Changes in Facebook Status Updates: Appraisal, Emoticons and Intensifiers

Ruth PageUniversity of Leicester, UK

Rep22@le.ac.uk

Overview

• A longitudinal study of Facebook Status Updates– Before and after the update

change in July 2008

• Features which signal ‘affective discourse’– APPRAISAL, Textual displays

of emotion, Intensification

• How these vary over time and according to the characteristics of the updater

Facebook’s context

• Participatory, Convergent, Multimodal

• Dynamic– Changes according to

members’ activities (RSS feeds)

– Changes according to the developers’ activities

– Archiving, privacy settings, Updates

Changes to the Status Update

• Before July 2008• Prompt: ‘What are you

doing right now?’• X is......• No comments or ‘Likes’

• After July 2008• Prompt: ‘Share what’s

on your mind’• ‘is’ deleted• ‘Like’ button and

comments appended

Data Sample

• 2000 updates– 1000 from 2008– 1000 from 2010

• 100 White British participants– 90% were the same participants

• Equally divided between men and women• Teens, students, late 20s, 30s, 40s• Second order contacts from my Friend list

General Observations

• Increased range of expression• X is…..– 2008: 45%– 2010: 3%

• Continued emphasis on ‘Breaking News’ (Georgakopoulou 2007)– 2008: 63% of self reporting updates– 2010: 59% of self reporting updates

Affective Discourse Style

• Updaters do not write unmodulated reports: they express their feelings and opinions– Updates about feelings (11% of 2008 sample)

• Beyond Evaluation (Labov 1972)• How might we analyse ‘emotional’ aspects of

talk?– APPRAISAL (Martin and White 2005)– Textual Displays of Emotion (e.g. emoticons)– Intensification (Labov 1984)

APPRAISAL

• ‘[a] particular approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positioning and relationships’– (White 2001: 1)

Attitudinal APPRAISAL

• AFFECT: the speaker’s emotional response; • JUDGEMENT: their moral evaluation of

behaviour; • APPRECIATION: their aesthetic opinions of

entities or processes• APPRAISAL can be positive or negative• Augmented (scaled up)or Mitigated (scaled

down)

Comparison of APPRAISAL2008 2010

Amount of updates with APPRAISAL

39% 48%

Amount of AFFECT

83% 71%

Positive APPRAISAL

59% 64%

Women 59% 62%

Men 41% 38%

Textual displays of Emotion

• Emoticons (smileys, frowning faces, yawns etc)– Ashamed to take last place in the Shitehouse quiz. Too much wine

methinks :-).• (female 40s 2008)

• Laughter (lol, hehehe)– X cant wait to get through this week and be off for a week. It gives

him the chance to laugh at those of you who will be working. HAHAHAHA... hahah... hehehe...ha.• (Male 20s 2008)

• Affection (kisses, hearts and hugs) – Has just had a lovely a lovely meal with her hubby 2 b! Thats rite

peeps, he popped the question and I said yes! Yay! X• (female 20s 2010)

Comparison of Emotional Displays

• Proportion of updates containing an Emotional Display increases– 7% in 2008, 20% in 2010

• Women use more Emotional Displays than do men– 2008: 76% (women) 24% (men)– 2010: 76% (women) 24% (men)

Emotional Displays by age and gender

2008

15-18 19-22 23-29 30-39 40-490

5

10

15

20

25

30

WomenMen

2010

15-18 19-22 23-29 30-39 40-490

5

10

15

20

25

WomenMen

Intensification

• Repetition• Exaggerated qualifiers and quanitifiers• Ritual Utterances• Prosody / Typographical emphasis• Boosters: so, really, very

Comparison of Intensification

• Proportion of updates containing at least one marker of intensification increases– 47% (2008) and 60% (2010)

• Women use more intensification devices than do men, but this gender difference decreases over time– 2008: 60% (women) 40% (men)– 2010: 55% (women) 45% (men)

Distribution of Intensification

2008 2010

15-18 19-22 23-29 30-39 40-490

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

WomenMen

15-18 19-22 23-29 30-39 40-490

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

WomenMen

So, very, really

• Three most common intensifying adverbs• Focus of linguistic change• Very > Really > So• Increase in frequency of combined totals of all

three adverbs between 2008 and 2010• Least increase in ‘very’• Most increase coming from women’s use of

‘so’

Intensification and APPRAISAL

• ‘So’ used to scale up positive APPRAISAL– is soooooooo excited that Lisa Brown and Robert White

are coming to stay tomorrow :-D• This tendency is increased in 2010 – 45% to 48% of appraised updates used ‘so’

• ‘Really’ used to scale up negative APPRAISAL– Miriam is really stupid...and still cant tell north from

south...even with a satellite navigation system!!• But in 2010, women start to use ‘really’ with

positive APPRAISAL

Evolution of Affective Styles in Faceboook

• APPRAISAL, Textual Displays of Emotion and Intensification – All increase in the later dataset– All are used more by women than by men

• Initially, these features are concentrated in the updates written by young female updaters, but now adopted more widely across different age groups and by men.

Why?

• Facebook as a site for fostering ‘affective talk’ and hypersociality

• Expressing emotion and projecting social connection: performing ‘friendliness’?– Increased in settings where speaker and audience are

remote (e.g. personal letters, Biber and Finegan, 1989)– Social environments promote emotional expression– Positive emotions are more social than negative ones

• Does affective style correlate with interactive engagement?

Interactive patterns: ‘Likes’

• Overall, updates written by women attracted more ‘likes’ than did the updates written by men (56% v 44%)

• But a gendered difference varies according to age group– Greatest in 23-29 y/o– Least in 15-18 y/o

teen students 20s 30s 40s0.00%

2.00%

4.00%

6.00%

8.00%

10.00%

12.00%

14.00%

16.00%

18.00%

Femalemale

Interactive patterns: Comments

• Overall, updates written by women attract more comments than to updates written by men (53% - 47%)

• But this gendered difference varies with age – Greatest for 23-30 y/o– Least for 40-49 y/o

teen students 20s 30s 40s0.00%

2.00%

4.00%

6.00%

8.00%

10.00%

12.00%

14.00%

Femalemale

Commenting favors same-sex ‘conversations’Male

commenterFemale

commenterTotal

Female Updater

364 1203 1567

Male Updater

880 496 1367

Total 1244 1699 2943

Interactive profiles and distribution of ‘affective discourse’

• Updates with most interaction written by teenagers (male and female)

• Updates with highest concentration of affective discourse written by women between 19-22 y/o

F15-18

M15-18

F19-22

M19-22

F23-29

M23-29

F30-39

M30-39

F40-49

M40-490

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

Affective DiscourseInteraction

Conclusions

• Frequency of affective discourse increases after the change in template

• General trends which associate affective discourse with women updaters, but this varies with age

• There are gendered patterns of interaction in updating, these vary with age

• Not an authentic measure that people ‘feel more’ or are ‘more positive’

• Status updates as tokens competing within a system of exchanging social capital