The technodiscourse of scientific dissemination

rhetorical relations and non-linear reading in hyperlinks of digital news

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the rhetorical-discursive behavior of hyperlinks constitutive of digital news of scientific dissemination published on the Galileu and Superinteressante online magazines, based on notions postulated in the framework of Digital Discourse Analysis (DDA), by M-A. Paveau, and of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), developed by W. Mann and S. Thompson. Towards that, we examine the hyperlinks according to the technodiscursive category of non-linear reading (ADD), as well as to the rhetorical relations (RST) that emerge between the source and the target text by means of the hyperlink. The analyses show that the textual producer chooses to non-linearize, by means of hyperlinks, the syntagmatic, enunciative and discursive threads of his/her text, in a markedly visual way, in order to cause rhetorical effects on the writer, such as: to bring credibility to the scientific information disseminated, to increase the ability to understand information, to detail the information and, ultimately, to induce the reading of other texts published in the same magazine. It is important, however, to point to the fact that the achievement of those effects depends directly on the read-writer, who will choose to activate, or not, the hyperlink by means of a gestural statement: the click.