Discourse and organization

Interaction on social media follows certain organizing principles and patterns, as does face-to-face oral conversation. Research has begun to apply and adapt methods developed from and for offline interaction, such as Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis, to the sites of interaction that have emerged with the advent of the Internet and mobile phone technology. Our chapter traces the results of this research, encompassing Internet Relay Chats, text-messaging forum interactions, emails, Facebook posts and comments, Twitter, Skype calls and video blogs. This varied range of both spoken and written data has received attention regarding the sequential organization of the users’ contributions in terms of both time and space, and it has drawn interest to its implementation of classic motifs in Conversation Analysis, that is, repair, openings and closings. The chapter presents an overview and synthesis of the results of these strands of research.