Persuasive Technology: A New Facet of Digitality

This talk is part of the series of events under the Language at Leeds Multimodality satellite https://www.latl.leeds.ac.uk/research-satellites/multimodality/
Speaker Sandra Petroni University of Rome "Tor Vergata"
Digital textuality involves a wide range of text types today. Most of them are “remediated” discursive practices (Bolter 2001, Bolter and Grusin 1999), e.g. digital news reports, articles, interviews, video-conferences, etc. Others are “prototypical constructions” (Santini 2007, Petroni 2011), i.e., new instantiations of emerging genres, or better, genres still in formation, often without a name, a label, and not fully standardised and acknowledged, such as a wiki text.
What gives rise to these new meaning-making processes, in particular to these new forms and potential pattern structures, are the technological capabilities and the functionality of the medium itself (Shepherd & Watters 1999). On the one hand, these affordances shape the way social actors (users) interact in digital settings (web pages or sites, social networks, collaborative productions, or mobile applications) by creating new forms of social practices. In digital contexts, in fact, user agency has been profoundly transformed thanks to the presence of the two potentialities of interaction and interactivity. All the new digital practices and communicative exchanges are mediated and filtered through the new digital technologies. Moving from real contexts to digital ones implies the presence of mediating technologies, embodied by interfaces, which re-model the nature of user agency in terms of agentic value, identity, social positioning, etc.. On the other, these technologies provide tools that can affect people’s attitude and engagement and push them to carry out digital actions, such as posting, commenting or sharing but also logging in and clicking on links which, additionally, imply evaluation (Martin & White 2007).
The aim of this talk is to show how “persuasive” technologies (Fogg 2009), along with the digital actions they endorse, are created and used to encage users in these settings and to affect what people think and do.
Biosketch: Sandra Petroni is Associate Professor of English Linguistics and teaches at the Department of Humanities of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, on the Languages in the Information Society Degree Course. Her research fields are critical discourse analysis, multimodality, digital communication, CMC, and specialized discourse - in particular the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) discourse.