MEDIATING THE CHALLENGES OF A NEW WAY OF LIFE THROUGH BLOGGING AN ANALYSIS OF THE BLOGS OF SIX NEW MIGRANTS TO AUSTRALIA

Web 2.0 technologies have presented new opportunities for developing diverse online environments and enhancing interactivity, participation and feedback between diverse groups of authors and readers. In particular, blogs and social networking sites have provided new opportunities and incentives for personal writing. For new migrants to Australia, blogs represent a virtual space where they can share knowledge in their home language, form communities and construct identities in response to the challenges of an environment vastly different to their original homelands. As the use of blogs among these new migrants increases, it is important to gain a deeper understanding of the potential they offer for the maintenance of home languages and culture, the mediation of new experiences and the construction of new identities. The aim of this research is to highlight a framework for analyzing blogs that takes account of the multimodal nature of blogs as well as the characteristics that make them ‘spaces’ where choices about content construct aspects of ‘multiple selves’ (Döring 2002).

Web 2.0 technologies have been advanced as potentially transformative in the area of education in general and foreign language learning in particular. In this paper, Web 2.0 technologies are shown as presenting new opportunities for developing diverse online learning environments and enhancing interactivity. The potential of web 2.0 provides the opportunity for migrants to construct, create discursive spaces for that employ a range of multimodal tools in order to negotiate identities and resolve the tensions and desires that are an integral part of establishing a new life in a distant place. Understanding how these tools work in to establish the dynamic and interactive nature of these spaces is important to the development of our understandings of the potential of new media.

The proliferation of these new technologies is evidenced by statistics such as those showing that 7 out of 10 Australian household access web 2.0 technologies every day and the fact that there are 4 million blogs in Australia alone.
Such facts highlight the importance of gaining a better understanding of multimodality in online texts and the changing disposition of readers and writers as they grapple with the semiotics of juxtapositions of images and text on the computer screen (online environments).

This paper will present an analysis of six blogs of new migrants to Australia. Particular attention will be directed to the multimodal nature of these blogs and the meanings they convey to members of the language community in Australia and in the home country. The two frameworks that were combined and applied for this research draw on the work of Bateman and Delin (2001) and that of Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). The first is used to identify those specific structural elements of the medium of blogs that are available and can be used in the analysis while Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework is used to gain a deeper understanding of the way in which images and designs work within a blog to convey meaning. This research has been able to capture those aspects that serve the concept of the blog as a 'discursive space' and the framework that has been developed is shown as enabling a closer examination of the choices made by the bloggers in relation to text and image and the role played by these blogs as sites for language maintenance as well as the construction of new identities..