Virtual communities: Interaction, identity and authority in digital communication
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Antonio Reyes
Antonio Reyes is an Associate Professor at Washington and Lee University. His research focuses on the relationship between language and society, and the way they intertwine and shape each other to create new contexts of meaning and new realities. Particularly, he is interested in developing interdisciplinary theoretical approaches in discourse studies to decode the relation between language and social processes of power and ideology. Tucker Hall, Room 312, 204 W. Washington Street, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA. Email: reyesa@wlu.edu
Abstract
This paper analyzes two settings of digital communication in which social actors participate, interact and engage differently within virtual communities. Online identities are interactionally and discursively constructed and this process defines differences in groupness, illustrating the nature of those online spaces. This study builds on the notion of Citizen Sociolinguistics, that is, ordinary people producing metacommentaries on language uses, to examine the data in different digital communication settings.
This work analyzes 500 comments posted by readers on the site of the newspaper El País, in response to an article announcing the new Spanish orthographic reforms. Additionally, it analyzes 200 threads of the “Sólo español” (“Spanish only”) sub-forum within WordReference.com. The analysis investigates identity and hierarchy in digital communication as socio-cultural results of linguistic interaction. By analyzing interaction and identity in online spaces, this paper proposes empirical ways to account for differences in virtual communities, reconsiders established criteria such as time and regularity in interaction, and proposes new criteria (hierarchy and authority) to accentuate the distinctions regarding virtual communities.
About the author
Antonio Reyes is an Associate Professor at Washington and Lee University. His research focuses on the relationship between language and society, and the way they intertwine and shape each other to create new contexts of meaning and new realities. Particularly, he is interested in developing interdisciplinary theoretical approaches in discourse studies to decode the relation between language and social processes of power and ideology. Tucker Hall, Room 312, 204 W. Washington Street, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA. Email: reyesa@wlu.edu
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- ‘My almost-leggings-so-I’m-kind-of-cheating jeans’: Exploring hyphenated phrasal expressions in fashion discourse
- Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories
- Web-TV as a backstage activity: Emerging forms of audience address in the post-broadcast era
- Discourse-pragmatic functions of the present perfect in American English TV and radio interviews
- Virtual communities: Interaction, identity and authority in digital communication
- Acting out on Twitter: Affordances for animating reported speech in written computer-mediated communication
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- ‘My almost-leggings-so-I’m-kind-of-cheating jeans’: Exploring hyphenated phrasal expressions in fashion discourse
- Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories
- Web-TV as a backstage activity: Emerging forms of audience address in the post-broadcast era
- Discourse-pragmatic functions of the present perfect in American English TV and radio interviews
- Virtual communities: Interaction, identity and authority in digital communication
- Acting out on Twitter: Affordances for animating reported speech in written computer-mediated communication
