Abstract
The undesirable nature of self-praise has long been widely held within and without pragmatics, albeit mostly at the level of theoretical considerations. Empirical studies in this respect overlap considerably with compliment responses and focus on various mitigation strategies deployed to weaken its face-threatening potential. Within the Chinese speech community, where modesty is held as one of the most valued attributes, self-praise in face-to-face communication is found to be strategically paired with a modification or disclaimer. Sometimes it is framed as a complainable (Wu, 2011). This study extends such an inquiry to the self-praise acts in the prevalent communication of WeChat Moments to explore whether those patterns as identified in the literature are generally practiced in the collapsed context of Moments interaction. Our data reveals that the multimodality afforded by the communicative platform is another resource exploited by social media users to do self-praise work, regardless of the nature of the topics and the attributes they present. The patterns that emerge in the dataset are the intertwined actions of teasing, complaining and praising which send a clear message of jocularity as well as an ambiguous message of self-praise. The ultimate purpose of the combined pragmatic acts is to seek participant engagement and social bonding. The multimodal perspective indicates that it is ultimately how users employ images and how images are framed and interpreted by users themselves that contribute to the bonding effects most users seek when they engage in CMC activities. Through this focused analysis, we hope to inspire further studies on the pragmatic acts of jocular complaints in other forms of mediated communication whereby delicate relational work or other thorny social issues are present.
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Notes
- 1.
These numbers, when summed up, exceed the total demographic number because these subjects are encouraged to write down whatever comes to their minds. Thus, some of them provided more than one answer.
- 2.
Given all of the informants in the present studies are singles during the time when the data were collected, we exclude the subtype “significant other selfies.” Group selfies in our data have the implication of displaying relationships.
- 3.
We cannot determine with certainty how many rounds of interactions can be deemed as “popular” generally via the number of turns attached, since there are cases (personal experience) that an update can be followed by hundreds of comment exchanges between the users who share and their ratified viewers. In our data 30 turns in total, is relatively high, considering that the data are generated by informants who were university students back then.
- 4.
The English translation of the text in the figure may go like this: “For the first time the Senior me uses Meitu [authors’ note: an image processing software]. All the special effects are applied. Feel superb fantastic. City dwellers always play it cool. Happee!”
- 5.
The English translation of the text in the figure may go like this: “Just wanna ask you (am I) beautiful or not.”
- 6.
The same can be said of the coda 摩擦 ‘to rub.’ We finally render it as “Happee” to reflect its status as an in-group expression among online gamers expressing their intriguing emotions like excitement, joy, among others.
- 7.
Out of ethical considerations and space limitations, we present the uptakes of analytical interest in typed form instead of screenshot. The numbers leading each line indicate its sequential place in the original interactional stories.
- 8.
In the original update, the Chinese characters are sound imitations of pants.
- 9.
The English translation of the text in the figure may go like this: “Big face type
Hopeless
”. - 10.
The interposition of another thread of exchange starting at line 19 is an affordance of Moments. At present, Moments can only line up the comments according to the temporal order, regardless of whether some exchanges should be better clustered together for better readability. Nevertheless, the notification function allows the user to reply in a coherent manner to the target comment with ease. In Moments, comments are viewable to mutual friends only. As such, MN’s response to CDR manifests that they have mutually befriended each other.
Hopeless
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Funding
This research is supported by a General Project of Philosophy and Social Science of Jiangsu Province (No. 4832021SJA0483) and by a Special Project of Cultivating Leading Talents in Philosophy and Social Science of Zhejiang Province (22YJRC11ZD).
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Tong, Y., **e, C. (2022). Self-Praise in and through Selfies: A Multimodal Perspective. In: **e, C., Tong, Y. (eds) Self-Praise Across Cultures and Contexts. Advances in (Im)politeness Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99217-0_5
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