In this article, we evaluate the ways in which computer-mediated communication (CMC) has thus far been conceptualized, proposing an alternative approach. It is argued that traditional perspectives ignore participants’ everyday understanding of media use and media characteristics by relying on an individualistic and cognitive framework. The SIDE model, while improving on the definition of what may count as ‘social’ in CMC, still disregards the way in which identity is constructed and managed in everyday talk and text. To fill this gap, we offer a discursive psychological approach to online interaction. Presented here are the materials from an online discussion forum on depression. It is shown that participants’ identities do not so much mirror their inner worlds but are discourse practices in their own right. More specifically, we demonstrate how participants attend to ‘contradictory’ normative requirements when requesting support, thus performing the kind of identity work typically obscured in cognitive models.

In this article we draw on the methods developed by conversation analysis and discursive psychology in order to examine how participants manage rules, fact and accountability in a specific ideological area. In particular, we focus on how participants in online discussions on veganism manage the problem posed by alleged health threats such as vitamin deficiency. We show how speakers systematically attribute responsibility for possible deficiencies to individual recipients rather than veganism. The analysis focuses on a conditional formulation that participants use in response to the recurrent question about supposed health problems in a vegan diet (for example: if you eat a varied diet, there shouldn't be any problems). This specific construction presents the absence of health problems as a predictable fact, depending on individual practices. The use of a script formulationtogether with a modal expressionenables participants to blend morality with logic, and thereby to indirectly attribute responsibility and blame to individual rule-followers. The modal construction (including qualifications as certainly, easilyand in my opinion) also allows speakers to display a concern for saying no more than they can be sure of, thus enhancing the trustworthiness of their accounts. It is suggested that this way of managing rules and accountability may also be found in and relevant for other (than) ideological domains.

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OverviewThis book addresses issues of talk and cognition. For the first time some of the world"s experts on interaction analysis have been brought together to consider the nature and role of cognition. They address the question of what part, if any, cognitive entities should play in the analysis of interaction. They develop different answers. Some are consistent with current thinking in cognitive psychology and cognitive science; others are more critical, questioning the idea that cognition is the obvious and necessary start point for the study of human action.The question of the relation of language and thought has been a central one in cognitive and developmental psychology for more than 30 years. For the contributors here the focus is not on language as it is traditionally understood but rather on talk or, even more specifically, on talk-in-interaction. That is, not on language as an abstract set of words, meanings, or a system of contrasts as it has usually been conceived, but talk as a practical, social activity, located in settings, occurring between people, used in practices. This approach has significant implications for the way traditional issues of cognition are treated.Talk and cognition have been brought together only rarely in the past, and often for particular purposes local to one discipline. However, there are some important precursors to the current enterprise, and we will describe them in detail below.-2 -It is worth noting at the outset that because of its interdisciplinary focus this book is likely to have audiences with different levels of knowledge, understanding and expectation.In particular, we hope it will be of interest to at least three groups of researchers. First, it will be of interest to those people whose primary topic is the study of interaction. The issue of how (if at all), or in what way, cognition figures in interaction is a live and complex one with important implications for how analysis can be done and what might be possible. Second, it will be of interest to discursive psychologists and the wider community of social psychologists who have attempted to develop an alternative to traditional social cognitive perspectives. For them, it will refine several of the issues and highlight the value of considering them in terms of natural interaction. Third, we hope the book will be interesting to the very broad community of cognitive scientists. Cognition has been understood in a wide range of ways in this community (some of which we will describe below) but only rarely has the start point been research on natural interaction.The contributors to this book are some of the foremost analysts of natural interaction in the world. Although each has his or her individual take on things, they mostly draw on one or more of the connected approaches of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and discursive psychology. We will have more to say about these approaches later. For the moment we will use thumbnails.Ethnomethodology is an approach to the methods that people use for making sense of, ...

Policy and technology actors seem to focus ''naturally'' on risk rather than on technology's social and ethical impacts that typically constitute an important focus of concern for philosophers of technology, as well as for the broader public. There is nothing natural about this bias. It is the result of the way discourses on technology and policy are structured in technological, liberal, pluralistic societies. Risks qualify as ''hard' ' (i.e., objective, rational, neutral, factual), other impacts as ''soft' ' (i.e., subjective, emotional, partisan, valueladen) and are therefore dismissable. To help redress this bias, it is necessary to understand how this distinction between hard and soft impacts is construed -in practice and in theory. How are expected (desired, feared) impacts of technology played out in expert-citizen/consumer interactions? We first discuss online patient deliberations on a future pill for celiac disease (''gluten intolerance'') promising to replace patients' lifelong diet. By ''rejecting'' this pill, patients displayed concerns about how the new technology would affect their identity, and the values incorporated in the way they had learned to handle their disease. Secondly, we analyze how experts construct a consumers' concern with ''naturalness'' of food: as a private -and invalid -preference that requires no further debate. The point of the analysis is to make available for discussion and reflection currently dominant ways to demarcate public and private issues in relation to emerging technologies, including the accompanying distributions of tasks and responsibilities over experts and laypersons. However, the actors themselves cannot simply alter these demarcations and distributions at will. Their manoeuvring room is co-shaped by discursive structures at work in modern, technological, pluralist, liberal societies. In the third section, we therefore identify these structures, as they provide the hegemonic answers to the three key questions with regard to the possible impacts of emerging technologies: how are impacts evaluated; how are they estimated; and how are they caused? We conclude with some suggestions for further research.