Introduction: Face Work and Social Media

On platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, on message boards, in blogs and commentaries, in short: in the Social Media, users interact as if they knew each other personally. Malicious verbal behaviour is found next to clapping and kissing emoticons, both indicative of users' relational work strategies. This book presents seventeen papers on face work in Social Media – theoretical reflections as well as corpus-based studies – thus opening the way to rethink linguistic pragmatics in computer-mediated communication.