INTRODUCTION
Social network is a mechanism for mediating distal interaction among people which allows people to follow the lives of friends, acquaintances and families and the number of people on social networks. One of the examples of social networks is Twitter. Twitter is the first microblogging systems that made its first appearance in 2006. Microblogging systems provide a light-weight, easy form of communication that enables users to broadcast and share information about their current activities, thought, opinions and status. Twitter users can stay in touch and keep up with friends regardless of where they are and what they are doing. People update their status or known as tweets, with a maximum of 140-characters, in the form of either spoken or written.
Spoken form differs from written form in several ways. The first one would be, spoken form is less formal than written form where language conventions are broken such as beginning sentences with but. Spoken form is much more dynamic and immediate, therefore precision is not given much attention. In addition, spoken form is more communicative where tone, intention and meaning. On the other hand, written form gives extra attention on grammar and language conventions. Furthermore, written form present ideas in a precise, well-ordered and presented in a more sophisticated way. This shows that written form is more articulate and sophisticated than spoken language.
The objectives of this study are to identify the differences between spoken and written language by analyzing the corpus available and to study the factors that might lead to such use in language. In other words, the corpus which is the compilations of the twitter will be analyzed in terms of its use either in written form or in spoken form. Some of the factors that lead to the used of those languages in the corpus will be discussed in details. The corpus contains 60 tweets from 17 people that was selected randomly.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Huberman, Romero and Wu through their article “Social Networks That Matter: Twitter under the Microscope” discuss the issue of how relevant is a list of “friends” is to members of the network. It is mentioned in the study that scholars, advertisers and political activist see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing. The dataset used in this study contains 309,740 users with average posts of 255, 85 followers and 80 followees. Out of the number of users, 211,024 posted at least twice and they are under the category of active users. Twitter post or known can be categorized into direct and indirect posts. The findings show that 25.4% of the posts are direct which means they are directed to friends, mostly. The findings also show that users who received attention from many people and users who have more followers tend to be more active in posting their tweets. This shows that the number of friends is the driver of Twitter user’s activity.
The article “Why We Twitter: An Analysis of A Microblogging Community” by Java, Song, Finin and Tseng focused their study on microblogging phenomena, particularly Twitter. As a start, they define microblogging as a new form of commucation where users describe their current status in short posts. Microblogging mainly acts as a medium to talk about daily activities and to seek or share information. Furthermore, microblogging systems provide a light-weight, easy form of communication that enables users to broadcast and share information about their current activities, thoughts, opinions and status. Microblogging intentions varied from daily chatter, conversations, sharing information to reporting news. The authors monitor the public timeline of their samples for two months which result in 1,348,543 posts from 76,117 users. These users shared intentions of information sharing, information seeking and friendship-wise relationship.
In the article “Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self - An Investigation into User Appropriation of a Web-based Communications Platform” written by Edward Mischaud discusses the use of Twitter, its features and the people who uses it. As defined by Mischaud, Twitter is a web-based communications platform combining Instant Messaging and SMS that enables subscribers to its service to send short ‘status updates’ to other people. In this article, Mischaud seeks to investigate the extent to which users of Twitter responds to the ‘guiding’ question ‘What are you doing?’. From this question it is possible to find out whether users of Twitter goes beyond this particular question, by deviating to other ‘updates’ or vice versa. By analysing the results obtained, Mischaund concluded that the majority of Twitter users observed are appropriating the platform beyond “What are you doing?”. This article also discusses about the society’s role in shaping technology and the influence a technology’s design may have on how it is used. This research of Mischaud contributes in the understanding of the spoken and written language of the Twitter users. A line can be drawn between the two by applying Mischaud’s method of study.
