Demotivator in media discourse: Boundaries and properties of the genre

Abstract

Demotivator is considered as a new network media genre, involving in its orbit advertising, logos, political caricature on the basis of common genre characteristics and the same stylistic dominant — ironic modality. The media properties of demotivator are analyzed: utilitarianism, topicality, polycode, intertextuality, inclusion in the actual media discourse and social evaluation. This text is secondary to the corpus of media texts. The latter is seen as a discourse, the lower tier, the context, the reaction to which becomes a demotivator: thus the audience of the media reacts to the current agenda of the media Implicating one actual ideology of the media discourse, the demotivator expresses its assessment by the society. Regardless of the material medium, the demotivator is a modular text with the properties arising from this quality. First of all, it is laconism, which is achieved in the image by visualization of the main details of the media narrative, stereotype or frame; intertextuality, the predominant implicitness, and in the verbal part of its compliance with the principles of the newspaper headline: brevity, aphorism, brightness, simplicity, the ability to implicate the theme and problem of the text. The stylistic dominant of the genre is an ironic comprehension of reality; expressive means are a linguistic and visual game, often based on a metaphor of the bodily, biological and linguistic bottom. The author compares the traditional point of view regarding demotivator as a genre of network creativity of Internet users and the results of the study, in particular, prove that the genre remains polycode, even if it presents only the visual or only the verbal part, since in both cases there are cognitive parallels in the encoding of information.