Organization of Repair Structures Among Users of a Social Networking Site

1. Introduction

Thanks to the advent of and development of computers, cell phones, and especially the Internet in our day-to-day life, the ways people communicate have grotesquely changed, initiating a new era for human beings. According to the figures of Internet World Stats , in late 2012, there were over two-thousand millions people around the world connecting to the internet, and this number of internet users currently occupies 34,3% of the world population. The Internet is not only an imperative technology, but it also has become the main medium of communication among people, and has already impacted the ways people communicate with each other. Conversation is thus no longer exclusively a face to face act or a simple chat over the phone. Presently, Computer-mediated communication (hereafter CMC) appears to be more commonly exercised by individuals, as the Internet creates networking spaces for those who fail to exchange conversation within each other’s presence. As mentioned above, rapid development in the globalized world has led to a proliferation of information technology especially for the internet applications. Thus, people are simply connecting to each other through the online devices such as e-mails, websites, forums, online chatting, to name a few. To this new face of communication we now turn in the next section.

1.1. Computer-mediated communication

CMC is a new communication mode carried out by means of computers and portable devices that combine telephony and computing (e.g. smart phones with social networking apps), enabling people to chat and contact with one another without having to exchange face-to-face talks. Through computers and the Internet, people can communicate with no time and space restrictions. A...

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...ion. Moreover, CMC interaction helps participants to broadcast messages to a group of people at the same time rather than having point-to-point communications (Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999).

On the other hand, those researchers who consider web-based interaction as a third modality of language may view it as a bridge between the learners’ written and spoken skills (Chun, 1994). Davis and Brewer (1997) have given the language used in CMC the term ‘writing talking’ and Crystal (2001) has called it ‘written speech’. Crystal (2001: 47-48) argued that CMC should be viewed as a “genuine ‘third medium’”. Örnberg (2003) argued that CMC is a different mode of communication as a result of the medium. It is not spoken and not written but the message is typed through the keyboard. It was concluded that CMC results in a different conversation structure from that of FTF interaction.