Emotional self-presentation on WhatsApp: analysis of the profile status

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Emotional self-presentation on WhatsApp: analysis of the profile status

Carmen Maz-Arevalo, Complutense University of Madrid

Abstract

Self-presentation can be defined as “the process through which individuals communicate an image of themselves to others” (Yang and Brown, 2015: 404) and it is an essential part of human communication. Self-presentation has been widely studied both in face-to-face communication and online. Most online research, however, has focused on social networking sites, blogs, chatrooms, etc. while less attention has been paid to other online means of communication such as WhatsApp despite the growing importance of WhatsApp as a means of communication. The present paper aims to redress this imbalance by analysing self-presentation on WhatsApp; more specifically, by paying attention to emotional self-presentation in profile status. To that purpose, a corpus of 206 WhatsApp statuses was gathered in Spanish. Results show the existence of recurrent patterns connected to variables such as sex The term “gender” has been purposefully avoided (and hence the use of “sex”) given that its social components (e.g. the participants' sexual orientation and identification with gender independently of the biological sex) have not been considered in this preliminary study. Future research intends to zero in on social gender, for instance by means of interviews with participants so as to ascertain their gender adscription. or age, which play a crucial role in determining the emotions users choose to display in their profile status.

Keywords: self-presentation, emotions, WhatsApp, Spanish

Эмоциональная самопрезентация в WhatsApp: анализ статуса профиля

Кармен Маис-Аревало, Мадридский университет Комплутенсе

Самопрезентацию можно определить как процесс передачи собственного имиджа другим (Yang and Brown, 2015: 404). Она составляет важную часть коммуникации и активно изучается исследователями как в сфере непосредственного межличностного, так и он-лайн общения. Однако основные исследования он-лайн самопрезентации базируются на материале социальных сетей, блогов, чатов и т.д., в то время как другим способам коммуникации, например WhatsApp, уделяется меньше внимания, несмотря на их возрастающее влияние. Цель данного исследования -- восстановить баланс путем анализа самопрезентации на WhatsApp, в особенности ее эмоциональной составляющей в профиле статуса. Для достижения этой цели был проанализирован корпус из 206 статусов WhatsApp на испанском языке. Результаты показывают, что существуют определенные шаблоны, различающиеся в зависимости от пола и возраста и играющие важную роль в выборе эмоций, которые пользователи решают показать в профиле статуса.

Ключевые слова: самопрезентация, эмоции, WhatsApp, испанский язык

Introduction

Self-presentation can be defined as “the process through which individuals communicate an image of themselves to others” (Yang and Brown, 2015: 404). It is a dynamic process which develops along five major interconnected dimensions: intentional- ity, depth, positivity, authenticity and breadth (Kim and Dindia 2011, Yang and Brown 2015). Self-presentation can also trigger very emotional responses. For example, disclosing personal emotions can be positively valued by other members, who might reciprocally disclose their own emotions in return. However, disclosing too much can also have counter effects and lead to rejection by others both in face-to-face and online contexts (Altman and Taylor, 1973).

Nowadays, with the increasing use of Internet to communicate, self-presentation takes place not only face-to-face but also digitally in the form of the profile or user status. As rightly argued by Attrill (2012), however, different settings will lead to different types of self-presentation. In the case of Facebook and WhatsApp, for example, the interface provides users with the possibility to offer semiautomatic self-disclosure by choosing from the available options. However, most users prefer to edit their own status. This interface personalization is hence exploited by users to their own advantage so as to present themselves in a specific light (e.g. humorous, tender, sophisticated, wise, etc.) which makes them unique and different from the others. As Yus (2017: 78) points out:

An example is interface personalization, which in theory should generate an offset of positive effects in the way the user feels that he/she is treated as a unique individual whose specific preferences and usage patterns are attended to by the app. Users like to feel part of the group, network or community, but they also like to “stand out from the crowd,” to feel unique in how they experience the app.

Indeed, most WhatsApp users tend to carefully select both the picture and status that other users will see whenever they exchange phone numbers. As evidence of the importance of the status, we just need to recall what happened last 24^th February 2017 when, coinciding with WhatsApp 8^th anniversary, its creators launched a new version of its “status”. Rather than allowing users to include a short text next to their profile photo, the new version permitted to share a 24-hour status in a similar way to that of Snapchat. Users' massively negative response, however, forced WhatsApp to restore the past statuses just one month afterwards (24^th March 2017), after the web was flooded with complaints and queries about how to get back to the textual status. This demonstrates that, far from being a frivolous matter, most users dearly value the opportunity these statuses provide for them as a self-presentation strategy. The aim of this paper is to delve into the kind of self-presentation users provide for others in their WhatsApp profile statuses, more specifically, whether Spanish WhatsApp users tend to reveal their personal emotions as a self-presentation strategy.