ANALYSIS
From the corpus that has been analyzed, it is found that there are some differences between the spoken and written form used by the respondents. For example, in spoken- form, most of the respondents are artists or public figures of both women, and men. A few examples of spoken form produced by two public figures are “I just saw the most beautiful young girl. About 5 years old. Lovely hair, lovely smile, lovely face. A stunning girl. She has albinism” and “Soup too salty? Instead of adding more liquid, add raw cut potatoes, It'll absorb the salt. Discard the potatoes...” Artists tend to use spoken form in order to attract attention from their audiences and also to share their opinions or tips. It is because, most of these artists’ followers are their own fans, so it is very important for them to keep their tweets interesting and entertaining to their audiences. More examples of spoken form of tweets by women are “With tears I drive home... Good to do a little or a whole lot of reflection. Will be busy today... Take care everyone!”and “Left leg needs a massage :( Aching :( ”. Through these two examples, it can be said that female users of Twitter tend to share their feelings and show their emotions through the use of emoticons and punctuation marks in their tweets. This could be influenced by the fact that women are more emotional and they like to share their feelings rather than keep them inside. A few examples of spoken form of tweets produced by men can be seen through these two examples “I will be offline for the rest of the day doing some hardcore packing. Take care y'all! May peace be upon you~” and “Been reading all tweets...thank u thank u so much for all ur
Other than the spoken form, status updates or tweets by the users can also be found in the written form. This denotes that the tweets do not contain any spoken form criteria such as emoticons or punctuation marks. Written form tweets are usually produced to give advice or motivation usually in the form of quotes. Examples of written form tweets that are extracted from the corpus available are person A tweets “Knocking other's success doesn't make you more successful. It just makes you a hater” and Person B “It’s better if someone doesn't recognize your existence rather than a person that knows you exist and yet gives you no worth.” The language used here can be categorized as a written language as it is very much formal, usually exist in books or even if it is used in a verbal-communication, people use it as or with reference. Especially users who tweet quotes, these are established words where it is printed again and again in different sources thus it has authority on its own. When one uses this in a communication, it is known that the words are not a product of the speaker but a quote in itself. Therefore if twitter users update their status by using quotes or words of wisdom, it is categorized as a written-form of tweet. It is not just formal but more articulate and sophisticated.
This idea however, does not apply to all the quote-tweets of the users because there are some users who produce their own sayings. With the intention of giving advice, motivation or words of wisdom, it is not possible that users can produce their own. An example of this is when Person C tweets, “Twitter is a river that we share. It flows us forward together. Don't pollute it with hatred, disrespect and rudeness.” This is a piece of advice given by a user who wishes that all Twitter users would not abuse the real usage and intention of Twitter. This advice can be categorized as a written-formed tweet as it is formal and very much sophisticated in its words and structure.
CONCLUSION
Through the analysis, it can be seen that spoken form of tweets are mainly determined through the use of emoticons and punctuation marks. This is due to the fact that emoticons and punctuation marks replace tone, body language and intention in spoken language. The purpose for the use of spoken form in tweets are mainly to share feelings, thoughts and information, to show emotions as well as to share tips. The tendency to use spoken form could be because the Twitter user wants to address people from different background and the tweets carries less-serious tone. On the other hand, written form of tweets are seen to be influenced by the intention of the Twitter user and the intended meaning. As written form carries a more serious tone, tweets of written form are largely dedicated to the purpose of giving advice, words of wisdoms and to motivate.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Huberman B. A., Romero D. M., Wu F. (2004). Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under The Microscope. Retrieved on 11 February 2011 from http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0812/0812.1045v1.pdf
- Mischaud. M. Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self – An Investigation into User Appropriation in a web-based communications platform. Retrieved on 12 February 2011 from http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/Mishaud_Final.pdf.
- Java A., Song X., Finin, T., Tseng B. (2007). Why We Twitter: An Analysis of a Microblogging Community. Advances in Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis. Retrieved on 4 February 2011 from http://books.google.com.my/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8me70KLsvw4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA118&dq=twitter&ots=x4uBcpsg-m&sig=R2kSPvMFkjRdpcVvDMm0GHBRrE8#v=onepage&q=twitter&f=false
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