MySpace comments
| Pages | 58-76 |
| Published date | 20 February 2009 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520910944391 |
| Date | 20 February 2009 |
| Author | Mike Thelwall |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
MySpace comments
Mike Thelwall
School of Computing and InformationTechnology, Universityof Wolverhampton,
Wolverhampton, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments
to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research.
Design/methodology/approach – English comments from a representative sample of public
MySpace profiles were examined with a collection of exploratory analyses, using automatic data
processing, quantitative techniques and content analyses.
Findings – Comments were normally for general friendship maintenance and were typically short,
with 95 per cent having 57 or fewer words. They contained a combination of standard spelling,
apparently accidental mistakes, slang, sentence fragments, “typographic slang” and interjections.
Several new creative spelling variants derived from previous forms of computer-mediated
communication have become extremely common, including u, ur, :), haha and lol. The vast majority
of comments (97 per cent) contained at least one non-standard language feature, suggesting that
members almost universally recognise the informal nature of this kind of messaging.
Research limitations/implications – The investigation only covered MySpace and only analysed
English comments.
Practical implications – MySpace comments should not be written in, or judged by, standard
linguistic norms and may cause special problems for information retrieval.
Originality/value – This is the first large-scale study of language in social network comments.
Keywords Social networks,Online operations, Internet,Information retrieval, Language,
Written commucations
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The public messages exchanged by social network site members, sometimes called
comments or wall postings, are a new type of text-based communication. These
messages are unusual in that they are public – either world-visible or visible to all of a
members’ friends – and can be permanently associated with the identity of the poster,
more directly and publicly so than listserv postings. The widespread use of social
network sites in many countries (Boyd and Ellison, 2007) makes them an important
object of study and also gives an opportunity to investigate informal interpersonal
communication on a larger scale than previously possible.
Earlier forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) for interpersonal or
informal communication have previously been investigated – typ ically, with a case
study approach or a potentially unrepresentative sample due to the limitations of the
technology. These studies have shown the emergence of many forms of non-standard
English and distinctive stylistic features (reviewed below). In addition to the intrinsic
linguistic interest of these phenomena, online information retrieval can be impacted
because if social network sites have casual language and spelling errors, then this
could make them difficult to search effectively (see Baron, 2003) and difficult to
automatically translate (Climent et al., 2007). Moreover, if social network profiles are
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
OIR
33,1
58
Refereed article received
21 June 2008
Approved for publication
23 August 2008
Online Information Review
Vol. 33 No. 1, 2009
pp. 58-76
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520910944391
typically not rich in useful information, then search engines might wish to allocate low
search rankings to them and a convenient automatic mechanism for this would be to
penalise slang or incorrect spelling.
The study presented here focused on English language comments in one social
network site, MySpace, using an exploratory set of predominantly quantitative
analyses. The choice of MySpace was due to its popularity, apparently being the most
visited site for US web users at the start of 2007 (Prescott, 2007), and because of its
amenability to quantitative analysis (Escher, 2007). The analysis included text length,
common words, spelling, grammar and rare words. This was an initial exploratory
study to highlight issues and patterns for future in-depth investigations.
Language in computer-mediated communication
Language and CMC types
Perhaps the key issue for early online language researchers was the degree to which
internet language is similar to spoken rather than written language (Baron, 2003;
Crystal, 2006). Previous findings have been ambiguous – its linguistic features can fit
between the two (Ko, 1996 – an educational chat room) or can be different from both
(e.g. modals in Yates, 1996 – a student-oriented discussion forum). Similarly, a study
showed that language in an international Bulletin Board System (BBS) covering a
mixture of recreational and serious topics tended to be more informal than most
written forms and was quite similar to the language of formal interviews, but with a
higher degree of abstract information (Collot and Belmore, 1996). The problem with
attempts to generalise from such studies is that “internet language” is too broad a
category and a more nuanced approach is needed (Herring, 2002).
There are many different computer-mediated communication (CMC) modes (Baron,
2003), including e-mail (one-to-one, asynchronous), instant messaging (one-to-one,
synchronous), blogs (one-to-many, asynchronous), live streaming broadcasts
(one-to-many, synchronous), chat applications (many-to-many, synchronous) and
listservs or wikis (many-to-many, asynchronous). Online CMC also varies in the extent
to which it is product-oriented or process-oriented (Baron, 2003). Those with more
durable outputs (e.g. blogs) probably tend to use more carefully chosen language
whereas those with less durable outputs (e.g. chat, instant messaging) are more
oriented towards the process the users are engaged in and the use of casual language
may be more appropriate.
Since CMC services vary in their capabilities and usages, it is useful to have
dimensions through which to compare and analyse their language. In particular, it is
important to recognise that internet language is not homogeneous, but is socially
constructed by users appropriating available technologies (Androutsopoulos, 2006).
For example, although similar kinds of messages are possible with instant messaging
and mobile phone text messages, they are integrated in different ways into people’s
lives because of their differing conveniences (Grinter et al., 2006).
Herring’s (2007) faceted classification scheme summarises a wide range of factors that
may influence the language used within a particular CMC context, distinguishing
between medium and situational types. Partially quoting from Herring (2007), the
medium factors include: synchronicity (asynchronous/synchronous), persistence of
transcript (how long the record of the communication is likely to survive), maximum
permitted message length and whether the messages are private or anonymous. The
MySpace
comments
59
To continue reading
Request your trial