Social Media Discourse of Chuka University Students on Whatsapp Platforms

Abstract

Social media influences the way people communicate with one another and it is gaining popularity owing to the technological milestones made in the world of communication. As people communicate via social media interaction platforms, language naturally and inevitably experiences some changes. Therefore, there was a need to undertake a linguistic study to account for such changes and developments in language use. The main concern of this study was to analyse the university students’ social media discourse. The discourse analysed sprang from WhatsApp interaction platform. The WhatsApp groups utilized were those formed by Chuka University students in Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. Particularly, the following objectives guided the study: analysing the politeness strategies used in social media discourse, describing the unique features of language inherent in the university students’ social media discourse and explaining how identities are marked in the social media discourse. The study employed an eclectic approach whereby three theories; Genre Theory by Macken et al, Social Identity Theory by Tasfel and Politeness Theory by Brown and Levinson were used in analysing data. Genre theory was used to examine the distinctive features of language, Social Identity Theory analysed the data on how linguistic identities are marked through language in social media while Politeness Theory shed light on politeness strategies used in the social media discourse Some of the features that the study sought to analyse included phonological and morphological conditioned word formations, the nature of sentences, code switching and mixing, how paralinguistic and suprasegmental features are represented in social media discourse. A descriptive research design and the qualitative technique was employed to analyse data. Both Snowball and purposive sampling procedures were used. Snowballing was used to establish the WhatsApp groups that were used by the students, while purposive sampling procedure was used to selectively collect texts from WhatsApp groups. The texts that were purposively selected were those that showed politeness strategies, indicated how the university students created identities and those with linguistic features that characterized university students’ social media discourse. The researcher collected a total of 116 texts and this sample was adequate for this study. The rationale for choosing WhatsApp was the fact that there was a paucity of linguistic studies based on this interaction platform despite its popularity. This document contains seven chapters; chapter one, two and three which comprise the introduction, the review of related literature and research methodology respectively. Chapter four presents the features of language at the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic levels. The study findings revealed that social media discourse is a hybrid between written and spoken discourse that uses language in a distinctive manner and it is characterized by such features as phonographic, semasiographic, logographic, prosodic, paralinguistic, word formation processes, code switching and mixing and these features are depicted in a peculiar manner. Chapter Five entails the creation of identities by the university students. The study findings in chapter revealed that identities are created by using a special register/ jargon, multimodality, and through indexicality. Chapter Six deals with politeness in social media and the findings indicated that four categories of politeness strategies as postulated in the politeness theory were manifested in social media discourse of the university students. Chapter seven provides the summary of the findings, conclusions and recommendations. This study sheds light on the language usage and its dynamics. It will hopefully enrich knowledge on the various tenets of the three theories used: Genre Theory, Politeness Theory and the Social Identity Theory.