Women and Social Media: How Face Threatening Acts of Female Indonesian Instagram Users be Portrayed?

Abstract

. Politeness is a norm in society that functions to maintain harmony between individuals in the society. Currently, the development of information and communication technology enables a shift in social interaction from direct human interaction to online interaction through a media, like social media. Without politeness, there will be a chaos, and one of which that appears more often nowadays is cyberbullying. The politeness phenomenon in this online interaction can be seen from the interactions that occur in social media, with Instagram as one of the platforms that increasingly more popular recently. In the context of the use of social media, it appears that the number of female users is higher than men. Not only in term of the number of the user, women also be found as more crowded in social media than men. This study aims to explore how politeness representation, specifically relates to Face Threatening Acts (FTA) in online interactions among female users of Instagram accounts. The politeness theory by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson is used as a basis for dissecting the phenomenon that is being studied. Politeness theory explains how small variations in the way we say something are related to the wider features of social relations and social contexts. This helps us understand how individuals create and interpret messages and also offer accounts for the use of the language of the speaking community. In this matter, the term positive face and negative face established, which lead to FTA. Politeness theory consists of various strategies for committing FTA which are Bald-on-record strategies and Off-record strategies. It is a descriptive qualitative study about FTA in online interaction, particularly between women Instagram users. It is a literature study that is hoped can enrich the conceptual study about politeness in online interaction using social media. The data collection techniques in this study is document studies, with the source of data are reference about the research topic from journal articles or handbook. The expected findings from this study are the presence of FTA patterns on social media, especially among women. The implication of this study is that there are guidelines for further conducting studies that are able to find the background and reasons why female Instagram users apply or not apply the FTA.