Phatic communication in a Viber-community of an information resource: etiquette, entertaining, and metatextual genres

Abstract

The article discusses the current situation in which the roles of participants of mass and information discourse are changing because of modern Internet technologies. Instant messengers these days not only serve as a platform of interpersonal communication but are also used to ensure contact with the audience and creation of stable traffic on the websites of information Internet resources. In the status oriented discourse of Viber communities, speech techniques of a person-focused discourse are used: the etiquette formulas characteristic of interpersonal communication, small talk as a kind of phatic idle-speech genre, the topics related to private life of administrators of community and its participants are discussed. In the analyzed community vertical communications in the “editors — audience” binomial tend to evolve horizontally, while phatic communication becomes an attribute of mass communication. Through the case of a Viber community of an information resource the author studies the genres of phatic speech communication in the messenger: etiquette (formulas of greeting, farewell, advice), entertaining (stickers, polls, jokes), metatextual (introductory heading — “triggers”). Two key tonalities of texts are distinguished: the tonality of intimization, characteristic of the etiquette and entertaining genres, and the tonality of the outrageous, typical of introductory heading — “triggers”. Introductory headings in publications of the community are formed according to the laws of “the selling texts” in marketing communications and carry out the role of psychological hooks that “hitch up” the participants’ attention: threat to personal security, details of private life, exclusiveness of an event, desperate acts, financial benefits, etc. Thus a Viber community of an information resource becomes the kind of space where one can see an overlap of various types of discourse, namely, mass and information, colloquial, and marketing.