Text-Context Interaction in Facebook

Here is the first analytical meat of description. We can look at how Facebook profiles interact with and define the contexts in which they are written, and how they relate to larger rhetorical contexts in which Facebook exists.

By now, you have identified some Facebook rhetorical conventions, as well as some disruptions. With that background, you can look at any given profile and discuss how that profile "fits" rhetorically, both within the rhetorical context of Facebook, and with respect to the rhetorical expectations outside of Facebook:

• conformity: fittingness. messages are constructed to meet expectations and norms of the situation.
• non-participation: messages are constructed to not live up to or to violate expectations of the context
• desecration: "an attempt to disrupt communication ... by purposely violating rules of ... discourse." those rules may be considered as local rules (violating the rules of Facebook) or more global rules (those rules of discourse outside of Facebook that Facebook disrupts.)
• contextual reconstruction: the message violates one set of expectations but serves to ''redefine those expectations, making the violation acceptable." This can happen locally - a kind of one of a kind episode - or more globally, which tends to create a new genre or new form of message.

Presentation

Drawing on your description notes, Barton and Haskins (if appropriate), and Stoner and Perkins's material on Text-Context, present your understanding of rhetorical conventions you have discovered in Facebook and how they interact with context. That context can be either or both internal (how the Facebook conventions work internally) or external (how Facebook interacts with context outside of Facebook.)

Set this up as a presentation on a wiki page (FacebookPresentationGroupA, etc), using a bulleted list for notes, and links to profiles to illustrate your observations.

Each person should present. 15 mins or so. Be ready for questions.

Your presentation doesn't need to come to any earth shattering conclusions, and you don't need to evaluate messages or Facebook; in fact, you shouldn't evaluate it. We're interested more in sharing information - what each group has found goes on rhetorically in Facebook, and how what they have found interacts with context. You have plenty of observations in your descriptions to draw on to substantiate your ideas. And you have the terminology and the concepts with which to analyze your observations.