“I love u the most!”: CMC Acts and Politeness Variation in Instagram Live Videos
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper is an empirical study of the use and variation of CMC acts (Searle, 1976; Herring, Das & Panumarthy, 2005) and politeness behaviors (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Herring, 1994) in two Instagram Live Videos datasets from Spain and the United States. Using a Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis approach (Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015) to researching online discourse, previous studies have found that reactions and claims are common CMC acts in certain sites (Ishizaki et. al, 2005). It has also been documented that males tend to violate negative politeness by using more direct, unmitigated language than females, who also show more listenership, engagement, and polite discourse (Herring & Kapidzic, 2015). A total of 1000 tokens were collected between both datasets, divided into 720 textual messages and 280 oral utterances across 5 different videos. Utterances were coded for gender in a binary male/female category, type of CMC act, and politeness behavior according to the effect on the addressee’s face. Results show that, while the textual medium yielded similar patterns in terms of CMC act use in both languages, with a preference for reactions, greetings, and inquiries, the oral data presented more individual differences, probably as a consequence of the types of online personas these two users are performing on the internet. An analysis of gender and regional variation suggests that females show more engagement and listenership, while males seem to use more assertive, informative language. Politeness behaviors were highly established, with a preference towards observation of positive politeness and violation of negative politeness phenomena, but the English-speaking user shows an overwhelming tendency to observation of positive politeness behavior in his oral data. Findings suggest that this multimodal CMC medium might be highly conventionalized by its users, who join celebrities’ livestreams to interact with them by asking questions, reacting, and making personal claims. The interface layout of Instagram Live Videos seems to shape this kind of many-to-one communication, inasmuch as its technical properties such as screen tapping for fast typing favor certain CMC phenomena.
Downloads
Article Details
The Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers (the "Publisher") and Author(s) agree as follows.
1. Publication and Promotion: In consideration of the Publisher's agreement to publish the Work, Author hereby grants and assigns to Publisher the non-exclusive right to print, publish, reproduce, or distribute the Work throughout the world in all means of expression by any method known or hereafter developed, including electronic format. Author further grants Publisher the right to use Author's name in association with the Work in published form and in advertising and promotional materials.
2. Copyright: Copyright of the Work remains in the Author's name.
3. Prior Publication and Attribution: Author agrees not to publish the Work in print form prior to publication of the Work by the Publisher. Author agrees to notify IULCWP before publishing the Work elsewhere.
4. Author Representations: The Author represents and warrants that the Work: (a) is the Author's original Work and that the Author has full power to enter into this Agreement; (b) does not infringe the copyright or property of another; (c) contains no material that is obscene, libelous, or defamatory. Author shall indemnify and hold Publisher harmless against loss of expenses arising from breach of any such warranties.
5. Licensing and Reuse: Reuse of the published Work will be governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). This lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the Work non-commercially; although new works must acknowledge the original IULCWP publication and be non-commercial, they do not have to be licensed on the same terms.