THE NOTION OF 'TEXT': AN APPLICATION TO WEB 2.0

THE NOTION OF ‘TEXT’: AN APPLICATION TO WEB 2.0 1. INTRODUCTION According to Halliday and Hasan “a text has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text. It derives this texture from the fact that it functions as a unity with respect to its environment.” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 2) The authors of one of the most popular work about text construction consider the unity a fundamental feature to define a text, unity which is both of structure and of meaning. Starting from this definition, the aim of this essay will be to discuss the idea of ‘text’ in relation to coherence and cohesion. It will be then connected to Web 2.0 sites, in particular Facebook news feed, to see if the “old” definition of ‘text’ is still suitable for describing this new generation of World Wide Web. In the end, conclusions will be stated, expressing the idea that Web 2.0 news feeds are indeed texts, even if in a slightly different way in comparison with more traditional constructions. 2. WHAT MAKES A TEXT: COHERENCE AND COHESION As previously mentioned, when Halliday and Hasan (1976) have to provide a definition of ‘text’, they refer to two main kinds of unity: unity of texture and unity of structure. Firstly, it is important to highlight that these two features cannot be clearly distinguished from each other: in fact they are related to the meaning and the organisation of a text, which are deeply interconnected and depend on different factors. Nevertheless, these unities can somehow be separately analysed thanks to two main concepts which seem important to explain, to talk about texts: coherence and cohesion. 2.1 COHERENCE According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘coherent’ is something “accordant or related logically or in sense; congruent” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2013). Talking about texts, Halliday (Halliday & Hasan, 1989) underlines the importance of expectation for easily understanding the meaning of a linguistic unit: for this reason, coherence is a necessary feature of a text, since the connection between what has been said before and what is coming next is what helps making inferences. In addition to this, Brown and Yule (1983) state that coherence is that feature on the basis of which we can interpret a text as one semantic unit, where all elements are connected to create one meaning. Hasan (Halliday & Hasan, 1989) then connects the idea of ‘texture’ to coherence, when he says that the texture is created by a network of semantic relations within a text, which are perceived by the addressees and make them analyse a particular piece of language as a single unit. Of course, this feature is sometimes difficult to judge, since the ability to make the correct inferences also depend on the knowledge of the context of situation and context of culture, as Halliday and Hasan (1976) explain. The ‘context of situation’ is made of the environment of a text, which is social and textual: namely, the situation in which a text appears and other texts that surround it. The ‘context of culture’, on the other side, is the cultural background you need to interpret a text, which is what makes the listener infer some particular meanings from the text. 2.2 COHESION The other, and maybe even more important feature that defines a text as a text according to Halliday and Hasan (1976) is cohesion. According to Johnson’s definition, ‘to cohere’ means “to be well connected; to follow regularly in the order of discourse” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2013). To use Halliday’s words, cohesion is “the set of linguistic resources that every language has (as part of the textual metafunction) for linking one part of a text to another” (Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 48). The cohesion within a text is therefore achieved by grammatical ties and lexical ones, so to connect the different parts and create a sort of continuity. This is the feature that make the listener able to fill the gaps, making inferences to understand the meaning of a text. In other words, if coherence supply the semantic unity of a text, cohesion is responsible for the structural one. What Halliday and Hasan (1976) and then Hasan (Halliday & Hasan, 1989) call ‘cohesive tie’, then, is the structure which creates the internal texture of a unit of language, linking two items or two sentences. Of course, as the authors state, a text can even be made of one single sentence: in that case, cohesion is provided by the structure of the sentence itself, which is always internally cohesive. Moving to text made of more than one sentence, on the contrary, this feature becomes more important, since cohesive ties are the only way in which the texture can be achieved. 2.3 NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT FEATURES In their discussion about the definition of ‘text’, Halliday and Hasan (1976) also investigate whether cohesion and coherence are necessary features to create a text or not. According to them, cohesion is fundamental, since it creates the links within the text and makes different sentences analysable as one unit. On the other side, cohesion is not a sufficient condition to define a text: as the authors say, it constitutes only a part of the textual component which really makes a text. This component uses in fact every source of semantic relatedness of the language, relatedness to the environment of the text and between the various elements within it. Moving then to coherence, that has been defined as semantic continuity, it is neither necessary nor sufficient: namely, within a text the ‘subject-matter’ can change, since there are many other features of the context of situation which bring it together (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). To conclude this analysis, therefore, we can say that Halliday and Hasan consider cohesion slightly more important than coherence. Overall, anyway, it is the texture what really distinguishes a text from a non-text, since it consists of any feature that links the various parts with each other and relate the text to a linguistic and cultural environment needed to interpret it. This definition seems to be general enough to comprehend very different kinds of text. This coarseness is necessary if we consider that people tend to interpret every set of linguistic elements as a text “if there is the remotest possibility of doing so” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 23). Under this assumption, it is maybe easier to think of a definition of ‘text’ which is descriptive rather than prescriptive, as Halliday and Hasan did (1976; 1989). 