Quoting on Facebook. An Attempt at a Categorisation for Quotations on Social Network Sites

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Augsburg, language: English, abstract: According to boyd and Ellison (2007:2), “Social network sites [are] web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” People use such services to represent their personality online, thus facilitating communication with friends and also the maintenance of social ties. Clearly, the most successful (and influential) of those networks is Facebook. Established in 2004 as an exclusive community for Harvard students, it opened for the general public in 2006 and has since then gathered over 1 billion members all across the globe, currently holding second place of the most visited websites worldwide. Human communication has always been characterised by the recycling of language. When people talk, a great extent of the content of their discussion is devoted to what other people have already said. In doing so, speakers refer to utterances made by themselves or others inter alia by repetition and paraphrasing. They do so simply to report other people’s words but also to evaluate what has been said. Quoting has also found its way to communication media online, due to the technical properties of computer-supported environments facilitating the act of accurately reproducing a previously made statement. Characteristically, Facebook employs mechanisms of automated text creation and distribution to support the users in making quotations. These mechanisms though, can be very complex and impenetrable. This is why I strive to provide insight into the process of quoting on Facebook in this paper. To do so, I will provide insight into the basics of the scientific field of computer-mediated communication as well as the structural principle of hypertexts in online environments. Following that, I am going to employ a newly shaped definition of the act of quoting by Bublitz in an examination of the most common text actions on the social network site Facebook. Thereby, I plan to come up with a framework of quotations on Facebook in both user-created and software-created texts.