La communication expressive dans les forums de discussion : émotions et attitude ironique chez l'adolescent

This study investigates how adolescents communicate their feelings and attitudes on an Internet forum. Our guiding question is: Is this "expressive communication" specific compared with face-to-face interaction? According to the social information processing theory (Walther, 1996, 2007), it should: Internet forums have significant limitations to express feelings and attitudes due to the lack of contextual cues or nonverbal channels and adolescents try to compensate for these limitations. In this paper, we focus on the communication of basic emotions and ironical attitude in Internet forums. Our results show that adolescents broadly practice expressive communication but always have to make their feelings and attitudes explicit with suitable devices. Thus, basic emotions are communicated by symbolic means, but also by iconical means (like smileys) and typographical ones (like expressive punctuation). Ironical attitudes are clearly communicated by iconical means (smileys) or by verbal explanations. These different means of communicating expressive content are described and discussed.