Examining (Im) Politeness in Nigerian Cyberspace: An Instagram Keyboard Warfare Experience
Abstract
Cyberspace interactions are characterized by verbal conflicts and disagreements which usually arise from differences in opinions, backgrounds, beliefs, professions and worldviews of participants. These unfortunately, degenerate into impolite exchanges and outright verbal aggressions sometimes. Recent studies have investigated diverse linguistic behaviors in motion: issues of flaming, banter, cyber bullying and impoliteness in the Nigerian cyberspace. However, not so much study has been done in the area of exploring impoliteness in multimodal discourses. This study seeks to identify impoliteness and linguistic aggressive exchanges in a selected Nigerian social media platform- Instagram, the probable cause(s) and characteristics of such exchanges. Data was purposively selected from an Instagram blog post and 16 first line comments were also purposively selected and anlysed anonymously using Culpeper (1996)’s (im)politeness super strategies. The study discovers that a face threatening act is a likely cause of linguistic impolite exchange in cyberspace interactions. And the impolite verbal exchanges analysed contain elements of appearance and body shaming, career shaming and insults. There was heavy use of Yoruba language and Nigerian Pidgin English. The study concludes that objectivity, civility and politeness can be achieved in cyberspace interactions if participants pay attention to face saving acts.