Presence and Antisocial Behaviour in Academic Weblogs

The purpose of this article is to analyse interaction in academic weblogs, focus-ing on discursive features that provide cues as to the participants ’ interpersonal behaviour. The data for this study consisted of postings and their corresponding comments taken from 11 academic weblogs. The analysis of the corpus allowed us to work out a framework of different categories of discursive indicators of social and antisocial behaviour. Following Rourke et al. (1999), the indicators of social behaviour were categorized into the following types: (i) affectivity, (ii) cohesiveness, and (iii) interactivity. The indicators of antisocial behaviour were classified into three groups: (i) negative socioemotional behaviour, (ii) group exclusion, and (iii) confrontational interaction. The study shows that bloggers and weblog readers use a great variety of discursive strategies aimed at constructing and sustaining affective and solidarity relations in the community and creating an identity for themselves as competent members of the disciplinary community