Identity Construction Online: Identities and Ideologies in Reader Comments in Online News Fora

The relationship between language and identity remains a core topic of interest in applied (socio) linguistics. The investigation of identity in the online context, however, remains underexplored despite of a mushrooming of participation by users. Adopting a social constructionist perspective which views identities as dynamic and multiple, this thesis investigates how identities are discursively co-constructed in interaction, with close attention paid to the wider sociocultural Discourses and ideologies that impact on these negotiations. I focus on interactions that take place in online news comment boards, with the goal of identifying how commenters discursively construct and negotiate their identities through their comments, addressing the overarching research question: “How is identity constructed and negotiated through comments discourse in an online communication setting?”The dataset includes approximately 3,000 comments collected from the reader sections of news articles published on three different online news websites: Stuff in New Zealand, and The Guardian and Mail Online in the UK. The comments are responses to 40 articles, covering topics focusing on same-sex marriage (an explicitly ideologically-loaded topic) and travel (a topic where ideologies are less overt). All comments were collected within a one-week period following the respective news article’s appearance. This data set allows me to capture the most immediate responses from readers and provides naturally-occurring interactional data to investigate identity construction.

In line with the social constructionist stance I view identity as emergent and negotiated within discourse, as a discursive and socially situated phenomenon that is interactionally achieved with other interactants. Through in-depth qualitative discourse analysis supported by thematic coding, the findings demonstrate the interrelationship between commenters’ ideologies and identity construction in online interaction. Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) with its principled inclusion of both micro and macro considerations is applied to ensure rigour in the discourse analysis and I employ positionality (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) and Intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1981) to productively narrow the analytic focus.

The analysis indicates that salient identities for commenters hinge on constructs of nationality (which in turn interacts with ethnicity) and gender (and relatedly sexuality). This resonates with the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), at the core of which is the recognition that macro aspects of identity (e.g. race, sexual orientation, etc.) are overlap and interact with each other in multiple ways. In addition, the findings suggest that these identities are often ‘triggered’ by the positioning of self and other, including the present interlocutor(s) and other characters involved in the interaction, as represented by specific ideologies. In reaching these conclusions I highlight the contextual intricacies of the asynchronous, text-based online environment where traditional contextualisation cues such as gesture, intonation, eye contact, etc are not available. In their stead I demonstrate the omnipresence of ideologies through the lens of the ‘ideal reader’ (Fairclough, 2001). The study thereby draws attention to the affordances of investigating ideologies when exploring identity and emphasises the need for a deeper reflection on the connections between language, identity, and ideology in the online context.