Open AccessTalking Visuals in Social Media: Linguistic Study of Facebook among a Selected Group of Kenyan Internet Users.
Author(s) -
Florence Muthoni Mwithi
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
editon consortium journal of media and communication studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2663-9300
DOI - 10.51317/ecjmcs.v2i1.191
Subject(s) - meaning (existential) , the internet , social media , entertainment , upload , argument (complex analysis) , presentation (obstetrics) , meaning making , psychology , linguistics , media studies , sociology , computer science , visual arts , world wide web , art , medicine , biochemistry , philosophy , psychotherapist , radiology , chemistry
This paper investigates how Facebook users in Kenya lean on pictures to amply meaning in their online posts. This argument on visuals, and their utility on social media is important to the current study as visuals form part of the analysis and it will be important to examine what realities they represent apart from the written texts. The article located itself within the frameworks of Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and used questionnaires to obtain data. Pictorial presentation of information has been a common practice in the 21st century Kenya. A text on the Internet may be multimodal; having written speech and visual texts. These visual texts are used with various motives like entertainment, passing information, advocacy, and advertisement. It becomes extremely important to recognize that visuals and other forms of semiosis (making meaning) are as important as words in the construction of reality. A pictorial will often offer a different version of reality from that of verbal text. This study concluded that the number of photos by females was almost double the ones for males, meaning as far as this study is concerned, this motivation factor of photo uploads is more in females than in males.