Facebook

The prevalence of Internet communication accelerates the blooming and growing online social society. People use the Internet for multiple purposes: searching for information, communicating with others, socializing, or even shopping. One of the major functions of the Internet nowadays is doing social activity. Since the rising of MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and many other friend-making oriented websites, social

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network sites have had a great influence on the behavior and habit of Internet users.

Yus (2011:114) proposed hybridization of human interaction. He suggests that the interaction among people is not restricted in merely one type of interaction. Although offline interaction like the traditional way of meeting in person and communicate with one another is still major means for people to make friends or connected with them.

Nowadays people spend even more time getting online and make friends so that they create more opportunities to contact people they might rarely met in offline social activities in daily lives. With growing numbers of users and data update every day, language use on the Internet is worthy of research.

In the rise of social network sites, Facebook undoubtedly is the most dominant and influential platform. The total number of Facebook users has reached 1.317 billion (update to July, 2014). The total number of Facebook pages is over 50 million.

76 percent of active users log in Facebook at least once a day (Smith, 2014). All these stats strongly show that Facebook has become a huge corpus and generated tons of utterances everyday around the world. Disagreement on the Internet has been discussed on various platforms, such as blogs (Bolander, 2012), discussion forums (Baym, 1996), online discussion (Wojcieszak and Mutz, 2009), and emails (Graham, 2007). Comparatively, SNS is less discussed in the previous studies, especially Facebook, which is a powerful influence that cannot be ignored in the virtual world.

Facebook provides multiple functions including both synchronous and asynchronous communication service for the users, but the kernel of all these functions is the profile system. The incomparable feature of social networking on Facebook is totally different from the function of blog. The thorough profile system on Facebook enables users to share information, images, videos, articles, or links to outer websites or even other SNSs with their friends and even friends of friends. Timeline function on Facebook is a new profile system that allows other people to quickly view users’ life

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experience in a reverse chronological way. That is, the latest post will show up at the top of the page so that people can realize who do what at what place in what time.

Besides, Facebook Messenger, an application for mobile devices, supports the function of posting through smartphones or tablets. Comparing to blog writing that bloggers need to type in front of the monitor of laptop or computer, Facebook users only need one single cell phone or any mobile device to post anything anywhere. The mobility of sharing information makes Facebook a stronger platform for people to connect with each other.

The major function the present study focuses is the main page of “Facebook Profile” or “Wall”, which has been replaced as “Facebook Timeline” since December, 2011. Facebook Timeline is a profile space that organizes all the content shown of a user. All the content would be categorized according to the time that a post or event is created. This page allows Facebook users to leave a short message or note with the time and date shown, based on the time when the message is left. According to users’

private setting, one user’s Wall is open to all the users in the friend list. All the messages left are available for other users (who are also friends on the list) to comment on. The interaction inside each message/note is the primary target to be observed in the present study.

The interaction through the Comments box in Facebook is similar to the post on a blog. A user posts a message, creates an event, or shares any link on the Wall; other users who have access can leave their comments below. The interaction is similar to the mode of blog. Multi-directional interaction on the Wall includes the exchange of words among users who post and users who give comments. In the comment section, users can clearly identify who say what since the users’ names and profile picture registered in FB are shown on the left upper spot. Unlike face-to-face (FtF) communication, users have plenty of time preparing to key in the message they want

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to comment or respond. Every word typed can be erased or re-edited before sending out the message, or even after sending the message, since FB has added this new function to edit posts or comments. Benefit from the traits of permanency of message archived, users whoever see any series of discussion can quickly join the discussion.

In FtF conversation, speakers who have not involved from the very beginning have difficulty joining the talk since no prior content accessible. In Facebook, however, users can retrieve the old message freely and realize the whole content of the conversation. Therefore, even the original post is fragmented or difficult to understand without sufficient background knowledge. The response of the original post can help new participants to realize the full story through the interactions on Facebook. The response device allows the audience to interact with one another and hence the audience is capable of collecting more information like a jigsaw and to figure out the picture of the whole story (West, 2013). Different from other CMC, FB copies Twitter’s successful experience and provides a new function, tagging, since September, 2009. Uses can tag any post, event, or name on others and a hyperlink is created to the FB page of the one being tagged. In the comment section, users can tag other’s name so that the one who is tagged would get a notification and join the talk of certain topic, even he or she never involve in the discussion. The concept of this tagging function is closed to the addressing term in other CMC platform. Addressing term works only when the user who is addressed has already involved in the discussion however, but tagging need not.

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Figure 1 Interface of FB message and comment section

As shown in Figure 1, 魏延 posts a “status” on his Timeline (Wall). The system shows that the status is posted at 10:45 on September 15. Also, how many people and who “Like” this post will be shown. Below the post, are so called “Comment box”

which display all the comments in response to the post. In the present study, Comment box is our main target when we search for disagreement tokens.

The communication on Wall is basically asynchronous and text-based. The unique system and function supported on FB allows FB users to interact without the spatiotemporal separation. The aim of this research is to observe the pragmatic strategies used for disagreeing with others in Facebook.

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