ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Bell's model and then goes on to suggest how it can be adapted to explain interactions on one online site, Facebook, including the particular audience roles that pertain on Facebook and the strategies available for addressing others. It then shows how this comes together through examples from the author's own research into multilingual Facebook interactions, which focuses on how language choice can be a resource for addressing certain members of the audience and excluding others. Speakers in face-to-face interactions can draw on various resources in assigning audience roles, including physical arrangement, conversational history and linguistic content. The chapter illustrates how people use complex strategies to simultaneously target different groups or individuals within a status update, and how language choice can mark an utterance as more or less private. The conclusion that social researchers reach is that people still care about privacy in the social media age, but that they define and manage it in new ways.
