Cyberpragmatic Analysis of Indonesian Opposition Politicians’ Tweets

Abstract

The study attempts to describe how opposition politicians construct their transmission of meaning by utilizing cyber-based communication features, particularly in a social media platform. A corpus of 30 Twitter postings (tweets) is qualitatively analyzed within a cyber-pragmatic framework. In analyzing the data, the authors focused on the textual-visual explicature and implicature. In other words, interpreting the politician tweets entails a comprehensive analysis of the processing of the text, visual images, and the identification of possible connotative meanings. The data were collected during the 18th Asian Games 2018 in Indonesia. An underlying assumption for choosing the timeframe is that a multinational sporting event should be neutral and unifying in nature. Thus, it is interesting for the authors to study how the Indonesian oppositions compensate their responses through Internetmediated communication.