It is important to mention that the speaker's expression of emotions has been traditionally considered as an expressive speech act (Searle, 1969). However, given the heterogeneity of Searle's category of expressives, I shall follow Weigand's (2010: 166) more specific denomination of emotive acts, which she defines as statements “which focus on the speaker's emotional involvement [... such as] emotional affect or being overwhelmed by emotions” (emphasis in the original). Within self-dimension and its five interconnected dimensions (i.e. depth, breadth, authenticity, positivity and intentionality), emotional statuses are related to the dimensions of depth (i.e. level of intimacy of the presented information), and can also be related to positivity (in the case of positive emotions) and authenticity (i.e. degree to which the disclosed information accurately reflects reality). As for intentionality (i.e. the fact that the user is intentionally using this information to present him/herself), the expression of emotion is clearly intentional. Hence, the only dimension which does not play a significant role in the expression of emotion in WhatsApp statuses is breadth, understood as the frequency with which users display personal information (Yang and Brown 2015). Breadth, however, is directly linked to the new WhatsApp status, where users can share new personal information every 24 hours. The study of the new WhatsApp status might also open new avenues for future research, but it is unfortunately beyond the scope of the present study.

Taking the above into account, I intend to answer the following research questions:

1 Do WhatsApp users display emotional status (i.e. emotive speech acts) as a self-presentation strategy? If so, to what extent and in what frequency?

2 What are the linguistic realizations to express emotive speech acts (emotives henceforth) as a self-presentation strategy?

3 What kind of emotions are expressed by users when presenting themselves in WhatsApp?

4 Do the sociological variables of sex and age play a role in the use of emotives as a type of self-presentation strategy?

The rest of the paper is structured as follows; section two below briefly revises the literature on the concept of self-presentation and its study in digital communication Traditionally, the term computer-mediated communication (shortened as CMC) has been employed. However, this term no longer represents the kind of communication that may take place using other devices such as Smartphones or tablets. For this reason, digital discourse and digital communication are increasingly being used., with a special interest in studies focusing on WhatsApp. Section three describes the methodology, more specifically the criteria followed in the compilation of the corpus and its description. The fourth section discusses the findings and results in relation to the research questions before offering the conclusions in section five together with some pointers to future research or research already in progress.

Literature review

Self-presentation has been widely studied both in face-to-face communication and online. Most online research, however, has focused on social networking sites (especially Facebook), blogs, chatrooms, etc. (cf. Bronstein 2012, Garcia-Gomez 2010, Papacharissi 2011, van Dijck 2013, Zhao et al. 2008) while less attention has been paid to other online means of communication such as WhatsApp (Calero-Vaquera and Vigara 2014, Sultan 2014, Sanchez-Moya and Cruz-Moya 2015a, 2015b) despite its ever increasing popularity as a means of communication, with 1.2 billion worldwide users in January 2017 According to the web Statista, WhatsApp had a thousand two hundred million active users in January 2017, which makes it the most widely used mobile messaging app worldwide (together with Facebook Messenger).. This is probably why WhatsApp is increasingly attracting researchers' attention. Most studies up to now, however, have often adopted a sociological perspective, focusing on the social effects of WhatsApp amongst its users (Church & Oliveira 2013, Soliman & Salem 2014, Devi & Tevera 2014, O'Hara et al. 2014, inter alia), with a special interest towards its effects on younger users, especially students (Bere 2012, Plana et al. 2013, Yeboah & Ewur 2014, Ahad et al. 2014, Bouhnik & Deshen 2014, Maniar and Modi 2014). This growing interest has also given rise to methodological concerns on data collection (e.g. Vela Delfa and Cantamutto 2016) and medical consequences related to the overuse of the app (cf. Montag et al. 2015).

WhatsApp also offers undeniable breeding ground for linguistic research, even if still under researched. As Calero Vaquera (2015: 112) points out, “WhatsApp interests us as linguists since it has become one more witness of human ability to adapt and colonize communicative competence in any channel” (my translation). This interest has more recently been also emphasized by Yus (2017: 75), who states that “WA [...], immensely popular nowadays and exhibiting interesting interface evolutions for a pragmatic analysis” (my emphasis).

More recently, there have emerged some studies that adopt a linguistic perspective, either discursive or pragmatic (or a combination of both) with a special interest in the multimodalMultimodality is here understood as the combination of two or mode modes (e.g. textual and visual) to communicate. nature of WhatsApp (cf. da Fonte and Caiado 2014) or its use of typographical variation like textese (cf. Sanchez-Moya and Cruz-Moya, 2015a). Calero Vaquera (2015) provides a seminal study on the discursive similarities and differences between WhatsApp, Messenger and SMS, highlighting their hybrid and multimodal nature, especially given by the use of emoticons. Her study offers an interesting set of discursive features, which are subdivided into extra-textual, intra-textual and para-textual characteristics. However, in contrast to the current study, Calero Vaquera's does not offer a corpus analysis of naturally produced data but it is more an overview of WhatsApp characteristics, useful as a departing point for more detailed research. More recently, Yus' (2017) study focuses on the app from a relevance-theoretic approach, emphasizing the relevantly positive effects of its use to boost phatic talk. Most of these studies, however, have focused on WhatsApp either in general terms or on the “conversations” held by its users. Less attention has been paid to how users choose language to present themselves to others through the 139-character blank where “WhatsApp users are prompted to write any message in order to complete their profile information” (Sanchez-Moya and Cruz-Moya 2015b: 52), even if it highly contributes to the user's self-presentation.

