Multimodality in Facebook interactions

This paper discusses multimodality on Facebook interactions. It applies concepts and ideas of Conversation Analysis (CA) to describe the multimodal nature of interactions occurring on Facebook. Although multimodality has been studied by conversation analysts for many years, it seems that the majority of studies on multimodality have focused on spoken conversations. Furthermore, these studies appear to have focused on gestures, gaze, facial expressions and body movements in everyday spoken interactions (#_ENREF_2, #_ENREF_3, #_ENREF_4; #_ENREF_5, #_ENREF_6). However, nowadays, the majority of our social interactions take place online, especially on social media like Facebook (#_ENREF_7; #_ENREF_8, #_ENREF_9). Two billion people have a Facebook account and 1.3 billion use it on a daily basis (#_ENREF_1). Facebook interactions consist of selfies, photos, written messages, videos and hyperlinks. In other words, interactions occurring on Facebook are multimodal. Therefore, this paper will use a corpus of 177 Facebook interactions, made up of 346 comments to show that Facebook interactions may consist of written messages only; visual messages only as well as combinations of written as well as visual messages. This study will also demonstrate that the nature of Facebook messages, whether they are written, visual or they consist of combinations of both written and visual elements, does not affect the way people interpret them. In other words, the nature of Facebook messages does not affect the interaction. This is because despite their format, Facebook messages perform specific actions (e.g. questions, answers, requests, and so on). Furthermore, Facebook users take advantages of the affordances of the medium to accomplish these actions. Findings of this paper will provide researchers with insights on how people communicate on Facebook. More broadly, this research will contribute to the dialogue on language and its role in a changing world.