Conflictual and consensual disagreement

Abstract

This chapter explores a series of foci which have emerged in the study of disagreement in social media, notably in Web 2.0 environments. These include comparisons between disagreement online and offline; the role played by social and medium factors for the linguistic realisation and emergent meanings of disagreement; the recent upsurge in work on sociable disagreement and play; a focus on disagreement, language and gender; the exploration of disagreement in connection with polylogues and participation frameworks; increased interest in disagreement in educational contexts; and a progressive move towards inclusion of data from language varieties other than English. To account for the fact that disagreement is a move which can have various manifestations and meanings, we also include discussion of “conflictual disagreement” and “consensual disagreement”. In the course of the chapter, we further highlight the close relationship between changes in the study of disagreement online and changes in the study of language use online more generally; and we address contemporary research on the challenge of context and the indexing of emotion as pertinent for the study of disagreement online.