CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

The literature review of the study begins with the exploration on political tweets
and its advantages for politicians and the masses. The review discusses issues concerning
the English Language used by politicians to tweet and increase their supporters and
power through Twitter. The theoretical of this is also explained.

2.1

Internet VS Newspapers
With the emergence and advancement of the internet technology, does the

traditional media such as newspapers and magazines sales decline? Figures constructed
by ZDNet showed a decline in traditional newspaper and news weekly consumption due
to the internet (William & Nicholas, 1999).
In recent years, internet has become a major source of news and information
(Mehrabi, Hassan & Ali, 2009). Salman et al. (2010) stated that the internet has overtaken
the traditional media, like radio and television as the main source of information. They
discovered that 96.9% of their respondents responded that Newspaper and Internet are the
main sources of information. The finding showed that, internet is on a par with
newspaper.

The print newspapers decline and the new journalism startups (Internet
Companies which is just beginning to operate) which supported by low entry costs on the
Internet are developing around the country (Kirchhoff, 2010). 53% of adults in United
States received news online than by buying a newspaper (Zwemer, Xu, Pang, Aguirre,
Weisberg, 2010). Ariffin and Jaafar (2009) stated that newspaper have to reappraise their
role in the internet age due to the internet technology, local newspapers not only compete
with each other, but also with foreign newspapers from the whole world (eg.The New
York Times, The Armenian Reporter, The Times) and other information providers
choosing to supply news on their websites. There is no doubt that newspapers proprietor
who fails to identify the power of the Internet face a very uncertain future.
The figure below is the research of Audit Bureau of Circulations (ECM Libra,
2010) which carried out the newspapers circulation from 2006 to 2009.
Figure 1: Major Malaysian newspapers daily circulation

Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations (cited in ECM Libra, 2010)

Based on the Figure 1 above, Harian Metro, Kosmo and The Sun recorded a
stronger daily circulation growth. However, all the major mainstream newspapers (The
Star, The New Straits Times, Berita Harian and Utusan Malaysia) have been declining
9

daily circulation due to competition from internet news portals. Harian Metro and
Kosmo are said to be popular due to their Malay tabloid content (ECM Libra, 2010). In
addition, the distribution of The Sun is increasing as it is free in LRT stops, major office
buildings, and etc.
The studies (Salman et al., 2010; Ariffin & Jaafar, 2009) stated that the popularity
of Newspaper is equal with Internet; though some of the studies (Mehrabi, 2009; ECM
Libra, 2010; Kirchhoff, 2010; Zwemer et al., 2010) reported that internet has caused
decline of the traditional newspaper. The research to date has tended to focus on internet
rather than newspaper. There are many different sources in Internet, like e-mail, blogs
and social network are considered as sources of information. This study has chosen
Twitter, one of the social networks in Internet as the main focus of the survey.

2.2

Twitter
Mischaud (2007) stated that, Twitter is an online application that is social net-

working or microblogging, users of Twitter are called as twitterers, the community

members are called as followers and the 140-character text-based post is known as tweets
( Mischaud, 2007, p.60 ).
The following details of Twitter were found in Twitter.com
(http://twitter.com/about).

Twitter is a real-time information network

that connects you to the latest information about what you find
interesting. Twitter is based in San Francisco, but it has been using by
people globally. Twitter now comes in English, French, German, Italian,

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Japanese,

and

Spanish.

Twitterers

can

change

their

language

preference in their user settings with just a few clicks.

