Expressing the Sense of Belonging in the Digital World

Abstract

The processes of maintaining social relationships for both personal and professional goals have been transferred significantly to online venues and modes. Our research focuses on the use of emoji in English and Macedonian in social media as a tool for showing a sense of belonging. Research has shown that emoji are in fact evolving into a separate language specific for its graphic features (Ge & Herring, 2018; Monti et al., 2016) and will soon be universally used and understood (Ai et al. 2017). The aim of our study is that close discourse analysis of everyday social activities such as online chatting can help us understand how we adapt personally and professionally as human beings. For the purposes of this qualitative study, 15 participants with 150 conversations and 10 posts on Reddit created a rich corpus for analysis. We analyzed chats and reactions by English and Macedonian speakers on major social media. The long texts in an uninterrupted time sequence were taken from Viber, Reddit, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Twitch. The findings show that 1) the emotional state of participants and their mutual relationship in real life dictates the conversation and 2) cryptic language and context-bound communication defines the sense of belonging not the sense of fear that the standard language is being destroyed.