Computer Mediated Communication : Facebook

Literature review

Many scholars have explored the role of computer–mediated communication (CMC) in issues discussion. Sites such as Facebook are one of the famous CMC in this world and it can be considered as the representative of the phenomenal growth social network sites have seen in recent years.

Social network sites such as Facebook are clearly becoming important in the daily life of human being and it functions primarily to connect people virtually. In the article entitle “Use of Facebook for Academic Network Learning in Universitas Terbuka-Indonesia”; written by Adhi Susilo, stated that Facebook benefits its users by providing them a channel to express their thoughts and emotions. It is believed that Facebook brings advantages in open distance learning. This is because Facebook has important factors that influence learning process in distance learning: interactivity, closed collaboration, interesting context, and a sustainable learning environment, and a new opportunity for innovation. Furthermore, it provides platform for users to enlarge their networking by meeting new people.

Facebook members expressed significantly greater trust in both Facebook and its members, and were more willing to share identifying information. Based on the article entitle “Trust and Privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace” written by Lampe, B.Ellison and Steinfield mentioned that Facebook is considered as more trusty and friendly compared to MySpace. This is because, users can leave comments of pictures and can leave public note for other members on a space on their profile called “The Wall” where other people can view and read as well. Facebook also reveals more information about its users and in line with previous article; it helps users maintaining contacts with old friends at the same time get the chance to know them better.

Facebook is a source of information, place of communication and a comprehensive arena of performance. The idea is to help people access and display as much information about our self and others as we want and at the same time pursues connections between the heterogeneous mess of people, components, and ideas. Thus, it provides fastest and easiest way to find any specific persons. The entire system is organized around exploring and engaging other participants. In the article entitle “Changes in Use and Perception of Facebook” written by Dwyer, Hiltz and Passerini it is said that Facebook had undergone certain changes for the sake of betterment. As the result, Facebook users are satisfied with the site and their attitudes toward Facebook also change over time.

Analysis and Findings

Discourse functions help people to understand the meaning of a conversation. There are sentences contain functions such as to give a statement, to question (rhetorical, exclamatory, tag), directive, and exclamation. Communication is a tool of interaction between two people or more. Through Facebook, a worldwide established social network site, people can communicate with people around the world with no boundaries. 

            Some of the discourse functions found in the corpus are to; agree and disagree, to suggest, order, provide information, to apologize and to inform. 'To question' is one of the functions during a communication with another speaker. For example, “Where can I get these manga from, ebay?” refers to where a user got his /her comic book. Another example is “omg u like james patterson too?”. From both examples, we can see two different functions of the question mark. The first example is to question whereas in the second example is to confirm.

            Another discourse function found in the corpus is to agree. There are loads of examples from the corpus that shows the users tend to agree with others on certain issues such as books, magazines, and their favourite characters. For instance, “And hey, i love eragon, eldest and brisingr too!”. The use of the word “too” suggests that the users share the same interest. However, there is also times when the users disagree with opinions in the conversation, for example, “honestly speaking, I’m not a fan of books except fanfictions”.

Next, we found out that most of the users tend to ignore the function of the upper case as to differentiate between general and specific nouns. For example, most of the users used lower upper case when they wrote the novel’s title; “do u read maximum ride?”. 'Maximum Ride' is a title of a novel that is written in a lower case. The same goes to Eragon, Eldest and Brisingr, which are written  in lower case as well. Other than that, the users use the capital letters to stress on their excitement  with another party to share their opinion. For example, “ I KNOOOOWWW HE IS SO GOODLOOKING!!!" was found in the corpus.

Self-expression is about being able to explain what you mean or what you want to say. It's about expressing yourself in words, music, painting, or any activities to express your inner feeling. However, in a conversation between a group of users on Facebook, nothing much can be observed. The users only have text as the medium to show their expression. This matter leads to the invention of emoticons. An emoticon is a facial expression represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood.

The most common emoticon is the happy smile, :) .It is essentially positive in nature and conveys cheer. It is usually used to thank someone, to greet a person, or other situations where warmth is to be conveyed. For example, in the corpus provided, "remember me is funnay XD, i recommend the book :)".

However, we can see the regular use of ^^ instead of :) along the corpus. Both emoticons actually mean the same, a happy smile. :) is one of very few Western style emoticons found. The rest of the emoticons like >.<, ._. , D:< and especially XD, are all from the East. We did a simple research and found out it is because of the rise of anime on 1996 all over the world, especially among Asian countries. Anime is commonly refers to Japanese animation. Most of the Facebook users participated in the corpus provided were born between 1987 and 1992, so the posibility that they grow up watching anime is there. The later research we did proved that 8 out of 9 users participated watch anime as they grow up, and a few of them are still watching it now eventhough they already in their 20s. That explain the regular use of eastern emoticons in the corpus.

Turn-taking is one of the basic mechanisms in conversation, and the convention of turn-taking varies between cultures and languages. However, when it comes to asychronized communication, every users are facing the same problem regardless of different culture. It is because the conversation is not spontaneous, and the new response will only appear after the page is refreshed. So the possibility of one or more message of being ignored is always there. For example, in the provided corpus, a person asked who played 'Luke' in the Percy Jackson movie and because of the turn taking problem, more than one person answered the question.

In analyzing the lexical characteristics, it can be seen through the recurrent lexical choice. For the lexical choice, two items will be analyzed; noun and verb. In this corpus, it seems that there are high occurrences of noun that are related to the title of books, movies and the name of the authors. For example the word "Percy" is appeared 15 times in the corpus where the word itself is being used for different functions according to the users' intention. The word sometimes might refer to the title of the book "Percy Jackson", or "Percy" as the character in the movie itself. The word "book" is the highest occurrences that can be seen in the corpus which is 44 times.  In addition, there is also high occurrence of verb like "love". The word "love" is being used 19 times in the corpus. Since the theme of the conversation is about "favorite books", it shows the rationality of the reason for such words mentioned to be used repeatedly throughout the conversation.

Another language function which will be analyzed throughout this corpus is politeness. According to Yule (1996), politeness is defined as the means employed to show awareness of another person's face. Positive politeness can be defined as a face saving act which is concerned with the person's positive face in the meaning to show solidarity, sharing the same interest and having a common goal. In the corpus, there are many since the users are an acquaintance for instance the statements "Don't you think Logan is so damn gorgeous?" is considered as positive politeness. Another aspect of politeness which is bald on record is defined as directly address the other as a means of expressing the needs which might lead to face threatening act. However, the bald on record does not cause face threatening act if it applies among acquaintance. Thus, the examples of bald on record are "go watch!! its a must!", "u better do so!", and " finish it asap XD!!".

Conclusion

A couple of weaknesses of computer-mediated communication (CMC) were spotted after an analysis was done. The most obvious is the failure to use upper case on necessary words, especially on novels and books. Most of the users are more comfortable using all lower case in their sentences, leads to a misunderstanding of the message to people who are not familiar with the books, novels and dramas. Even though such problem did not occur in the corpus as all the users are sharing the same interest, so all the titles are familiar to them, it became a problem to the analysers who never heard of the titles such as Eldest, Brisingr and Baker King Takgu. Another weakness spotted is having more than one person responding to a certain question due to the turn-taking problem. Since the conversation is not spontaneous, the users need to refresh their page to see the new response, and hence, it leads to a problem. However, regardless of these weaknesses, the conversation is still considered a success. The use of other discourse functions mentioned in the findings with the help of the emoticons leads to a very effective conversation where all users from various parts of the world and of different ages can understand each other perfectly without any confusion came up during the conversation, proving the role of Facebook as a place of communication.
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III 
References

  

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