Understanding text-making practices involves studying the use of texts, including the communicative functions that texts serve. The status updates I collected were categorized into 11 basic functions, some of which were developed from Baron et al.’s (2005) categories for away messages while some were inferred from the data (see Categories 1, 9, and 11 following this paragraph). In the following, I provide descriptions and examples for these functions to provide a snapshot of the possible ways of using status updates, followed by a summary of the distribution of each message type before and after the change of Facebook prompt:
1. “What are you doing right now?” : This type of status update was a direct response to the original Facebook prompt, and messages were constrained by the technological aff ordances of Facebook (i.e., starting the message with “is” and speaking as a third person) .
• Claudia is listening to Chris Brown’s With You…
• Frances is struggling with the assignment, exam and fi nal project. 2. Everyday life : In this type of status update, the participants talked about
activities in their day-to-day life, including domestic and work-related topics .
• Bates had a lot of meetings this Monday.
• Katy just received a nice call from a friend in U.A.E.
3. Opinion and judgment : Messages of this type expressed and revealed the participants’ beliefs about themselves and others .
• Snow can’t believe CZZ thinks that’s a weird book! • Ariel thinks that no news is good news.
4. Reporting mood : Mood messages expressed participants’ inner feelings and emotions, whether positive or negative .
• Peter is feeling so BAAAAAAAD!!! • Amy is in a good mood.
5. Away message : Away messages on Facebook were similar to those on IM (i.e., letting people know the user is momentarily not at their com- puter); but at the same time, “away” messages on Facebook seemed to have a lower degree of immediacy, with messages indicating the poster’s absence in the past or future .
• Nelson goes to China on Feb 21 & 22. • Angie will fl y to Seoul tomorrow morning.
6. Initiating discussion: This type of message often consisted of open- ended questions with an aim of eliciting responses and comments else- where on the personal profi le .
• Claudia : Is there anything we could do for the Haitians? The whole country is RUINED now...
• Peggy :“點解我句 status msg 會自動消失?” (“ Why has my status
message disappeared? ”)
7. Addressing target audience: As the code suggests, this type of mes- sage was directed to a specifi c audience but not all Facebook contacts . • Katy : take care my love...
• Joey : Just want to say Merry Christmas to all of my friends and your families here in facebook !
8. Quotation: This category of messages shared quotes of songs and famous sayings .
• Amy : ‘Learn from yesterday, serve for today and hope for tomor- row’ What a meaningful and thoughtful saying from Rev. Stephen Leung’s sharing meeting today afternoon!)
• Snow is “I’ve seen you in the shadow”.
9. Silence and interjection: This type of playful message expressed “speechlessness” through punctuation marks such as a series of ellip- sis or question marks .
• Peter : ... • Katy : ?
10. Humor: Humorous messages occurred when the user made jokes or used (visual) language play.
• Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus is Uranus.
11. Facebook-related discourse : This last type of message often expressed opinions about Facebook and its technological aff ordances .
• Claudia hates the new FB interface. • Kenneth quitting facebook .
Figure 6.1 off ers an overview of the use of diff erent communicative functions before and after the Facebook prompt “What are you doing right now?” and the obligatory “is” were removed. The relatively high percent- age of messages expressing personal opinions, judgments, or beliefs about themselves, other people, or events (Category 3) suggests that the partici- pants often ignored the mechanical constraints imposed by Facebook ; in other words, only a handful of messages actually answered the Facebook prompt (Category 1). It is these messages about personal feelings and states of mind that allow users to project their identity on- and offl ine just as IM away messages might do (Baron et al., 2005). Another aspect of self- reporting was the sharing of everyday activities, which could range from what was eaten at lunch to short personal narratives of “breaking news” (cf. Page, 2010). This tendency to post messages about oneself continued even after the Facebook prompt was changed to “What’s on your mind,” although my sample is too small to know for certain whether this was the
40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%
(i) “What are y ou doing right no w?” (ii) Ev eryda y lif e
(iii) Opinion and judgement (iv) Repor
ting mood (v) A
way message
(vii) Addressing target audience (viii) Quotation (ix) Silence and interjection
(x) Humour (xi)
-related discourse (vi) Initiating discussion
Communicative Function
2008–09 2009–10
case in other instances of status updates. However, based on what is already known about texting (Thurlow, 2003; Thurlow & Poff , 2011) and away mes- sages (Baron et al., 2005), communicating mundane and day-to-day topics does seem to be a persistent function of short new media messaging.
