In this paper we examine a key relational practice found in interactions in online discussion boards in Mainland China and Taiwan: ‘doing deference’. In drawing attention to a relational practice that has received attention in quite different research traditions, namely, linguistic pragmatics and conversation analysis, we mean to highlight the possible advantages of an approach to analysis that draws from both in analysing relational work in CMC. We claim in the course of our analysis that the participants are orienting not (...) only to relationships but also to identities through this practice. In this way, we suggest that online discussion boards afford both meaningful interaction and relational work. We further claim that this analysis provides support for the theoretical position that while relational practices may intersect with the emergence of identities, they remain distinct analytical concerns. (shrink)

This paper describes how bilingual colleagues living in Hong Kong make small talk in instant messaging to achieve various business-oriented goals and construct multiple identities in the discursive process. Guided by James Paul Gee’s revised framework of discourse analysis, the analyses evidenced that, overall, colleagues use small talk in instant messages to maintain minimal ties with distant partners, fill in silence during computer work, affect informal decision-making at work, and to diffuse useful surrounding information into business talk. These instances interplay (...) with different affordances provided by the gadgets in the instant messenger interfaces. Such creative usage, together with the perceived nature of online interaction and instant messaging, results in multiple and turbulent identities circulating in the broader context of workplace discourse. The article concludes by arguing that computer-mediated communication has offered participants an emerging modus of interacting socially, beyond the physical and psychological constraints of time and space. (shrink)