Bettina and I met three senior students for brunch on March 31, 2018. We explained to them the objective of our project and asked them if they would like to participate in it. It was interesting to see their reactions when we asked them for access to their text messages. Two of the students were hesitant in the beginning and were quite protective of their texts. On the other hand, the third student was completely open to the idea of sending us screenshots of her messages. I think we need to question why millennials consider their SMS to be very personal and private even though tech companies (i.e. Apple) always have access to it. Bettina and I were able to retrieve screenshots of two different conversations from Student 1, two different conversations from Student 2, and two different conversations from Student 3. We began reading through the text message threads to identify patterns and linguistic habits. We noticed in Student 3’s text messages that social status played a role in how Student 3 worded her messages. Even though Student 3 was conversing with another millennial (only three years older), Student 3 chose to speak formally in order to maintain a particular relationship with the person she was texting.
In addition to starting our data collection, Bettina and I drafted an email to send out to students in Sociology 3010. We think it will be interesting to use our classmates’ data to make our research relatable to the class. Bettina and I plan on collecting more data throughout the next couple of days, hopefully from underclassmen as well as older millennials. Going forward, Bettina and I realized we had to conduct short interviews with the millennials we obtain data from in order to ask some clarification questions and question the intention of using particular language in their SMS.
(Below is a working version of the email that we intend to send out to the students in Sociology 3020.)
Hello,
For our final project, Bettina and I are interested in analyzing millennials’ (college students) SMS (short message service) to identify patterns in text language. We plan on using text message chains, Facebook messenger, and direct messages (i.e. Instagram, Twitter). For example, phrases are abbreviated, visuals (i.e. GIFS, memes) are used, or punctuation marks are intentionally left out.
We would greatly appreciate your participation. If you are interested, please respond to this email. We are asking for screenshots of a day’s worth or an extended conversation. All names and specific details will be omitted. We are not concerned about the context of the messages, instead we are focusing on messaging habits/patterns. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me or Bettina.
Michelle Jeong ([email protected])
Bettina Mariano ([email protected])
Thank you!
Best,
Bettina and Michelle
Michelle,
This is an ambitious project, made more ambitious by recent events pertaining to Facebook and the “breaches of privacy.” I think until this point in history, many people took for granted that their texts and posts were not necessarily private, and they certainly did not know that other organizations can use their data to manipulate their decisions. This is not to dissuade you and Bettina from moving ahead, but you might consider a “Plan B” if you are unable to obtain a critical mass of SMS texts to analyze. I wonder whether you can also examine more public forms of online communication (i.e. Comments pages, or public tweets), which might also give you a sense of the linguistic choices that Millenials engage when communicating. You can also interview people or survey people about how they communicate.
I think your findings are rather interesting; have you considered a literature to root your discussion? I’d be curious to see where you take this project.