Paradoxically, now that the field of discourse studies has high visibility, the universe from which discourse studies emerged is vanishing. New communication devices subvert the very distinction between orality and writing, and so we have to rethink many categories: textuality, speaker, addressee, utterance, memory, storage, circulation, etc. We can no longer consider technology as just an element of the “context”: it now needs to be considered as a true actor in the communication process. Such a transformation relates to the data – since the Internet offers new kinds of semiotic productions – but also to the very conditions of research, which depend increasingly on sophisticated programs and data bases. The problem is that most discourse analysts seem to live in a world where traditional face-to-face talk is still the norm of communication. If we consider the handbooks and the articles published in the field, a peripheral role is given to corpora produced by new technologies, except if they can be tackled by using the toolkit of Conversation Analysis. This is particularly the case with chats, forums, emails, phone text-messages and so on. As the focus of discourse analysis is not on the most important aspects of the Web, its study belongs mainly to specialists from other fields. The Discourse Reader (Jaworski and Coupland, 1999) does not mention the Internet. But, surprisingly, this is also the case 13 years later in The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis: the introduction does not mention the existence of new communication technologies and none of the 46 chapters deals with this topic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201758, acessado em 25/08/18.