Facebook status updates are not as monologic as they seem; some can be highly interactive and relational in nature. The sharing of quotes and links was only one of many ways to relate to target readers. Some partici- pants would use this space to communicate with one particular person, or a selected group of people (Category 7), while other messages were designed to elicit feedback (Category 6)—even if, as Knobel & Lankshear (2008) note, responses are seldom expected. The removal of the origi- nal prompt (“What are you doing right now?”) defi nitely off ered greater fl exibility for the participants to write interactive messages, as indicated by the increased proportion of messages explicitly initiating discussions, addressing a target audience, and sharing quotes. Another way of relat- ing to others was the use of humor. For example, Uranus played with Facebook ’s aff ordance (the default “is”) by repeating the fi rst two words “Uranus is” 15 times (Category 10). Of course, playfulness is a core activity in many new media contexts (Danet, 2001; Thurlow, 2011), and verbal/vi- sual play often serves phatic functions in short messaging. Perhaps in the relatively public environment of Facebook , users feel even more motivated to show off their wit and creativity, allowing target readers to display their own cyber literacy in comments and responses (Katsuno & Yano, 2007). I am well aware that the multifunctionality (or polyphony— see Jones et al., Chapter 2 of this volume) of language means that a message like “Kenneth doesn’t want to tell you what he is doing now ” not only may literally express the poster’s feeling in the moment but also indicates his playful resist- ing of the conventional function of status updates by responding to the Facebook prompt negatively. As such, even though most messages were not classifi ed primarily as “humor,” they could still be perceived as jokes by the reader. Notwithstanding this, my preliminary fi ndings off er a broad understanding of how status updates can be used to serve a wide range of communicative functions, and the extent to which the status updating has become a crucial aspect of everyday life.
In addition to these ways of using status updates, the language and style adopted in the production of the status messages are a crucial aspect of text- making practices. For example, one of the essential practices for bilingual online users is negotiating language choice (see Danet & Herring, 2007). About 60% of the status messages I collected before Facebook changed the prompt to “What’s on your mind” were written predominantly in English.
However, more Chinese and mixed-code messages were identifi ed in the more recent corpus (i.e., after the removal of the constraining “is”). This seems to suggest that the participants became more used to perceiving Facebook as a multilingual medium, partly because of the availability of Facebook in various languages and the easier processing of and access to non- Roman writing systems on the web. In Hong Kong–based new media dis- course, a notable feature is code switching, especially in IM (Fung & Carter, 2007; Lee, 2007b), but this is less so in the data in the present study. One possible explanation is that code switching is more common in face-to-face oral communication than in writing (Li, 2002). Synchronous new media such as IM and online chat are designed to resemble the immediacy and inter- activity of face-to-face talk, which motivates multilingual users to code-switch as they would do in a conversation. Status updating, however, is essentially a “delayed” mode of communication like e-mail and online forums, and thus bilingual users do not feel as strong a need to mix languages as they do in face-to-face talk or online chatting. All this also echoes recent fi ndings about the reduced use of English on Twitter (Semiocasts, 2010).
With regard to the English posts collected, not so surprisingly, the sentence structures became more varied and creative since the prompt “What are you doing right now?” and the obligatory “is” were removed from Facebook . In the interviews, the participants frequently refl ected upon their status-updating experiences by referring to linguistic terms as in “ It depends on the aspect of the verb and the tense ” (Peter) and “ I still keep
saying things with a gerund after deleting the ‘is’ from the interface ” (Frances).
Through such comments, the participants were reconstructing their own theories of “folk linguistics” (Niedzielski & Preston, 2000) or folk gram- matical rules for their status updates. Such rules were often formulated according to Facebook ’s technological aff ordances (e.g., the presence and absence of “is”). These metalinguistic views, together with language choice, gradually became part of the participants’ resources for defi ning the “genre” of status updates.