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Part of
Approaches to Internet Pragmatics: Theory and practice
Edited by Chaoqun Xie, Francisco Yus and Hartmut Haberland
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 318] 2021
► pp. 175–206

Chapter 6
Humour and self-presentation on WhatsApp profile status

| Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Self-presentation encompasses a set of strategies through which individuals communicate an image of themselves to others. Self-presentation has been widely studied both in face-to-face communication and online. Most online research, however, has focused on social networking sites, blogs, chatrooms, etc. while less attention has been paid to other online means of communication such as WhatsApp. The aim of this chapter is to analyse self-presentation on WhatsApp statuses. More specifically, I focus on the use of humour as a self-presentation strategy in WhatsApp statuses and ascertain whether or not there are common patterns with regard to gender or age. To this purpose, a corpus of 206 WhatsApp statuses in Spanish was analysed following both a quantitative and qualitative methodology. Results shows the existence of recurrent patterns connected to these variables, which seem to play a crucial role to determine the choice of humour as a self-presentation strategy.
Keywords: humour, self-presentation, WhatsApp , Spanish, profile status, digital communication, incongruity, intertextuality, age, gender
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Humour
    • 2.2Humour and digital communication
    • 2.3 WhatsApp and its statuses
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Types and frequency of WhatsApp statuses according to realization
    • 4.2Types and frequency of WhatsApp statuses according to content
    • 4.3Humorous statuses
      • 4.3.1Intertextuality
    • 4.4Humorous statuses, gender and age
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.318.06mai
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