Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech acts, stories and self-praise(260 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Chapter 1. Introducing the pragmalinguistic approach to the study of Twitter; 3. Chapter 2. Discursive identity: Self and group; 4. Chapter 3. Disclosive speech acts: Self-praise and third party complaints; 5. Chapter 4. Twitter as a communicative environment; 6. Chapter 5. Describing the corpus and the annotation scheme; 7. Chapter 6. Self-disclosure; 8. Chapter 7. Third party complaints; 9. Chapter 8. Narratives in microblogs; 10. Chapter 9. Bringing the findings together: In-group language and interpretive repertoires; 11. Glossary of ballet terms; 12. References; 13. Index

Review :
Daria Dayter’s Discursive Self in Microblogging presents a highly original and detailed investigation of the complexities of group membership negotiation in a ballet Twitter community. The particular strength of this study lies in the careful documentation and qualitative analysis of her target group material – 1,000 tweets of ballet aficionados – while tackling larger issues of positioning through self-disclosure and narratives in a formally restricted electronic medium. The focus on self-praise – so far significantly under-researched – and third party complaints provide new insights into the significance of such speech acts for group membership status negotiation. Written in a clear and accessible style Dayter’s study will be an important resource for students and researchers with an interest in CMC and Twitter, speech acts and narrative discourse. This volume, with many breakthroughs in its viewpoints and methods, provides a comprehensive illustration of how ballet Twitter users construct their identities discursively. Theoretically, it enriches identity studies from the perspective of pragmatics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, narrative studies, discursive psychology, sociology and third-media studies. It also provides insights for studies in CMC and narrative discourse since it combines scientific corpus analysis with detailed linguistic feature examination of each speech act. In practice, it functions as guidance for any individual or organization to identify its ‘in-groupness’ by referring to the identity construction strategies. Furthermore, the volume is written in a clear and accessible style and is exemplary in its compilation through its organization of the nine chapters into two parts according to their content: theoretical foundation and analytic process. These features help to make it a valuable resource for students and researchers in the area of linguistics and social studies. Its clear strength is the clear outline and the author’s rigorous discussion of the speech act phenomena; in particular, the findings on self-praise are noticeable and remain relevant in many other domains of our digital lives. Dayter’s study is a solid piece of work on online interactions in a discourse community in Twitter. Dayter carefully constructs theoretical and methodological frameworks based on an extensive literature review. The mixed methods approach is a fresh way to study data in research that is based on computer-mediated discourse analysis and online ethnography. Different types of approaches are needed to explicate digital interactions. The analysis is a thorough examination of the chosen objects of study, which are imaginatively chosen. The qualitative analysis obtains results that shed light on the understudied phenomena of computer-mediated discourse analysis, online ethnography, and related fields. Finally, the author takes care in explaining the aims and questions she intends to tackle in each chapter and ends them with helpful conclusions. This study on identity construction and the emergence of group identity in English ballet tweets is bound to receive attention since the combination of identity construction with microblogging is important but yet under-explored in CMC research. The study is commendable for its creative mixed methodology and innovative discussions of concepts such as complaints, compliments, self-praise, tiny stories and the impact of the Twitter affordances on the observed online practices.