Acosta Jillian Rechelle Acosta Thesisfinal

MSU-GSC ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
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HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of Filipinos in Twitter
An Undergraduate Thesis
Presented to the Faculty of the English Department
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Mindanao State University
General Santos City
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Bachelor of Arts in English
JILLIAN RECHELLE CADORNA ACOSTA
June 2019
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Republic of the Philippines
MINDANAO STATE UNIVERSITY

College of Social Sciences and Humanities
General Santos City
APPROVAL SHEET
The undergraduate thesis entitled “HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of
Filipinos in Twitter” prepared and submitted by JILLIAN RECHELLE C.
ACOSTA in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree BACHELOR OF
ARTS MAJOR IN ENGLISH has been examined and recommended for oral
examination.
MELY P. SUBIERE, MAED-TESL

Adviser
PANEL OF EXAMINERS
Approved by the Committee on Oral Examination
NORMAN RALPH ISLA, M.A.ELL
Chairman
SALVACION B. SANTANDER, M.I.E. MELY P. SUBIERE, MAED-TESL

Member Member
______________________________________________________________
Accepted and approved in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ENGLISH.
Recommended by: Approved by:
LORENZO L. LAROCO, M.A.T MAULAWI L. CALIMBA, M.A

Chairperson Dean
____________________ ______________________
Date Date
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Acosta, Jillian Rechelle C. “HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of Filipinos in

Twitter”. Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis of Bachelor of Arts in English.
Mindanao State University. College of Social Sciences and Humanities, English
Department, General Santos City. June 2019.
Abstract
This research study aimed to determine to identify Call-out Culture present in

Twitter and its impact to the social world. Also, this study explored how call-out
culture works in the internet. The data used in the study are the Top 10 Most
Followed Filipino in Twitter retrieved from Twitter’s official data website
socialbakers.com. This included 1. Jose Marie Viceral (@vicegandako), 2. Anne
Curtis-Smith (@annecurtissmith), 3. Angel Locsin (@143redangel), 4. Kathryn
Bernardo (@bernardokath), 5. Daniel Padilla (@imdanielpadilla), 6. Yeng
Constantino (@YengPLUGGEDin), 7. Bianca Gonzalez (iamsuperbianca), 8.
Relationships (@ohteenquotes), 9. MYX Philippines (@MYXphilippines), 10.
Vhong Navarro (@VhongX44). These call-outs, were analysed using Xie and Yus’
analysis model. Results revealed that the call-outs are constrained by the user’s
familiarity of topics, jargons, expected background, and the user’s personal traits.
It also revealed that the different linguistic features used in each call-out are text
deformations and emoticons/emojis, which makes the call-out more realistic or has
more feeling. Through these, each call-out could either be determined as a positive
post or a negative one. It all depends on how one reacts to it, as it is in the social
world every little thing has its own controversy.
Keywords: Call-outs, Twitter, Contextual Constraints, Linguistic Features

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Acknowledgment
God has been so good and gracious to me through all the days of hard
work. To Him, who made all things work together for good, I give honor and
greatest thanks.
This study was completed with the assistance of many individuals whom
I acknowledge with deep gratitude.
To Prof. Mely P. Subiere, who unselfishly devoted her time in checking
my drafts and with unending assistance and effort in guiding me which helped
improve my study.
To my panel examiners, Prof. Salvacion Santander and Prof. Norman
Ralph Isla, for their invaluable help in offering their time, efforts, and
commitment to bring out the necessary changes in my study.
To my Mango Skwad, Reeeynz, Aybeeeh, Jaaairah, Peeerlaa, Miiich,
Jooveth, Queeenylaine, and Raaam who saw me at my best and bestest
moments as a person, for their invaluable presence in giving their moral support
and above all their love and concern, especially to Jen, who gave me the idea
of making this study, without them this study would not have been pursued.
To my Dating Daan pips (B4B & Friends), Sheng, Roddy, Shuks,
Jenebeb, and Alon, I thank you guys for the guidance you gave and of course,
for all the coks we had and also to the “Holy Trinity, the father the son, and r u
the Amen”. I also thank the Dingal Residence, our hideout, for accepting us in
your humble abode despite the noise we make.

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Finally, to my family, for giving inspiration, untiring prayers, and spiritual
support in all undertakings, thank you for everything.
To all those who in one way or the other made this study possible, I am
deeply grateful.
Jillian Rechelle Acosta

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Table of Contents
Page
Title Page i
Approval Sheet ii
Thesis Abstract iii
Acknowledgement iv
Table of Contents vi
Chapter I: THE PROBLEM AND THE SETTING
Introduction 1
Statement of the Problem 3
Scope and Delimitation 3
Significance of the Study 4
Definition of Terms 5
Chapter II: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Related Literature 7
Call-out 7
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Uses of Call-outs
Integrative Call-outs 13
Off-scene Coaching 13
Processual Call-outs 14
Intrusive Call-outs 14
Calling-out Exclusion 15
Identity Call-outs 15
Twitter 17
Internet Pragmatics 20
Related Studies 31
Conceptual Framework 37
Chapter III: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
Research Design 39
Subject of the Study 39
Data Gathering 40
Data Analysis 40
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Chapter IV: PRESENTEATION, ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF
DATA
Contextual Constraints 42
Linguistic Features Used 64
Text Deformation 65
Emoticons/Emojis 74
Positive and Negative Vibes from the Social World 83
Chapter V: SUMMARY, FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS
Summary 96
Findings 97
Conclusion 98
Recommendations 99
References 100
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Chapter I
THE PROBLEM
This chapter consists of five parts mainly: 1. Introduction which presents
the purpose and rationale of the study; 2. Statement of the Problem which
states the general and the specific problems of the study; 3. Scope and
Delimitation which specifies the coverage and the limitation of the study; 4.
Significance of the Study which discusses the benefits that may be derived from
the result of the study and enumerates the person that may benefit from it, and
lastly, 5. Definition of Terms which provides conceptual and operational
meaning of the important terms that will be used in the study.
INTRODUCTION
The internet has always been there since then, it has served people in
many ways one can imagine, may it be giving information, making
communication, and bringing entertainment, though what it really did to people,
is that it became an outlet for letting out their feelings about things they like or
do not like. Specifically, the social media paved a way wherein people from all
ages tend to post what they’re feeling about their day, and most of the posts
are rants which all sums up to something called “callout culture”.
Social media can be a wonderful place to browse when waiting for the
time, though it can be very intriguing as to why many use it. Callout culture,
according to Wikipedia, is a social phenomenon of publicly pointing out

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oppressive or prejudiced speech or language, denouncing perceived racism,
sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry that may have poked the user’s
attention.
Many say that it is a pernicious influence in both academic and business
worlds, and others say that it harms progressive politics by attacking people
perceived to have exhibited prejudiced behavior, rather than using dialogue
with such people to change such behavior (Paresky, 2017).
The callout culture started merely only as something that protected Black
femmes, for they were being violently harassed every single day, rape threats,
death threats, and ban evasion. They used the idea of calling out to those
people who were doing it, for it was the only way to prevent them from being
abused daily, letting everyone in the internet see what they are doing and
people were learning through these call-outs. There’s no better learning
experience than watching it (Riley, 2017).
When looked at clearly, call outs became the strength of those who were
bullied for it was scaleable and easily shared, building a critical mass to affect
change in a very short period of time and slowly, over time, others may begin
adopting call outs in response to their abuse as well (Burns, 2017).
Through this, Burns (2017) added that call outs have been made as a
tool for maintaining a social order, fighting off oppressive behavior – especially
in Twitter – and starts a good, deep discussion and purposeful conflict. Then in
this dynamic conflict and learning, it builds better communities, where call outs
can be the integral part of that building process.

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Furthermore, the basic functionality of a call out is to let out those
emotions through calling out someone in social media protecting those who are
being abused and bullied.
Studies about call out culture are still young. Many are still confused
what call out culture really is, how it works, why is it there. Though, it has been
one of the top consumer trends that was found in the 2018 research of
Euromonitor, however very few still have the vaguest idea about it.
Thus, the researcher was pushed further to find out this specific topic
and identify how call out culture works in people’s minds, how language
structure is made, and how do this generate the anger and sympathy of those
who wrote and read these call outs.
Statement of the Problem
This study aimed to identify callout culture present in Twitter how callout
culture works in the internet. Specifically, it sought to answer:
1. What are the contextual constraints of user-to-user communication
found in the Call-out Twitter accounts, in terms of:
2. What are linguistic features used by the Twitter accounts?
3. How do Call-outs generate positive and negative vibes from the social
world?
Scope and Delimitation
This study was delimited only to analyze the callout culture made by
famous Filipino accounts in Twitter and partially focused on their contextual

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constraints and linguistic features according to Layer 1 of Xie and Yus (2017).
The call outs were retrieved from the popular social media site, Twitter, where
many call outs can be found. The researcher chose only the call out of those
who are the Top 10 most followed Filipinos in Twitter (Socialbakers, 2018), with
whose posts are from December 2018 to January 2019.
Also, this study determined what impact of callout culture to the world of
the internet.
Significance of the Study
This study, HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of Filipinos in Twitter, would
be of value to the following:
To the society, for this study helps them clarify about the call outs made
in Twitter, understanding the effects made by it in their daily social media
ventures and that its functions will not be toxic, but could build communities in
the social world.
To the teachers and the English Department , for this study may be
introduced to their students and further discuss the Language structures used
in this research. This may also be a good lesson as to how students can
understand the call out using the language structure.
To the students, this study about callout culture can be a start for more
exploration of the topic.

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To the people in Twitter, for this study helps them understand what
callout culture really is, that it does not only abuse people, but also can be a
way of helping those who are bullied in the social medias.
And to the researcher, this study helps widen her knowledge about
current generation she is in and understand the culture of how different people
communicate to let out their thoughts and emotions through the internet.
Definition of Terms
For clearer and better understanding of the study, the following terms
are defined:
Callout is an instance of being summoned, especially in order to deal
with an emergency or to do repairs (Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary,
1999). In this study, this refers to the way they call out to people to announce
it in social media the problem.
Social media is the website and the application the enables users to
create and share content or to participate in social networking (Merriam-
Webster’s collegiate dictionary, 1999). Operationally, this is where the people
post about the daily lives in the internet.
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging online service that
allows users to send and receive text-based messages or posts of up to 140
characters (Techopedia, 2018). In this study, this is where the researcher
retrieved her tweets.

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Emoticon is a representation of a facial expression such as :-)
(representing a smile), formed by various combinations of keyboard characters
and used in electronic communications to convey the writer's feelings or
intended tone (Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary, 1999). In this study,
these are characters that are made into different emotions of faces used in
Twitter.
Emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion,
etc., in electronic communication (Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary,
1999). In this study, this refers to the digital characters used by users of Twitter
to express their emotions.
Jargons are special words or expressions that are used by a particular
profession or group and are difficult for others to understand. A form of
language regarded as barbarous, debased, or hybrid (Merriam-Webster’s
collegiate dictionary, 1999). In this study, these are phrases of different social
groups found in Twitter.

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CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES
This section presents gathered concepts and various materials found to
be relevant in this present study. It includes review of related studies which the
research is derived and the conceptual framework.
Related Literature
Call-out Culture
The idea of call-outs started from people on social media who were being
violently harassed every single day. According to Riley H (2017) it developed
around 2011-2012 on Tumblr, where black women who also likes black women
(lesbian black women) are being harassed each day in public. Rape threats.
Death threats. Ban envasion. Tumblr, on the other hand had no real means to
block or prevent them from harassing someone in any way they saw fit. This is
where the call-outs took place, those who were harassed realized that people
were learning when they did those call-outs.
Their hypervisibility allowed multiple people to watch, in detail, from
beginning to end, how something that seemed okay to white sensibilities quickly
devolved into racism. People actually began to learn about why Black femmes
appear to “jump the gun”, that is, call something racist before they themselves
can see the racism, because they could view the progression through the
process of a call-out (Riley H, 2017).

