ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses adopting a combined media linguistic and socio-pragmatic perspective and explores the types of interactivity and interaction that occur in the media. It focuses on online news media, and explains how media interactivity can translate into actual interaction with the recipients, thereby affecting the overall participation framework of the media discourse event. The chapter outlines several trends and some potential problems associated with the participatory phenomena. The description of the nature of the audience's participation with the media needs to operate with a number of dimensions. One of these concerns the temporal relationship between the act of participation and the media text or discourse event. A specific spin-off of media-based participation practices include post-medial communicative situations in which various speakers–as end-recipients of media messages–engage with one another in interpersonal interactions based on the media content.
