Identity Construction Through Interactive Comments On Renren.com

This study aims at analyzing the interactive comments on Renren.com with conversation analysis as well as analyzing identity construction through these interactive comments with membership categorization analysisDue to the fact that the research object is the product of newly emerged technology, there are few well established theories and methods. So many problems need to be considered.The first question is about the nature of this research object. Renren.com is the biggest Chinese social network site. Social network sites are the newest product of computer-mediated communication. The biggest feature of Renren.com is the nonynmous environment. Another feature is that there are convergent media that can log on to Renren.com:the specially designed Renren desktop software and application software for mobile devices enable the users to interact and comment on others’profile with visiting the web.Through the literature review of research in computer-mediated communication, I found that these interactive comments fit more into computer-mediated conversation. Moreover, it also fits into what Herring (2012) defined as covergent media computer-mediated discourse or discourse2.0. However, few studies have been done on this type of discourse, especially those generated in Chinese language.So the first concern of this study is the nature of this discourse. Beside, the identity construction under the nonymous environment is another focus in this study. Through the relevant studies, I found that Renren community, made up of Renren users and their friends on friend lists, could be regarded as a community of practice.Based on what has been mentioned, the research questions in this study include:(1) To what extent are these interactive comments analogous to conversation?(2) How is membership of Renren community constructed through these comments?(3) How are other identities constructed through these interactive comments? To address these three questions, this study adopts the following methods. First conversation analysis is adopted to analyze the data. The membership categorization analysis, then, is employed to analyze the identity construction. The analysis of Renren membership is through the study of its distinguished language style.The data are all collected from users on Renren.com, specifically from webpages of sophomore college students. The analysis of the data shows that these interactive comments have notable conversational features. They could be both synchronous and asynchronous, with clear turns and turn-taking due to the technical design. Moreover, each friend on the user’s friend list has full access to these interactive comments even if they are not commentators; these comments, carried out between status updater and one or more commentators, can be defined as public conversation. The identity construction is mainly achieved through common membership categories (e.g. age) and relationship categories. The change of categories (identity) in different turns is also very common in these comments. The playfulness of identity is achieved through such categorization. In addition, the membership of Renren community is realized through its distinctive language style, like dialect-accented Mandarin, the imitation of spoken grammar, the common use of emoticons and frequent repetition of punctuations.