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However, call-outs have always been there, people just were not really
aware about it at the time, because as people look out for different hot topics,
issues, and gossips that run the internet, and give their criticisms about it, they
actually are calling out those who are in the issue at hand.
Au (2018), to really understand call-out culture, said that as an act of
publicly naming instances of oppressive behaviour, it is not a new behaviour
exclusive to the rise of the internet. For as long as humans could speak,
there have been differing opinions, and with differing opinions comes
instances of oppression, prejudice, and the creation of the “other” complex.
However, with the rise of conflict, there are often times a desire to “call out”
or make one accountable for their actions and opinions. And thus, call out
culture was born.
Ahmad (2017) also shared that call-out culture refers to the tendency
among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly
name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by
others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist,
racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because call-outs tend to be public, they
enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which
the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself. It’s a public performance where
people can demonstrate their wit or show how pure their politics are.
In addition, Kirk (2018), says that call-out culture justifies itself by
claiming to dissuade individuals from engaging in behaviours that many people
(progressives, especially) deem unacceptable. Though it may have once served a

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constructive purpose, call-out culture has since morphed into the online equivalent of road
rage. It encourages dangerous overreactions to perceived offenses, many of which are too
innocuous to warrant a reaction at all. Also, that call-out culture is a manifestation of the herd
mentality. One of the features of this mentality — and the one that may be the
most responsible for call-out culture’s expansion — is perhaps best
characterized as a “diffusion of responsibility” (Kirk, 2018).
We don’t believe we can be individually held responsible for the behavior
of a group. Combine this mentality with virtue signaling on steroids, and you
have the perfect conditions for the worst aspects of contemporary internet
culture (Ahmad, 2017).
However, if there is such as a call-out, there is also the call-in. According
to, Ahmad (2017), “calling in” has been proposed as an alternative to calling
out: calling in means speaking privately with an individual who has done some
wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the
address itself.
Likewise, Zaeh (2018) said it is when you talk with someone privately
about their behavior (or, you wait to talk in person), and is considered a less
reactionary route to work through conflict. Though the idea of calling people in,
rather than calling them out, has been around for a while, according to BDG
Press (2018) there's been a resurgence of this conversation in activist
communities — particularly because many people have deemed call-out
culture to be counteractive to social justice, and "performative" in nature.

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Furthermore, Grieve (2016) said “calling someone in can still be
awkward but I think most people would rather be taught a better way to say
something than to just be told they suck when they say the wrong thing. He
strongly argues that, you don’t want to make the person feel like they’re lesser
than you and you are pushing them out, exposed and alone in front of everyone.
One way to change this is to talk to the person one on one. If you’re with a
group of people you can ask to go speak to them in another area, or talk to
them later when it’s just the two of you. That way it feels less like a lecture in
front of all your friends and more of a conversation between two human beings.”
Another thing is that calling in isn’t insulting the person. Calling someone
in makes it more of a realization about what they’re saying. The conversation
allows you to hear the person out instead of immediately telling them that they
are wrong. It gives them a chance to acknowledge their language and reflect
(Grieve, 2016). Nonetheless, calling-in is not enough for those who can’t keep
their calm. As today’s generation tend to be more aggressive, where emotions
are let out however they want, mostly saying it in public, posting it in social
medias. They just want attention, they want someone to side with their
argument, or maybe they just want that someone to read it without them telling
in person.
Ahmad (2017) said, it has since been mobilized frequently to argue that
calling people out is always harmful, and that people should keep all their
grievances in the private sphere.

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But sometimes the only way we can address harmful behaviours is by
publicly naming them, in particular when there is a power imbalance between
the people involved and speaking privately cannot rectify the situation. Since
power exists on multiple planes, it is not always easy to tell who has more power
than you, but class, race, gender, and ability all play a part (Ahmad, 2017).
Scott (2018) also says that many critics call “call-out culture” is actually
a past-due moral balance being called in. With interest added. Had our pain
been spoken more consistently over a longer period of time, perhaps our anger
would be a manageable trickle, and not an avalanche. But we never asked for
the condition that required us to remain silent in the first place. Oppressed
groups once lived with the destruction of keeping quiet. We’ve decided that the
collateral damage of speaking up—and calling out—is more than worth it (Scott,
2018). Though as negative as it what they say, a call-out isn’t as bad as it
seems. Many say that calling out is not toxic, and that the people are. In the
people’s defense, they say that calling out is just for protecting those who are
bullied in the internet. Others, just letting their emotions out by mentioning that
someone who made him/her to call out.
Zaeh (2018) also added that public call-outs can be toxic, and typically
— especially with your friends or peers — call-ins can be a much more effective
way to create positive change and make sure your feedback is actually heard.
However, this is not to say that public call-outs should never be utilized; they
are still a tool in some situations activists face. As Hari Ziyad (2018) writing for
AfroPunk notes, “calling people out can sometimes be necessary, especially if

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the person in question is not responsive to concerns raised during a call-in —
or, if the person doing the calling-in is perpetuating problematic behaviour
themselves. Any kind of constructive feedback is uncomfortable, but that
doesn't give someone the go-ahead to tone police someone by dismissing their
call-out as toxic.”
Ahmad (2017) stated that there are ways of calling people out that are
compassionate and creative, and that recognize the whole individual instead of
viewing them simply as representations of the systems from which they benefit.
Paying attention to these other contexts will mean refusing to unleash all of our
very real trauma onto the psyches of those we imagine to only represent the
systems that oppress us. Given the nature of online social networks, call-outs
are not going away any time soon. But reminding ourselves of what a call-out
is meant to accomplish will go a long way toward creating the kinds of
substantial, material changes in people’s behaviour – and in community
dynamics – that we envision and need.
In addition, Burns (2017) says that are a legitimately effective tool for
fighting oppressive behavior — especially in social media spaces — and can
trigger wonderful, deep discussion and purposeful conflict. As he says, “we
build better communities through this dynamic of conflict and learning, and call
outs can be an integral part of that building process. But, in order to ensure that
as many people as possible feel welcome in our communities, we should all
believe in treating each other with respect.”

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Uses of Call-outs
According to Venegas (2016), here are the uses of Call-Outs:
Integrative Call-outs: Education and Discipline
In this form of integrative accountability, actors employ
constructive strategies to “educate” errants and to re-integrate them into
the scene once they have become aware of their wrong. Respondents
who advocate for this type of accountability do not necessarily mobilize
public pressure, but when they do, they give the accused an “out”- a way
out of public pressure and reintegration into the group. Based on
respondent data, a key distinctive feature of this type of consciousness
shaping practice is that it is usually reserved to neophytes, close friends,
and people within activist circles.
Off-scene Coaching
In off-scene coaching, actors pep talk one another and give
each other advice to prevent them from repeating “problematic”
behavior in their space, particularly after the fact. This happens both
outside the spaces that comprise the scene, and in the midst of these
spaces. The coaching occurs one on one as someone with more
experience takes an errant aside from the scene to inform them of their
act. In this form of private correction, the call-out seeks to address a
problem with speech-whether it is using an offensive term, or
mannerisms that reflect privilege such as “man-spreading”- a term to

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denote how men take up physical space in everyday life via their
bodies.
Processual Call-outs
In this form of public accountability, members of the queer
activists not only expose problematic acts, but also articulate the larger
process at hand that they find problematic. A key difference between
this type of public correction and the smaller consciousness-shaping
moments is depth. That is, the accuser does not merely point out the
problem but offers a course of action to address the larger problem,
process, or practice in the situation. Whereas with consciousness
shaping call outs, where errants are corrected for their conduct, in
processual call-outs, it is not a particular act of a particular individual,
but a larger practice such as corruption or organizational processes like
funding and staff. In Processual Call-outs, participants have the power
to disrupt and stop the action until the problematic dynamic is fixed.
Intrusive call-out
In intrusive call-outs, accusers seek out aspects of a person’s
life, whether a past action, or present, to call out in public and bring them
to shame and thus discredit them. These call outs exhibit an accused
as “problematic” or “fucked up” for others to see. Intrusive call-outs seek
to not only place actors as problematic, but exposes personal details of
their private lives as a way to moralize the call-out and invite
condemnation from audiences. It focuses on past actions and seek to

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dismiss the person or group as problematic and a failure for reinscribing
oppression.
Calling Out Exclusion: Inclusion Litmus Tests
In this form of call out, those who take a Foucauldian Ostrich position
to social justice mobilize inclusion as a perfect standard to discredit and
dismiss people or events for not living up to including every identity in the
book.
Identity Call-Outs: “You’re cis straight white, who are you have an
opinion?”
Foucauldian Ostriches, in their search for a truly inclusive space
that is free from any and all forms of domination, dismiss any perspective
that comes from any privileged identity as inherently problematic and as
not having an opinion. dismissing someone by identity and not transforming
the social relationships that underpin these identities is one factor that
makes call-outs like these toxic and unsettling. This type of call-out
conceptualizes identity as static and a stigma, as if whiteness and
Latinidades are ahistorical and not grounded in shifting transformations of
the state and of capitalism. This ahistorical treatment of identity is
symptomatic of postmodern intellectual influences, since this intellectual
project seeks the rejection of history, meta-narratives, and conceives
identity in the ephemeral and present form. In a context of flexible
accumulation (Harvey 1991, p. 147 in Venegas, 2016), postmodernism
shifts the terrain of struggle to cultural production and allows capitalism to

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further commodify culture and identity, thus treating identity as static and
stripping it of any history. Under these conditions, identity becomes a site
for call-outs that register identity as markers of authenticity and police
identity for any sort of consumption out of line with its notions. Further, by
conceiving of privileged identity as problematic, and conversely, by
conceiving oppressed identities as pinnacles of truth, these call outs
reinforce essentialisms that one, are not mutable, and two, relegate
identities to be the sole voice of authority on their own experience without
possibility for error or growth (Patai 1992 in Venegas, 2016).

