Dynamics of Community Formation by Robert W. Compton Jr. Ho Hon Leung & Yaser Robles

Author:Robert W. Compton, Jr., Ho Hon Leung & Yaser Robles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Fang-Nu as Identified in a Virtual Community

The virtual community under study here is labeled as “I am a fang-nu(房奴)” hosted on the site of NetEase (网易), a major social networking corporation in China. Thousands of homebuyers across the country have posted their home-buying stories, commentaries, or verbal exchanges on the site since it was started in 2008. This site may be defined as a “speech community” in terms of ethnographical traditions (cf. Gumperz 1965; Gumperz and Hymes 1964), although it is virtual. More and more ethnographers have acknowledged the notion of virtual community (cf. Beaulieu 2004) and doing ethnographic study on virtual communities (e.g., Marciano 2014; Soukup 2004). While researchers follow different ethnographic traditions in their studies on virtual communities, Dell Hymes’ ethnography of communication is considered here as the most effective approach to the discursive construction of identity in a speech community.

Ethnography of Communication (EOC) is an approach to the study of speech/communication as a radically cultural phenomenon (Hymes 1962, 1972, 1974). It seeks to explicate the specific ways in which participants in a speech community perform identities, conduct social events, and exchange communal experiences in their distinctive ways of communication. Dell Hymes (1974) proposes that a communicative event may be observed, described, structured, and interpreted in terms of its setting and scene, participant, end, act, key, instrumentality, norm, and genre—which form the acronym SPEAKING. The SPEAKING model helps structure the site of “I am a fang-nu” as a speech community and it also helps explicate how participants’ group identity as fang-nu is discursively formed and performed through communicative acts.

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