“Have You Been in This Position? Because Your Comment Does Not Make Sense.” Discourse Strategies and Situated Ideals of Interaction on Social Networking Sites for Mothers

Abstract

I use a Grounded Practical Theory approach to examine the discursive strategies and situated ideals of interactants on social networking sites for mothers (SNSM). Through identifying a problem of practice shaming and analyzing the discourse and metacommunication around the problem, I identified interactants using discursive strategies of antagonistic questions, personal experience, direct insults, and emoji reactions to engage in and respond to practice shaming. An examination of the discursive strategies revealed situated ideals of speaking authority and the place of shaming on SNSM.

Keywords:

• Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis
• Grounded Practical Theory
• Mediated Communication
• Mom-Shaming
• Motherhood

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Where individuals can put the post either on their own Facebook Page, a connection’s Facebook Page, or send privately in a Facebook Message.

2. Because of the nature of the data, demographic information was not available. While these Pages are targeted at mothers, and many of the commenters identified themselves as mothers, it should not be assumed that all users on these Pages are mothers, women, female, or fall into any other certain demographic. I use the neutral pronoun “they/them” throughout, unless a user clearly identified themselves within the thread; then I may use the pronoun “she/her.”

3. The initials in brackets represents when a user has “tagged” or linked another user’s account in their comment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelly M. Weikle

Kelly M. Weikle is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.