The second set of data used in this study was collected from the rapidly rising social media platforms. According to the definition posted on Wikipedia,8 social media are web-based and they use computer-mediated technologies, such as smartphones and computers, to “create highly interactive platforms through which individuals, communities and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content or pre-made content posted online.” In other words, websites and applications that are dedicated to forums, blogging, social networking, etc. are different types of social media. Among the various social media websites, Facebook and Dcard were selected as the sources of the second set of data in this study because
8 Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia; the detailed definition of social media can be found in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
42
they are considered two of the most popular social media in Taiwan.9 Since social media are web-based, it is important to know the Internet penetration rate in Taiwan to make sure the reliability of the data collected from the social media platforms.
According to the Internet World Stats,10 which is an International website that features world Internet Usage up to date, the Internet penetration rate in Taiwan in December 2014 was about 84%, showing that more than 19 million Taiwanese people have used Internet service. Besides, eMarketer in 2016 reported that Taiwan is the most mobile country for 73.4% of Taiwan's population uses smartphones and it is the highest smartphone user penetration among countries in the world. Due to such easy access to the Internet and the availability of smartphones to people in Taiwan, analyzing data collected from popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and
Dcard, may be a good way to observe people’s online linguistic practices.
In the following, the two social media platforms − Facebook and Dcard, and how
the data was collected from these two platforms are briefly introduced.
Facebook, an online social media which provides social networking services, was launched in 2004. In 2005, only six million users were active on Facebook;
however, due to its expansion of registration to everyone in 2006, Facebook had up to
9 Although the number of the registered Dcard users is not available to the public, in 2016, there were more than 18 million Facebook subscribers in Taiwan. Reference:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm
10 The website of Internet World Stats: http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm
43
58 million users in the world in November 2007.11 Not only the general public share their feelings, opinions, and jokes with their friends but organizations, such as news media, create their Fan Pages to report the news and interact with the netizens on Facebook. In other words, nowadays social media enable users to swap ideas, to post updates, and to comment on the news to interact with other netizens. Besides, Business Pages and advertisements are also actively created and posted by businessmen and companies to promote their products through Facebook. In 2016, Facebook had more than 1.86 billion monthly active users worldwide;12 in the same year, the total number of Facebook Pages had reached up to 74 billion. Moreover, according to Facebook statistics on Statistic Brain website13 (research conducted date:
August 1, 2016), one million links are shared, two million friends are requested, and three million messages are sent within every 20 minutes on Facebook. All of these statistics suggest that Facebook has become the most dominant and influential platform and since this platform generates tons of utterances every day worldwide, it is surely a huge corpus for linguistic research.
Dcard, founded in December 2011 in Taiwan, is a kind of bulletin board system which provides social networking services targeting Taiwanese college students.
When Dcard was first launched, it only allowed certain college students to register
11 Reference of the statistics of Facebook: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
12 Reference of the statistics of Facebook: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
13 The link of the Statistic Brain: http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/
44
because the founder of this platform wanted to help college students in Taiwan to expand their social networks and satisfy their social needs. Thus, the registered users of Dcard are mostly Taiwanese college students even though later on this social media platform has allowed those who are not university students to become registered users.
Dcard has 37 boards covering a multitude of topics, and there are also articles and comments posted every day. Once logged in, the user can read and post articles, and even make friends on this platform. Although the exact number of registered users of Dcard is unknown, at least 80 thousand registered college students are active users of this social media platform as claimed by its official website. Viewed in this light, analyzing data collected from Dcard may help find out how young people in Taiwan use kěài in different contexts since this platform is especially made for Taiwanese college students.
In the current study, 400 tokens of kěài were collected from the social media platforms –200 tokens retrieved from Facebook and the other 200 tokens from Dcard.
All of the tokens were manually collected one by one through the researcher’s own personal account of Facebook and Dcard. Dcard has the search function which can be used to search for the keyword in any boards and articles. Therefore, kěài as the keyword was entered in the search engine of Dcard to retrieve the data. On the other hand, the search engine of Facebook is quite different from that of Dcard. The search
45
engine of Facebook is used to search for other people’s accounts, official accounts of companies, and Fan Pages. Thus, there is no way to search for the keyword kěài by
using the Facebook search function. In order to collect data from Facebook, tokens of kěài were retrieved by continuing browsing the articles and comments of
Fan/Business Pages, groups and news feed of friends posted on the researcher’s own Facebook account within the past twelve months. And once the keyword kěài was found in articles or comments of Fan/Business Pages or news feed of friends, it was recorded then and used as the data of this study. The Fan/Business Pages that the researcher collects include mostly news media, such as ETtoday (東森新聞雲) and NOWnews (今日新聞), the two largest online news publications in Taiwan. Besides, other popular Pages, such as cnYES (鉅亨網), specializing in financial news, and Storm Media Group (風傳媒), featuring international news, are also included for data collection. These online publications have been on the rise in recent years to satisfy a growing Internet-savvy population. In addition to Pages, the researcher’s Facebook account includes auction groups as well; thus, articles or comments mentioning the word kěài there are also included. In addition, in order to make sure that the retrieved data of kěài was truly Taiwan Mandarin, only those written in the traditional Chinese characters were included while those in the simplified Chinese characters were excluded.
46
Although using the researcher’s own Facebook account to collect data may seem problematic since those data may represent that person’s own social network, Facebook is actually a platform in which people “share” information and links with their friends. Meanwhile, if a person clicks the Like button of a Page, that person’s friends can see this Page on their news feed as well. In other words, everyone’s social
network is connected and overlapped to a certain degree. With this view, tokens of kěài collected from Facebook can truly represent the usages of kěài after the popularity of the social media platforms.
47
Chapter Four
The Descriptive Range of Kěài
This chapter presents the analysis of the descriptive range of kěài, including the objects and the properties that kěài describes based on the data collected from the Sinica Corpus and the social media platforms, along with detailed discussion. Section 4.1 presents the framework of analysis of kěài, namely the classification criteria of the descriptive range of kěài based on the review in Chapter Two. At the same time,
examples are introduced. Then, the results and discussion of the descriptive range of kěài found in the Sinica Corpus and the social media platforms are given in Section
4.2. Finally, Section 4.3 compares and contrasts the similarities and differences of the descriptive range of kěài in the two sets of data.