Category: Tumblr

The internet is a source of innumerable connections and communications, giving us the ability to instantly contact someone miles away or across the country in seconds. But in Keith O’Brien’s The Empathy Deficit, he poses the suggestion that the internet is actually driving humans apart and making us less empathetic towards each other. Distant and isolated. “…New research suggests that behind all this communication and connectedness, something is missing. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979…” (O’Brien) It’s thought by some psychologists that the internet has increased our narcissism, which in turn has damaged our ability to empathize and consider others.

I don’t believe that people are inherently less empathetic. Sure, we take a lot more selfies and play more violent video games, but there isn’t an innate or permanent change that has occurred. We haven’t become unfeeling and cruel monsters. However, the way we are interacting, using social media, and the way we are dealing with certain emotional issues today is definitely hindering our ability to connect deeply with one another. The more we turn to the internet instead of reaching out for help in face-to-face or one-on-one conversation the more we lose the ability to handle and understand our own emotions, and therefore, other people’s emotions as well. Understanding is key to empathy.

There is an uprising of people, especially young adults, using the internet as a diary of sorts. An outsourcing for all their rants and venting. Their problems with school, their parents, the world they live in. Almost everyone has expressed themselves in this way on the internet, maybe about their bad experience at a restaurant or their frustration over their team losing a game. This is common, and usually perfectly okay. But what about those teenagers and adults that use the internet a little more obsessively than that? They use the internet as their only source of emotional release, whether on blogs, sites like Twitter or Facebook or even on websites devoted solely to angry rants. One of those sites, “www.justrage.com” has more than 6,500 rants and 90,000 comments as of 2013 (Martin, Coyier, VanSistine, Schroeder). These people use the internet to cope with their intense emotions, a means of catharsis. But Brad Bushman, professor at Ohio State University, said that the ease with which we rant on the Internet is making us angrier than ever (MacDonald). When we rant on the internet, we think that what we write will be forgotten, and once we cool down we can leave in the past. There are no checks or filters to keep us in place. Our raw emotions can be let out freely. But this only allows anger or sadness to fester. When calling or texting a friend there is often a cool-down period of waiting before venting. This allows those intense emotions to dissipate.

To most people, especially those who don’t deal with mental illness or social anxiety, it might seem like a “no duh” statement. Obviously using the internet a lot is bad for you. How many people’s social circles are largely made up of online friends? But what many don’t realize is that there is actually a large number of people with private Twitter accounts, “finstas” (private Instagram accounts used to spam photos and rants) and Tumblr blogs, places that are the only way they feel they can freely express themselves.

I’ve always been an introvert myself. Being around people drains me and after several hours of socialization, I’m ready to be alone and recharge. I’ve adapted as I’ve grown but when I was a kid it was a lot more difficult. I far more preferred the internet than hanging out with my loud group of friends. I had online friends to talk to, who didn’t drain me in the same way as actually hanging out in real life. I had forums and blogs and text posts to express myself however I wanted. I loved it. Being social without having to leave my house.

At first, there was nothing too unhealthy with how I used the internet. There was a balance between my screen time and being outside and with my friends. But when I turned thirteen, I started to have a lot more personal issues and also began to struggle with depression and anxiety, which only got worse as the years went by. Instead of turning to the people physically around me, I began to isolate myself in my room and stay on my computer or tablet as long as I was allowed. I could be as emo as I wanted on the internet without having to bother anyone that mattered to me. No one online was telling me to shut up or tell me that it was all in my head. Everyone else on Tumblr was depressed too. We were all in it together.

I thought that the internet could fix my problems. If I vented enough it would all just go away. I just had to wait it out and hide in my room and life would continue along until everything was better. I had created a false sense of community and connection for myself.

As years went by and I spent more and more time online, I noticed my ability to empathize and interact with other people around me began to change. All I could think about were my own problems and how very alone I felt (the only place bringing comfort being the internet). The more isolated I felt, the less I sought to relate and understand other people. Being online with people who seemed to perfectly understand me had made me lazy. I didn’t want to put in the effort to empathize or connect anymore.

Empathy might be a relatively new defined concept, only entering the English lexicon in the early 1900s (O’Brien); however, it is beyond important to who we are as a human race. Without empathy, we fall apart. I don’t think we are as in danger as O’Brien’s article seems to suggest, however. I think people still have empathy within them, but true empathy is difficult to find or express on the internet; a place whose culture centers around memes, snarky comments, public humiliation and ridicule.

I believe the way you present yourself on the internet will begin to affect the way you present yourself in the outside world over time. If all you post about or read about is your mental illness or your varied issues with the world and yourself, that is what you will become. The internet, when used obsessively, can eat away at any depth to our personalities and reduce us to caricatures of what we once were.

Some would be familiar with the term “echo chamber” – in which ideas are strengthened by being repeated over and over in a closed system, so there is no growth or change of concepts or beliefs. This often refers to social media in terms of what is recommended to us or what headlines are shown. But I believe it also applies to what we put out into the universe, reflected on ourselves.

Many people might turn to the internet because getting a therapist is too expensive or unattainable for them. Talking to family and friends might be out of the question. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. The internet can educate us and connect us, yes, but above all, we are responsible for our own healing and we can’t become comfortable allowing ourselves to stagnate and dwell on our problems on social media. Reach out in any way you can to have an actual discussion with someone. Allowing a conversation to happen is so much more beneficial than simply ranting on some text post or tweet.

