We examined the use of "I" in Tweets posted by 50 famous people during a one-month window. The linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) was implemented to determine the percentage of 140-character Tweets that used the personal pronoun "I". Our findings showed patterns typically seen in natural speech. Specifically, women used the self-referent focus "I" significantly more often than men did, and lower status (operationalized as the number of Twitter followers) people used "I" significantly more often than those with higher status. Men of low social status used significantly more "I" language than did women with lower social status, but women and men of higher social status used "I" equally. Our findings suggest that social status may alter sex-linked communication, with the use of an informal and friendly style that includes self-referencing by men of lower social status, perhaps in an effort to engage more people and enhance their own status through more self-referencing.
Background : We studied the "affect language" (emotional content) in over 2000 Tweets of 50 famous celebrities across a one-month period. Method: The 140-character language bursts were analyzed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which provided percentage of language used to represent various emotional states. Results: Lower-status celebrities (i.e., those with fewer followers) used more positive emotion in their Tweets compared to higher-status celebrities, although negative emotional content did not vary by celebrity status. There was no statistically significant difference between sexes on emotional content. Conclusion: Our results suggest that social status may be more important to public use of affect language than sex of the celebrity.
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