Language Use in Kaskus Essay

A. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Computer-mediated communication refers to any form of communication enabled through the use of computers. In the computer-mediated communication literature, the term generally refers to communication modalities dependent on computer-based networks or meta-networks, particularly the Internet and commercial online services. Language plays an important role in the communication activities in the computer-mediated communication. The language itself is used by people as a communication tool. Specifically, as i mentioned above that computer mediated communication (CMC) is about anything(communication) that use computer as a media to transfer information, to talk with other persons, to discuss issues or something like that.While we know that on CMC, for right now internet with its world wide web (network) is the only tool and the only way to get connected with others, i don’t see any alternative beside internet. In internet there are many people with different language background, different social background and of course different culture and manners. What’s become my curiousity is how people with these so many differences talking and discussing to each others, how can they understand each others without being rude to others. But i’m not going to conduct a linguistic research of language use in the internet generally globally, because there has been a lot of research on this subject. But, what becomes my interest is how indonesian people with different social and culturul background talking and disccussing a topic in Kaskus, one of the biggest and largest online forum in Indonesia. Kaskus, with more than two millions users from all over indonesia is a populer online service to discuss and to sell products. Kaskus has an easy  peasy access, has a discussion thread about almost everything like computer, books, entertainment and many more. Kaskus user are from all over indonesia which have different culture and social background, in this case sometimes user doesn’t pay attention to the forum rules, nettiquette and sometimes being sarcastic, i’ve found this several time in kaskus. This case indicating that some of user do not know the nettiquete and language rules used in kaskus forum. So why i’m here try to observe and doing a research on how kaskuser (kaskus user) use the language, what style are used, and what kind of expressions in kaskus forum that is used to show respect, manners, and and self expressions like anger, happy etc. B. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM From the title and the background of the study i formulate the research questions as follows : 1. What are the general forum rules applied in kaskus? 2. How far kaskuser pay attention to the forum rules in discussion thread? 3. What are the form of languages style used in kaskus? 4. What are the meaning of those language expressions/style? 5. Who use the language? The gender, the age. C. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY This research is aimed to gather information about the language use in kaskus forum, especially how those language are used to express manner and ethical relations between the kaskuser. D. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY The significance of this research is to bring a data to enrich the linguistic analysis in indonesia especially in computer-mediated communication subject. This research is also will be useful for those who use internet as a communcation tool generally and for kaskuser who love to join discussion in kaskus so they are will never again feel worried about being rude to others, bacause this research will bring them information how to use the language properly and how to communicate ethically to others E. SCOPE AND LIMITATION The research is limited only on the language use, the style and the way kaskuser interact with others, the researcher will not analysis where the language comes from and how the language changed. CHAPTER II THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK A. INTERNET Internet, according to Merriam Webster Dictionaries is an electronic communication network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world. B. KASKUS Kaskus is an Indonesian internet forum site which claims itself as the largest Indonesian online community. It ranks as the top 10 most popular website in Indonesia (weasel words), positioning at 241 worldwide according to Alexa.com. It was established on November 6, 1999, by three Indonesian students (Andrew Darwis, Ronald Stephanus, and Budi Dharmawan) in the United States. In August 2012, Kaskus has more than 4,000,000 registered accounts and more than 650,000,000 total posts. In August 2005 and September 2006, PC Magazine Indonesia voted Kaskus as The Best Indonesian communities twice (2005 & 2006). Registration is required for new users to participate in the community, and every registered member has access to more than twenty regional and subject-related sub-forums. The community runs on the vBulletin forum software. C. NETTIQUETE Cyberspace contains many different cultures, which some writers have called â€Å"virtual communities.† Each of these communities has its own rules and customs. But many rules apply throughout almost all of cyberspace and the rules of internet is called nettiquete. Nettiquete comes from word Internet and Etiqutte. Virginia Shea Stated that The word â€Å"etiquette† means â€Å"the forms required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be required in social or official life.† Etymologically, it comes from the French word for â€Å"ticket.† If you know the etiquette for a particular group or society, you  have a ticket for entry into it. (Virginia Shea,1994) D. COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION 1. Computer mediated communication (CMC) involves exchanges of information in textual, audio, and/or video formats that are transmitted and controlled by the use of computer and telecommunication technology. It must be noted that CMC is the basis of interpersonal interaction via groupware systems. An interesting definition of CMC is given by December (1997): â€Å"Computer-Mediated Communication is a process of human communication via computers, involving people, situated in particular contexts, engaging in processes to shape media for a variety of purposes.