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Twitter
The internet has been an outlet where people post what they want,
may it be what they’re doing, where they’re going, and even just what
they’re eating. It can also be what they call “blogging”. Blogs, a site that
people set up as a basic website and post long and informative write-ups
(Gil, 2018). Now, Twitter is somewhat the same, however, there are only
limited number of characters or letters that can be posted.
According to Crook (2008), Twitter is a new form of communication
– a Web 2.0 micro-blogging tool. It is a treasure trove of information. It
consists of little blogs about people’s everyday lives. They may post their
thoughts, feelings, and/or opinions on almost every aspect of life (Chew
and Eysenbach, 2010). Online interaction, therefore is now a regular part
of daily life for a demographically diverse population of billions of people
worldwide (Golder and Macy, 2014).
Twitter was described by Purohit et al (2013) as a microblogging
(Tomer, Avishay, & Bruria, 2015) platform that acts as a medium for the
flow of information where users can post updates and subscribe to other
users, known as ‘following’, in order to receive updates or microblogs from
other users.
It is not only solely for people’s thoughts; Twitter is also used for the
pre-incident activity, near real-time notification of an incident occurring, first
hand reports of the impact of an incident occurring and gauging the
community responses to emergency warnings (Merchant, Elmer, and

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Laurie, 2011). It has become a data source which can be utilized by
emergency services during disasters (Tomer, Avishay, and Buria, 2015).
Twitter data, in comparison with other social media platforms such as
Facebook, are more openly accessible and, for a proportion of tweets, can
contain valuable metadata, including geospatial data, such as the precise
latitude and longitude co-ordinates from which a Tweet was posted
(Ahmed, Bath, and Demartini, 2017).
Twitter reports having 316 million monthly active users, there being
500 million tweets posted per day, and 80% of active Twitter users use a
mobile device (About Twitter, n.d.). Tweets contain a wealth of data, and
mining this data can provide insight into public opinion and (Bakardjieva,
2005) (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2015) behaviour responses in particular
situations (Chew and Eysenbach, 2010).
It is important to understand the features of Twitter fully, for these
features may have ethical implications that should be considered. For
example, people may not be fully aware that their Tweets are publicly
viewable, some researchers (Townsend & Wallace, 2016) argue that if a
tweet contains a hashtag, then the user tweeting this has intended for their
tweet to be visible to a broader audience, and therefore informed consent
is not necessary when reproducing the tweet in an academic article. Purohit
et al (2013) described the key features of Twitter:
 A tweet is a short message also known as a post, status or microblog
from a user on Twitter and which consists of a <140 characters,

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these tweets may contain updates about user activities, or share
useful information.
 Tweets can also contain links to web-pages, blogs etc., and, to avoid
lengthy URLs, Twitter users will use condensed versions of URLs
which are shortened by external services such as “http://bit.ly/”.
 A hashtag, is denoted by a word preceding with the ‘#’ symbol, (e.g.,
#Christmas2018). The hashtag is a platform convention for user-
defines topics, and which was intended to identify a topic of
communication, e.g., #MSUIntramurals2018
 The reply feature is platform provided to communicate with the
author of a tweet by clicking in Twitter’s ‘reply’ button in response to
a tweet.
 The retweet function forwards a tweet from a user to their followers
and this is similar to forwarding an email to one’s email contacts for
example. The ‘mention’ feature acknowledges a user with the
symbolic ‘@’, but this does not use the reply platform feature e.g.,
“Thanks @userhandle”.
 A new feature implemented after the paper by Purohit et al (2013)
was published is that Twitter allows users to retweet with a
comment. Users can now quote a tweet and attach a comment to it
e.g., users tweet ‘[Original tweet]’ as @userhandle I agree
[@userhandle1 today is a good day]
 A trend also known as ‘trending’ on Twitter refers to when a topic (a
keyword or hashtag) a keyword or hashtag) is popular at a specific

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time. Twitter provides a list of topics that are currently trending for
users, based on the frequency of particular hashtag.
Internet Pragmatics
The wind of the internet has spread to almost every corner of the
globe. Now the internet is here and there (Bakardjieva 2005; Bechmann
& Lomborg 2015), impacting dramatically almost every aspect of human
life, from politics to ecology, from language to economy. The internet is
becoming more and more indispensable to the social and
communicative life of human beings, and digital living or internet-
mediated living is becoming something normal for most social
members. We are now “always online” (Baron 2008) and online
interaction is simply something ordinary.
According to Xie and Yus (2018), pragmatics can be said to be
centered upon the role of context in human communication. Besides,
for pragmatics (especially for cognitive pragmatics), what is coded in
communication (words, gestures, etc.) highly underdetermines the
speaker’s or writer’s intended interpretation, which emphasizes the
importance of context in the analysis of human interaction.
When applying pragmatics to internet-mediated communication, the
analyst is faced, among other things, with two apparently contradictory
statements. On the one hand, internet makes no difference, in the sense
that net users also build up interpretations with the aid of context, much
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in the same way as they do in face-to-face communication. However,
on the other hand, internet makes all the difference, since virtual
communication often takes place in a cues-filtered environment,
typically text-based, and with fewer options and resources for
contextualization (e.g. lack of nonverbal communication). At the same
time, the internet shatters traditional dividing lines among offline genres,
mixes qualities of several genres, creates new ones and defies
deterministic positions regarding its limitations compared to highly
contextualized situations of physical co-presence. (Xie and Yus, 2018)
A possibility when analyzing the application of pragmatics to the
internet-mediated communication, is to set up a number of layers and
study the contributions that traditional pragmatic school can make to
this new research area (Yus, 2018).
Moreover, Xie and Yus said the possible layers include the following:
 Layer 1. User and contextual constraints. A crucial aspect of
internet-mediated communication is that it is invariably
constrained by a number of factors that influence the eventual
(un)successful outcome of the act of communication. They
frame, as it were, communication and have an impact not only
on the quality of interpretation, but also on the willingness to
engage in sustained virtual interactions through a specific
interface. These constraints may be divided into those related to
the use of an interface (user-to-system communication) and

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those related to the exchange of information among users (user-
to-user communication). Among the former, we can list the
“affordances” of the sites for virtual interactions, the interface
usability (good arrangement of text and image, good structure of
links, which allows for accessing content without unnecessary
effort), and presence/ absence of effort-increasing elements on
the interface (e.g. pop-up advertisements), among others.
Concerning user-to-user communication, contextual constraints
include the degree of mutual knowledge existing between
interlocutors, familiarity with topics, jargons, expected
background, the reason for the act of communication (a casual
chat, and getting information on a topic entail different
expectations in the interaction, for instance), and the users’
personal traits such as personality.
 Layer 2. User to user by means of discourse. Pragmatics
conceptualises utterances as open to multiple possible
interpretations in a specific context. There should be little
difference in how internet users engage in interpretive strategies
compared to listeners in physical contexts; and disciplines such
as computer-mediated discourse analysis or digital discourse
analysis cover similar areas to the ones addressed by offline
pragmatic research. An essential term at this layer is genre,
whose purpose is not an individual’s private motive for

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communicating, but a socially constructed one and recognized
by the relevant organizational community and invoked in typical
situations. Internet discourses exhibit similar patterns both in the
way they are processed and in the way genres are stabilized and
enacted in interactions.
However, several qualities of virtual communication and online
discourse should be taken into account. Firstly, the degree of
genre (dis)similarity between online and offline genres depends
on how inherent to the Net the genre in question is. Secondly,
the prototypical act of communication, namely “a single
addresser, who intends a single interpretation (and interpretive
path) with a single piece of discourse directed at a single
addressee” is altered or blurred, leading to a reconsideration of
its elements, and posing a challenge for traditional pragmatic
analysis. Finally, at this second layer it is necessary to comment
on the quality of many online discourses in their hybridisation of
oral and written properties, and how users resort to different
techniques of oralisation including text deformation (repetition of
letters, creative use of punctuation marks, etc.) and the use of
emoticons/emoji in order to connote their typed texts not only
with an additional layer of orality, but also, and crucially, with a
more realistic version of the feelings, emotions and underlying
attitudes that would not be conveyed without the aid of these

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“enriching” techniques. This opens up nice areas of pragmatic
analysis that move beyond the rigidity of text.
 Layer 3. User to user in interaction. On the internet, users
engage in conversations, among them synchronous oral
dialogues (internet-enabled mobile messaging calls, video-
conferencing, Skype), multi-party typed chat conversations (on
web servers), one-to-one and one-to-many typed dialogues
(WhatsApp, Messenger), audio-file conversations, and typed
asynchronous interactions (email, mailing lists, internet fora,
dialogues on a user’s entry on a social networking site, etc.). In
theory, pragmatic disciplines such as conversation analysis,
interactional sociolinguistics or ethnomethodology should be
capable of accounting for how online conversations are
structured. And the last two include a social connotation in their
analyses.
A. Conversation analysis (CA), typically dissects
conversations, analyses the role of turn transitions, pauses,
silences, overlappings and interruptions, together with
interactional combinations such as adjacency pairs and latched
turns. Problems for a direct applicability of CA to conversations
on the Net stem from their textual and interactional properties.
Concerning the former, specifically in the case of text-based chat
interactions within a central, general-purpose screen,

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conversations show alterations and disruptions that pose
challenges for a prototypical CA study. Regarding interactional
constraints, online conversations often move beyond the
prototypical dyadic structure and into a multi-party configuration.
B. Interactional sociolinguistics aims at explaining how
interlocutors signal and interpret meaning in social interaction.
Unlike CA, more interested in the structure of conversation,
interactional sociolinguistics focuses on how interpretations are
achieved. Besides, it shows an interest in how sociological (and
cultural) knowledge and communication influence each other in
making sense of the speaker’s intentions. These foundations are
clearly applicable to internet-mediated communication, but it is
Goffman’s (1990) work that has been more intensely applied to
virtual interactions, especial his proposal of the term stage,
referred to the distinction between the roles that users play in
society at the front stage of interactions and the personal reality
that lies at the backstage of their identities, the part that hides
behind this social playground (cf. Xie and Yus 2017).
C. Finally, for ethnomethodology conversations are a
unique source of information on social and cultural knowledge.
In other words, everyday instances of communication may be
regarded as social realities, and this allows us to trace the social
aspects of the individuals by the way they speak in specific
communicative scenarios. Although conversations on the Net

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are not situated on many occasions, in the sense that
interlocutors share a common scenario and elicit similar social
meanings through their interactions, this pragmatic perspective
may also be applied to virtual interactions.
 Layer 4. User to audience. A pragmatics of internet-mediated
communication should include the analysis of online narratives,
aimed at an audience that shares with the author some portions
of mutual knowledge regarding posts and previous chunks of the
narrative. For example, faithful readers of a blog may be able to
extract from new posts all the implications and presuppositions
that are only accessible by sharing a store of information with the
author’s previous posts, whereas occasional readers may find it
difficult to fill in the informational blanks that the author does not
code and whose mutuality is taken for granted.
An interesting aspect to bear in mind regarding online
narratives is that there is a clear difference – in pragmatic terms
– between narratives that demand a purely linear processing of
the successive chunks of text, and those which offer the user
partial or total freedom to choose which sub-plot of the narrative
to follow, which link to click on, which tab in a parallel frame to
select, etc., with the user turning into “the maker” of his/her own
narrative plot, and the author’s role being left as the mere
provider of narrative threads without a favoured processing path.

