a professor of information science at Indiana University-Bloomington. She studied linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and was one of the first scholars to apply linguistic analysis to computer-mediated communication. Her early research focused on gender issues. Herring went on to create computer-mediated discourse analysis, which she has used to analyze politeness, interactional coherence and change over time in Internet communication. Her current research interests include multilingual and multimodal computer-mediated communication with an emphasis on convergent media.

Herring’s guest lecture at the iSchool will critique Web 2.0 as an analytical lens through which to view, understand and advance predictions about the Web. Herring will compare Web 2.0 to convergent media computer-mediated communication (CMCMC). CMCMC includes numerous Web 2.0 phenomena, such as blogs, wikis, social network sites and media-sharing sites, but is not limited to Web-based platforms.

Herring’s comparison reveals the advantages and biases of both Web 2.0 and CMCMC. Her comparison also presents an argument for a broader approach to understanding new media—an approach that includes technological convergence.

In addition to her role as professor of information science at Indiana University-Bloomington, Herring is an adjunct professor of linguistics. She is co-editor of “The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online,” published in May 2007 by Oxford University Press. She is also the editor in chief of Language@Internet, an open-access, peer-reviewed, scholarly electronic journal that publishes original research on language and language use mediated by the Internet, the World Wide Web and mobile technologies.