Facebook Birthday Postings from a Language Ecology Perspective in Russian, German, American English, and French

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to examine Facebook postings from an ecological language perspective as a special type of discourse of "everyday life" with an orientating function, to evaluate the environmental potential of this network that influences the character of the posts, and to determine cultural differences in thinking and expressing birthday greetings on the Facebook platform. The paper outlines some specific features of the Facebook environment or niche such as the reduced characters of the message, the use of abbreviations, simple structures, merging and interaction of written and spoken languages, and the use of graphical signs to convey emotions. The methodological approach was to compile a database by randomly gathering, from various Facebook timelines, 680 birthday postings in Russian, American English, German, and French. The posts were then analyzed according to three dimensions: (1) focus of the greetings on the specific day or years to come / life in general (Western vs. non-Western countries, analytical vs. holistic mindsets); (2) use of nominal structures; (3) stress/emphasis on characteristic features of a person, compliments. Various psycholinguistic and cultural aspects of the verbal greetings from the timelines of Russian, American, German, and French users of the social net are singled out in terms of holistic and analytical types of critical thinking. The data collection shows that while Russians and Germans predominantly display holistic thinking, as expressed in birthday postings of a general character and wishes in general for the upcoming year or years to come, Americans and the French display analytical thinking as their birthday posts are more focused on that special day. Most birthday postings are usually short and have one similar pattern. Americans use a lot of praise and stress personal relations. French postings are very emotional often expressing love and kisses. This study shows that analysis of Facebook birthday postings should be multimodal and complex, taking into account a complex interaction of a number of internal and external factors and a personal inclusion into socio-cultural interactions.

Linguistic and cultural aspects of relationship status on Facebook and Vkontakte

“…This leads to the assumption that, stereotypically, French people pay more attention to the emotions they invest, rather than the stability and legality of the romantic alliance. French birthday postings are also very emotional, expressing love (hearts) and kisses (Karamalak, 2016).…”

“…When birthday greetings were analyzed, French Fb birthday greetings are very emotional and express love, which can be observed through the abundant use of emoticons (smiles, hearts, kisses) and a great number of exclamation marks. The word “kiss” is written very often; however, the spelling of this word in most cases is not correct showing that the emotional state prevail over grammatical regularities (Karamalak, 2016).…”

“…Westerners tend to engage in context-independent and analytic perceptual processes by focusing on a salient object independently of its context, whereas Asians tend to engage in context-dependent and holistic perceptual processes (Nesbett, Miyamoto, 2005). The division into holistic styles of perception, attention, and memory in 'collectivist' (Eastern) cultures and categorization in 'individualistic' (Western) cultures (Martinez et al., 2013) encouraged the analysis of cultural and linguistic peculiarities of birthday greetings posted on Fb, where holistic thinking is traced in general wishes for the whole year or years to come while analytical thinking focuses on the particular day (Karamalak, 2016). Andersen (2012) gives an example of how cognition influences the language we speak: in Western cultures people introduce themselves starting with the name followed by the surname (analytical thinking: perception from object to background), while in Eastern cultures it is the opposite (holistic thinking: perception from background to object).…”

Reseña del libro: Mancera Rueda, A. y Pano Alamán, A. (2020). La opinión pública en la red. Análisis pragmático de la voz de los ciudadanos

“…Mancera Rueda y Pano Alamán 2013a) son principalmente adulatorias en el sentido de que predominan los comentarios positivos entre contactos -cabe preguntarse si por solidaridad o por narcisismo-, en especial cuando se conocen entre sí (Maíz Arévalo 2013). Un ejemplo podrían ser las felicitaciones de cumpleaños en Facebook (Theodoropoulou 2015;Karamalak 2016;Banikalef 2021). En el décimo capítulo, Pano Alamán confirma los hallazgos de Maíz Arévalo (2013) sobre los elogios en Facebook: frente a la conversación cara a cara, las respuestas suelen ser implícitas (emoticonos, GIF, botón de "Me gusta"…), lo que acaba fomentando "una marcada polarización ideológica" y cámaras de eco (p. 183).…”