It can, of course, be beneficial to find others who can relate online. Mea Pearson (Holpuch, theguardian.com) sought the internet after she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She was able to create a community that shared stories and insights, bringing people who had previously thought they were completely alone, together. But according to Jen Tombs, that “all-in-together” mindset can quickly become “we-can-never-get-better”.

Jen Tombs (studybreaks.com) wrote an article about Tumblr, a blogging website known for being a place anyone can speak freely and find community with others who might deal with the same disorders or struggles. “It’s helped create a culture where it’s commonplace to talk about depression… However, despite this, Tumblr still doesn’t seem to be a very happy place. Users talk openly about their struggles with mental illness, but no one seems to be healing.” Tombs suggests that you can get stuck in a vicious loop of discussing depression in a purely nihilistic way. “Depressed people enabling each other’s depression”, as she puts it.

Coping mechanisms are very important to people who deal with mental illness. It’s what keeps them going through the day or during particularly difficult times in life. But not all coping mechanisms are created equal. Ineffective coping, or maladaptive coping, are counterproductive to growth and healing. Maladaptive coping and addictions go hand in hand. (Dual Diagnosis) Internet addiction is a bad enough issue as it is, but when combined with isolating tendencies and unhealthy coping mechanisms it can be extremely destructive.

People who suffer from anxiety and depression are more at risk for internet addiction. Online addiction can cause both short-term and long-term effects, including feelings of guilt, depression, anxiety, isolation. There are also physical symptoms of online addiction such as weight gain or loss and insomnia. For someone who is already dealing with mental illness, this is incredibly damaging, and would in no way improve their current situation. While the sense of community and belonging might be a relief at first, using it as the only source of connection will not allow any kind of healing or growth.

I believe empathy is important to healing ourselves. Like I stated before, I believe the more you obsess with yourself and your own problems (and nothing else), and the more you are encouraged to do so, the worse those problems will become. When we empathize, we are understanding ourselves, our own emotions, and the emotions of others. We are forced to acknowledge that we are not the only people in the universe, that we are not truly in isolation, but that we are all very connected. The internet can seem to be a place of connection, but too much of it, with nothing else, and all it becomes is a reflection of yourself back at you. There isn’t any growth or new insights. Just bad habits, obsessions, and damaging coping mechanisms.

There is no cure-all for mental illness. But I would like to hope that there is a level of healing that can be attained, the ability to find peace. And most importantly, finding a way to not slide back into harmful coping mechanisms, which would only make things worse. The internet can give a false sense of comfort and learning. However much information may be stored online, true wisdom and knowledge of yourself comes from taking a step back and realizing that you’re not going to find all the answers from blogs and text posts online. You’re not going to find growth if the only people you talk to are exactly like yourself and in the same place as you. Distancing ourselves from the internet as a coping mechanism and finding healthier options will not only improve our daily lifestyle but hopefully will help us find our way back to understanding and listening to each other, which in turn will restore some of the empathy we might have lost.

Works Cited

1. MacDonald, Fiona. “Sorry, But Venting Online Just Makes You Angrier, Scientists Find.” Science Alert. Science Alert, 15 Aug. 2015. Web.
2. Martin, Coyier, VanSistine, Schroeder. “Anger On The Internet: The Perceived Value of Rant-Sites.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, And Social Networking. Mary Ann Liebert, 20 Feb. 2013. Web.
3. Tombs, Jen. “Why Tumblr Might Be Hindering Your Mental Health.” Study Breaks. Study Breaks, 18 Aug. 2018. Web.
4. Holpuch, Amanda. “‘I Just Feel Less Alone’: How Tumblr Became A Source For Mental Health Care.” The Guardian. Guardian News & Media, 19 May 2016. Web.
5. “How Do You Cope?” Dual Diagnosis Program. Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, 2019. Web.
6. Ramasabbu, Suren. “Expecting Empathy On the Internet.” Huffpost. Huffington Post, 7 July 2015. Web. (https://www.sciencealert.com/sorry-but-venting-online-just-makes-you-angrier-scientists-find)

This section explains the criteria used for creating the corpus and selecting secondary literature, as well as the methodology employed to analyze both.

To assemble the corpus, the first step was collecting as many samples as possible using trending hashtags such as #antivaxx, #vaccineswork, #measles and further similar ones; which resulted in over 200 samples total. Then this selection was filtered again based on the hypotheses (excluding H5), which led to the final corpus, which became the base for the case studies cited in this work (to be found in the appendix).

In order to conduct a thorough qualitative analysis, the quality of the samples far outweighed the quantity, which in this case was disregarded given that the aim was not to gather quantitative data. On the other hand, this also presents a limitation: due to the research being qualitative and no quantitative not enough samples were used to be able to extrapolate the research to a bigger scale conclusion which applies to all discourse on both platforms by both main opposites of the spectrum involved. When discussing results in the summary, the conclusions are meant for what applies to these specific samples. The main aim in doing it this way is to be able to analyze the phenomenon of humor and to understand the users’ different strategies, as well as being able to establish a more detailed comparison of both platforms by looking at concrete examples. Due to the length of this work, it focuses on text-based materials only, which represents another limitation, since most mixed media like memes, reaction gifs and other imagery, which are core sources of online humor, were purposely not included. Further specifics about the corpus are that there is the same quantity of samples for both platforms, a mix of posts from anonymous as well as identifiable users, as well as content posted by both, anti-vaxxers and anti-anti-vaxxers. Despite the specific amount of reblogs per post not having been incorporated as a criterium to select the samples, the final corpus deemed heterogeneous in this aspect, too.