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Although all narratives are processed in a similar cumulative
way that takes the chunks of text that have just been processed
as preliminary contexts upon which subsequent chunks are
inferred, different types of narrative will demand different lines of
processing and parallel amounts of processing effort depending
on aspects such as usability, reader involvement or demands for
mutuality. Elements that may also alter inferential strategies for
new narratives include the (un)predictability of links to click on,
and the role of pictures and their processing in the eventual
overall interpretation (these pictures may work as ‘anchorages’
of the accompanying text and vice versa). Besides, certain
narratives play a part in social identity shaping and community
bonding, especially those which are multi-authored or demand
from readers the aid and advice from a community of users to
move effectively through the unpredictable narrative threads.
 Layer 5. User in a group of users. Several pragmatic disciplines
have addressed social aspects of communication and the effects
that communication produces on feelings of group membership,
stabilization of social rules and norms, etc. Among them, the
ethnographic approach should be emphasized, but the
application of this socially-connoted approach to virtual settings
entails are conceptualization of its objectives, methodology and
even the way data are gathered from sample dialogues and
interactions. The analyst cannot live among the users to

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conclude what social aspects are assumed and reinforced
through online interactions. Instead, partial logging onto the
social sites is expected. Besides, identity play and anonymity are
frequent on the Net and the ethnographer may well be deceived
in his/ her research. In the case of pragmatics, our intuition is that
in general people’s awareness of social aspects leaks, as it were,
from instances of communication, generating a store not only of
general social qualities of the person’s environment, but also
qualities regarding the position of the individual within the group.
Internet users would generate and manage social qualities
through interactions in a similar way to offline communication.
For example, certain types of online discourse (or some form of
online code of behaviour, interface use, etc.) and discourses
exhibited therein are only comprehensible to those who belong
to a specific social group within some delimited space of the Net,
thus generating feelings of community membership.
 Layer 6. User and non-intended no-propositional effects.
Pragmatics has traditionally analyzed the communication of
propositions which match, to a greater or lesser extent, the
propositional information that the speaker intends to
communicate (i.e. thoughts). Propositions are typically explicit or
implicated, and come in degrees (strongly or weakly
communicated). In a way, it is sensible to base a pragmatic
theory on the analysis of propositions. They are account-able in

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truth-conditional terms and possess content that allows us to
trace the speaker’s intended meanings. The problem is that on
many occasions the key to successful acts of communication
does not lie in propositional content but in certain non-
propositional effects (feelings, emotions, impressions), and this
is particularly pervasive on the inter-net, where users spend
hours exchanging utterly useless (propositional) content which,
nevertheless, provides them with alternative sources of
satisfaction through non-propositional effects, some of which
may not even be intended by the user (as part of communicated
content), but are generated from the act of communication
making up for the low informational quality of the discourses
transferred to other users.
Recent research has focused on the communicative value of
non-propositional effects for the shaping and management of
online identity. These aspects entail the incorporation of other
disciplines (sociology, anthropology…) into the pragmatic
analysis in order to assess the effectiveness of the online act of
communication as a whole. Indeed, online interactions are
excellent sources of non-propositional effects regarding personal
and social identity shaping, especially in a time in which many
interactions take place in situations that lack physical co-
presence and therefore language is important for foregrounding

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aspects of the user’s identity that would otherwise be taken for
granted in a face-to-face situation.
Pragmatics, it is believed, has clear and straightforward
applications to communication on the internet. The same
communicative strategies, inferential steps and management of
interactions that are at work in offline, face-to-face exchanges,
are also performed in online scenarios. However, the application
of pragmatic theories to internet-mediated communication often
entails an adjustment of the hypotheses, methodologies, and
conclusions that are at work in the analysis of offline
communication. Research on internet pragmatics, it is believed,
can, should and will extend and expand the scope of pragmatics.
Internet pragmatics should, on one hand, look into those new
phenomena, issues and puzzles that emerge in the process of
internet-mediated interactions, techno lingual, techno cultural,
social, multimodal, cognitive, moral, and so forth. On the other
hand, internet pragmatics and pragmatics in general, should
notice what has gone unnoticed as a result of taken-for-
grantedness in both online and offline interactions. Our life-world
is multi-dimensional, so is our language use as practice and
presence. No matter how multi-dimensional language use is,
however, it is ultimately oriented to human presence and
existence. Modulated by the wind of the internet, the wing of
pragmatics will, hopefully, contribute to helping us see our

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discourse, soul, self and other. Internet pragmatics seeks to
explore and expound, from the perspective of pragmatics as
broadly conceived, ways of living, ways of doing, ways of seeing,
and ways of (re)discovering (Xie and Yus, 2018)
Related Studies
Huffman (2016), in his study, “Call-out Culture: How Online Shaming
Affects Social Media”, hypothesized that young social media users are
concerned that the information the post online could cascade out of control
leading to a verbal attack by an anonymous crowd. As a result, users reduce
the frequency of posting content to social media after witnessing or
experiencing acts of online shaming. Academic attention has not focused
on social media participation, or the lack thereof, as a behavioral trait akin
to organizational silence.
Spencer (2009), in his study, “Twitter’s Relevance and Use as a
Communication Tool”, analyzed how social medias, specifically, ‘Twitter’, a
new form of communication that still continues to evolve. He states that not
only is Twitter for entertainment but is also used for business and
organizations of different areas around the world are using it for commerce.
Also, not only that, but also even those health care organizations are using
it, and even in education.
Moreover, Twitter is the most used social media among others, and
is the most progressive one. By understanding the ways social networking

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allows individuals to be connected with one another, it lays the groundwork
for discovering how Twitter connects people to one another.
Šķilters, Kreile, Bojārs, Brikše, Pencis and Uzule (2011), in their
study, “The Pragmatics of Political Messages in Twitter Communication”,
aims to formulate a conception of pragmatic patterns characterizing the
construction of individual and collective identities in virtual communities (in
their case: the Twitter community). They explored several theoretical
approaches and frameworks and relevant empirical data to show that the
agents building virtual communities are ‘extended selves’ grounded in
highly dynamic and compressed, linguistically mediated virtual network
structure. Their empirical evidence consists of a study of discourse related
to the Latvian parliamentary elections of 2010. They used a Twitter corpus
(in Latvian) harvested and statistically evaluated using the Pointwise Mutual
Information (PMI) algorithm and complemented with qualitative and
quantitative content analysis.
Aarts, Maanen, Ouboter and Schraagen (2012), in their study,
“Online Social Behaviour in Twitter”, examined the state of the art research
in the field of online social networks. Their goal is to identify the current
challenges within the area of research, given the questions raised in society.
They paid attention to three aspects of social networks: actor, message,
and network characteristics. They further limited their work to research
based on Twitter data, because the online social network is the most widely
used by researchers in the field.

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Barbulet (2012), in his paper, “Social Media – A Pragmatic Approach:
Contexts and Implicatures”, aims at approaching Social Media from a
Pragmatic point of view. Implicatures and contexts in social media are also
taken into account as linguistic tools that may facilitate such an approach.
Communication — the sharing of information, ideas, and thoughts — is a
vital part of life for all of us. The different methods that allow us to
communicate are called media. A postcard to a friend, a telephone call, and
a computer disk holding homework are all types of media. Some of these
have developed beyond simple methods of communication to become
sophisticated tools, capable of persuading and influencing large numbers
of people. It seems that nowadays the techniques for building a Social
Media presence have acquired an outmost importance. Our analysis will
centre on Social Media sites with a special focus on British newspaper
blogs.
Bright, Margetts, Hale, Yasseri (2014), in their study, “The Use of
Social Media for Research and Analysis: A Feasibility Study, to explore the
ways in which data generated by social media platforms can be used to
support social research and analysis at the Department for Work and
Pensions [DWP]. The report combines a general review of all the
possibilities generated by social media data with an empirical exploration
assessing the feasibility of some solutions, focusing in particular on the
examples of Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment. The
report argues that social media data can be useful for social research
purposes in two key respects. Firstly, these media can provide indications
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of information seeking behaviour (which may indicate public awareness of
and attention to specific policies, as well as providing an idea of the sources
where they get information from). Secondly, they can provide indications of
public opinion of specific policies, or reaction to specific media events
Hoffman and Bublitz (2017), in their book, “The Pragmatics of Social
Media”, which provides a comprehensive overview of the pragmatics of
social media, i.e. of digitally mediated and Internet-based platforms which
are interactively used to share and edit self- and other-generated textual
and audio-visual messages. Its five parts offer state-of-the-art reviews and
critical evaluations in the light of on-going developments: Part I The Nature
of Social Media sets up the conceptual groundwork as it explores key
concept such as social media, participation, privacy/publicness. Part II
Social Media Platforms focuses on the pragmatics of single platforms such
as YouTube, Facebook. Part III Social Media and Discourse covers the
micro-and macro-level organization of social media discourse, while Part IV
Social Media and Identity reveals the multifarious ways in which users
collectively (re-)construct aspects of their identities. Part V Social Media and
Functions/Speech Acts surveys pragmatic studies on speech act functions
such as disagreeing, complimenting, requesting. Each contribution provides
a state-of-the-art review together with a critical evaluation of the existing
research.
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Montallana-Palacio and Gustilo (2016) their study, “A Pragmatic
Analysis of Discourse Particles in Filipino Computer Mediated
Communication”, is an attempt to investigate the phenomenon and
further delve into the discourse-pragmatic functions of discourse
particles (DPs) in digital genres, particularly on Facebook, since DPs
are commonly used by Filipino youths when posting and commenting
online, since the English language continues to evolve through time,
many of its structures and functions changed, which made it even
realizable that the smallest unit in a discourse can play a crucial role in
communication. Thirty tertiary-level students from different universities
in Metro Manila, Philippines, were selected to participate in the present
study. Using both qualitative and quasi-quantitative methods, results
revealed a surprising number and interesting types of combined
English and Filipino Relational DPs having several micro functions.
Generally, they serve as a device that can let the interlocutors convey
their emotions, relationships, and attitudes towards the receiver of their
message. Discourse particles have crucial and prominent implications
in the way Filipinos, particularly the youth, express their message, gain
understanding of the received message, and establish speaker-
receiver relationships and attitude on Facebook.

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Sen (2016), in her study, “The Discourse Analysis of Facebook and Its
Impact on Language Learning: A Study, attempts to find out the role of
Facebook on language learning. Therefore, it includes analyzing the
discourse of different apps that are popular in use on Facebook.
Different components of discourse analysis have been used to identify
and explore the impairment, and how they affect one’s language
practice. For the empirical data, a survey was conducted with the use
of quantitative method. This paper concluded with some
recommendations on what steps should be taken to overcome the
limitations which were found during the research.

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Conceptual Framework
According to Ahmad (2015), call-out culture refers to that tendency
among progressives, radicals, activists, and (Ziyad, 2018) community
organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behavior
and language use by others.
Most call-outs posted in the internet are in social medias, particularly,
Twitter. Purohit et al (2013) described Twitter as a microblogging platform
that acts as a medium for the flow of information where users can post
updates and subscribe to other users, known as ‘following’, in order to
receive updates or microblogs from other users.
According to Xie and Yus (2018), pragmatics can be said to be
centered upon the role of context in human communication. Besides, for
pragmatics (especially for cognitive pragmatics), what is coded in
communication (words, gestures, etc.) highly underdetermines the
speaker’s or writer’s intended interpretation, which emphasizes the
importance of context in the analysis of human interaction.
The current study further explores the call-out culture in Twitter and
how call-out culture works in the internet.

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a. Familiarity with Topics

a. Text Deformation
b. Jargons
b. Use of Emoticons/emoji
c. Expected background
d. User’s personal constraints
FIGURE 1. Schematic Diagram of Conceptual Framework

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CHAPTER 3
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
This methodology presents the general procedure of data gathering
and the techniques of analysis, which the study followed. This includes the
research design, Subject of the study, Data Gathering Procedure and Data
Analysis.
Research Design
This study is a descriptive and used the content analysis approach.
Content analysis according to Duriau, Reger and Pfarrer (2007) is a
research technique used to make replicable and valid inferences by
interpreting and coding textual materials. It determined patterns of
pragmatics in the call-outs showed in the posts from Twitter.
Subject of the Study
The data used in the present research were from the Top Ten Most
Followed Filipinos in Twitter. The accounts that were utilized are from 1.
Jose Marie Viceral (@vicegandako), 2. Anne Curtis-Smith
(@annecurtissmith), 3. Angel Locsin (@143redangel), 4. Kathryn Bernardo
(@bernardokath), 5. Daniel Padilla (@imdanielpadilla), 6. Yeng
Constantino (@YengPLUGGEDin), 7. Bianca Gonzalez (iamsuperbianca),
8. Relationships (@ohteenquotes), 9. MYX Philippines (@MYXphilippines),
10. Vhong Navarro (@VhongX44).

