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Part of
The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - group - collective
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 78] 2018
► pp. 177–202

“no prizes to anybody spotting my typo, by the way”

The interplay between criticism and identity management in the comments sections on newspaper websites

| University of Heidelberg, Germany

Criticising others not only seems to be one of the core functions of comments posted on newspaper websites, but also an intriguing means to perform identity work. This paper therefore consists of a fine-grained analysis of the discursive construction of identity in critical comments posted on the websites of the Guardian and the Times. Drawing on the framework proposed by Bucholtz and Hall (2005, 2010), the study explores how the users construe and negotiate not only the identity of the person criticised in their comments, but also their own. Focusing on criticism targeting the journalist and prior commenters, it reveals how criticism can be used to foreground certain identity aspects and uncovers the different strategies employed for this purpose.

Keywords: reader response, user-generated content, identity construction, criticism, disagreement, impoliteness, digital discourse, mass media
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data, goals and methodology
  • 3.The communicative situation
  • 4.The discursive moves of criticism and disagreement
  • 5.Targets of criticism
  • 6.Aspects criticised and forms of criticism
    • 6.1Criticising the journalist
      • 6.1.1Journalistic quality and identifying the target
      • 6.1.2Challenging argument/reasoning
      • 6.1.3Attitude/character
      • 6.1.4Lack of integrity (balance, completeness, objectivity)
      • 6.1.5Minor aspects
    • 6.2Criticising other comment writers
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.78.08ell
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