The samples were grouped in different, sometimes overlapping, categories (stated in chapter 4), and analyzed based on the core arguments of three main theories of the field of Pragmatics, namely Speech Act Theory, Grice’s maxims of conversation, and humor theory, which established a frame for analyzing the users’ linguistic strategies. For the first one, the focus was mainly in classifying speech acts present in the samples according to Searle’s taxonomy; regarding the maxims, the focus was on occasions of flouting and extracting implicatures; lastly, in the field of humor special attention was paid to semantic script-switch triggers and cues. Due to space restrictions, not every detail from every sample will be analyzed. How all three fields make up for the constituents of the linguistic strategies being researched is further explained in chapter 3.

Last but not least it is relevant to mention that one more criterium was employed for literature research, that being that the sources quoted – apart from seminal works from the field of Pragmatics – are from latest 1990 but preferably not older than ten years old, given that both platforms being researched are relatively new and increasingly dynamic in nature. In the next section, all important existent publications regarding Tumblr, Twitter, and the topic of anti-vaccination which inspired this work are briefly listed.

This section provides with an overview of the relevant existing literature regarding the topic of antivaccination, as well as existing works based on Twitter and Tumblr samples. Then, the crucial secondary sources of literature which were taken into consideration for this work shortly be mentioned. The fundamental texts of linguistic theory will be outlined in chapter 3.

As far as I could research, there seems not to be any existing studies regarding linguistic aspects of the discourse around antivaccination, which served as motivation to explore this particular area, apart from those already previously stated. There are a few studies centered on Tumblr and Twitter, but most of them do not address the linguistic features of the platforms’ discourse. There are plenty of different approaches to the platforms, but the following are considered to be core readings which led to this work’s conception.

Mccracken (2017) and Kanai (2017) wrote about youth subculture, almost exclusively regarding the ones in Tumblr. As to why the platform is particularly appealing to some specific subcultures, Renninger’s (2014) work on what he called counterpublic discourse proved particularly useful. Cho (2017) proposed the notion of default publicness, another concept which contributes the questions behind Renninger’s motivation, too. Morimoto (2018), as well as Click and Scott (2018), paid particular attention to the concept of fandom, a wide-spread online phenomenon which is strongly present in but not exclusive to Tumblr; nevertheless, it will not be addressed in this paper. Vásquez and Creel (2017) researched what makes a post “relatable” and how creative processes take place in Tumblr’s text posts based on the idea of double voicing. Cho, Maccracken, and Stein are considered prominent scholars in the field and they are working on A Tumblr Book which was announced will cover a broad and miscellaneous scope of essential Tumblr notions, which shows how this platform has slowly but steadily been receiving more attention from a linguistic point of view.

Gillen and Merchant (2013) wrote about communicative practices in Tumblr from a linguistic perspective. Argüelles Álvarez and Muñoz Muñoz (2012) provided with a comparison between tweets in Spanish and in English, extracting similarities regarding the users’ use of language in both languages. Wilkström wrote two papers on hashtags (2014) and animated reported speech (2014) on Twitter. The former enriches Daer’s (2014) research on metacommunicative functions of hashtags. Lastly, Reyes, Rosso, and Veale’s (2013) research regarding irony in Twitter provides a contrasting and enriching view on irony in Twitter, which features different strategies from the Tumblr ones researched by Vásquez and Creel.

The conclusion which can be drawn from the multifaceted studies –which have surfaced mainly over the last ten years, – is that these platforms provide interesting and rich material to a new type of computer-mediated communication; which, despite being in its infancy stages, has great potential for being studied linguistically, but most importantly, within the field of Pragmatics, too. Further reasons as to why these platforms were chosen and the details of their characteristics will be elucidated next.

Application

This chapter is a summary of the results of the practical application of the theories and literature presented in chapters 2 and 3. The main research question of this work is, as the title suggests: In what way do linguistic strategies used by users of both platforms differ from one another? Which of characteristics proposed in the hypotheses distinguish them from one another, if at all?

In order to reply to these research questions, specific features of each platform needed to be identified first. That was achieved through the procedure described in the methods section. Then said features were compared against each other based on the theoretical framework of the three theories of Pragmatics chosen for this purpose.

Each section of this chapter seeks to test a different hypothesis and focuses on different aspects since each hypothesis is considered to be a possible constituent of the linguistic strategies that were sought.

