You\u27ve Got Mail: Identity Perceptions based on Email Usernames

This study explores the idea that email recipients use the email username of the sender as a mediated cue to make basic assumptions of the identity of the sender. For this study 215 participants completed self-report surveys asking their perceptions of a fictional work group member including sex, age, race, and work productivity. Most participants were able to create a basic identity of their fictitious group member based solely on their email username

Interpreting technology-mediated identity: Perception of social intention and meaning in Bluetooth names

Belgium Herbarium image of Meise Botanic Garden

The Role of Business Information Visualization in Knowledge Creation

Past research suggests that one of the reasons causing Business Intelligence (BI) systems to fall short of expectations could be that certain BI capabilities may not be appropriate for individuals’ or organizational challenges. Our research proposes the need to enhance our understanding of information and knowledge processes to address the issue. We evaluate the appropriateness of adopting the implications of information and knowledge processes to Business Information Visualization (BIV) as one of BI capabilities by exploring how data interaction and data representation reduce information-based challenges of uncertainty and complexity, thus enabling the creation of new insights. Formal model and resulting propositions are offered. Research implications suggest that effective and efficient insight generation can be achieved by deploying BI visualization capabilities only if those capabilities result in knowledge workers’ perception of lower information uncertainty and complexity. Larger implications of this study for BI, BIV and knowledge creation process are discussed

From Bonehead to @realDonaldTrump : A Review of Studies on Online Usernames

In many online services, we are identified by self-chosen usernames, also known as nicknames or pseudonyms. Usernames have been studied quite extensively within several academic disciplines, yet few existing literature reviews or meta-analyses provide a comprehensive picture of the name category. This article addresses this gap by thoroughly analyzing 103 research articles with usernames as their primary focus. Despite the great variety of approaches taken to investigate usernames, three main types of studies can be identified: (1) qualitative analyses examining username semantics, the motivations for name choices, and how the names are linked to the identities of the users; (2) experiments testing the communicative functions of usernames; and (3) computational studies analyzing large corpora of usernames to acquire information about the users and their behavior. The current review investigates the terminology, objectives, methods, data, results, and impact of these three study types in detail. Finally, research gaps and potential directions for future works are discussed. As this investigation will demonstrate, more research is needed to examine naming practices in social media, username-related online discrimination and harassment, and username usage in conversations.Peer reviewe

Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in Computer-Mediated Communication

The study reported in this paper examines the occurrence of cross-cultural misunderstandings in computer-mediated communication (CMC). CMC has become a part of many people’s everyday life; rules of language practice such as politeness and other characteristics of relational communication are blurred. The study will expose subtle conducts that are language and culture specific. It will further explore how these social and culture factors influence language use of native and non-native English speaking national and international postgraduate Education students. In particular, the positive and negative tactics and the depiction of relational regularities and patterns prove to be useful to uncover cross-cultural interactions. Questions that arise are: What is considerate as polite and acceptable and what is rude and intolerable in CMC? Is politeness a luxury we no longer can or want to afford? How is this affecting cross-cultural communication and negotiation in CMC

Anonymity and Authenticity on the Web: Towards a new framework in internet onomastics

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00074.ker.Building on our own research (Kersten and Lotze 2018; Kersten and Lotze 2020; Lotze and Kersten (in press); Lotze and Kersten (under review)) as well as other work in this area (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Stommel 2007; Lindholm 2013; Aleksiejuk 2016a, 2016b), this article will discuss the pragmatics of (self-)naming practices online and how they contribute to identity construction and face-work (Bedijs, Held and Maaß 2014; Seargeant and Tagg 2014). Drawing on the data collected, both existing and analysed as part of a wider study of usernames across 14 languages (Schlobinski and Siever 2018a), the use and function of anthroponyms and other names in online contexts are explored. Furthermore, we endeavour to situate both onomastic- and sociolinguistic research in the field of digitally-mediated interaction (DMI) and in the field of pragmatics in general.Peer reviewe

Creating a Self-Image : Face-Work and Identity Construction Online

© 2020 Dr. Saskia Kersten, Dr. Netaya Lotze. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).In this article, we build on research arguing that linguistic self-representation on social media can be viewed as a form of face-work and that the strategies employed by users are influenced by both a desire to connect with others and a need to preserve privacy. Drawing on our own analyses of usernames as well as that of others which were conducted as part of a large-scale project investigating usernames in 14 languages (Schlobinski/T. Siever 2018a), we argue that these conflicting goals of wanting to be recognised as an authen­tic member of an in-group while retaining a degree of anonymity are also observable in the choice of username. Online self-naming can thus be viewed as a key practice in the debate of face-work on social media platforms, because names and naming strategies can be stud­ied more readily than broader and more complex aspects, such as stylistic variation or text-image interdependence, while at the same time forming part of these.Peer reviewe

Notions of impoliteness at the Argentinian workplace. Representations and evaluations from users and learners of EFL for business purposes

Treball Final de Màster Universitari en Ensenyament i Adquisició de la Llengua Anglesa en Contextos Multilingües. Codi: SAY531. Curs acadèmic: 2011-2012Despite some attention given to the teaching of politeness phenomena from a non-universalistic view (Brown, 2010; Cashman, 2006; Meier, 1997; Nurmukhamedov & Kim, 2010; Sharifian, 2008; Uso-Juan & Martinez-Flor, 2007), impoliteness has largely been ignored by both teachers and researchers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) (Mugford, 2008, 2009). This is particularly true in the area of English for Business Purposes (BP), where the understanding of cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness is but starting (Culpeper, Crawshaw, & Harrison, 2008; Culpeper, Marti, Mei, Nevala, & Schauer, 2010). Given such state-of-the-art, I contribute to this area by researching first-order notions of impoliteness (Watts, 2003) as it emerges from Argentinian users and learners of EFL-BP when exchanging emails with U.S. American employees in workplace contexts. From a natural corpus of emails, I select two syndicated conflictive email sequences (words=939) as the basis for the design of research instruments. These involve a questionnaire and a discourse completion test to Argentinian participants (n=22), as well as a semi-structured interview to U.S. American interviewees (n=10). Argentinian participants characterize impoliteness through features referring to aggressiveness, imperativeness, inappropriateness, inconsiderateness, heedlessness, unfairness, and evasiveness, while U.S. Americans referred to interrupting, tardiness, and uncooperativeness. Initial pedagogic implications for the teaching of impoliteness are derived from these results