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Examining Palestinians’ literacy and social media practices, motivations, and linguistic choices
Abstract
According to Simon Kemp, “digital [interaction] is growing faster in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world” (Lam and Radcliff, 2017 p. 4). Social media use in particular has steadily been increasing over the past decade due to greater accessibility to digital technologies for middle class families. Social media is used by the majority of people, especially youth under 30 years old, who make up sixty-five percent of the population in the Middle East. Despite these staggering percentages and the increasing role of social media in people’s lives, little attention has been given to West Bank Palestinian social media users. This project examines the full range of their social media and linguistic practices and motivations for their social media use. Palestinian society is considered by some to be socially conservative (Abdo, 1999; Hasso, 2001) in terms of communicative norms. Understanding the intricacies of social media use as a literacy practice can shed light on how Palestinians are preserving or challenging these conservative values, and the dynamic roles that social media is playing in changing social communication on a global scale. This study builds on previous work that examined the ways in which Palestinians are thwarting the traditional expectations of written Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) on Facebook. This pilot study focused on language choice to examine if Palestinian social media users are opting to use formal written language, colloquial language, or a combination of the two on Facebook. Findings suggested that Palestinians consider Facebook a social sphere, more like synchronous face-to-face oral contexts and therefore are using more informal colloquial language in digital written form. The current study seeks to build on the previous one by looking deeply into the literacy and social media practices occurring on various technological devices. This study’s data sources include a survey of participants and an analysis of a self-selected collection of social media artefacts to identify Palestinian literacy practices and motivations for this social media use. Follow up interviews provide an additional source of data to examine linguistic choices users make in different social media contexts (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.). Triangulation across these data sources facilitates validation of data through cross verification. This presentation and paper will reveal the complex ways that Palestinians navigate social media to meet their social and communicative needs and examines new social dynamics that occur between various members of Palestinian society as they interact digitally.
Discipline
Linguistics
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Sociolinguistics