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Language and Dialogue: Online-First Articles

Social identity construction in expert-lay dialogue on Facebook

| Jagiellonian University

The paper focuses on identity construction on the Facebook profiles of medical professionals. Drawing on existing conceptualisations of identity and proximity, the study explores how five Polish medical experts construct their social identity and create affinity spaces in their interaction with an audience. The analysis shows that affinity spaces are established through the reduction of social distance and epistemic asymmetry between the professionals and their audience. Increasing emotional proximity and stressing the proximity of experience between the interlocutors also contributes to the creation of affinity. Affinity spaces are co-constructed in dialogue with the profile visitors through e.g. deictic resources indicating proximity, personal stories, recontextualisation of medical concepts, expressiveness, and the stressing of commonalities between the orthopaedic surgeons and their followers.

Keywords: identity, affinity, social media, medical communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Identity and proximity
    • 2.1Identity management
    • 2.2Identity in digital communication
    • 2.3Proximity
    • 2.4Materials and methods
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Orthopaedic surgeons’ multiple identities: An overview
    • 3.2Building affinity spaces
      • 3.2.1Reducing social distance
      • 3.2.2Reducing epistemic asymmetry
      • 3.2.3Increasing emotional proximity
      • 3.2.4Stressing the proximity of experience
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 11 June 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00169.ter
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