3. WEB 2.0 AND FACEBOOK’S NEWS FEED More than twenty years after Halliday and Hasan’s (1976; 1989) definition has been stated, people are now exposed to new kinds of language, in particular related to the use of Internet. Prensky (2001) talks about ‘digital natives’ to describe people born and raised in a world where the use of technology is common and somehow natural, in comparison to ‘digital immigrants’ (mostly old people) to whom technology is still something new and alien. Even if the World Wide Web is a recent reality, a second generation has already been created: it is widely referred to as ‘Web 2.0’. This label can be assigned to web-based applications in which users can collaborate to create contents and are connected to them in an interactive way. In this kind of applications, in fact, creators provide only the frame, which will be filled with what users generate by themselves: for this reason the result can be quite patchy, since anyone can make his contribution to the content without regard to what already exists (Barton & Lee, 2013). A good example of Web 2.0 is Facebook, the Social Media created by the Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and firstly launched in 2004. In this website, every user can register and fill in his profile, providing personal information and a ‘profile picture’ that will be seen by other users connected to him. Since this is mostly a ‘social network’ application, the main purpose of Facebook is indeed to connect people: in order to do so, users can add others who have a profile as friends, and then have access to their information and see what they have posted. The reason why Facebook is considered as part of Web 2.0 is that within their profiles, users can create contents, such as written posts and shared pictures, that will be seen by their ‘friends’ on the ‘News Feed’. Reading the description that the Facebook Help Centre provides to his users, the ‘News Feed’ is presented as “the constantly updating list of stories in the middle of your home page” and “includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes from people, Pages and groups that you follow on Facebook.” (Facebook Help Centre, 2015). As it is clearly shown by this description, the news feed has a dynamic content, since it is made of the set of contents generated by one user’s ‘friends’. Moreover, the algorithm Facebook use to decide what updates to show on the news feed is based on the frequency of the interaction with a particular user, rather than being finalised to create a coherent result. As a consequence, a status about English politics can be followed by a cake recipe which in turn can precede the picture of a cute cat. It is however important to underline that on a news feed there may be some sort of coherence, for example after an event which is particularly relevant such as an election or a terrorist attack: it is likely, in this case, that most part of users will talk about it, with the result that the shown updates will share the main topic. Nevertheless, this is not what usually happens and in most cases a news feed is composed of a patchy set of updates about various topics and with very different registers. 4. THE DEFINITION OF ‘TEXT’ APPLIED TO A NEWS FEED By digital natives (Prensky, 2001) news feeds are perceived as something normal, since they are so common in their life. Under this assumption, it seems easy to think that they could now be described as texts, even if Halliday and Hasan’s works (1976; 1989) date back to a long time before the appearance of Web and Web 2.0. As it was previously mentioned, their definition of ‘text’ is based on the idea that it is necessary to have some sort of texture, links which tie together all the different parts to create something that is essentially unitary (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). It was also underlined that coherence, the semantic unity, is not as important as cohesion, the structural unity, since the grammatical links within the text provide the basis for interpretation in combination with the context (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). In light of this, it seems that Facebook’s news feed cannot be defined a text, since its content generally has neither coherence nor cohesion at all. On the other side, though, one can say that it has some kind of texture, which comes from the frame provided by the creators and inside of which auto-generated contents are inserted. It seems possible, then, to think about the frame as a new type of texture-provider, in the same way in which a frame story holds together all the parts of a novel which is made up of different tales (such as in the traditional novel ‘One Thousand and one nights’, also known as ‘The Arabian nights’). 5. THE FRAME AS SOURCE OF TEXTURE To think about the frame as a source of texture it is necessary to find a way in which it can provide coherence and cohesion to the text: in other words, we have to explain how it holds together all the “status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes” (Facebook Help Centre, 2015) on a Facebook news feed. This can firstly appear as a task impossible to be performed because of the complete lack of grammatical ties. On the contrary, nevertheless, in this kind of construction the presence of the context is very strong and can maybe represent a support to back up the idea of unity. 