Search

"Analysing Digital Interaction" is a book that explores the study of online communication and interaction. The editors highlight the importance of understanding the details of interaction in order to comprehend the changing nature of contemporary society. The book showcases microanalytic methods from conversation analysis, membership category analysis, and discursive psychology to analyze the digital nature of interaction and how it is impacted by being online. The chapters address key methodological issues, such as research ethics and the complexities of online contexts, and demonstrate the performative nature of textual actions and the management of affordances in mediated interaction. The book provides valuable insights into the rapidly evolving forms of life in the digital age. [Extracted from the article]

This article uses conversation analysis to investigate the communicative practices of unacquainted, matched Tinder users in chat conversations, in the process of developing a potential romantic relationship. Drawing on data from 157 Tinder conversations, the analysis explores the occasioning of talk about personal and intimate matters. The analysis shows that the interactional device through which the revelation of personal and intimate information is prompted is the 'elicited self-disclosure sequence'. In cases in which a direct question fails to prompt a disclosure from the recipient, the 'volunteered self-disclosure sequence' emerges as an alternative to promote the revelation of further intimate information. We conclude by observing that relationships are ongoing routine accomplishments arising in mundane sociorelational contexts. The data are in Spanish and Catalan with English translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is argued that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong methodological focus on people's accounts of their sensorial experiences at the expense of studying the practical achievement of sense work as an interactional phenomenon. Recent work has called for more innovative methods in sensorial scholarship and the use of creative approaches to explore the senses. While applauding this move, in this article the authors show the importance of a focus on micro-behavioural actions in studying the senses. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, they analyse video recordings of near vision tests in optometry consultations illustrating the highly routinised, but also the embodied and improvised character of the actions through which the vision is made available for scrutiny. They argue that sensorial scholarship has sidelined the study of social context as a lived-order and demonstrate the importance of treating sensorial actions as routinised, embodied and improvisatory. The authors agree that using more creative methods would be valuable but caution against relying exclusively on methods that do not sufficiently contextualise the senses as a lived and practical social accomplishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Conversation analysis facilitates an examination of the communicative function of emoji. • Emoji perform communicative work related to the textual context. • Gestures indexed by emoji are important referents in their analysis. • Research should focus on the process of emoji selection and technology interfaces. Abstract This paper uses conversation analysis to explore the communicative functions of one emoji in a mobile reading community in China. In contrast to semiotic approaches to emoji that focus on their cultural signification, or that treat them as reflections of users' inner intensions, we analyse emoji as communication phenomena by exploring their relation to other textual actions in the production of text-talk. The emoji analysed here functioned as a laughter token, and performed specific interactional work related to laughter. We conclude that conversation analysis offers an important corrective to abstracted semiotic analysis and a useful resource for exploring the demonstrable meaning of emoji for interlocutors. However, we also emphasise the importance of capturing the process of composing messages, the challenges of dealing with the variety of forms that emoji take and their relation to gestural and other actions in face to face communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an interactionist analysis of guitar pedal review videos this paper explores the communicative practices of product reviewing in YouTube. Focussing on one guitar pedal, the analysis reveals how reviewers positioned the pedal as an 'idealised object' and as part of the 'material good life' of guitarists. Reviewers' communicative strategies projected a sense of shared intersubjective experience of the pedal by bracketing out issues of knowledge, skill, and access to technology, and by constructing the vloggers' credentials as reviewers. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the structures of consumer cultures on YouTube, showing how reviewers communicatively construct audiences, products, themselves, and, more generally, the practices of material culture use in this specific art world. I argue that the interactionist perspective adopted here is an important and under-used framework for analysing consumer culture, and that it helps us to see how material culture is manufactured as a discursive, communicative act through the mundane activities of reviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of transcripts in the analysis of social action. Drawing on a study of the interactional processes in optometry consultations, we show how our interest in the rhythm of reading letters from a chart arose serendipitously from our orientation to transcription conventions. We discuss our development of alternative transcription systems, and the affordances of each. We relate this example to constructivist debates in the area of transcription and argue that the issues have been largely characterised in political terms at the expense of a focus on the actual processes of transcription. We show here that analytic affordances emerge through an orientation to professional conventions. The article ends by suggesting that a close reflection on the design of transcripts and on transcription innovation can lead to more nuanced analysis as it puts the researcher in dialogue with the taken for granted ideas embedded in a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the sequential ordering of multi-modal discussions in real-time online classes in postgraduate education contexts. The article explores the ways that text and verbal talk are organized by the participants as inter-connecting modes of interaction. Focusing on Initiation, Response and Feedback sequences as an example of a form of exchange, the article shows that the interaction was comparatively disorderly where conducted across talk and text modes. For instance, written responses to questions or to encouragement turns often overlapped with verbal answers from other students or with encouragement turns from the tutor. However, through the withholding of speech turns, the close latching of speech to written talk, and the ceasing of written turns at points where the topics or speakers changed, the participants showed a concern with re-establishing sequential order across the modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights that this perspective can bring to the examination of written asynchronous discourse. The paper shows that in the section of the discussion analysed here, the discourse displayed remarkable similarities to the ways in which face-to-face conversation has been seen to operate in terms of the organisation of conversational turns, the application of specific interactional rights, the lineal development of topics of conversation and the structural use of question-answer turn pairs. The paper concludes by showing how this form of analysis can relate to the formation of reflexive pedagogy in which course design can be created to take account of such findings. It shows how a detailed understanding of how pedagogy is played out in interaction is fundamental for reflecting on the relationship between pedagogic aims and educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper works through the methodological issues involved in treating "culture" and "interculturality" as interactionally demonstrable and observable phenomena in written online asynchronous discourse. In particular, the paper explores the ways that conversation analysis (CA) and its focus on sequentiality and membership categorization analysis might aid the analysis of culture as a textural interactional achievement. The paper argues that, while there are some clear differences between sequential talk and written asynchronous discourse, there are still interesting ways in which CA's analytic foci may be worked through in relation to online discourse. Both the concern with sequentiality and with membership categories may well help us to see how the construction of visible and recognizable intercultural discourse practices are accomplished through written modes in online forums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]