Maximiliane Frobenius

Tying in comment sections: The production of meaning and sense on Facebook

Abstract This study investigates the organization of interaction through comments on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook offers a range of affordances that allow communication between users. These include written language in various settings (messaging, commenting, posting), as well as a range of non-verbal resources, such as uploading photos, sharing links, the “like”-button. Our analysis focuses on the post+commenting section, which users treat as a quasi-conversational space. Much as conversation is organized through the sequential unfolding of turns through time, the interaction in the comments section is organized according to a pattern that lets users “make sense” of the communication as a coherent exchange. This comment organizing mechanism, which is enacted through tying practices, operates on written language rather than spoken, and so needs to accommodate different affordances than turn-taking does: it has to be able to co-ordinate contributions not just through time, but through space as well. The theoretical significance of this research then is its exploration of a complex mechanism that is used by humans to maintain social order through writing and reading practices. In particular, it takes into account how the context of the website shapes peoples communication through the resources made available.

When making pie, all ingredients must be chilled. Including you: Lexical, syntactic and interactive features in online discourse – a synchronic study of food blogs

The present study describes food blogs as a genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The combined approach of corpus linguistic and pragmatic methods reveals the characteristics of food blogs as a hybrid genre that mixes elements from various other discourse types. Lexical and syntactic analyses depict the use and frequencies of (1) CMC related phenomena: innovative vocabulary and spelling; (2) food related jargon: specialized vocabulary, grammatical patterns; (3) phenomena related to spoken interaction: discourse markers, hedges and address. The pragmatic analysis reviews these elements in their blog context. They contribute to creating an audience directed text through features such as humor, repetition and expert knowledge. We thus provide evidence that one of the main goals of this discourse type is interaction and describe how this interaction is systematically achieved.

Pointing gestures in video blogs

Abstract Video blogs are a form of CMC (computer-mediated communication) that feature speakers who talk into a camera, and thereby produce a viewer-directed performance. Pointing gestures are part of the resources that the medium affords to design vlogs for the absent recipients. Based on a corpus of 40 vlogs, this research categorizes different kinds of common pointing actions in vlogs. Close analysis reveals the role multimodal factors such as gaze and body posture play along with deictic gestures and verbal reference in the production of a viewer-directed monologue. Those instances where vloggers point at referents outside the video frame, e.g., elements of the Web site that represent alternative modes of communication, such as written comments, receive particular attention in the present study, as they require mutual knowledge about the shared virtual context the vlog is situated in.