Article published in:
Dialogue across Media
Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
[Dialogue Studies 28] 2017
► pp. 155–178

Friends and followers ‘in the know’

A narrative interactional approach to social media participation

Interactional approaches to everyday conversations, both bi- and multi-party ones, have amply documented the systematicity of sequential phenomena to be found within turn-taking as well as their close links with participant roles and relations. A comparable approach to social media communication is lagging behind, despite the fact that much of the social media pre-designing is specifically aimed at getting users in some kind of a ‘dialogue,’ e.g., between posters and respondents, with facilities such as Like, Comment, Share, etc. In addition to providing a framework for future work on dialogical processes on social media, the findings of this study problematize restrictive views of social media platforms as environments for self-selecting participation on the one hand and ‘context collapse’ (e.g., Marwick 2011) of participation on the other hand.

Published online: 19 January 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.28.09geo
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