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This study is an attempt to semantically decompose the most popular metaphorical expressions associated with two particular Web 2.0 practices: social networks and folksonomies. What is a friend on a social networking Web site like MySpace and StudiVZ? Is it polite to poke strangers on Facebook and give them fives on hi5? How can we subscribe to RSS feeds, if we don't pay subscription fees? Do we really broadcast ourselves on our YouTube channels ? These and other similar questions are dealt with from the perspective of the referential and the conceptual approaches to meaning, i.e., what these words stand for (referential/extensional approach) and which concepts they signify (conceptual/intensional approach). Thus, from the referential point of view, a friend on MySpace is only a hyperlink directing to a profile page of another MySpace user. But from the intensional point of view, a friend is a subscriber to the content generated by the profile owner.
List of contents
Contents : Web 2.0 - Internet - Metaphor - Social networks - Folksonomies - Registration - Profile - Friend - Poke - Tagging - Subscribe - Channel - Tag cloud - Social bookmarks - Search engines - Homepage - RSS - Facebook - MySpace - StudiVZ - hi5 - YouTube - Flickr - Delicious - Metonymy - Cognitive linguistics - Semantics - Pragmatics - Grammar - Sociology.
About the author
The Author: Alexander Tokar, born in 1980 in Kursk (Russia), holds degrees in English and German philology from the Universities of Kursk (2002) and Düsseldorf (2005). In December 2008 he obtained his Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Düsseldorf. Since 2006 he has worked at the Department of English Linguistics of the University of Düsseldorf as a research assistant.
