Facebook and Conversation Analysis: The Structure and Organization of Comment Threads

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Facebook and Conversation Analysis investigates the structure and organization of comments on a major social media platform, Facebook, using applied conversation analysis methods. Providing previously undocumented insights into the structure of comment threads, this book demonstrates that they have a meaningful organization, rather than casually following one another. Although normally used to explore the structure of spoken conversations, in recent years conversation analysis approaches have been successfully applied to examine online interactions on Twitter, discussion forums and email exchanges. By turning this approach towards Facebook comments, Matteo Farina provides clear and important insights into the organization of this type of social interaction. Supported by a large sample of data, with findings based on a corpus of 213 comment threads, with over 1,200 comments exchanged by 266 contributors, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the way people communicate on Facebook.

Reviews

An informative and substantial empirical study of how CA could be applied to understand online talk [This book] will be most useful in masters programs, postgraduate level courses and for researchers that wish to conduct CA in the field of CALL. * CALICO Journal *
A welcome addition to research on CMC, as it provides an original and much-needed systematic analysis of the structure of FB comment threads ... Readers will not only appreciate the analysis, but also the clarity and accessibility of the whole book, since the structure of each chapter is clear, the main findings are repeated several times, excerpts from the corpus are carefully translated and thoroughly analyzed, and the writing style is clear. Though the scope of the book is confined to Italian, its general conclusions can be safely extended to other Western languages ... A valuable addition to the literature on CMC in general and digital CA in particular. * LINGUIST List *
Across the chapters, observations are supported by painstaking analysis of full comment threads and claims carefully elaborated. The rich examples are replete with interactional and social phenomena ... In relation to the development of a digital conversation analysis, the book points to important questions regarding the fundamental distinctions between interactionally accomplished turn-taking in synchronous spoken interactions and the sequentially organised exchange of online posts. * BAAL News *
Offers ample examples and detailed descriptions ... A useful reference for scholars of FB discourse, particularly in Italian. * Discourse & Communication *
A plethora of examples and the clear and thorough summaries between chapters make this volume particularly accessible for researchers unfamiliar with CA or Facebook ... [It] provides a valuable toolkit for any scholar aiming to investigate the structure and organization of comment-thread interactions on contemporary social media. * Internet Pragmatics *
It will be particularly helpful for scholars concerned with online interaction, specifically sequence organisation, turn adjacency, as well as the application of CA methods in digital contexts. More broadly, this book will be an interesting read for those thinking about, and researching, the relationship between technological architectures and communication. * Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Studies *

Author Bio

Matteo Farina is Lecturer in the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages at the University of South Australia, Australia.