Network community member’s status-role representation in the online forum dialogues

Abstract

The article deals with lexical units that nominate communicative statuses and communicative roles of the Internet forum participants, as well as speech statements containing specified lexemes with metacommunicative function. The research is a case study of three popular Belarusian Internet forums. Poll results of 18 active members of one of the online forums (the experience of communication on the site is 5–12 years) were madditionally used. The analysis of the status-role nominations used by the Internet forum participants in order to regulate communicative relationships allowed to reveal the main features of forum community members communicative consciousness. The status-role ratio of the online forum participants is determined by the character of the forum. To maintain the online forum community its members have to perform certain communication roles connected with generating, distributing, and consuming content, as well as regulating the users’ interaction in relation to this content. There are four main factors at play in terms of participants hierarchy and opportunities for leadership: communicative power possession (administrators, global moderators, moderators), communicative activity level (“topikstartery”, inspirers, users, “yuzery”), cognitive qualities and demonstrated level of user competence (gurus, experts, “aksakaly”, connoisseur, “chayniki”, “lamery”), commitment to specific, evaluative-marked speech behaviour types (violators, critics, “fludery”, “fleymery”, “neadekvaty”, graphomaniacs, “povtorshchiki”). The status-role names are used by forum users to label meaningful statusrole positions and to determine the participants’ roles in communication.