Conversation Analysis and Community of Practice as Approaches to Studying Online Community
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Abstract
This article explores how interaction analysis, drawing on Conversation Analysis (CA), can be useful for the study of online community. This kind of analysis can be situated within the model of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2004). Extracts from a German forum on eating disorders are analyzed, and it is shown that discursive identities as well as community are resources for participants in their web-based forum interactions. Various aspects of community are attended to in these interactions, including solidarity, a shared purpose, norms and values, conflict, roles, and hierarchies. Norms and values are further invoked by a moderator's intervention with reference to the forum's rules. However, the status of forum rules cannot be captured from an interactional point of view only. Thus, the concepts of participation and reification adopted from Community of Practice theory are incorporated into the account, highlighting the close relation between rules and actual online interactional behavior.
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