Formal and functional characteristics of email hoaxes: a genre study

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of email hoaxing. Email hoaxes are deceptive messages that circulate in digital social networks through the forward function of email programs. The study is embedded in the question of genre change on the Internet: how genres evolve and migrate into the digital medium has recently become a central issue in research on computermediated communication. In this paper, a two-level genre ecology is proposed in which email hoaxes constitute a microlinguistically defined subgenre of Digital Folklore, the functionally defined supergenre. This model helps to further our understanding of how genre hybrids, which show properties of both the old and the new medium, are engineered at a linguistic level. Within this theoretical framework, a number of quantitative and qualitative analyses have been carried out. In particular, this paper describes the pragmatic and narrative structure of email hoaxes, as well as their propensity for textual change within the forwarding process.