“Keep in mind that I will be improvingâ€: The Opening Post as a Request for Absolution
Journal Title: Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies - Year 2015, Vol 5, Issue 1
Abstract
Creating, sharing, and critiquing user-generated content are increasingly common practices in online environments, as users become active producers, reviewers, and promoters, not just consumers, of content. This paper investigates the functions of the opening posts in an online discussion forum dedicated to user-generated game levels (i.e., mini-games) designed with the LittleBigPlanet digital game series. In the analyzed community, the first post of each thread plays a crucial role, as authors introduce themselves, present their work, and set the stage for discussion. Findings show that the opening post carries a variety of discursive functions: it serves as a creative presentation of content, a self-reflective disclosure of practices, and a passionate call to participation. Moreover, by artfully using these themes, participants construct the opening post as a “request for absolution.†Through an ethnographic discourse analysis approach that draws on politeness theory, this study furthers the understanding of how users discursively construct and seek to increase opportunities for interaction, peer feedback, and social learning in a creative online space.
Authors and Affiliations
Vittorio Marone| The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP10023
- DOI -
- Views 359
- Downloads 16
Innovations in Placing Advertisements on Television: An Analysis of News Channels in India
An accepted fact worldwide is that, advertisements are the most important source of income for any media product. However, in case of News channels in India, they are the only traditional source of income because the o...
Instrumental, Strategic and Political Conception of Corporate Social Responsibility
The corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature defines instrumental, strategic and political approaches to CSR. The strategic approach to CSR in transnational corporations goes beyond the customer orientated shor...
Educational Use of Mobile Phones by Undergraduate Students: An Indian Perspective
As India has the world’s second largestmobile phone user base (over 929.37 million users, May 2011) and Wireless communication has emerged as one of the fastest diffusing media on the planet, fuelling an emergent’...
Characterizing Language Usage in Formal and Informal Webpage Text Corpus
Language is an integral part of any culture. English has changed substantially in the last 1500 years of its use, reflecting patterns of contact with other languages and the changing communication needs of people. The...
The Relation between Positive Brand Emotions and Recall
Brand memory and ad memory is a kind of mental storage that consumers apply to while making decisions about brands and buying. A positive ad memory for a given brand plays an effective role for consumers to develop a p...