5.1 CONTEXT OF SITUATION The context of situation is the environment of the text: namely, the set of extra-linguistic factors which are relevant for the text and its interpretation (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). In this specific case, if we consider the home page of Facebook and the news feed in it, the context of situation includes the structure and all the purposes of the website itself. To do so, we have to suppose that the user knows how the social network works, what is its function and what he will find in the news feed, even if maybe he is not aware of the algorithm underneath the choice of contents to show. In any case, he knows that he will find the name of the user who generated the content on the top, followed by the time in which it was posted, and the section for likes, shares and comment at the bottom. This layout is part of the frame, together with the affordances of the application (Barton & Lee, 2013): whichever content is inserted, the way in which it is presented and the actions an user can carry out in relation to it are always the same. This provides some sort of coherence to the news feed, at least at a superficial level. Speaking about the semantic aspect of the content, instead, it is more difficult to achieve coherence, and even harder to achieve cohesion. Every piece of content, as a matter of fact, exists by itself and has a meaning in relation to which it can be fully interpreted. What can probably supply a semantic link between all the parts is the interest of the user. It is in fact important to highlight that users who generate content someone will see in his home page have to be his ‘friends’, that is known people. As a consequence, Facebook news feed can be seen as a description of what is going on in one’s friends’ life, whose main purpose is to easily keep the user up-to-date. We can then think about all the posts as items in a list, with the only peculiarity that they have been generated by different people. The list organisation also makes the content cohesive, proving a structure in which every piece can be inserted without seeming out of place. 5.2 CONTEXT OF CULTURE Another feature important to a text is the cultural background needed to interpret it and understand its meaning. Speaking about the Facebook news feed, all the users share the same knowledge about the world and the current news, and thank to it they can make inferences about the meaning of what they see. Furthermore, the context of culture also includes what users know about each other: this is necessary to fill the gaps and guess those information that the person who generated the post took for granted. In addition to that, users also know how the social network works and can judge and build their opinions on the basis of this knowledge. Finally, people share the same language, sometimes more than one: this is of course fundamental to understand each other. All these things together create some kind of unity within the text and link one piece to the others, since they mostly need the same background knowledge to be interpreted and understood. 6. FUNCTION AND PERCEPTION We managed to find in the frame a source of texture for the news feed, but something even stronger lead to the thought that it is indeed a text: users’ competence. This notion was already used in Halliday and Hasan’s (1976; 1989) and Brown and Yule’s (1983) works, which tended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, as previously mentioned. In particular, Halliday and Hasan focus on the idea of functionality, when they state that a text is “language doing some job in some context” (Halliday & Hasan, 1989, p. 10). Brown and Yule, instead, support an even broader definition: according to the authors, in fact, the attempt to find and list the integral features of a text is useless, since in the end texts are “what hearers and readers treat as texts” (Brown & Yule, 1983, p. 199). Moving from this point of view strongly based on the addressee, we can state that the one who makes use of a piece of language is the only possible judge of ‘textuality’. In the end, therefore, the question we need to answer is: what is the perception that the user has of the content of a news feed? We believe, in fact, that all the discussion about coherence, cohesion and texture can somehow turn out to be unfounded if the addressee is not considered as a constitutive part of the problem. There seems to be no purpose in define a text if this definition is not borne out by the facts and by people’s judgments. It is likely that a Facebook user considers the news feed an unitary structure, basing on the common function that all its contents share: to give him updates about his ‘friends’ and their activities, whichever they are. 7. CONCLUSION The aim of this essay was an attempt to analyse the traditional notion of ‘text’. In particular, we used the definition provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976; 1989) and some ideas from Brown and Yule’s work (1983). To test the effectiveness of this kind of definition we tried to apply it to the news feed of a Web 2.0 application, Facebook, to study whether it can be considered a text or not. We firstly tried to use the notions of coherence and cohesion, then moving to a more functional explanation. At the very end, it seems important to underline the limits of this research: on one side, limit of space; on the other side, limit of sources. It is to be taken as a suggestion and starting point for further studies: we believe, in fact, that the superficial structure of Web 2.0 is still an unknown field, since most of the recent studies have focused on the language used within this kind of websites rather than on the general environment. Furthermore, it is interesting to notice how Web 2.0 has changed our perception, and maybe even our ability to analyse together different types of information in an always more multimedia system of communication. REFERENCES Barton, D. & Lee, C., 2013. Language Online. London: Routledge . Brown, G. & Yule, G., 1983. Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R., 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R., 1989. Language, context and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Facebook Help Centre. [Online] 2015. [Accessed 5 December 2015]. Available from: www.facebook.com/help/ Oxford English Dictionary. [Online] 2013. [Accessed 5 December 2015]. Available from: www.oed.com Prensky, M., 2001. Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(1), pp. 1-6.