Individuals, businesses and social causes can use Twitter for
Short Message Service (SMS) and click the Fast Follow program to
connect directly to anyone with a mobile phone. Twitter for SMS is an
instant infrastructure for mobile communications. There are total of 72
countries that offer Twitter for SMS and Malaysia is one of the countries
which offer Twitter for SMS.
Twitter.com declared that, the user of Twitter can connects
businesses to customers in real-time. The user who are interested to
do business in Twitter can use Twitter to quickly share information with
people interested in their products and services, gather real-time
market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships

with

customers, partners and influential people. Twitter has provided a link

(http://business.twitter.com/)

to

guide

the

users

to

carry

out

transactions on Twitter.
According to a research by Mills, Chen, Lee, and Rao (2009), Twitter has a lot of
advantages in communication system. Twitter is one of the lowest cost communication
tools since users just have to access to internet by computer, cell-phone, and so on.
Other than that, they also stated that Twitter can be accessed as long as with a
satellite, cellular, or wired connection. It is one of the fastest networking tools in the
11

world because the users of Twitter can tweet within a second. When a second user takes
an original tweet and forwards it, its referred to as retweeting a process that enables
a very fast flow of information between mobile devices as well as computers (Sutton,
2008).

2.3

Tweets in Society
Twitter is an important tool in society to connect with each other. This view is

supported by Sarno (2009) who stated that Twitter was becoming a way to form
connections in real time with thousands of people who shared your interests or a way to
get to know strangers through tweets. Besides that, he also noticed that Twitter evolved
from an online application where users answered a simple question to a new economy
of info-sharing and connectivity between people all over the world. The article Social
Media Stats (2009) pointed that Twitter is the one of the fastest-growing social
networking websites with unique visitors growing from 1 million in June 2008 to 21
million in 2009.
Based on the report by Chen (2010) shown that in June 28, 2010, 33.56% of
global internet users visited Facebook, 6.45% visited Twitter and 2.52% visited Myspace.
Besides that, the percentage of global Internet visitors of Twitter had an increase number
of 25.79% ever since April to June 2010, compared with Facebook, an increase of
10.04%, and for MySpace, a drop of 16.7%. Therefore, we can say that even though
social networks tend to develop rapidly and successfully and may be in serious
difficulty, at least Twitter seems to have powerful attraction by the raise of 25.79% since

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April to June 2010, which recorded as the highest improvement of usage rate among all
the social networks.
In Malaysia, there is Twitter service via Telecommunication Company, which is
Maxis and Tune Talk. Maxis users received message from Maxis, which is Tweet via
SMS with tweet2me. Post tweets and follow your favourite celebrities on Twitter. Only
RM1/week. Send ON TW to 28933 or go to http://tw.nplay.com.my/m. Through the new
promotion from Maxis, we know that Malaysians are twittering quite often and needed
the service from Telecommunication Company.

2.4

Political Tweets
The Internet is speedily growing into a universal channel that turned over the

media status quo, public nowadays are focusing on the news and the information of
politic through internet (Ariffin & Jaafar, 2009). Furthermore, the masses may know the
latest political news through media, like newspaper, magazine, TV and radio, but they
would not know the personal opinion and information through the politicians directly.
Clarke (2010) stated that social network can facilitate citizens to become more effective
political actors. Several studies (Foong, 2010; Blevis, 2010; Tumasjan et al., 2010) have
reported that Twitter is an important platform for politician and there has been an
increasing interest in tweets and set up their Twitter account to connect with the masses.
There is no doubt that the effective discourse in tweets is a key to winning elections.
Golbeck, Grimes and Rogers (2010) argued that the users of Twitter take tweets as
a potential solution for information sharing problem. One demonstration of this is the
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TweetCongress initiative (http://www.tweetcongress.org/). It is the most basic level

of Web-based campaign with the goal of promoting that allows everyone to see the truth
easily in government by encouraging representatives in Congress to use Twitter.
Chi and Yang (2010) examined the adoption of Twitter among all active members
in the United States 111th House of Representatives, they found that if representatives
received a high percentage of votes during that election, they are more likely to continue
adopting Twitter because of the aspiration to maintain existing constituent support, rather
than advertising their platform and engender more support.
Tumasjan et al. (2010) analyzed over 100,000 Twitter messages of selected
politicians prior to the German federal election 2009. They found that more than one
third of all messages to be part of a conversation indicating that Twitter not only been
used to spread political opinions, but also to discuss the politic opinions with the
followers. Besides that, Senak (2010) points out that Twitter is a communication indicator
but not an election predictor. It is representing how broadly, how often, and how well
elected politician are communicating. There is no doubt that the effective discourse in
tweets to communicate with masses is a key to win elections.

