“This is an erroneous argument”: Conflict in academic blog discussions

• There was a high incidence of conflictual discourse in academic blog discussions.
• Strategies to construct conflict are similar to those in other online polylogues.
• Unhedged disagreement and blunt criticism is higher than in most academic genres.
• Conflict is a strategy for the construction of commenters' online social identity.
• Conflict is related to the purpose of the genre and the affordances of the medium.

Academic weblogs are sometimes used by scholars and interested public to engage in discussion about discipline-specific topics. The nature of the blog and its technological affordances affect the interaction taking place and the strategies used by the participants in the blog to negotiate interpersonal relations. The purpose of this paper is to examine conflict in academic blog discussions (i.e. discussions in the comments sections), to analyze whether the medium features of weblog discourse influence the strategies used to construe conflict and to determine how conflict is used for the construction of online identity. The data for the study consisted in discussions taken from 9 academic weblogs. I analyzed the corpus to get data on the following aspects: (i) the frequency of conflictual acts in each academic weblog; (ii) the strategies used to construe conflict; (iii) the target of the conflictual act. The analysis revealed a high incidence of conflictual acts in academic blog discussions, ranging from mild criticism and disagreement to more severe expressions of conflict, like bold criticism, challenging questions or insults. These results can be related to the participants' desire to construct their online identity by using conflict to defend their values and beliefs and show their allegiance to a particular group.