Selfie: One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure
Universiti Selangor, Malaysia
ABSTRACT
Selfie is commonly defined as a self-portrait posted online in the social networking sites such as Facebook. The number of selfie photos in Facebook has grown tremendously in the recent years. With the development of mobile technology to the like of smartphones and tablets, the process of taking selfie has been easier as compared to the past. The obsessive selfie-taking has been classified as a mental disorder and many psychologists have categorised this kind of disorder as ‘selfitis’. Looking into the language and linguistics perspective, however, selfie brought about many insights in the form of communication in related to speech act theory. This study was carried out to examine the reasons on why social networkers post selfie and types of feedback retrieved from each selfie photo posted in the Facebook site. A total of 200 respondents were selected randomly from a local private institution of higher learning to take part in the survey. Data from the social networking was also retrieved to analyse types of feedback posted by the respondents in respond to selfie. Overall findings had shown the analysis of frequencies on selfie-types and illocutionary speech acts presented could vary chances for language users to ‘speak up’ in communication.
KEYWORDS
Selfie, self-portrait, feedback, speech act, communication