• H1: “The use of hashtags varies significantly between both platforms” If yes: in what way?
• H2: “Are there differences in how speech acts, especially directives, are used in both platforms?”
• H3: Is double-voicing present in both platforms’ samples? If yes, are there are differences in its manifestation?
• H4: “In all humorous posts of the corpus communicative clues or semantic script-switch triggers are present and contrast two distinctly different scripts.”
• H4a: “Both distinctly different scripts are always essentially the same”
• H5: “Humor is used mainly by anti-anti-vaxxers to ridicule anti-vaxxers’ logic”

Due to space restrictions, not every detail from every sample will be analyzed. Short analyses of different samples grouped in different categories are provided with references to the appendix for each section of this chapter. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind the limitations of this study, qualitative in nature, and all the following conclusion apply only to samples of the corpus. It has not been researched to a scale which enables scaling of the results leading to a bigger generalization for both platforms regarding the topic.

Hashtags

This section deals with the use of hashtags in both platforms. The hypothesis is “the use of hashtags varies significantly between both platforms” If yes: in what way? In order to test this hypothesis, the following table was compiled to provide an overview of all 32 samples, the majority of the hashtags which appear on each sample, and whether the nature of the post is advocating against anti-anti-vaxxers or if it was posted by an anti-vaxxer.

In this section, it will be proved whether the same criteria applied for the samples of this corpus, as the ones detected by the two following authors. Wilkström’s (2014) original publication studied hashtag use in Twitter and he regarded them as sources of metacommentary. The categories are the following and are not meant to be “understood as mutually exclusive” (Wilkström 2014: 130): topic tags, hashtag games, metacommentary, parenthetical explanations/additions, emotive usage, emphatic usage, humorous or playful usage, or even memes popular culture references (cf. Wilkström 2014: 133–148). Daer’s (2014) criteria for hashtags as metacommunicative will also be applied. She classified the metacommunicative function of hashtags in social media into 5 rhetorical genres, namely emphasizing, critiquing, identifying, iterating, and rallying (cf. Daer 2014: 13–14) because hashtags are a “dynamic, interactive function of designed software being appropriated by users for tacit, recurring purposes of meaning-making within and across social technologies” (Daer 2014: 14)

Just from comparing both platforms on the table the following observations are possible: Users in Tumblr used more hashtags than users on Twitter. In Twitter Anti-anti-vaxxers address anti-vaxxers in their post using the hashtag #anti-vaxxers (cf. Twitter 1, 2, 4, 9, 10 and 15, see Appendix), whereas anti-vaxxers show a tendency towards using the hashtag #vaccines (cf. Twitter 7, 9, 16).

This is interesting because is the opposite of what was expected. If anti-vaxxers are against vaccination, it could be expected for them to spread the #antivaxx tag, but instead it is being used as a way for anti-anti-vaxxers to counter anti-vaxxers’ discourse. On the other hand, anti-vaxxers using the hashtag #vaccines are not advocating in favor of vaccines, therefore users searching for this hashtag end up finding misinformed assertions about vaccination. In order to illustrate this further, a small analysis will be provided next.

The most notorious contrast of these strategies can be seen comparing Twitter samples number 9 and 16, where the hashtag #VaccinesWork (an assertive on itself) is used in the former by an anti-anti-vaxxer to reinforce his representative speech act and in the latter it is used by an anti-vaxxer to question the message this hashtag is trying to convey. According to Wilkström’s classification, the first use of the hashtag could be attributed an emphatic usage, while at the same time falling into the category of rallying as defined by Daer; whereas the second use of the hashtag could be classified as critique according to Daer and as having a parenthetical function according to Wilkström (2014: 138), since it does not “supply additional information to help readers lacking relevant background knowledge make sense of the tweet”.

Now Tumblr users’ use of hashtags in the samples will be analyzed. It is noticeable, that Tumblr allows spaces between words in a way that Twitter does not. This lacking was the central point to Wilkström’s work (2014: 148) where he states that some users “appear to be appropriating Twitter’s hashtag format as a substitute for features that Twitter lacks, e.g. tagging instead of bolding or italicizing. Other posters appear to be using tagging as an alternative to conventional options that Twitter does not afford”. Apparently, this is a feature Tumblr has that Twitter does not, and which is also exploited by the users, as it becomes clearer further on in chapter 4.

A peculiar trend was the presence of the hashtag #actuallyautistic, which indeed serves to identify, –following Daer’s criteria–, those users self-disclosing their personal experience in relation to vaccine hesitancy. This is the case for samples 1, 10, and 15. In sample 7, identity is implied through the rallying hashtag #autistic revolution, but the user’s definite identity remains ambiguous. Samples 11 and 13 relate to autism content-wise, and the latter is even directly aimed at autistics, but this cannot be distinguished from hashtags only. So, this also serves as an example for hashtags not always necessarily acting as topic markers, related 1:1 to the content of the post. It is in a different way than the Twitter example of #VaccinesWork but it follows a similar principle of non-correspondence between the form and the function of a hashtag. A more radical case of this is Tumblr sample 5, where the poster links the post to absolutely no vaccine-related hashtags, but to politics. This will be analyzed further in 4.7. Another interesting fact is that autistics take an active part of the discussion and fight against misinformation too, in different ways. Through childhood stories like in sample 15, or by addressing their posts to educate or support fellow autistics and other readers, like in sample 1 and 10. This shows signs which tend to confirm Kashian et al. (2017: 275) argument that CMC “promotes self-disclosure”, and Mccracken’s (2017: 151) thesis that Tumblr is a site where “popular culture, socially critical discourse, and peer education collide”.

