CYBERPRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL HUMOR IN WHATSAPP STICKERS

Abstract

With the growth of digital environment, social interaction between people, particularly university students, is also affected. Communication has become multimodal, meaning people not only send textual messages but also visuals such as videos, memes, stickers, or emojis. These multimodal communication forms are facilitated by digital communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Line. The use of stickers, specifically in WhatsApp, could suggest certain implicatures which are covered in humorous way. The present research aims to describe how the text and the image of WhatsApp stickers create humorous intention and to find out the implicit functions of digital humour of WhatsApp stickers in daily interaction. The data for this study were collected from university students’ communications in their WA, in which 20 students were requested to submit 5 samples of stickers used in actual interactions. As a result, 100 stickers were gathered as the data. The collected data were analysed qualitatively using the theories of digital humour and cyberpragmatic approach. Cyberpragmatic is basically the use of pragmatic concepts in analysing digital data.  The results show that WhatsApp stickers were used by the students to convey the feeling of sadness, anger, tiredness, concern, and eagerness, which were represented by the text and image of the stickers. For example, when a student complains about the number of assignments, he sent a sticker showing an ads for headache, where the brand name was changed into “Oh tugas” (oh assignment). The interrelatedness between the text and the image in this sticker can convey the pragmatic implicature in humorous way. Thus, the findings of this study implied that stickers could become an effective way to communicate the intended message of the speakers. Stickers can also be an alternative way of communicating in digital environments beside using other forms of multimodal communication forms such as texts, GIF, meme, and emoji.