† 2. Chrispin Thurlow, laura lengel and Alice Tomic (2004) define Computer Mediated Communication into 3 cores : a. Communication While trying to ground CMC into a proper understanding we have to know what exactly is communication. * Communication is dynamic, One of the most well known ways of thinking about communication is the idea of a sender, a message and a receiver, in computer terms, might be regarded as an ‘information-processing’ perspective. Instead, communication is better understood as a process which is much more dynamic. The meaning of messages does not reside in words, but is much more fluid and dependent on the context, shifting constantly from place to place, from person to person, and from moment to moment. * Communication is transactional, Even though people still sometimes like to think of communication as the exchange of messages between senders and receivers, communication is really about the negotiation of meaning between people. Individuals are both speakers and listeners and these roles switch back and forth all the time in any one conversation. Once again, this also means that communication is constantly changing as two (or more) people interpret each other and are influenced by what the other says. In other words, it’s a transaction between them. Most theorists would agree that communication simply cannot happen outside human social interaction. It is really only when someone recognizes and/or responds to something you say or do that communication can be said to have occurred. * Communication is multifunctional, Consciously or unconsciously, communication serves many different functions and usually  serves more than one function at any given time. For example, communication may be used to influence people’s behavior or attitudes, to inform people, to seek information, to exert control over people, to befriend or seduce people, to entertain and please people, and so on. Although for the sake of analytical convenience, scholars do sometimes distinguish between the interactional (or relationship-focused) and informational (or content-focused) domains of communication, it’s usually impossible to separate the two. Think about famous chat-up lines like ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ or ‘Do you have the time?’ Although both appear to seek information, the intention is clearly relational! * Communication is multimodal, However important it may be, language is of course just one of many ways we have of communicating. Verbal messages always come packaged with other messages (or ‘metamessages’) formed by different ways of making meaning – what are usually called nonverbal modes of communication. In fact, more often than not it is these other modes of communication which are relied on more than the verbal mode. The best example of this is when someone is lying to us: ‘Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t do it!’ The range of nonverbal codes is vast and accounts for much of the social information we glean: vocal (e.g. tone of voice, accent, volume, pauses), movement (e.g. facial expression, gestures, posture), physical appearance (e.g. height, weight, skin colour), artefacts (e.g. lighting, dà ©cor, fashion), and use of space (e.g. body orientation, touch, distance). b. Mediated Depending on how much we already know about human communication, we will more than likely know that all communication is mediated to some extent or other. According to Chambers’ Twenty-first Century Dictionary, the verb to mediate means to convey or transmit something or to act as a medium for something. In turn, a medium is something by which, or through which, an effect is produced. In other words, mediation is simply the process or means by which something is transmitted – whether it’s a message, a feeling, a sound, or a ghostly apparition! In the case of communication, we’ve already indicated that communication is always channelled by, and dependent on, its context for meaning. Communication is therefore mediated through our interactions with people and by means of any number of different verbal and nonverbal  modes. Communication can never exist in a vacuum.We will probably have heard about the phrase ‘channels of communication’. These can be social (or cultural), psychological (or mental), linguistic (or symbolic) or material (or technical). It’s in this way that scholars usually identify several layers of contextual variables which influence – or mediate – communication. Broadly speaking these fall into three main categories : psychological, e.g. our perceptions, mental maps, and prototypes; social, e.g. our relationships, stereotypes, and individual experiences; cultural, e.g. the myths and ideologies of whole societies of people. c. Computer Having confronted the relative complexity of the terms ‘communication’ and ‘mediated’, it may disappointing to know that even the term computer cannot be taken for granted. Almost everything nowadays involves computers in some way or other, and, consequently, almost everything we do is in some way or other mediated by computers. Think, for example, of the digital technology which drives our telephone exchanges, brings television channels into our homes, tells us the time, and so on. What’s more, with such things as video conferencing, webcams and voice recognition, technological changes are taking us nearer and nearer to the kind of face-to-face (or just FtF) communication we’ve been used to all along. It’s in this way that the computerization, which drives so many areas of our lives, is becoming more and more invisible. Indeed, Pixy Ferris (1997) previously proposed that CMC should also be broad enough to include office automation, â₠¬ ¢ (Chrispin Thurlow, laura lengel and Alice Tomic :2004) CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY A. RESEARCH APPROACH AND DESIGN The reseacher use qualitative discriptive aproach. Qualitative research refers to inductive, holistic, emic, subjective and process oriented methods used to understand, interpret, describe and develop theory on a phenomenon or a setting and is a systematic, subjective approach used to describe life experiences and give them meaning (Morse & Field 1996:199; Burns & Grove 1998:35). Brink and Wood (1998:335) cite Benoliel’s (1984) description of qualitative research â€Å"as modes of systematic inquiry concerned with understanding human beings and the nature of their transactions with themselves and with their surroundings†. Leininger (1985:5) defines qualitative research as the methods and techniques of observing, documenting, analysing, and interpreting attributes, patterns, characteristics and meanings of specific, contextual or gestalt features of a phenomenon. B. DATA COLLECTION 1. Data Source The data is mainly taken from discussion thread in kaskus, like discussion thread, results of observations etc. 2. Instrument of Collecting Data * Doing observations * Interview (By Chating and PM or Private Message) * Making a Poll or Voting * Taking screenshot/ image * Questionaire C. DATA ANALYSIS The data will be analyzed using Miles and Huberman Theories where there are 3 Steps in ana lyzing the data : 1. Data Reduction. The data that has been collected from observations, questionaire and interviews are selected and sorted. The data that can represents the theme of the research will be analyzed. 2. Data display The data will be displayed after getting a summarizing. In data display the data that have been reducted then will be compressed, organized without risking the loss of information. 3. Drawing and veryfying conclssion The reasons for reducing and displaying data are to assist in drawing conclussions. While drawing conclussions logically follows reduction and display of data, in fact it takes place more or less concurrently with them. Thus possible conclussions may be noted early in the analysis, but they may be vague and ill-formed at this stage. They are held tentative pending further work, and have been analysed. Conclussions will be in the form of  preposistions, and once they have been drawn, the data need to be verified. D. EXAMPLE OF DATA SAMPLE 1. Red Font Colour 2. The Using of Capital Letters 3. Kaskus emoticon 4. Kaskus Terms Like Agan, Bata, Cendol, Sundul REFERENCES * http://kaskus.co.id * Creswell, J. W. 2003. Research Design: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. SAGE. Thousand Oaks. USA. * Thurlow, Crispin. Lengel, Laura. Tomic, Alice. 2004 Computer Mediated Communicatio (Social interaction and The Internet). SAGE. Thousand Oaks. USA. * Shea, Virginia. 2004. Netiqutte. Albions Books, USA