Analysing Digital Interaction

This book investigates interaction-focused scholarship on online communication. It focuses on a broad range of online contexts including social media, dating apps, online comments, instant messaging and video-mediated interaction. Bringing together experts from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, chapters demonstrate how different microanalytic methods, including conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology, can be applied to online communication. The book also goes on to address ethical, methodological and theoretical issues of analysing online social interaction. With the explosion of the use of online platforms for everyday and institutional interaction, this book is a timely collection which explores the current state of the field, and considers future directions for microanalysis of online communication. 

“Analysing Digital Interaction is an extremely timely contribution representing an important statement on how methods from CA, MCA, and DP can inform our understanding of the rapid social socio-technological that we are currently experiencing. … Flexible and sensitive analytic methods such as those discussed here are capable of rendering distinctive views of these interactional nuances and they are critical to help us understand these rapidly evolving forms of life.” (Will Gibson, Symbolic Interaction, March 14, 2023)

Joanne Meredith is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Dr Meredith was awarded her PhD in social psychology from Loughborough University, UK focusing on the analysis of instant messaging interaction using conversation analysis. She has a particular interest in the development of conversation analysis and discursive psychology as methods for analysing online interaction. David Giles is Reader in Psychology at the University of Winchester, UK. Dr Giles has been writing about media and human behaviour for over two decades, specializing in the relationship between audiences and media figures, particularly celebrities. His books include Illusions of Immortality (2000) and Twenty-First Century Celebrity (2018). He co-founded, and continues to co-edit, the international peer-reviewed journal Qualitative Research in Psychology. Wyke Stommel is Assistant Professor in Dutch Language and Culture at Radboud University, The Netherlands. Dr Stommel obtained her PhD from the University of Frankfurt / Main for a study of online support group interaction. Her research focuses on (mediated) interaction in institutional settings using conversation analysis, including chat counselling and video consultations. Short videos from each chapter author, introducing their research, are available to view here: https://sites.google.com/view/analysingdigitalinteraction/home