An Analysis of the Intertextuality of Social Media Discourse of Chuka University Students on WhatsApp Platforms

Abstract

The earliest forms of the internet were developed in the 1960s whereas the first recognizable social media site was created in 1997. Since then, Social media has greatly influenced the way people communicate with one another and continues to gain popularity owing to the technological milestones made in the world of communication. As people communicate via social media interaction platforms, language naturally and inevitably experiences some changes. Therefore, there was a need to undertake a linguistic study to account for such changes and developments in language use. The main concern of this study was to analyze the university students’ social media discourse. The discourse analyzed sprung from the WhatsApp interaction platform. The WhatsApp groups utilized were those formed by Chuka University students in Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. Particularly, the following objective guided the study:  to demonstrate the intertextuality nature of social media discourse.  The study employed a multimodal semiotic approach as the analytic tool. A descriptive research design and the qualitative technique were employed to analyze data. Both Snowball and purposive sampling procedures were used. Snowballing was used to establish the WhatsApp groups that were used by the students, while the purposive sampling procedure was used to selectively collect texts from WhatsApp groups. The texts that were purposively selected were those that demonstrated the intertextuality nature of social media discourse. The rationale for choosing WhatsApp was the fact that there was a paucity of linguistic studies based on this interaction platform despite its popularity. The study findings revealed that social media discourse exhibits intertextuality in which language is dexterously and creatively used.   This study sheds light on language usage and its dynamics. It is hoped that it will enrich knowledge on Multimodality and Semiotic Theory.