ABSTRACT
A shortcoming that became apparent during the analyses of the two largest subsamples news and campaign webpages was the inability of the current research to fully analyze video material. The most natural extension of this research project is its repetition with a larger number of cases. Comparative designs are not the sole research avenue where ICON can make a contribution. Political communication as a research field is in a state of perpetual growth and development since it opened up to the Internet. Among the major novelties ICON brings to the table of communication research is the heightened awareness of genre as communicative as well as social action. The notion of genre as a set of semiotic affordances is of tremendous help in the process of charting new scientific territories, and the Internet is arguably the widest field communication research has had to map to date.