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Data Gathering
Since this study is fairly recent, the researcher opted to use the social
media, Twitter, where the posts of the Top Ten Most Followed Filipino
accounts were used as the material for this research. Also, the researcher
maximized the use of internet in gathering the data about call-outs in Twitter
and internet pragmatics which found to have bearing in the study.
The call-outs used in this research were from the posts of The Top
Ten Most Followed Filipino of 2018 from the website SocialBakers. A total
of ten call-out posts, one from each Filipino Twitter user, was used in the
study. Since there were many comments and threads under each post, the
data collection went through random sampling to avoid biases.
Data Analysis
After the data were gathered, the researcher analysed them
qualitatively. In answering the question number one (1) the researcher
applied Xie and Yus’ (2017) methodology to analyse the contextual
constraints of call-outs found in Twitter accounts. Then, the researcher
categorized the call-outs found according to the possible factors in Layer 1
by Xie and Yus (2018).
In answering question number two (2) the researcher focused on the
linguistic features used in each post of each Twitter account using also by
Xie and Yus’ (2017) Introduction to Pragmatics.

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Lastly, in identifying the data of success of chosen call-out posts, the
researcher got the records and statistics of each from the same website she
used in getting the samples. Then she analyzed how the call-outs generated
positive and negative vibes from the social world by looking at the types of
Call-outs by Venegas’ (2016) study, and focused on how they affected the
audience. She then, determined the factors that affect the call-outs and how
it will work in order to be non-toxic and could help people.

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CHAPTER IV
PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA
This chapter contains the presentation and analysis of the call-outs
made by the Most Followed Filipino artists in Twitter. This consists of three
parts: Contextual Constraints of User-To-User Found in Call-outs, Linguistic
Features Used, Positive and Negative Vibes Generated from Call-outs.
Contextual Constraints
The data for the present study were gathered from the website
SocialBakers which includes accounts of 1. Jose Marie Viceral
(@vicegandako), 2. Anne Curtis-Smith (@annecurtissmith), 3. Angel Locsin
(@143redangel), 4. Kathryn Bernardo (@bernardokath), 5. Daniel Padilla
(@imdanielpadilla), 6. Yeng Constantino (@YengPLUGGEDin), 7. Bianca
Gonzalez (iamsuperbianca), 8. Relationships (@ohteenquotes), 9. MYX
Philippines (@MYXphilippines), 10. Vhong Navarro (@VhongX44).
Xie and Yus’ (2018) internet pragmatics when applying pragmatics has
possibility of setting up a number of layers, and one of those layers are user
and contextual constraints which is defined as “aspects that underlie or frame
communication and interaction (i.e. they exist prior to the interpretive activity)
and constrain its eventual (un)successful outcome” (Yus forthcoming) which
has a set of four (4) to engage in sustained virtual interactions through a specific
interface: familiarity with topics, jargons, expected background, user’s personal
constraints. The familiarity with topics is defined as to how the user-to-user

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have well-known knowledge about a specific subject. Jargons are the special
words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are
difficult for others to understand. The expected background can be described
as the reason for the act of communication. And finally, the user’s personal
constraints are the user’s personal traits.
Nowadays, a huge amount of Internet-mediated exchanges whose
interest does not lie in the content communicated, but in what the act of
communication as a whole generates in users, producing an offset of non-
propositional effects that compensate for the lack of relevance that the content
objectively possesses. The researcher expanded Xie and Yu’s internet
pragmatics that show analysis of the contextual constraints of user-to-user
found in call-outs. The set, is then, analyzed for each call-out.
The first sample of call-out analyzed with constraint of familiarity with
topic is the one made by “Vice Ganda”, about how one of the hosts in Miss
Universe wore her outfit. During the Miss Universe, there were three hosts, one
of them was Ashley Graham, an American model who is a proponent of
the body positivity and the Health at Every Size movements.
Figure 2.a.1
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Figure 2.a.1
The figures above show that Vice Ganda made a comment calling-out
one of the hosts. Vice Ganda used pragmatics concerning user-to-user
communication’s familiarity of the topic.
As what can be observed in those figures, both of the users were aware
of the subject that was being talked about. As shown in Figure 2.a.1, Vice
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Ganda tweeted about how the dress of the host was not suitable for her, for it
showed her big curves and the figure also showed that some of the comments
in Vice’s tweet were defending him and some were criticizing.
The call-out made garnered many comments, retweets and was shared
a lot of times for the reason of the act of communication was at everyone’s
attention. The whole Philippines was watching Miss Universe at that time and
the watchers had some comments on the hosts, however, no tweet had really
impacted peoples, not until Vice Ganda paid attention to it and tweeted it. Many
have had always known that Vice Ganda has this kind of personality, where he
is thinking out loud, telling that someone what his/her flaws are, may it be on
national television or the internet. The second sample of call-out analyzed is
Anne Curtis-Smith’s retweet where she shared her thoughts about the law
(Juvenile Justice & Welfare Act (RA 9344). where children can be sent to jail
and sentenced as an adult.

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Figure 3.a.1
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Figure 3.a.1
As what the figure above shows, Anne Curtis-Smith tweeted about her
feeling towards the law, a call-out which is a subtle way to protest. Anne is an
advocate for UNICEF Philippines that is why she was upset about this. Her
familiarity with the topic at hand made her feel involved in the matter. This would
show that a non-intended propositional effect, which refers to feelings,
emotions, and impressions etc., was her reason for communication for she
wanted to be heard. She was fond of kids and now she was defending them.
As for the comments, they knew what Anne was tweeting about, and so they
either agree or disagree with her thoughts.

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The third sample of a call-out is from Bianca Gonzales, where she
called out about the traffic, which is unusual for her, for there is always traffic in
that place.
Figure
4.a.1
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Bianca Gonzales, in her tweet, she was shocked of the zero traffic. In
their place, traffic has always been there, now that there was none, she tweeted
about it. Everyone who commented in her post was familiar with the situation
she was in; they knew that traffic is really there, and they also know that she is
one of the hosts who are coming back to Pinoy Big Brother. She was a host of
PBB until she got pregnant. The reason for the act of the communication is that
Bianca wanted to share that she is going back to PBB but not really announcing
it, a subtle way to surprise her fans and the viewers. She is an enthusiastic
person and she never wants a boring time. Also the PBB wanted to surprise the
fans.
Another aspect of a contextual constraint is the use of jargons, as can
be seen here in Vice Ganda’s post.
In the comments, @pastor_lovelie used the word “anebe”, which is a
jargon used by the LGBT community, specifically the gays. It is a combination
of ‘ano’ and ‘ba’, then used by the gays, saying it in a “pabebe” (cute) way of
speaking making it ‘anebe’ – simply means ‘what’.
Another jargon was found in @iamannefracc_, where she used “plus
size supermodel”. In the fashion industry “plus size” refers to the sizes 16 and
up of women. Many feel the category marginalizes them, suggesting they are a
small group outside the mainstream whose fashion needs are secondary (Bain,
2016).
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Figure 2.a.1
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The sample of call-out with jargons is also found in Anne Curtis-Smith’s post,
specifically in the comments.
Figure
3.a.1
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Figure
3.a.1
The jargons found in the tweets were mostly political jargons, which are
usually used by politicians, lobbyists, and other people who talk about political
issues in a quicker coded way. The words used by @joriedv and @ithrusthard
were: jail, justice, sentence, and juvenile court, all of which are not familiar to
those who are not politically inclined, but is known to those who are.
A different type of constraint is seen in the call-out from Kathryn
Bernardo’s post, which is the expected background of each user.

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Figure
5.c.1
The figure shown is not a call-out, but one of the comments is a call-out.
Kathryn Bernardo is not one who really tweets about her thoughts in the social
media, just some photos, a few retweets of her endorsements, and some
quotes. However, fans are unstoppable when it comes to commenting on their
idols. Just like the one in Figure 5.c.1, “hoy @iamdanielpadilla YANG ASAWA
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MO WALANG RESPETO SAMING MGA PANGET (crying face emoji) ANO BA
YAN (heart eyes emoji and two crying face emoji)”, which is a call out made to
Daniel Padilla telling him that his wife, Kathryn, doesn’t respect the ugly people
because of her beauty, and also where she compared herself from Kathryn’s
photo, which is a pragmatic that means Kathryn is very beautiful and no can go
beyond her beauty. As an expected background, everyone knows that Kathryn
is beautiful, because since her childhood she is in the industry, and so she is
well-taken care of. As for the reason of communication, the one who
commented wanted to be noticed by Kathryn, and that is why her comment
went like that.
The next sample of call-out is from Relationships, where the post intends
to tell someone what to do if he/she did something wrong.
Figure
6.c.1
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Figure
6.c.1
The figures showed a great deal of being familiarity. The call-out is made
to those people who ignore the ones they are mad at. This account is full of
tweets that are relatable to teens of today’s generation as it is its expected
background. This particular tweet is just one of those call-out has made. The
reason for the act of communication of this tweet is for those people who have
high self-esteem. Looking at this and its other tweets, this kind of account is a
very wise person, he knows how to give advice and life lessons to others
through twitter.
Another sample of a call-out with a constraint of the expected
background is from MYX Philippines. They don’t usually post anything, but just
keeps on retweeting from other celebrity singers, dance groups, and boy
groups. However, the call-out can be found in the comments.

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Figure
7.c.1
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Figure
7.c.1
The MYX Philippines account retweeted a post that said Kai of EXO was
seen at Cebu. This made the fans furious, and so call-outs were made. The
expected background of it was that Kai was having a vacation at Cebu and MYX
Ph having it posted in Twitter would ruin his vacation, for fans would swamp his
hotel. The reason for the act of communication was that the fans wanted the
post to be taken down, however, MYX Ph did not take any action. Through this,
the account be seen as pompous, as what can be seen through the comments
made by those users of Twitter.

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The last constraint in these call-outs is the user’s personal trait, which is
found in the call-out that was made by Angel Locsin, where she made a positive
call-out to her friend.
Figure
8.d.1
Angel Locsin’s call-out is different than the first two, she was calling-out
to her friend, greeting her a happy birthday and saying things that are positive
to the one she’s calling-out. However, as what is shown in the figure, the ones
who commented do not really know who Angel is greeting, they are not familiar
with the topic, or in this case, the person, so their comments are directed only
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to Angel, appreciating and adoring her. As for the reason of the communication,
Angel wanted to greet her friend through tweeting because a lot of people would
be seeing it and would greet her also. Also, Angel is a celebrity and many follow
her, so her personal and social qualities influence eventual quantity and quality
of use of Internet-enabled interactions.
The next sample of a call-out made is from Daniel Padilla, a tweet calling-
out to everyone. His tweet was connected to another social media, Instagram,
it is accompanied by a picture.
Figure
9.d.1
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Figure
9.d.1
Daniel Padilla’s tweet is a call-out for every person who reads it. He is
aware of what is happening around, familiar about who makes mistakes,
blaming this or that, that is why in his tweet he is calling out to everybody, which
is also his reason for communication. He wants everyone to look at themselves
before blaming someone else, because of how it is in today’s society. Also, as
it is his personal trait, Daniel is a deep person and a very serious one.
The next sample who made a call-out is Yeng Constantino. Her tweet
contains a sentence which could mean a lot of things.

