"We are all in this together" – Balancing Virtual Proximity and Distance in Online Care Partner Discussions

Text-based online communication has often been attested a 'speech-like' character (Danet 2010, 146) which manifests in communicative constellations and linguistic features typically associated with private, spontaneous face-to-face conversations and the semiotic compensation of kinesic and paralinguistic cues (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011, 149). Crystal's famous term 'Netspeak' (2001; 2006) foregrounds this idea of 'conceptual orality' (cf. Koch and Oesterreicher 1985; 1985/2012). While the notion of Netspeak was criticized for implying the existence of a distinct, homogeneous language variety (e.g. Dürscheid 2004), research of the early 2000s already indicated that 'speech-like' and 'writing-like uses' of language in digital communication have to be conceived of as scalar phenomena (Danet 2001, 16; see also Crystal 2001, 42f.) and are clearly not just technologically determined (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011, 146). Meanwhile, studies on a range of social media contexts have further contributed to a more differentiated picture (e.g. Hoffmann 2012; Sindoni 2013; and the contributions in Bublitz and Hoffmann 2017). Viewing digital environments as social spaces which give rise to particular communicative practices, we aim to show that next to modeor genre-specific variation, we need to consider potentially different user orientations as interactive phenomena in their local discourse contexts (see also Androutsopoulos 2007, 80, 91). For that purpose, we have investigated data from the discussion forum of a Facebook support group for care partners1 of people living with dementia of the Alzheimer type (PWD). This study asserts that even on one particular social media platform, within one sociotechnical mode and one particular virtual community of practice (CofP), users' linguistic choices vary in the act of balancing virtual proximity and distance. This paper starts out from a definition of the core concepts (section 2), followed by a description of the methods and data of the study (section 3). The realizations of the three dimensions of virtual proximity and distance in the corpus will be presented in more detail in section 4, before we focus on the linguistic dimension in section 5. Section 6 will explore the interplay of linguistic patterns of immediacy/distance with the other two dimensions in the complex communicative practices of balancing virtual proximity and distance, and section 7 will round off our discussion.