Regarding posts which were humorous in nature (Tumblr samples 3, 4, 5, 11, and 14). Sample 3 does not indicate humor through hashtag use, whereas sample 4 uses metacommentary hashtags such as #LOL and #funny to emphasize the ironic tone of the joke being reposted. Sample 11 is clearly a critique according to Daer’s criteria, which is also peculiar since one would expect the critique to be in the post itself or implied in a certain way. Nevertheless, as it is blatantly clear on sample 6, too, some users in Tumblr tend to express their views through the hashtags.

The conclusion that can be drawn from this very limited approach to hashtag use on both platforms, which is merely meant to provide an overview, shows that use of hashtags does indeed vary significantly between Tumblr and Twitter posts. In quantity, which is the attribute that strikes the eye the fastest, Tumblr posters used more hashtags. Regarding form and function relation, both occasionally show discrepancies between both, but in different ways given that in Tumblr not all hashtags refer back to the content, they usually fall under different categories –as mentioned before– than the Twitter samples of the corpus, in which the position posters advocate for is usually the complete opposite of the hashtags they employ. Hashtag analysis of Tumblr also showed that some hashtags mark humor as well as the true meaning of the post and that they even serve to identify the users if they wish to disclose personal information, despite using anonymous pseudonyms. As proposed by Renninger (2014: 1521) and Maccracken (2017: 154–155), users in the platform value the privacy this feature grants them, so by disclosing it voluntarily and explicitly, one possibility is that they seek to be trusted on their assertions and personal experiences, as to ascribe more value to their words. On the other hand, it could also help in showing visibility, since it also represents a relatively small fraction of users and creates a higher degree of relatability as Vásquez and Creel (2017: 62-63) propose that “relatability and intertextuality appear to be the dominant principles that characterize highly reblogged Chats.” (Vásquez and Creel 2017: 63).

In this case it could be different, following the assumption that the post should ideally reach as many members of the audience as possible, given that the posters address the subject as of having such a high relevance that they leave that aside and are willing to self-disclose their identity for the sake of being more credible and reaching broader target audiences. This could be one interpretation for this strategy adopted by users.

Some hashtags were also directives, with users compelling members of the public to vaccinate their kids. How they are used in the content of posts will be discussed in the following section.

Use of Directives and Searle’s Taxonomy Applied

In this section, one sample of each platform will be compared in detail and analyzed using Searle’s classification of Speech Acts in order to test H2, which is about whether directives are used differently in both platforms. This aims to provide a window into different types of strategies taken by users. If not directives, then the different kinds of speech acts employed should be listed to be able to provide a partial explanation.

Twitter sample 1 is humorous in essence, displaying irony. The directives used such in sample 1 such as “Please DO NOT”, with the capitalization of the negative form of the auxiliary only reinforce the implicatum, in which with this directive the exact opposite is implied. By formulating this using such marked directives, it only helps in uncovering the ironic tone underlying the statement. This shows one example of how directives can aid in unveiling irony. Assertives are used here in a similar way, granting an almost mocking tone to the arguments cited, which echo those frequently quoted by anti-vaxxers. Directives used humorously in Twitter can also be seen in sample 15 regarding the use of #ProPlague as an alternative, mocking the other user’s clear ignorance about what happened in Europe in times of pest.

In Tumblr’s samples 6, 8, 14, and 16, directives are seen in hashtags, too, such as #vaccinateyourchildren. This hashtag echoes through several samples such as Tumblr 2, where the post begins with a directive, which turns out to be a part of the implicature arising from the flouting of the maxim of Manner in the post due to verbosity and heavy use of hypotaxis. It is at the same time a complaint and a directive. In Tumblr Sample 6, the user resorts to flaring and colorful language to enrich the directives at the end of the post, which only emphasize the user’s infuriation with the topic.

A few interesting observations which resulted from the analysis were the recurrence of representatives on both platforms, but in anti-vaxxers’ posts such as number 6, rhetorical questions marked as expressives and directives as the same time, acting as accusations for the line of argumentation were present. This was to be expected, since anti-vaccination is a very emotionally-charged topic. A similar strategy of asking rhetorical questions is seen in sample 7 and 14, which seems to be a strategy to gain attention and provoke thought without substantiating that claim without any fact. Furthermore, more expressive and representatives mixed were used by an anti-vaxxer to contradict and try and ridicule an anti-anti-vaxxer’s contribution, in this way the user is able to share her opinion while at the same time discouraging others to contradict her given the blatant statement followed by “Biology 101”, as if when questioned one would be the one that is ignorant about the subject. Then the original anti-vaxxer poster accommodates to her style and manages to backhandedly insult her, which is only softened by the hedge “maybe” at the beginning of the sentence.

No declarations were found in the samples chosen, but there were some occurrences of distinct expressives. Tumblr sample 8 and Twitter sample 12 will be compared now to provide some insight regarding the alternative uses of this type of speech act: In Tumblr sample 8 the user transcends humorous discourse and confrontational argumentation lines typical of both groups being studied in this work and decides to express sympathy for unvaccinated children. It is a different reaction than that in all other samples, followed by directives in the hashtag section. In sample 12, user congratulates anti-vaxxers and tells them “good job”. In case that until then the irony had not been explicit through the verbal cues as well as the ellipsis after the combination of a hedge (ya) and a marker of uncertainty (well), which together could be regarded as a colloquial marker of proximity, the contrast of the positive tone this type of expressive should have with the sad face smiley end up clarifying that, again, the dictum is the opposite of the implicatum.