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Figure
10.d.1
With regard to Yeng Constantino’s tweet as shown in the Figure 10.d.1
above, the people who read it do not know what Yeng is pertaining to. Her
probable reason for the act of communicating might be that someone had
angered her, and she vented it in Twitter, or that maybe she was making a joke
through posting it, for it had an emoji, a winking with tongue-out face. Her tweet
highly undetermined her intended interpretation. As for her personal trait, she
is the kind to goof around, which would slightly explain her tweet.
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The last sample of a call-out is from Vhong Navarro. His tweet was a
call-out to Catriona Gray when she won the Miss Universe.
Figure
11.d.1
As the figure shows, Vhong Navarro was congratulating Catriona Gray,
through Twitter for it would show that he was supporting her. It can be seen that
fans are commenting about Catriona Gray too, showing their support. These
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show that both interlocutors are known people. Even though it was Vhong who
tweeted it and not Catriona herself fans addressed their comment to Catriona.
The researcher, could now say that both are sending their appreciation and
support to someone. It also shows that they have the same personal trait, for
they both showed their support to their country.
After analyzing each selected tweet of every artist in the Top 10 list, it
can be determined that call-out culture in each tweet has contextual constraints,
which makes the artist’s tweet more influential to their fans for they have the
same reason for the act of the communication which could also explain the
expected background and the personal traits of each artist.
Through these tweets, the researcher could agree with what Xie and Yus
(2018) say, “Pragmatics has traditionally analyzed the communication of
propositions which match to a greater or lesser extent, the propositional
information that the speaker intends to communicate (i.e. thoughts)”.
Propositions are typically explicit or implicated, and come in degrees
(strongly or weakly communicated). In a way, it is sensible to base a pragmatic
theory on the analysis of propositions. They are account-able in truth-
conditional terms and possess content that allows us to trace the speaker’s
intended meanings (Xie and Yus, 2018).
The problem is that on many occasions the key to successful acts of
communication does not lie in propositional content but in certain non-
propositional effects (feelings, emotions, impressions), and this is particularly
pervasive on the internet, where users spend hours exchanging utterly useless
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(propositional) content which, nevertheless, provides them with alternative
sources of satisfaction through non-propositional effects, some of which may
not even be intended by the user (as part of communicated content), but are
generated from the act of communication making up for the low informational
quality of the discourses transferred to other users (Yus, 2018).
Each of the account who made a call-out were mainly expressing their
thoughts, with the one in mind that they have no intended meanings, but just
feelings they wanted to let out.
Linguistic Features Used
Many online discourses are characterized by their hybridization of oral
and written properties (oralised written text, as it was called in Yus 2011a), and
how users resort to different techniques of oralisation including text deformation
(repetition of letters, creative use of punctuation marks, etc.) and the use of
emoticons/emoji in order to connote their typed texts not only with an additional
layer of orality, but also -and crucially- with a more realistic version of the
feelings, emotions and underlying intentions beyond textual explicitness (e.g.
in ironical communication) that would not be conveyed without the aid of these
enriching techniques (Yus, 2005). In order to connote their typed texts not only
with an additional layer of orality, but also -and crucially- with a more realistic
version of the feelings, emotions and underlying intentions beyond textual
explicitness (e.g. in ironical communication) that would not be conveyed without
the aid of these enriching techniques (Yus 2005),

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Yus (2018) further stressed that very often the origin of these creative
techniques lies in the user’s awareness that typed text is not rich enough to
convey feelings, emotions or attitudes, on many occasions users resort to them
with other purposes, including humor, the creation of a more vivid or colorful
text, or an enhancement of areas of mutuality with other users, among others.
The researcher analyzed the call-outs through the use of Linguistic
Features the can be seen in the tweets. Specifically, the text deformation,
which are the repetition of letters, creative use of punctuation marks, usage of
all caps, etc and the use of emoticons/emojis.
Yus (2005) also proposed functions which are: (a) to signal the
propositional attitude that underlies the utterance and which would be difficult
to identify without the aid of the emoticon, (b) to communicate a higher intensity
of a propositional attitude which has already been coded verbally, (c) to
strengthen/mitigate the illocutionary force of a speech act, (d) to contradict the
explicit content of the utterance (joking), (e) to contradict the explicit content of
the utterance (irony), (f) to add a feeling or emotion towards the propositional
content of the utterance (affective attitude towards the utterance), (g) to add a
feeling or emotion towards the communicative act (feeling or emotion in parallel
to the communicative act), and (h) to communicate the intensity of a feeling or
emotion that has been coded verbally.
Text Deformation
This part of the study is to understand why people use text deformation
who are willing to produce a string of text rich enough to direct the recipient not
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only towards (supposedly) the intended interpretation of their messages, but
also towards a certain measurement of the underlying propositional attitudes,
affective attitudes and emotions attached to the message when it is typed on
the computer keyboard. At the same time, textual deformation shows the kind
of creative manipulation of discourse that chat users typically display as part of
their social identities. As normally happens with most jargons, textual
deformation in comments is continuously contrasted with well-established and
normalized forms of written communication against which the users of chat
rooms rebel. (Yus, 2001a: 148-151, 2002a, 2003a) In Kataoka’s (2003: 125)
words,
“graphemic features may serve as a means of the writer’s affiliation

with particular groups, community, contexts, and cultures. Affective signs,
exploited by young writers with a certain emotional drive, can index facets
of the encoder’s self through the ways s/he reveals and responds to affective
events. We could take affective signs and punctuation to serve as a means
of connecting emotion and youth identities... Youth identities are closely tied
to the community-sanctioned ways of representing emotions that are shared
between senders and addressees and appropriate to the epistolary context.”
As shown in Figure 2.a.1 deformation is evidenced by the use of one
of the comments in capital letters by user @maywardxander, which is under the
deformation of the text. This comment was meant to defend what Vice Ganda
tweeted, in which the one called out was one of the hosts in Miss Universe 2018
about what she was wearing. It conveyed that he/she wanted to be noticed by
those who are criticizing Vice Ganda, as it was written in capital letters, it made
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the words look louder, and so it could somehow speak to those bashers.
Figure 2.a.1
According to Robb (2014), typing messages all capital letters commonly
became closely identified with ‘shouting’ and may be considered rude. Its
equivalence to shouting traces back to at least 1984 and before the Internet,
back to printed typography usage of all capitals to mean shouting. Also, all caps
can be used as an alternative to rich-text "bolding" for a single word or phrase,
to express emphasis, repeated use of all caps can be considered "shouting" or
irritating.
Figure 2.a.1
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Another example of a call-out that has text deformation, is seen in the
Figure 2.a.1, from user @joriedv (the first comment), where she used all capital
letters in some words. This shows how she really wanted to emphasize her
point to the tweet Anne Curtis made.
Figure
5.c.1
Here is another sample of a call-out that has text deformation. In the
Figure 5.c.1, @chandriuuugh’s tweet are all comments trying to get Kathryn
Bernardo’s attention, the last one though was what really the comment that
could catch anyone’s attention. With the use of capital letters, everyone who
read the comments would easily notice her message and would read it,
resulting to achieving her goal in getting Kathryn’s attention.

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Figure
4.a.1
Another sample of text deformation is seen in the comment of
@kimberlyjoiceee in the Figure 4.a.1, where she used capital letters and
elongation of words. It shows that she really is excited for Bianca Gonzales to
be back to PBB. She expressed her feelings through the words she
commented.
These tactics suggest that the process linguists call “accommodation”—
the way speaking styles converge when humans talk to one another, facilitating
both conversation and a sense of common identity—is not limited to spoken
communication (Decot, 2014).

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Figure
7.c.1
Figure 7.c.1 is also another sample of call-outs that has text
deformations, which is the usage of capital letters to express one’s thoughts
and feelings. In the comments of @zkdlin_ni and @kenchubebi, they were
furious because of what @MYXphilippines tweeted, and so they wrote it in bold
letters. According to Luna (2013), using caps convey “grandeur,” “pomposity,”
or “aesthetic seriousness” for thousands of years—at least since Roman
emperors had monuments inscribed, in all caps, with their own heroic
accomplishments. Writers have used capital letters to convey anger in print,
too. Luna (2013) added,

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“All-capitals provide visibility—maximum size within a given area.” And that

works online, too. “All-caps in an email looks like shouting because when
someone is shouting, you’re aware of the shout, and not the nuance,” Luna
told me over email. “ALL-CAPS FILL THE SPACE, so there’s an element of
feeling that the message is crowding out everything else.”
Figure
8.d.1
Another type of a text deformation is the repetition of words, just like in
the Figure 8.d.1 above. A comment from user @iamlaivie to Angel Locsin’s
tweet. In her message, she repeated the word ‘good’ to express her feelings,
where she really wanted Angel Locsin to have a good day.

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Figure
10.d.1
In the figure above, @nhinyah’s comment is another form of text
deformation, where in her comment she added letters to the word ‘you’, making
it more expressive. According to studies, people may duplicate letters in an
effort to compensate for the lack of vocal cues when they’re writing as opposed
to speaking. When people talk, they use intonation in a number of varied and
subtle ways. There’s a lot of emotional nuance that can be conveyed that you
can’t do in writing. Extra letters can serve multiple purposes, including making
you sound friendlier or making it easier to get what you want without coming off
as demanding (Doll, 2013). As what can be determined in the figure above, the
word ‘you’ in the comment was elongated to make it sound friendlier and more
expressive.
As shown in the analyzed call-outs, creative spellings and punctuations
constitute important discursive markers of identity, since they create linguistic

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barriers of intra-group specificity (Yus 2002b), with jargons which are only
comprehensible to those in the same social group (e.g. the peers).
The researcher found that there is also an explanation at the level of
communicative interaction: when chat users type their messages they lack the
ability to communicate the full range of attitudes and emotions which a richer
context such as face-to-face communication facilitates (writers in general share
this feeling to a greater or lesser extent) and they resort to textual deformations
in order to compensate for this loss. This tendency is particularly explainable in
a medium, Internet, in which feelings and emotions typically spread without
much control (e.g. spam) as said by Yus (2005).
Kesseler & Bergs (2003) also commented that the cues-filtered quality
of written text on Internet facilitates the expression of feelings and emotions,
the extroversion of otherwise introverted people and the full display of affect.
Although Internet communication allows users to speak more openly about
feelings, desires and conflicts, it does not provide them with an effective means
to communicate them.
In general, the messages which are made in twitter undergo a double
process of informative loss, which is when the user who posted his/her tweet,
followers tend interpret their message different from what the user intends to
say. On the one hand, messages in tweet, like virtually any text or utterance,
underdetermine (i.e. literally code less information than) the thought(s) that the
speaker intends to communicate with them. Within relevance theory (Sperber
& Wilson 1986/ 95), human comprehension is pictured as an inferential task

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geared towards filling up all the informative blanks that the semantic
representations (i.e. logical forms) of utterances or texts possess when they
reach the receiver’s mind. For instance, hearers or readers are expected to fix
the time span of tenses, as in (1a), to find referents for indexicals (1b), to
disambiguate (1c), to engage in enriching (1d) and loosening (1e), to find the
elliptical propositional material of sub-propositional utterances (1f), etc., among
other inferential procedures performed by the addressees in their search for a
relevant interpretation of the utterance.
Emoticons/Emojis
Emoticons (the graphic signs, such as the smiley face, that often
accompany digital written communication) are an integral part of digital culture
since its beginnings: they have followed its development over the last decades,
evolving alongside with the rapid spread of new written communication
environments, such as social media or text messaging systems. They play an
important role in digital written communication: they can serve as markers either
of emotions or familiarity, and they can intensify or downgrade the pragmatic
force of a text (Spina, 2017).
Moreover, Spina (2017) stated that, as people use writing more and
more instead of face to face interactions or phone calls, the need for
overcoming limitations in communicating emotional tone arises. The
widespread use of emoticons allows to convey nonlinguistic information that in
face-to-face communication is expressed through facial expression and other
bodily indicators. Emoticons, therefore, are primarily “emotion icons”: additional

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opportunities to convey emotions through the use of graphic symbols, directly
mapped onto facial expressions.
Figure 2.a.1
As what is seen in Figure 2.a.1, @pastor_lovelie used emojis, smileys
like a rolling on the floor emoji and a face with tears of joy and hand gesture that
shows a peace sign. These could explain that she was making a comment as
light as possible, because she might be judged for siding with Vice Ganda’s
tweet. For emoticons are multifunctional and highly context-sensitive resources,
whose different functions most often tend to overlap and to occur
simultaneously within the use of a single emoticon (Spina, 2017). Both the
smileys are a marker as an expression to indicate she is starting a light
conversation and to lift up the mood of the ongoing messages.

