Faces, facets, and Facebook: A discursive analysis on ethos

Abstract

The study, “Faces, facets, and Facebook: a discourse analysis on ethos,” is a content analysis, specifically focusing on the discourse present in the use of language among Facebook users. Furthermore, applications and the purpose of using are considered in order to analyze on how users employed the ethos in specific content whether in the use of photo, message, video, link, share, music, games, and the like. The users’ subscriptions to Facebook were interpreted based on how they engaged to the technology and how technology poses questions pertaining to their ethos in life. Categories were provided, so with rubrics to provide better coding in the analyses and interpretation of data. For validity of the responses, the focus group discussion was incorporated to yield a more substantial substantiation of results. Majority of Facebook users were professionals with 46.66%. There was a little less than half of the respondents use Facebook in a day with only 45% in the category for less than an hour in a day consumption. Majority of the respondents spent their time in Facebook during the evening from 6:00 to 10:00 with 33.33%. As to Facebook features, Games were ranked first with 2.93, followed with links with 2.82, and music with 2.56. These three features were classified as used in moderate extent, verbally interpreted as specific feature is at times academic in tone with use of informal language. On the other hand, majority of the responses pertain to features such as tags, friend request, events, share, message, and video got the same descriptions as used to some extent. Moreover, with the same descriptions, photos and likes got a tie of 2.01 while notes with 1.6 ranked as 12th among the features used and was described as used to a less extent with verbal interpretation of specific feature as non-academic and with informal use of language. As to the purpose in using Facebook features, photos, message, events, friend request, music, share, and like were commonly used with applications of both academic and non-academic subscription in terms of topics. Moreover, Majority of the language forms utilized by Facebook users were the use of vernacular such as Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Suriagonon, and Kinaray-a. A little less than half employed vernacular in communicating with their friends through Facebook with 46.39%, followed by English with 41.24%, while the use of Filipino only got 12.37%. Lastly, among the common ethical issues encountered by Facebook users were: bullying, unsolicited messages, use of offensive messages in the form of vulgar and sexual remarks, uninformed/unaware tagging of pictures, and backbiting. These were normally seen in the course of conversation, exchange of ideas, sharing of photos with comments and in tagging links, shares, videos, and the like. With the given results, an ethos in the use of Facebook is offered primarily to be integrated in language classes to make students responsible users of technology.