In line with the present study, Sanchez-Moya and Cruz-Moya (2015b) also focus on the discursive analysis of 420 profile statuses by Spanish users, focusing on the age variable and the preference users have when editing their profile. On the whole, the authors provide a useful categorization based on the linguistic realization of the profiles, which they initially divide into automatically-generated statuses and self-generated ones. Automatically-generated statuses are those where users simply choose one of the statuses provided by default. In the case of WhatsApp, the default status is “Hey there! I'm using WhatsApp” but users may choose from the following range of 12 other default statuses, mostly showing their degree of availability Translation of the Spanish original. There are users who directly choose to write in English. (Available, Busy, I can't talk, only WhatsApp, Low bat, Only emergency calls, I'm sleeping) or places where they are located (At School, In the cinema, At work, At a meeting, In the gym). Self-generated statuses are those where users manually type a status of their own choice in the 139-blank character gap provided by the app. Within this macro-category, users may choose a purely verbal (or rather “textual”) status, leave it blank, choose just emoji or a hybrid status where both emoji and text are employed. However useful the taxonomy offered, the authors do not delve into the content of such statuses or the pragmatic functions status profiling may perform. In the present study, I intend to partially fill this gap by focusing on a specific type of status and self-presentation: self-generated statuses where users display their personal emotions to others as a way to present themselves. Furthermore, focusing on the expression of emotions can help us observe whether the linguistic It is beyond the scope of this paper to focus on the profile photographs chosen by users. Future research is intended to contrast the kind of self-presentation strategy in the status with that of the chosen profile image. realization of emotions in digital discourse varies with respect to face-to-face communication (Derks et al. 2008) as well as to find out more about self-presentation patterns.

Methodology

The data used in the present study were gathered during a month, with the aid of two other WhatsApp users The author would like to express her gratitude to her husband, Carlos Carvajal, and friend, Yelena Petrovic, for their inestimable help in collecting the data. Without them, this study would not have been possible. All errors, however, remain exclusively my own. who kindly allowed her to use their contacts. Data was not elicited but naturally produced, and collected randomly to avoid any bias. However, to ensure both the ethics and validity of the data, four main criteria were taken into consideration. First, users below the age of 18 were not considered given their vulnerability as minors, focusing on five age spans: 20 years-old, 30 years-old, 40 years-old, 50 years-old and 60 years-old and +60. Secondly, no personal data (proper names, photographs, etc.) that could identify the users in any sense were included to preserve their full privacy. All users were hence tagged according to their age (in their 20s, 30s, etc.), which was provided by themselves or by the data-collectors. Third, to guarantee the validity of the gathered sample, the same amount of female and male users was gathered for each age group (see Table 1). Finally, the amount of users per age group was determined by the ratio of Spanish users of WhatsApp; that is, following the results published by secondary sources such as the webpage Statista and infogr.am. According to Statista, the number of Spanish users of WhatsApp in February 2016 was led by the age group of 40-55, with 39% of users, closely followed by the 16-30 age span (36%) and the 31-39 years- old (25%), as illustrated by Figure 1.

In Statista's results, users of the last group (60s and +60s) still did not have any representation, although this trend seems to have changed more recently, as shown by the results provided on WhatsApp users in Spain in January 2017, where the age range already includes 60-years old and more (even if in the last position), as illustrated by Figure 2.

Figure 1. Distribution of users of WhatsApp in Spain according to age in 2016

Figure 2. Distribution of users of WhatsApp in Spain according to age in January 2017

Thus, in the last months, the number of WhatsApp users belonging to the last population group (60s and over 60s) has slightly increased, entering the scene. Taking these secondary sources into consideration, the ratio of the present corpus was calculated per sex and age so as to ensure the calculated ratio represents that of the Spanish population using WhatsApp as closely as possible. The corpus thus gathered consist in 206 WhatsApp statuses produced by five age groups of both sexes in a proportion replicating the ratio of use provided by secondary sources (i.e. Statista and infogr.am). As in the secondary sources, the age groups leading the number of WhatsApp users are 40s and 50s, followed by 30s and 20s, with the group of 60s and +60s occupying the lowest percentage, as illustrated by table 1.

Table 1 Age and sex of the subjects