With the growing number of SNS users, language on the Internet has started to attract the attention of linguistics researchers. Through the comparison between different interaction modes, it is found that disagreement has various forms to realize due to the specific features contained in different contexts. FB Wall contains written message and breaks the spatiotemporal limitation. Without the transfer of voice, delay devices like hesitation, request for clarification, or repair initiators become almost nonexistent in FB. Without facial expression, the use of punctuation, emoticon, capitalization and other types of playful words replace the missing features of oral conversation. Video-conferencing in the future might be widely applied in mobile communication through wearable devices because of the rapid development of
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Internet transportation; other unique ways of communication will be created then to fit in the evolutionary interaction mode. Since human interaction is aimed to make people’s life convenient and comfortable, the change of interaction will definitely change the way people communicate.
Due to the limitation of data collection, the number of disagreement tokens is relatively insufficient. Since Facebook is a semi-public space, collecting data requires more access to have the rights and permission for reading others’ SNS pages. Besides, collecting usable data which contains disagreement requires people with linguistic academic background to analyze the raw data. The present study aims to investigate the disagreement strategies employed by the FB users and compare the use of strategies in different contexts of CMC and FtF communication.
Social variables like age, gender, and power relation are not taken into account in the study. Future research may involve male and female language use on FB and their selection of disagreement strategy. According to Lin’s (1999) study, the distribution of disagreements by males and females, in the context of informal daily conversation, is quite equal. But when considering mixed gender of interlocutors, female to female interlocutors have the highest tendency to use more disagreements. This result contradicts the findings of previous studies that males tend to use more disagreements.
In Chen’s (2006) study, social distance seems to be a variable affecting strategies chosen by the interlocutors. Echoing Brown and Levinson’s (1987) results, Chen’s findings show that with more social distance between interlocutors, more politeness is needed (p.102). However, since social distance is relatively a non-factor between the peer-interaction in our databank, the conclusion yielded from FB may not be the same. These social factors are highly related to human’s behavior on the Internet.
With the rapid development on FB, more research is needed to validate the value and
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importance of SNS in human interaction.
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