Impoliteness across Online Platforms

Postgraduate Thesis uoadl:2874918 387 Read counter

Unit:
Κατεύθυνση Γλωσσολογία: θεωρία και εφαρμογές
Library of the School of Philosophy
Deposit date:
2019-05-24
Year:
2019
Author:
Teneketzi Korallia
Supervisors info:
Μαρία Σηφιανού, Ομότιμη Καθηγήτρια, τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Μιχάλης Γεωργιαφέντης, Επίκουρος Καθηγητής, τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Βασιλική Μητσικοπούλου, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Original Title:
Impoliteness across Online Platforms
Languages:
English
Translated title:
Impoliteness across Online Platforms
Summary:
The Internet and the various social media platforms constitute a space where users exercise their right to free speech by participating in polylogues. Being able to speak one’s mind is essential in interactions, though it may provoke face-threatening behavior. In fact, impoliteness is not that rare in online communication, especially when highly contentious issues are discussed. The aim of this work is to examine discourse across three online social media platforms (i.e. Twitter, YouTube and Reddit) and attempt to determine whether the individual features of the platforms have an impact on the amount and form of impoliteness employed by their users. To this end, I concentrate on a single topic, that of the July 2018 wildfires in Attica, Greece.
Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are followed since their combination is believed to offer great benefits to any kind of analysis. Three corpora were compiled, one for each of the platforms studied. Small but representative samples of them were qualitatively analyzed on the basis of the two major impoliteness types: implicational and conventionalized, and their subcategories. In addition, swearword keywords were extracted by means of corpus analysis tools and analyzed comparatively across the three corpora.
This joint analysis revealed that YouTube involved a great deal of (conventionalized) impoliteness which could be due to factors such as the total absence of moderation, of post length limit and of detailed personal profiles as well as the presence of videos as stimuli for interaction. Twitter was second in terms of the amount of face-threatening behavior observed among its users, probably influenced by the dual purpose of its use, which was initially to inform and later to criticize, the 280-character restriction on tweets, the permanent display of posts on one’s profile, the lack of moderation, the extensive use of multimodality and other inherent Twitter affordances like hashtags. Considerably less impoliteness was found on Reddit, whose forum-like nature makes it a place that mostly invites civil interaction. Implicationally impolite posts outnumbered conventionally impolite ones, perhaps owing to the heavy moderation, the existence of public profiles and the size and coherence of the user community. It is concluded that, due to their characteristics, platforms seem to attract a certain userbase with its own motives and mindset, which in turn shape the impoliteness found within them.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
impoliteness, conflict, online communication, social media platforms, youtube, twitter, reddit, corpus linguistics
Index:
Yes
Number of index pages:
1
Contains images:
Yes
Number of references:
80
Number of pages:
80
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