(Im)Politeness and (In)Civility in Social Media: The Case of Pronouns and Propositions in Twitter Comments

Abstract

While social media provides "a public sphere", a term coined by Habermas, which can foster public participation leading towards democracy, this also comes with issues of (im)politeness and (in)civility reflected in the use of language. This study explores issues of (im)politeness and (in)civility in digital communication through the analysis of pronouns and propositions in twitter comments posted by netizens in an official site of Jokowi's twitter account (@jokowi). 138 data were randomly collected from netizens' twitter comments responding to three Jokowi's twitter posts stating his actions towards students' demonstration posted on September 26, 2019. This study also used 106 responses from a questionnaire. Content analysis was used as the method of the study. To analyze the utterances in the comments, theory of impoliteness by Culpeper and theory of incivility by Papacharissi were used. The findings of this study revealed that some pronouns indicate inappropriate identity markers and some propositions used sarcasm or mock politeness based on the cotext and context of the use. In addition, the analysis of propositions showed some degree of incivility as they reflect an attack towards the positive face of President Jokowi as seen from their denying, and distrust towards President Jokowi's efforts. Thus, in spite of the fact that some impolite use of pronouns and propositions indicate public participations as in Lyotard's "democratic participation", this should be also accompanied by rational discussions in order to create a democratic society.