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The paper by Beatrix Kreß provides a contrastive study of face work in German and Russian online communication. She analyses users' comments in online newspaper and comes to the conclusion that Russian debates tend to have a more direct style, whereas German users more frequently apply humour to mitigate FTAs.
The difference between experts and laypeople is also the subject of the paper by Gesa Linnemann, Benjamin Brummernhenrich and Regina Jucks. In an experiment in pedagogical psychology, they examine efficient knowledge acquisition in e-learning contexts. In the experiment, tutors applied various strategies to criticise the learners' results, with different intensity levels of face threat. If mitigating strategies were used, the learners considered the tutors to be more credible.
Martina Schrader-Kniffki analyses how such status attributions are developed in the French forum 'Francais notre belle langue'. Users of this community discuss language-related topics, usually on the level of laypeople in linguistics. However, the self-presentation of the participants plays an important role in the discussion, which is often the result of intentional subjectified speech acts. In this way, the users develop evidentially and constructed knowledge.
The construction of a shared enemy is also the subject of the paper by Bettina Kluge. She examines the phenomenon of the troll, a user who joins a constructive debate with the intention of systematically destroying it by making hurtful or meaningless contributions or ones that detract from the subject. The paper looks at how a community cooperatively construes a user as a troll and how it deals wirh this disruptive behaviour.
The author dedicates her paper to collective attacks against absent third parties. The users, who do not know each other, construct a shared concept of the enemy which they then male fun of, attacking it collectively in the form of so-called 'flaming'. Even if the person being attacked is unaware of it, this FTA has the effect of enhancing the shared face of the group of attackers.
The author examines Comments on recipes in a French and Italian cooking community. She discovers how users avoid open criticism and use various diluting strategies to ensure that the potential FTA is mitigated. These include, for example, messages formulated in the first person to deflect the criticism from the addressed person, and and praise aimed at balancing and putting the criticism into perspective.
The author shows, on the basis of Watts' model, that online communication on interaction platforms tends to be marked. Due to the media conditions, utterances can be misunderstood or ambigious. This often leads to a discussion about how a post is to be interpreted and about a third party who may also be reading - a potential FTA. To counteract this, verbal, paraverbal an non-verbal strategies aim at marking the posts through multiple codes by means of their user profile, with their avatar, signature, etc. - options many platforms provide and thus support such behaviour.
The author examines interactions in a forum community. Her paper focuses primarily on the negotiation of status, which is measured for example by the length of membership and the activity of the users in the communities. Using the example of the community 'The Student Room', she shows that newcomers first have to earn the right to perform certain verbal actions.