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Figure 3.a.1
In the Figure 3.a.1, another kind of emoji (💔) was used by Anne Curtis-
Smith. According to Emojipedia (2015), in texts and on social media, the emoji
is used to express grief after a breakup, loss, or other setbacks. While often
sincere, its tone can also be more playful, over-exaggerating a frustration or
fawning over a crush. She used a broken heart emoji which only suggests that
she is saddened by a tweet from UNICEF Philippines. By putting an emoji, she
clearly expresses a feeling not only through words but also through graphic
symbols.
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Figure
8.d.1
As seen above, a comment from @mygel_teamangel, shows that she
only used emojis with no words or texts. This could only be explained that she
didn’t need words to express her thoughts and that emojis are enough to
express her feelings. Also, a comment from @iamlaivie used happy faces
emoji, which expresses that she is very happy to greet Angel Locsin. Another
comment from @GLonghas, used four same emojis which could be explained
just like the way letters are repeated. It sends a strong emotion that would let
the reader feel the genuinely.

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Figure
5.c.1
Figure 5.c.1 shows how several emojis were used in different ways. The
crying face emoji used by @chandriuuugh in the first comment was to show
that she is begging Kathryn to like her comment. In her next comment, she used
sad face that also screams for begging attention. Lastly, she used a crying face
and a smiling face with heart eyes, this only proves that she really wanted to
get Kathryn attention, hence emojis were her way of calling out to Kathryn.
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Figure
10.d.1
In Figure 10.d.1, an emoji of winking face with tongue is used by Yeng
Constanino which could define that her tweet was just for fun or merely a joke.
She wanted to let her fans or to those who read it know that it is not a serious
thing, for if she did not use an emoji, people would think that she has an enemy
and rumors would run around. In reading this tweet, one could say that she is
avoiding controversy by using an emoji.
Figure
4.a.1
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Figure 4.a.1 shows a tweet from Bianca Gonzales where she used the
shocked face that really expresses her feelings. She was surprised by the event
that there was no traffic that Saturday evening, where it is usually traffic. Using
the emoji was an indication that it is really a surprising thing to have no traffic
in their area.
Figure
6.c.1
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A comment from @gresivio1 in Figure 6.c.1 shows that he used a crying
face three times with his comment, which shows that he is hurt by the meaning
of the words from the post. He is showing his emotions through the use of
emojis. Another comment form @Rajan_Cool_ used the emoji, curious face,
which shows that he does not fully understand what the saying mean, or that
he is confused of what it truly meant.
Figure
11.d.1
As seen in Figure 11.d.1, Vhong Navarro used the emoji clapping hands,
a heart, and the Philippine Flag, all signifying his admiration. Through the used
emojis, Vhong was able to show his reaction and feelings, he was clapping
because the Philippines got the crown again.
The role of emoticon in digital written communication, however, is much
more nuanced and not limited to the expression of emotions. Dresner & Herring
(2010), Vandergriff (2014), and Spina (2016), developed at least two other
important pragmatic functions that are not necessarily mapped onto facial
expressions, or aimed at the expression of emotions:

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 The function of social markers of familiarity and empathy. In this sense,
they are relational icons, that promote rapport and play a social and
affiliative role; (These can be seen in Anne Curtis’ tweet, Figure 3.a.1.)
 The function of markers of the pragmatic force of a text, aimed at
intensifying or downgrading its meaning. In this function, they are
contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982; Auer, 1992) that provide
information on how to interpret the verbal message. (These can be seen
in Yeng Constantino and Bianca Gonzalez’s tweets.)
As a consequence, emoticons are multifunctional and highly context-
sensitive resources, whose different functions most often tend to overlap and
to occur simultaneously within the use of a single emoticon.
This claim is illustrated by the examples (1) and (2):
(1)
@user2: Are you coming to the pool tomorrow?
@user1: No :-(
(2)
@user2: Have you seen my profile picture?
@user1: So beautiful!! :-)))
In example (1), the sad emoticon serves both as a mitigation resource,
aimed at softening the refusal of an invitation, and as a means of expressing
regret for this refusal. In example (2), the smiley is both a marker of
intensification of the positive emotion expressed verbally by “so beautiful” and
graphically by the exclamation marks, and a marker of familiarity, aimed at
expressing empathy and friendliness.

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Emoticons, therefore, are not just a ludic and extralinguistic supplement
to language, with the exclusive role of expressing emotions, but rather linguistic
resources that play other important pragmatic functions in digital written
communication, such as conveying the intentions of the writer (Tagg, 2012),
supporting social relationships among participants, and providing new
opportunities for creative expressions.
Positive and Negative Vibes from the Social World
In recent years, there has been a trend on the rise in social media of
pointing or calling out the “problematic” behavior of anyone from celebrities to
internet personalities to just regular people like you and me. Any time anyone
says or does something that could even be construed as disparaging or
degrading towards a social minority of some kind (ie. people of color, sexual
and gender minorities, etc.), they are ruthlessly picked apart by the people on
social media who only yesterday may have professed to be their biggest fans.
This intense form of call-out culture had led to things like a whole blog on a
website being created and dedicated to compiling instances of when and how
celebrities have screwed up, and people have been driven off social media for
any and every perceived infraction (@itscalloutculture, 2017).
The call-out itself as a tool can, in the right situation, be an effective
means of furthering one’s cause, especially in social justice situations. It can
serve to highlight someone’s bad behavior in a very public way, and probably
springs initially from some perceived truth that may be valid. But the mass
audience people have at their disposal on social media is more often than not
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likely to take the call-out and proceed to blow it way out of proportion. In more
extreme cases, like the John Green incident (@itscalloutculture, 2017), the call-
out may also be a life ruining accusation that the accuser has no evidence for
and cannot prove. If this is the case, it can end up causing serious problems for
the accused if taken and run through the insane online rumor mill. Call-out
culture has become so vehement and violent in recent years, that it has lost
sight of its original intention, and only serves now as a means to completely
belittle and humiliate people to make oneself feel better, or like the morally
superior party in the situation (@itscalloutculture, 2017).
Venegas (2016) believes that call-out is not as destructive as what
others think, for he shared in his paper the different types of call-out in both
positive and negative ways of doing it. Thus, the researcher got the data of each
sample call-outs in tweets from each user account in Twitter to determine how
each generated positivity or negativity in the social world. According to Venegas
(2016) there are call-outs that are productive, that when it is used effectively
could and there are those that could reform consciousness, develop more a
coherent political good sense, and integrate budding interlocutors into their
scenes, and there are call-outs that are problematic, that accusers expose
problematic processes and seek to change the situation in order for the event
to live up to the goals of inclusion and continue its vigilance against oppression
from within the scenes.

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The tweet Vice Ganda posted is a call-out which generated negative
vibes in the social world. It was posted in December 17, 2018 and immediately
got 5,320 retweets and 44,366 likes which shows that many were agreeing with
Vice Ganda, however it also created fury with those who disagreed with Vice’s
tweet.
According to Venegas (2016), this type of call-out in way could be an
Identity Call-out, where it conceptualizes identity as static and a stigma.
Identity becomes a site for call-outs that register identity as markers of
authenticity. Further, by conceiving of privileged identity as problematic, and
conversely, by conceiving oppressed identities as pinnacles of truth, these call
outs reinforce essentialisms that one, are not mutable, and two, relegate
identities to be the sole voice of authority on their own experience without
possibility for error or growth (Patai 1992).
Figure 2.a.1
______________________________________________________________
Figure 2.a.1
Vice Ganda’s comment on how one of the host in Miss Universe dressed
showed that he somehow stereotyped the host, even though his post wasn’t as
blunt as how the fans took it, it still has the pragmatics that the host was too fat
to be a host in a pageant like Miss Universe. It was subtle but was very obvious
for those who have their pragmatic sense of understanding. Anything that does
not live up to such image is to be dismissed as problematic and not worthy of
attention.
______________________________________________________________
As seen, many were siding with Vice Ganda, but there were also who
criticized him for saying such thing. Therefore, the researcher could say that
this garnered negativity throughout Twitter.
In the next tweet, the type of call-out Anne Curtis-Smith made is a
Processual Call-out which generates positive vibe, although by doing this,
comments had the opposite reaction. This type has the power to disrupt and
stop the action until the problematic dynamic is fixed. The uses of this call-out
does not only inform but shape the discipline of actors within these scenes to
develop their politics, their conceptions of the world, and grow into members of
the intellectual groups that comprise these scenes.
Figure 3.a.1
______________________________________________________________
Figure 3.a.1
However, as seen in the comments, it was not the desired reaction that
showed. People were somehow against what Anne was trying to say in her
tweet, which caused the arguments in the comment section. This is another
type of a call-out which is called Intrusive Call-out, where accusers seek out
______________________________________________________________
aspects of a person’s life, whether a past action, or present, to call out in public
and bring them to shame and thus discredit them. Intrusive call-outs seek to not
only place actors as problematic, but exposes personal details of their private
lives as a way to moralize the call-out and invite condemnation from audiences.
Just like what the comments said, they used Anne’s way of life to contradict
Anne’s statement.
A tweet from Daniel Padilla is an example of an Integrative Call-out.
Actors employ constructive strategies to “educate” errant and to re-integrate
them into the scene once they have become aware of their wrong. Those who
advocate for this type of accountability do not necessarily mobilize public
pressure, but when they do, they give the accused an “out”- a way out of public
pressure and reintegration into the group. In Daniel’s tweet, he was trying to tell
everybody, though in a subtle way, somehow also educating that people should
not blame others for things, but first look at themselves first. He was saying that
the problem lies within but not at someone’s mistake, a way to also show his
seriousness.
Figure 9.d.1
______________________________________________________________
Figure
9.d.1
Figure
9.d.1
______________________________________________________________
It describes the gentle and inclusionary range of correcting transgressors
and their process of reintegration into the space. This set of practices range
from the correcting someone privately to the public exposure of wrongs and
subsequent action to remedy the wrong.
Another type of call-out was made by MYXPhilippines, in it was seen that
they posted as picture saying that a KPOP idol is having his vacation in Cebu.
This garnered negative vibe for those who are fans of the idol. As seen, they
were angry as to why they posted about a private vacation and that it could ruin
the idol’s trip. This type is called Calling Out Exclusion, where the people
calling out the situation used inclusiveness of voices and participation as the
fuel to paint the event as problematic, and thus calling for boycott.
Figure
7.c.1
______________________________________________________________
Figure
7.c.1
______________________________________________________________
MYXPhilippines was out of line when they announced the trip made by
the KPOP Idol, they were not supposed to post anything and that made the fans
furious saying that they should put down the tweet.
The last type of call-out is seen at the tweet by Relationships in Figure
6. c.1. It is called Off-Scene Coaching, where interlocutors pep talk one
another and give each other advice to prevent them from repeating
“problematic” behavior in their space, particularly after the fact. This happens
both outside the spaces that comprise the scene, and in the midst of these
spaces. The coaching occurs one on one as someone with more experience
takes an errant aside from the scene to inform them of their act. In this form of
private correction, the call-out seeks to address a problem with speech-whether
it is using an offensive term, or mannerisms that reflect privilege such as “man-
spreading”- a term to denote how men take up physical space in everyday life
via their bodies.
Figure
6.c.1
______________________________________________________________
Figure
6.c.1
As seen in the tweet, it was giving the advice of not ignoring someone
when angry, and many in the comments were somehow agreeing to this
statement.
These forms of call-outs take place primarily among three forms of
publicity. Drawing from Erving Goffman’s notion of stages where social actors
present themselves to public life (Goffman 1959), the first is the
private/backstage space, such as one on one conversations, and private
messaging away from any publics and members of the scene. The second form
of publicity is the scene public, a localized public consisting of members of the
scene who are present. For instance, this type of space includes present
members in an activist meeting, or audience members at a rally, or queer
festival or performance. The third publicity level is the virtual public, a wider
public space where not only scene members are witness but also members
from scene networks not confined to real space. This type of space includes
______________________________________________________________
social media such as Facebook groups both open and closed, event pages with
comment sections, and newsfeeds for scene members (Venegas 2016).
In general, the call-outs generate positive and negative vibe in the social
world through people themselves. The problem starts because people often
place too much emphasis on highlighting the fucked-up things people say or
do, and demand that blood and sanctions be exacted upon the person who
fucked up. This behavior has yielded plenty of thinkpieces coming from across
the political spectrum indicting the modern “call-out culture”, which leaves
people afraid to make mistakes publicly or say the wrong thing for fear of being
pounced on by the people they thought of as allies.
The problem is not actually the call-out itself. It is a powerful tool in
identifying each person’s problematic behaviors and becoming better people.
The problem isn’t calling people’s behavior out as much as the lack of
intellectual humility that can be seen in the execution of the public call-out.
______________________________________________________________
CHAPTER V
SUMMARY, FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This chapter consists of four parts namely: (1) Summary which
summarizes the purpose of the study and the research methodology; (2)
Finding which lays out the findings of the study; (3) Conclusions which presents
the conclusions made after completing the study; and (4) Recommendations
which offers recommendations in view of the results drawn.
Summary
This study analyzed how call-outs from Twitter users work in the internet,
and identified what are its impact to the social world. Specifically, it answered
the following questions: What are the contextual constraints of user-to-user
communication found in the Call-out of the Top 10 Most Followed Twitter
accounts? What are linguistic features used by the Twitter accounts? How do
Call-outs generate positive and negative vibes from the social world?
The researcher applied Xie and Yus’ (2017) Introduction to Internet
Pragmatics to analyze the contextual constraints of call-outs found in Twitter
accounts. The call-outs were taken from Twitter accounts of the Top Ten Most
Followed Filipino Twitter user. Moreover, the researcher categorized the call-
outs found according to the possible factors in Layer 1 by Xie and Yus (2018).
Next, the researcher focused on the linguistic features used in each post
of each Twitter account using also by Xie and Yus’ (2017) Introduction to
______________________________________________________________
Pragmatics. Each post was carefully reviewed in the analysis to further
understand what each feature contributed to be determined as a call-out.
Lastly, the researcher analyzed how the call-outs generate positive and
negative vibes from the social world by looking at the types of Call-outs by
Venegas’ (2016) study, and focused on how it affects the audience.
Findings
After the analysis and interpretation of data, this study generated the
following results:
The researcher found that there are contextual constraints in each post
of the Top 10 Most Followed users in Twitter, which are the familiarity with
topics, jargons, expected background, and user’s personal constraints.
Each call-out are added with different linguistic features, specifically, text
deformations, like, using of all capital letters and dragging out words, and
emoticons/emojis, like a happy face emoji, a crying emoji, a broken heart emoji,
and etc., so that when followers read the message they get the realistic feeling
like they are really talking face to face with the person.
Call-outs are just mere statements or expressions but when given the
explication that could make negative vibe only then it would be problematic.
However, when it is given a positive outlook, it could change the whole
communication.
______________________________________________________________
Conclusion
Call-outs each have contextual constraints that each have different
interpretations for every person. The content of each call-out have underlying
explanation that one really has dig deeper to understand it before reacting to it.
The linguistic features used in each call-out show that it gives more
emotion to the followers. Users resort to different techniques (text deformation
and using of emoticons/emojis) of oralization in order to connote their typed
texts not only with an additional layer of orality, but also with a more realistic
version of the feelings, emotions and underlying intentions beyond textual
explicitness that would not be conveyed without the aid of these enriching
features.
The vibes generated from each call-out depends on the message it
conveys and how the readers react to it. There are call-outs that are productive
and call-outs that are problematic, it all relies to the people how they interpret
it.
______________________________________________________________
Recommendations
Based on the findings, further studies are recommended:
1. A Study on the Call-outs of International Celebrities in Twitter
2. An Analysis of Call-outs’ Linguistic Features in Social Media
3. An Analysis of Emoji’s Used in Messenger

