In the ch 5 exerpt by Baron she discussed the evolving style of presenting one’s self through online communication via AOL’s IM away messages. He details the results of his case study of 5 away messages from 38 students. He points out that the overall objective of away messages is to leave a self presence online even if you are or are not at your computer. The use of away message was broken into four categories by Baron; “I am away, initiate discussion, or social encounter, convey personal info, and convey info about others. The away message represents the author as well as giving insight to the persons mood or persona. Memes like away messages are content constructed with the intention to convey a message by an author. Usually the message contains humorous elements. As discusses in the reading Davidson explains that unlike away messages authors are often anonymous. This can lead to misinterpretation or cloudy understanding of the language used for the concept of the meme. The problem was solved with the use of emoticons in the tittle of memes to let the audience know its emotion such as sad :( or funny : -). Memes also exemplify the notion of content manifesting thier away across the internet. People view the image read the content and send share with friends and other online communities who then decided to create their own.
4 thoughts on “Language and Presence”
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Language is used to communicate and portray the mood we are in and how we want to portray our messages. Away messages use the same concept because they are trying to portray messages. So it would make sense that they would use emotions. What I thought was most interesting was how humor makes everything easier to portray in both language and away messages.
One of the things mentioned in Baron’s chapter on away messages were individuals that posted away messages even if they weren’t away. These individuals stayed online, sometimes most of the time, and used it as a way to screen messages the way we screen phone calls. I think this is also driven by voyeurism, always wanting to know who is online when, and not wanting to miss anything, but not having your away message up would give yourself away as held hostage by the medium, which in fact many were.
I like your point on voyeurism. I do think that some people would stay online just to see who else was online and at what times. If you didn’t want to talk to certain other people while doing this, you could post an away message. While I don’t think voyeurism necessarily goes away with age, I do think certain behavioral patters exhibited via CMC fade as we mature.
I agree that memes are made as a means for the author to communicate with others. Any humor that he or she uses indicates hints of their personality to whoever receives the message. However, as stated in your blog, the content can easily cause confusion or limited understanding. The content of the message must be reviewed carefully by the author in order to prevent such misinterpretations from happening. Otherwise, it could take a lot more than some emotions to clarify the message’s meaning. Just as with studies of the Bible, the content needs to be viewed in the correct context to limit, or maybe eliminate, major misunderstandings.