To summarize, apart from declarations, all kinds of speech acts were found, but depending on the context not all of them had the same meaning as the one Searle usually ascribed them. They gain a new meaning without quite being indirect speech acts either. So, users frequently employed combinations of speech acts to convey or support humor and commands, mostly, or to reinforce their authority as speakers.

Double-voicing

This section explores double voicing in both platforms to test whether there is double-voicing present in both platforms’ samples and if there is what aspects it manifests differently.

Vásquez and Creel (2017: 64) propose that double-voicing “is used by the authors of those Tumblr Chats who seemingly present the voice of a single ‘character’ (or participant), yet present two different – and often conflicting – meanings.” What is more, they state (cf 2017:66) that double-voicing is best achieved through a blend of hyperbole and contradiction, which are features of linguistic creativity. There are two types of examples for double-voicing which this section will cover.

The first one seems to be based on a seemingly popular meme, being a meme “a portmanteau of mimesis and genes, originally coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, refer to ‘digital objects that riff on a given visual, textual or auditory form and are then appropriated, re-coded, and slotted back into the internet infrastructures they came from’” (Nooney and Portwood-Stacer 2014: 249 in Dean 2018: 5), colloquially known as “Mocking SpongeBob”. This meme’s echo can be seen in the combination of lower and capitalized letters in samples 3 and 4 (Twitter) and 13 (Tumblr). In all three examples this layout is supposed to grant a mocking tone to the statement. Arguments frequently used by anti-vaxxers, such as vaccines causing autism, or being poisonous (with the added stereotype of people practicing yoga being naturists who refute vaccines) or that there have not been enough deaths by measles for spurts to be considered a problem, or for vaccines directly being the cause of everything that might be wrong with a child (sample 3 in response to sample 2) are the ones being delivered in this code. This last example also echoes the Wake Up America movement advocating for the link between vaccines and autism. As Jaffe (2000: 504) puts it “The ‘indexical’ nature of non-standard orthography also presupposes reader knowledge of the codes represented.” If this meme were not to be recognized, the irony behind the statement might be unintentionally misunderstood or even overlooked.

The second example is that of Tumblr sample 11, where a situation at the doctor’s office is recreated. The first interaction by the anti-vaxxer is extremely ironic, since the second maxim of Quantity is being flouted to covey the ridiculous line of argumentation. The implicature here is that what they seek is exactly what vaccines provide. Then the second voice appears, that of the doctor and the anti-vaxxer’s response shows that the implicature is understood, but they still oppose vaccines. Members of such a movement are dangerous is the idea emphasized by the representative function of the hashtag.

As a summary: double-voicing, even using identic strategies can be found on both platforms. In the samples it manifested through, on the one hand, recreating a scenario and using stereotypes while ridiculing it and what it stands for, and on the other hand, through incorporating and re-interpreting the tone assigned to a specific online meme to mock specific mainstream arguments repeatedly employed by anti-vaxxers. Double-voicing was found to be used not exclusively in Tumblr, as it in Vásquez and Creel’s, and in these samples, it was employed as a tactic of ridiculing only by anti-anti-vaxxers. More on this in 4.5.

Communicative Cues and Script Comparison

This section focuses on communicative cues and in comparing the scripts being juxtaposed in order to test whether all humorous posts of the corpus show communicative clues or semantic script-switch triggers and whether both scripts being contrasted are truly different from one another.

Tumblr posts which are of humorous nature are samples 3, 4, 5, 11, and 14. Twitter humorous posts are samples 1, 3, 4, the response in 10, 13, 15, and the last response in 16. Tumblr Sample 11 and Twitter samples 1, 3, and 15 were already thoroughly explained in previous sections of this chapter and Twitter sample 4 was also frequently mentioned, therefore this chapter will focus only in the other remaining samples mentioned.

Tumblr Sample 3 shows verbal cues through generalizations such as “anything and everything”, “anything”, “apparently, […] not a single child”. Paralinguistic cues include the asterisks used for highlighting the word perfect, which is on Bieswanger’s (2013: 464) list of micro-linguistic features of CMC which qualify as relevant for the field of Pragmatics. It is further emphasized by bold font style. Ever is capitalized to add tone, which is a feature of this type of paralanguage (cf. Carey 1980: 67). This post which seems to be a statement at first glance is actually very ironic and that is achieved through the script-switch that the cues provide (as mentioned in chapter 3). The hashtags as directives aid the implicatum.

Tumblr Sample 4 shows hashtags marking humor, as seen in 4.1. The post plays with the lack of inference that this reasoning allows. It is supposed to parallel the way in which anti-vaxxers’ logic works. There are only contextual cues here, such as statistic is a field of mathematics and it should be logical and provable, but it ends up lacking any sense.

