From print to digital communication: the one-way journey of academic research

To state that a substantial amount of academic practices are nowadays making use of digital devices, platforms and media in one way or another is an obvious thing to say. The affordances that the digital technicalities offer are having an enormous impact not only on the dissemination of research output but also on the generation of knowledge itself. In this context of new ways of knowledge-creation and knowledge-dissemination, many aspects related to the way academic practices are instantiated are being revisited from the perspective of discourse analysis, applied linguistics and associated fields such as communication studies, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and, in general, linguistic disciplines with a social bias. In the light of these approaches, the study of the impact of new technologies and the use discourse communities make of them is essential in order to assess the role that digital platforms have as elements of innovation and change in the shaping and reshaping of already existing academic practices..