Abstract
As discourse has been redefined by our digital practices, so has discourse analysis. Social media has become one of the principal channels of communication, offering discourse analysts a major avenue of research into everyday discourse. Facebook and Conversation Analysis explores in particular the organising mechanism of new media discourse with special reference to Facebook comment threads. Facebook discourse shares more features with spoken interaction than written language, since these forms of communication have come to substitute much of our face-to-face interaction. This leads Farina to undertake this project from a conversation analysis (CA) perspective.
The book is organised in nine chapters. Chapter 1 sets the scene by reviewing previous work on Facebook and major concepts and notions of CA, such as turn-taking system and sequence organisation. Another key term is ‘telling’, which is defined as announcements and mini-stories posted on Facebook pages. Chapter 2 describes the research methodology and the building of the Facebook comment thread corpus. The author invited 29 friends as primary contributors of Facebook data and 237 friends as secondary contributors, and worked as a participant observer. The upside of this approach is that the contributors come from a relatively closed community: the author knows almost everything in the comment threads, and therefore can make reliable claims about the contents and the discourse organisation patterns. However, the controlled data collection poses a threat to the representativeness of the sampling and generalisability of the claims thus made.
The main chapters analyse separately the identifiable sequence organisation of Facebook comments. Chapters 3–5 concern the first ‘telling’, while Chapter 6 examines comments contributed after the first post and Chapters 7 and 8 the responses to Facebook comment thread tellings. The analysis shows that a CA approach is applicable to the analysis of Facebook comment threads even if their quasi-synchronous nature distinguishes them from face-to-face conversations. Facebook users do not ‘have access to comments in progress’, nor can they ‘negotiate poster change’ (p. 51). As a matter of fact, it is the Facebook system rather than users that has the biggest control over turn allocation. Facebook communication is more of a one-to-many type of open discourse. The initial poster may select next posters, and others are also free to join in the conversation. Adjacency pairs are thus present in Facebook discourse in the sense that they must be understood in the context of the previously posted comments.
Most of the posts in the Facebook corpus are initiated by first-post tellings. It is not too difficult for first-post tellers to secure a recipient. They can name a specific friend to be the recipient or provide relevant information for certain friends. In addition, humour is often used by Facebook posters to elicit responses. Non-initial tellings are clearly less prominent in comment threads, with only six instances of non-initial tellings occurring in the Facebook corpus. This is again attributed to the Facebook system, because only the first and the four or five most recent comments are visible to Facebook friends. It is, therefore, not strange to see the relative lack of response to a non-initial telling (p. 117). Even if there is a response, it is generally from the first-post teller.
The responses to tellings are the most interactive part of Facebook discourse. Assessments, representations of laughter, and second tellings are prototypical responses. Both first comments and later comments made by friends tend to respond to initial tellings. Alternatively, friends also like to respond to the immediately preceding comments. The later comments are also dealt with in detail. Such comments are characterised as dyadic exchanges within a comment thread, and grammatically represented by second-person singular pronouns and the imperative mood. Since these grammatical devices organise the comment threads as private exchanges, later comments commonly respond to most recent comments.
Overall, the book employs the CA techniques to chart the general sequence organisation of Facebook comment threads in a systematic and fine-tuned manner. Even if some of its claims (such as the importance of software algorithms in shaping the sequence organisation of Facebook threads, or the gravitational pull of the initial post tellings) are not novel, it provides a useful and important focus on the discourse organisation of social media rather than its better-studied sociological or socio-pragmatic aspects. It would be important for future research to explore whether the discourse patterns apparent in this Italian-language data hold true also for threads in other languages and mixed codes.