Tumblr Sample 5 “unpopular opinion” is already a preemptive verbal marker. Representatives used by the poster are associated with ideas of tolerance, support, and respect. They even go as far as to use directives such as forbidding people from insulting them and asking them to respect the ideas presented in the representatives. The group of people being referred to is specific and overgeneralized, in the dictum they are the ones that deserve respect, etc, but the implicatum is suggesting a strong antagonism, which shines through verbal cues such as “cute little unvaccinated children” and “great minds” which are almost paradoxical overstatements when comparing both frames of what is being said and what it is actually meant. “sn”, abbreviation for “side note” is on big trigger for decoding the true meaning behind the dictum. This leads to a deeper level of humor, which is what makes this sample stand out creatively, many of the Trump-supporters’ ideas are echoed, such as patriotism (commending the first amendment), respect, lack of statutory health insurance, deporting citizens (instead of providing a sanctuary). Even the syntactical structure in “tolerance, people” reminds the reader of this. The hashtags here serve the purpose of voicing an even deeper critique behind the anti-vaccination discourse, embedding it into a political narrative. This sample shows a complexly intertwined crafting of contrasting frames that define a clear antagonistic definition of participants in the narrative.

Twitter Sample 10 includes a directive and an expressive. Brain-washing is generally a negative concept. Complimenting this initiative with an emoji contradicts the message of the post by Picard. Teaching children about vaccination is supposed to be encouraged, but naming it brainwashing makes the comment either an ironic one of an anti-anti-vaxxer teasing or a concealed critique by an anti-vaxxer. Upon researching the commenter’s profile, it was established that it was the latter, but from linguistic analysis alone it could have been any of those two possibilities.

Twitter Sample 13 uses a simile to create a humorous analogy, comparing non-aerospace engineers being incapable to assess the safety levels of a plane by mere sight to antivaxxers deeming certain vaccines unsafe by looking at the ingredients. This is another repetitive argument in the anti-vaxxers front but portraying the critique through humor by using a comparison and adding a multimedia element such as an image, makes this sample worth mentioning. Tumblr Sample 14 follows a similar idea of echoing arguments and exaggerating them to the point they become ridiculous, such as parents researching safety of vaccines on their own, being able to prevent minor symptoms, and even by inference echoing arguments such as the “freedom” to choose what they want to receive and not let the government make decisions for them. Using food as an argument to replace vaccines makes the argumentation line one that is accessible and funny for readers. The food scenario evokes the stereotypical anti-vaxx argumentation strategy, nevertheless, it is never mentioned explicitly. It is Tumblr’s user who adds it as a contextual cue. Otherwise, it has to be inferred.

Twitter Sample 16 shows a sarcastic comment by the last commenter. At first sight, the comment implies an attempt to appease the previous commenter in telling them not to be an “alarmist”, but the measures mentioned are multiple, flouting the second maxim of Quantity and also extremely specific. That, together with the verbal cue “Oh, wait” amounts to the comment gaining a tone even stronger than irony. “[S]arcasm is delivered with a cutting or withering tone that is rarely ambiguous.” (Reyes, Rosso and Veale 2013: 242)

As a conclusion, all samples which were meant to amuse (and critique) show at least one type of cue or trigger that reveal the implicatum behind the dictum. Some strategies and frames are more elaborate than others, especially some Tumblr text posts, but both platforms show similar uses of humor. Both parties employ humor in similar ways, although there are clear tendencies that tend to suggest humor is used by anti-anti-vaxxers to ridicule anti-vaxxers. This is what section 4.5. explores.

Anti-vaccination Discourse Online

Before advancing to the main part of the study, this section is dedicated to explaining why the topic of anti-vaccination was chosen to be analyzed from a linguistic point of view, as well as why Tumblr and Twitter were the social media selected for the corpus, beyond the arguments cited in 1.1.1.

This chapter has to main sections, 2.1., which provides with a detailed overview of Tumblr and Twitter’s features, with special emphasis to those relevant for the analysis; whereas 2.2. aids in establishing common ground regarding milestones in the chronology of anti-vaccination as an issue and also some of the main arguments used by anti-vaxxers. The aim of providing this contextual information follows Vásquez and Creel’s (2017: 63) idea that “intertextual references to a wide range of cultural phenomena can serve as links between author and viewer, creating a bond through the shared background knowledge – or shared affinities – required to understand the reference(s).” Elucidating the samples’ context aids in understanding the implicatures and whether an utterance is ironical in nature or not, as it is deepened in chapter 4.

In the beginning, studies of computer-mediated communication (CMC) were very broad and regarded CMC as impoverished compared to face-to-face interaction (cf. Hancock 2004: 450), nevertheless, Herring, Stein and Virtanen (2013: 8) state that “[t]he written, persistent nature of CMC makes language more available for metalinguistic reflection than in the case of speech, and this, together with a tendency towards loose cross-turn relatedness in multiparticipant CMC, encourages language play.” There are less than ten years between both sources, yet views around the topic changed significantly, partially thanks to the new features present in social media. Bieswanger (2013: 464) mentions nine features of digital written communication which are of pragmatic relevance due to their function mirroring spoken language features, which parallels and expands Carey’s (1980) seminal work on paralanguage in CMC.

Vásquez and Creel (2017: 60) mention the distinction between “social networking sites (SNSs), whose main focus is on providing ways for people to connect and interact, and user-generated content sites (UGCs), which focus on the production of creative material.” Why this distinction is important will now be explained through the disambiguation of Tumblr and Twitter’s features.

