Self-oriented and other-oriented facework on social media

Abstract

Integrating insights from social psychology and speech act theory, the study proposes duality of facework as an important basis for individuals to manage relations on social media and develops a taxonomy classifying acts of self-oriented and other-oriented facework on social media. An investigation of Chinese and American celebrity microblogging discourses has been conducted so as to testify the proposed taxonomy. It is found that the taxonomy serves well in revealing commonalities as well as differences between American and Chinese celebrities in their facework and relation management on social media. The findings lend support to the applicability of this new taxonomy for future studies of facework and speech acts in social media discourse.