A pact of mutual aggression: digital-media audience’s negotiation of face and role. Readers’ comments in the newspaper La Nación.com

From the beginning, one of the most controversial features of the interaction on the Internet was the frequency of aggression and explicit violence in verbal exchanges. After two decades of the emergence of these spaces of virtual interaction, new discursive practices on the web have appeared and with them, new forms of violence that occur not only in forums, chats or blogs but in practice - like the newspapers- that they seemed beyond these verbal wars. In this paper we analyze one of the most widespread interactive practices in the public sphere, the comment in digital newspapers, which -even moderately- is common to find this type of behavior. In this paper, we propose to consider what kind of interpersonal / institutional relationship between the newspaper and its readers can sustain this kind of violent exchanges in the public sphere. The theoretical framework of this article is critical and multimodal discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003; Kress 2003, 2010). For the analysis of texts, the notion of image (Goffman1981) and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1978) and contributions to this model made Lavandera (1988), Bravo (2002) and Hernández Flores (2004) allow us to analyze the treatment of the image and the discursive strategies that remark changes in interpersonal and institutional relationship. The systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 2004) and appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) allow us to analyze the evaluative resources in these texts. The corpus analyzed consists of a series of 70 news of one of major media of Argentina: La Nación.com.