SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE TEXTS ON THE BASIS OF TRANSHUMANISTIC ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BLOG “SKINTOUR”
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2020-4-30-37
Introduction. The idea of Superman was more relevant than ever at the turn of the last Millennium. Echoes of thoughts about the existence of a “special” omnipotent person of the new era are found in the philosophical concept of transhumanism, aimed at improving the quality and prolonging the life span, as well as at preventing aging and death. The concept of transhumanism is considered not only as a philosophical concept, but also as a world organization. The ideas of transhumanism are embodied in texts dedicated to prolonging the life and preserving the youth of a person, including in Internet texts. With the wide spread of media in all spheres of life, the development of linguistics has reached a new stage – a new branch called media linguistics has been born. The object of the analysis of the new direction is one of the key concepts of media linguistics – an Internet blog, which is an Internet genre, which is a network space of a certain topic and contains relevant information content (texts, images, multimedia). The chosen model of blog analysis as an Internet genre highlights media, pragmatic, structural-semantic, and stylistic-language parameters. As part of the analysis of this work, the stylistic and linguistic features of the English-language blog “SkinTour” are: specific names of articles in the form of rhetorical questions, characteristic lexical units (medical procedures), the vocabulary used for nominating cosmetics themselves; acronyms, antonyms, the degree of comparison of adjectives. Material and methods. The material basis of the research was the author’s research corpus of texts of the Englishlanguage blog “SkinTour”, from which 50 authentic articles were selected. In the theoretical part of the study, the concepts of transhumanism, blogging and Internet genre are described; the analysis of the material base allowed to synthesize the obtained segments of scientific facts and knowledge accumulated by previous generations and contemporaries; the parameters of the analysis were systematized. In the practical part of the work, the lexical and grammatical content of the texts of the English-language transhumanist blog “SkinTour” is analyzed. The methodological basis of the work is a systematic approach, the following General scientific methods are implemented: analysis, synthesis, induction, generalization (methods of logic); quantitative methods, grouping method (methods of statistics); method of component analysis (methods of structural linguistics). Results and discussion. Due to the wide spread of media in a wide variety of areas of human activity, there is an increase in the number of products of the “network space”, one of which is the Internet blog (hereinafter: blog). The vast majority (about 90 %) analyzed English-speaking blogs tagged “Anti-aging” (more than 500) contains in the title the tag “Skin” and focused mainly on the female half of the population that seeks to care for problem skin. The English-language transhumanist blog “SkinTour” is also aimed at a female audience, containing thousands of articles from an expert in the field of medicine. In the process of analysis, media, pragmatic, structural-semantic and stylisticlanguage parameters of a blog as an Internet genre are highlighted. As part of the analysis of stylistic and language parameters, the content of the English-language transhumanist blog “SkinTour” is represented by the following features: lexical features: article titles in the form of rhetorical questions; frequent use of terms denoting medical procedures and cosmetics; acronyms; antonyms; grammatical features: the degree of comparison of adjectives. Conclusion. The English language of blogs is an original reflection of the modern virtual world. Due to the variety of language materials in the Internet space, medialinguistics is a large field for linguistic research. Heterogeneity of texts in the media sphere is the key to the diversity of analysis of transhumanistic blogs. The practice of studying texts of Internet genres should be carried out in order to fix new lexical, grammatical, stylistic and other features of the media repertoire of the English language.
Keywords: transhumanism, blog, media linguistics, transhumanistic blog, English-language transhumanistic blog, lexical features, grammatical features
References:
1. Zagurskaya N. V. Postchelovek: polozheniye chelovecheskogo sushchestva v situatsii posle postmoderna [Posthuman: the position of a human being in a postmodern situation]. Chelovek postsovetskogo prostranstva: sbornik materialov konferentsii [The man of the post-Soviet space: conference proceedings]. Ed. V. V. Partsvaniya. Saint Petersburg, 2005, no. 3, pp. 245–250 (in Russian).
2. Bostrom N. A history of transhumanist thought. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 2005, vol. 14 (1), pp. 1–25.
3. Grechkina E. V. Transgumanizm – mirovozzreniye XXI veka ili tsivilizatsionnaya ugroza chelovechestvu [Transhumanism – the worldview of the XXI century or the civilizational threat to humanity]. Gumanitarnye, sotsial’no-ekonomicheskiye i obshchestvennye nauki – Humanities, Social-economic and Social Sciences, 2015, no. 8, pp. 34–37 (in Russian).
4. Blokhin N. N. Kozhnaya plastika [Skin plastic surgery]. Moscow, Medgiz Publ., 1955. 227 p. (in Russian).
5. Olesen Merrel R., Olesen Marie B. V. Cosmetic surgery for “dummies” (Rus. ed.: Olesen Merrel’ R., Olesen Mari B. V. Plasticheskaya khirurgiya dlya “chaynikov”. Moscow, Villiams Publ., 2007. 288 p.).
6. Eden A. H., Moor J. H. Singularity hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment (еds). Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. 440 p.
7. Ulyanov V. A. Postgendernaya kharakteristika virtual’nogo: genezis androginnosti [Postgender characteristics of the virtual: genesis of androgyny]. Vestnik Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta – Proceedings of Voronezh State University, 2012, no. 2, pp. 158–171 (in Russian).
8. Turchin A.V., Batin M. A. Futurologiya. XXI vek: bessmertiye ili global’naya katastrofa? [Futurology. XXI century: immortality or global catastrophe?]. Moscow, Laboratoriya znaniy Publ., 2017. 290 p. (in Russian).
9. Dobroklonskaya T. G. Medialingvistika: sistemnyy podkhod k izucheniyu yazyka SMI [Metalinguistics: a systematic approach to the study of language media]. Moscow, Moscow State University Publ., 2008. 203 p. (in Russian).
10. Matyukhina M. V. Internet-blog kak predstavitel’ komp’yuternogo mediadiskursa [Internet blog as a representative of computer and media discourse]. Nauchnyy zhurnal sovremennye lingvisticheskiye i metodiko-didakticheskiye issledovaniya – Scientific Newsletter “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches”, 2019, no. 3 (43), pp. 118–128 (in Russian).
11. Efimov E. G., Nebykov I. A. Blogi kak vid sotsial’nykh setey (gendernye aspekty) [Blogs as a type of social networks (gender aspects)]. Izvestiya Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo tekhnicheskogo universiteta, 2012, no. 2 (17), pp. 119–123 (in Russian).
12. Rakhvalova N.A. Blogosfera kak sredstvo vyrazheniya molodogo cheloveka [The blogosphere as a means of expression of a young man]. Vestnik Buryatskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2010, no. 14, pp. 91–95 (in Russian).
13. Bazhenova E. A., Ivanova I. A. Blog kak Internet-zhanr [Blog as an Internet genre]. Vestnik Permskogo universiteta – Perm University Herald, 2012, no. 4 (20), pp. 125–131 (in Russian).
14. Shipitsina L. Yu. Zhanry komp’yuterno-oposredovannoy kommunikatsii [Genres of computer-mediated communication]. Arkhangelsk, PomorSU Publ., 2009. 238 p. (in Russian).
15. SkinTour: skin care blog. URL: https://www.skintour.com (accessed 14 February 2020).
( 1.17 MB ) 
( 1.1 MB )
Issue: 4, 2020
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: GERMANIC STUDIES
Pages: 30 — 37
Downloads: 705