Investigating Facebook walls: A quantitative approach to online community building

From different perspectives, Social Network Sites (SNS) have become a contemporary subject of sociological investigation. In particular, online networking has proved to be relevant to the study of new forms of civic engagement and social mobilization. But how can we investigate SNS interaction as a source of interpretative processes within the public sphere? Can Facebook discussion groups emerged in the local community bolster the emergence of virtual local public spheres? By focusing on a small sample of politically-oriented Facebook groups, this paper aims to show how a Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis - enriched with a Social Network Analysis - of wall-messaging allows one to approach the possible emergence of a virtual local public sphere.