The Communal Function of Social Interaction on an Online Academic Newsgroup

Abstract

Social relations in academic settings can be intensely problematic. Our case study joins the ongoing conversation among scholars interested in communication issues in academia by shifting analytic attention from individuals negotiating the boundaries of academic communities from the outside to how an academic community negotiates its own boundaries. Using analytic strategies from the ethnography of communication and ethnomethodology, we analyzed observable interaction on an online academic newsgroup (the Ethno hotline hosted by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, CIOS) to investigate how fellow academics criticized one another's communicative conduct in order to accomplish membering, the negotiation and affirmation of communal membership, and their community's identity. We approached such criticism as natural criticism, that is, criticism members of a self-identified community apply to the discursive conduct of those they see as communal members. We found that natural criticism functioned as a communication practice and as a symbolic resource for membering in the context of this scholarly community. We also found that, as a practice, natural criticism was accountable in multiple ways, and communal members responded to it negatively when it was seen to violate the moral and practical order of the community. For example, when the practice of natural criticism took on a pattern we refer to adversarial mirroring, this pattern became subject to negative evaluation by other members of the community. Our study contributes to language and social interaction scholarship on membering and natural criticism, and to communication scholarship investigating the management of social relations in academic settings.