Humor as a Communication Strategy in Social Networking Services

Abstract

The Internet manifests itself as a space of collective creativity where humor and positive emotions’ representation are dominant strategies of communication. The aim of this paper is to explore the connections between humorous content of Russian users’ timeline pages in social networking services (SNS) and their gender and age. The corpus of timeline pages (news feed and wall) was collected from 500 SNS users aged between 15 and 30. The results of the study confirm that gender and age play a significant role in humor’s application by SNS users. We found two key tendencies in humor usage connected to demographics of SNS users. Male SNS users applied humor aimed to emphasize problems of dominance by contrast to female SNS users who paid more attention to problems of conformity. These problems were highlighted by SNS users according to their age either related to interpersonal relations in adolescence or associated with public relations in youth and adulthood. The findings revealed that humor has been intended to represent the key needs of individuals as cues for comprehending their personality by other users. At this rate humor becomes a tool for SNS users to indicate their state, to build communication with unfamiliar people, and to be on the same wavelength with significant others.