“Hey There! I am Using Whatsapp”: The Presentation of Self in a Corpus of Romanian Users’ Whatsapp Statuses
“Hey There! I am Using Whatsapp”: The Presentation of Self in a Corpus of Romanian Users’ Whatsapp Statuses

Summary/Abstract: Self-presentation and identity construction have been the focus of research both in naturally-occurring conversation and digital communication. With respect to digital communication, a significant body of theoretical and applied research has focused on social networking sites (especially Facebook, Twitter), blogs, chatrooms, etc., while other means of digital communication such as WhatsApp have been largely disregarded. This article addresses the kind of self presentation Romanian users provide for others in their WhatsApp profile statuses. Its aim is twofold. Firstly, it provides a classification of WhatsApp profile statuses as it emerged from the analyses of my empirical data. Secondly, this work examines the extent to which Romanian users tend to employ humour as a self-presentation strategy on WhatsApp. To this purpose, a corpus of 120 WhatsApp statuses in Romanian was analysed applying both a quantitative and qualitative methodology. This article also intends to make a contribution to the increasing interest in the pragmatic approach to digital discourse.

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