Features of Tumblr and Twitter

The aim of this section is to provide a succinct summary of a comparison of Tumblr and Twitter’s features which will play a role later in chapter 4. Both platforms were selected due to their similarities but especially because they complement one another in their differences, which will be stated next.

“Tumblr is categorized as a microblogging site, which offers features of both SNS and UGC sites, with both dimensions equally emphasized.” (Vásquez and Creel 2017: 60) Twitter is also deemed as a similar multi-media social networking platform. According to Bouvier (2015: 151), social media can mainly be used “for a combination of identity construction, the maintenance of social relationships and also to engage with more socially relevant matters.” Twitter is a platform in which users tend to engage in the latter and is therefore regarded by Argüelles Álvarez and Muñoz Muñoz (2012: 38) more as “a source of information than a social networking site.” Bouvier (2015: 156) supports this thesis herself stating that Twitter’s trending topics are “based around breaking news events, as defined by mainstream media, and often contain links to full articles”, which is a phenomenon also present in some of the samples studied in chapter 4.

In social media, everyone can participate, indiscriminately. Gillen and Merchant (2013: 47) regard Twitter as “a ‘conversation’ – at once democratic, in that everybody can join, ostensibly on equal footing, and a powerful, way of communicating one’s message in an age of ‘networked individualism’”. Nevertheless, Zappavigna (2014: 211) comments that despite microbloggers using “social media platforms such as Twitter to engage in conversation-like exchanges between individuals, they will often simply be talking about the same topic at the same time”, not necessarily making it a conversation but more like phenomena occurring in parallel. What is more “[t]o participate in Twitter is to enter into a discursive relationship with others and to expect […] response, agreement, disagreement, and more.” (Gillen and Merchant 2013: 57). Anti-vaccination is a topic that emotionally charged and everyone contributing to the discourse believes their views to be the correct ones.

This discursive relationship also applies to Tumblr, where, according to Mccracken (2017: 154) users tend to be more selective and critic given their “exposure to a variety of identity categories, political positions, and affective material across generations”, which has shaped them into “sophisticated media consumers and producers who are critical of and resistant to existing institutional norms, social and cultural hierarchies, and narrow definitions of identity and behavior.” (Mccracken 2017: 154) This is to be seen not only in the content they post but in how it is phrased or in the references made, as it is also visible in some of the samples in chapter 4.

On the one hand, CMC “promotes self-disclosure” (Kashian et al. 2017: 275), but on the other hand, as Cho (2017: 3190) proposes, more often than not the “‘public’ is never neutral, is in fact highly scaffolded terrain, demanding a strict set of normative performances”. Which is what Tumblr users reshape and criticize in their contributions, as previously mentioned. One instrumental –as Renninger (2014: 1521) describes it– feature, which makes this possible, is the use of pseudonyms, “which [make] it much harder for families, employers, friends, and other institutional authorities to police [users]; as a result, many [sic] youth feel a greater sense of security and privacy on Tumblr than on other platforms” (Mccracken 2017: 154-155). Tumblr is deemed by Mccracken (2017: 161) as a “largely protected ‘private’ public sphere”, which is an attribute that differentiates it from Twitter.

Instead of mainly being based on reactions to trending topics or the identity of the posters, the majority of Tumblr’s popular chats, compared to Twitter for example, “rely on a sharedness of references, or a sharedness of experiences, for their interpretation” (Vásquez and Creel 2017: 62-63). On Tumblr, users “express social critique and to learn from it, but it also extends that critique beyond the individual, where it can continue to live and resonate with others through reblogging.” (Mccracken 2017: 161). This is the base for Renninger’s (2014) proposition of counterpublic communication. Interesting to mention is that both Twitter and Tumblr are “structurally rhizomatic; […] however, from the point that a public Tumblr post is reblogged by someone else, it cannot be recalled and deleted by the original poster, as it is possible on Twitter.” (Morimoto and Stein 2018)

Both Twitter and Tumblr users use intertextual references, through which “Tumblr users actively perform their interests” (Vásquez and Creel 2017: 62) but given that “so many posts on Tumblr are not text-based, tags are often the only way that users can easily stumble upon a given post through search.” (Renninger 2014: 1523). How hashtags –one way of expressing these references– are used differently on both platforms regarding the topic of anti-vaccination will be explained in chapter 4. Furthermore, Renninger (2014: 1523) proposes that there is a “near equivalent emphasis of posts from new and more advanced users” which provides all users with access and exposure. New users using hashtags allow themselves to be discovered by more experienced users, but the central concept is that all users (regardless of antiquity) get to see content grouped into their fields of interest and the content is not driven by how prominent a user is. This makes Tumblr in contrast to Twitter a “democratizing platform, with no demonstrable algorithmic hierarchy among its users” (Mccracken 2017: 155).

Lastly, regarding social media on itself: as has been stated in this section, users of both platforms have a certain awareness for current events and actively contribute to the online discourse in a dynamic way. Anti-vaccination is a current trending topic, very frequently on the news, and therefore it is compelling to be used as a means for linguistic analysis. In the next section a brief summary of the history of anti-vaccination is provided and how it is connected to online discourse is explained.