______________________________________________________________
References
Ahmad. (2017, October). When Calling Out Makes Sense. Retrieved from
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture
Au. (2018). Call-out Culture: Shedding Light on Media Platforms. . Retrieved
from The Quaker Campus:
http://www.thequakercampus.org/opinionsblog/2018/3/28/call-out-
culture-shedding-light-on-media-platforms
Bakardjieva. (2005). Internet Society: The Internet in Evryday Life. London:
Sage.
Burns. (2017). How Call Out Culture Snowballed & Why It’s Here To Stay.
Retrieved from https://everydayfeminism.com/2017/09/call-culture-
snowballed-stay/
Doll, J. (2013, March). The Atlantic. Retrieved from Why Drag It Out?:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/dragging-it-
out/309220/
Editor, A. G. (2018). Living in a “Call-out” Culture. Retrieved from
https://www.agweb.com/article/living-in-a-call-out-culture/
Gil. (2018). What is Twitter and How Does it Work. Retrieved from
https://www.lifewire.com/what-exactly-is-twitter-2483331
Grieve. (2016). Calling In Vs. Calling Out. Retrieved from
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/calling-in-verses-calling-out
H, R. (2017). Call-out Culture Isn't Toxic. You Are.
Huffman. (2016). Call-out Culture: How Online Shaming Affects Social Media.
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Huffman. (2016). Call-out Culture: How Online Shaming Affects Social Media
participation in Young Adults.
Kirk. (2018). Calling Out Call-out Culture. Retrieved from
https://medium.com/s/story/calling-out-call-out-culture-dresses-mental-
health-and-the-destructive-nature-of-online-shaming-1eaac4e164a
Purohit, Hampton, Shalin, Sheth, Flach, & Bhatt. (2013). What Kind of
#Conversation is Twitter? Mining #psycholinguistic cues for emergency
coordination. Computers in Human Behaviour, 26(9), 2438, 2447.
Scott. (2018). In Defense of Call-out Culture. Retrieved from
https://www.cityartsmagazine.com/defense-call-culture/
Spencer. (2009). Twitter’s Relevance and Use as a Communication Tool.
Spina, S. (2017). Emoticons as Multifunctional and Pragmatic Resources: A
Corpus Study on Twitter. Research Gate.
Tomer, Avishay, & Bruria. (2015). Socializing in Emergencies: A Review of the
use of social media in emergency situations. International Journal of
Information Management, 609-619.
Townsend, & Wallace, L. &. (2016). Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics.
The University of Aberdeen. Retrieved from
http://www.dotrural.ac.uk/socialmediaresearchethics.pdf.
Venegas. (2016). Planchando Consciousness: Public Accountability, Call-Out
Culture and a Praxis Sketch in Queer Activist Scenes.
Xie, & Yus. (2017). An Internet Dialogue on Internet Pragmatics. Foreign
Language and Literature Studies, 75-92.

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Yus. (2017). The interface between pragmatics and Intermediated
communication: Applications, extensions and adjustments. Amsterdam.
Zaeh. (2018). What Does Call-In Mean? When Call-Out Culture Feels Toxic,
This Method Can Be Used Instead. Bustle. Retrieved from
https://www.bustle.com/p/what-does-call-in-mean-when-call-out-
culture-feels-toxic-this-method-can-be-used-instead-9056343
Ziyad. (2018). AfroPunk. Retrieved from https://www.bustle.com/p/what-does-
call-in-mean-when-call-out-culture-feels-toxic-this-method-can-be-
used-instead-9056343
______________________________________________________________
CURRICULUM VITAE
Personal Data
Name: Jillian Rechelle C. Acosta
Sex: Female
Date of Birth: June 6, 1998
Age: 20
Civil Status: Single

Email Address: jelliyanreshel@gmail.com
Home Address: Prk. 5, New Society, Brgy. Apopong, G.S.C.
Educational Attainment:
Elementary: Living Legacy Learning Experience, School of Tomorrow

General Santos City
Year Graduated: 2011
Secondary: Irineo L. Santiago Nat’l Highschool of Metro Dadiangas

Niyog Ext., General Santos City
Tertiary: Mindanao State University, G.S.C.

Fatima, General Santos City
Degree: Bachelor of Arts Major in English – Linguistics and

Literature
______________________________________________________________

Acosta Jillian Rechelle Acosta Thesisfinal

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MSU-GSC ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of Filipinos in Twitter

Presented to the Faculty of the English Department

College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Mindanao State University

General Santos City

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in English

JILLIAN RECHELLE CADORNA ACOSTA

Republic of the Philippines

MINDANAO STATE UNIVERSITY

The undergraduate thesis entitled “HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of

Filipinos in Twitter” prepared and submitted by JILLIAN RECHELLE C.

ACOSTA in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree BACHELOR OF

MELY P. SUBIERE, MAED-TESL

SALVACION B. SANTANDER, M.I.E. MELY P. SUBIERE, MAED-TESL

Recommended by: Approved by:

LORENZO L. LAROCO, M.A.T MAULAWI L. CALIMBA, M.A

Acosta, Jillian Rechelle C. “HEY YOU! : Call-out Culture of Filipinos in

This research study aimed to determine to identify Call-out Culture present in

Keywords: Call-outs, Twitter, Contextual Constraints, Linguistic Features

I acknowledge with deep gratitude.

To Prof. Mely P. Subiere, who unselfishly devoted her time in checking

To my panel examiners, Prof. Salvacion Santander and Prof. Norman

commitment to bring out the necessary changes in my study.

To my Mango Skwad, Reeeynz, Aybeeeh, Jaaairah, Peeerlaa, Miiich,

Jooveth, Queeenylaine, and Raaam who saw me at my best and bestest

To my Dating Daan pips (B4B & Friends), Sheng, Roddy, Shuks,

your humble abode despite the noise we make.

Finally, to my family, for giving inspiration, untiring prayers, and spiritual

support in all undertakings, thank you for everything.

Jillian Rechelle Acosta

Thesis Abstract iii

Chapter I: THE PROBLEM AND THE SETTING

Statement of the Problem 3

Scope and Delimitation 3

Significance of the Study 4

Chapter II: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Chapter III: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

Subject of the Study 39

Chapter IV: PRESENTEATION, ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF

Linguistic Features Used 64

Positive and Negative Vibes from the Social World 83

Chapter V: SUMMARY, FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS

This chapter consists of five parts mainly: 1. Introduction which presents

lastly, 5. Definition of Terms which provides conceptual and operational

meaning of the important terms that will be used in the study.

many ways one can imagine, may it be giving information, making

communication, and bringing entertainment, though what it really did to people,

are rants which all sums up to something called “callout culture”.

according to Wikipedia, is a social phenomenon of publicly pointing out

oppressive or prejudiced speech or language, denouncing perceived racism,

Many say that it is a pernicious influence in both academic and business

perceived to have exhibited prejudiced behavior, rather than using dialogue

with such people to change such behavior (Paresky, 2017).

people were learning through these call-outs. There’s no better learning

experience than watching it (Riley, 2017).

adopting call outs in response to their abuse as well (Burns, 2017).

can be the integral part of that building process.

Furthermore, the basic functionality of a call out is to let out those

being abused and bullied.

who wrote and read these call outs.

Statement of the Problem