ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a swift and quasi-compulsory switch from in-person to online communication in most areas of our lives, be it professional, social or personal. It particularly engendered upheaval within the field of specialised, spoken professional genres. Alongside dialogic (that is, interactive) formats such as online meetings, conference calls and online job interviews, webinars – of which the very name underlines their digital raison d’être – present an interesting example of a novel, inherently interactive format. Indicative of the horizontal knowledge sharing that characterises web 2.0 and the “new knowledge economy”, they display a number of linguistic features which inform late capitalist society. While they are closely linked to the corporate world, webinars have been adopted by a vast array of actors in the professional sphere, serve a number of purposes and can, hence, qualify as a “hypergenre”. This chapter provides an overview of some discursive and cognitive issues raised by digitalised spoken communication, before turning to the case of webinars. It proposes a definition of webinars and analyses their specific interactive regime, as enacted via multiple technical devices and initiated via a contract of engagement which is realised by discursive and linguistic means.
