Conceptualization and Operationalization of Speech acts in Facebook

This paper will examine the possibility of conceptualizing and operationalizing Habermas’s theory of communicative action and its application to the case of Facebook users in Iran. In order to do that we selected 22 pages from Iranian users, which had highest number of “like” and covered political, cultural, social, entertainment and sports issues. We also reviewed comments left on our Facebook pages and also reviewed some publicly visible pages of a number of users. Then we used Habermas’s theory of communicative action along with grounded theory to operationalize concepts such as freedom, discourse, communicative rationality, and some types of action-speech that could be observed in Facebook. Some of the research results indicate that many types of action-speeches, dialogue that are strategically important take place among Iranian Facebook users. However, it seems performance types of action-speeches (self-disclosures) take place more in private pages than in public pages. The research results also indicate that Iranian Facebook users express their opinions freely in private and public pages. We can claim that based on the results, almost majority of Facebook users follow norms of dialogue and interaction. It could be nevertheless mentioned that some users with low level of tolerance used obscenity to express their anger against some of the comments. This indicated that communicative rationality was not present in some cases.