2.5

The Learning Potential of Twitter

Twitter provides a platform especially for students to learn second-language (L2)

beside scheduled class time. Hence, Twitter extending the wall of the classroom and
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expanding the potential of learning especially for students. Besides that, Twitter users
provide written output when they tweet and receive comprehensible input when they read
the tweets in timeline.
Twitter is a hybrid platform that facilitates both online and offline
communication, thereby adapting itself to both synchronous and asynchronous modes
where the fact is always-on, hyber-connected (Rheingold as cited in Mischaud, 2007, p.
16). Therefore, twitterers can adapt Web 2.0 as a tool to stimulate conversations by way
of an asynchronous mode of communication to reflect and plan their reply before posting
a tweet or a synchronous mode

of communication and immediately engage their

followers by reply tweet.

Donath and Boyd (2004) noted, Identify is faceted; we have different interest,
beliefs, traits, etc, and share different ones with different people. Twitter can help people
create an own and unique online identity because this is one of the requirement for user.
User can establish their identity by personalizing their account, selecting a username,
avatar, page design, and profile information.
However, Vascellaro (2008) criticized that microblogging is only recently
beginning to get popularity and it is not considered as mainstream of Web 2.0 technology
and is has not been investigated in the context of second-language (L2) learning.
Existing research on microblogging still is quite rare although fast rising. The
majority of work includes descriptions and analyses of Twitter (Mischaud, 2007;
Grossman, 2009; Golbeck, 2010). Other focus on microblogging as a learning tool
(Rheingold, 2007; Donath & Boyd, 2004; Vascellaro, 2008). Less research has been
15

published on the political tweets in Malaysia. Twitter has been identified as an important
tool in society; it has been bringing a lot of advantages in different way. This study found
some advantages of Twitter by way of reviewing several studies.
2.6

Advantages of Twitter
According to a research by Mills, Chen, Lee, and Rao (2009), Twitter has a lot of

advantages in communication system. Twitter is one of the lowest cost communication

tool and since users just have to access to internet by computer, cell-phone, and so on.
Besides that, they showed that Twitter is easy to be used as it only takes seconds
for an account registration and to understand how to use Twitter on web. Twitter provided
a platform that user can accommodate with millions of people which can be friends or
followers.
Other than that, they also stated that Twitter can be accessed wherever on earth as
long as with a satellite, cellular, or wired connection. It is one of the fastest networking
tools in the world because Twitter user can tweet within a second. When a second user
takes an original tweet and forwards it, its referred to as retweeting a process that
enables a very fast flow of information between mobile devices as well as computers
(Sutton et al., 2008). Furthermore, social media can facilitate citizens to become more
effective political actors (Clarke, 2010). However, nothing is perfect for all kind of
research, what are the disadvantages of Twitter are also identified by numerous studies.
2.8

Language and Politics

Politics is concerned with power, the power to make decision, the power to

control others people behavior and to control their value (Fairclough, 1989). For
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politicians, they will choose their words carefully as they believed that power of language
can influence thought (Joseph, 2006).
2.8.1

Language-Politic Relationships
The basic relationship between politics and language is by verbal communication

system associated with government. This relationship is very important for a

development of a country. For instance, even a colonizer country must have a general
language in order to communicate with people in colonized country. This mirrored by the
fact that when Malaysia colonized by Japan, Malaysian are forced to learn Japanese in
order to facilitate the new government.
A study by OBarr (1976), there are three important categories of relations between
language and politics: (1) those situation in which government intervene in order to
control the communication system itself; (2) those in which language factors affect the
processes of politics and government; (3) there are mutual interaction between language
and politics.
A situation where the government policy is affecting language is when government
policy is aim to manipulate communication system to suit political objectives. His study
was strengthened by Rubin and Jernudd (1971) case studies of language planning and the
consequences in the country like Israel, East Africa, Ireland, and so on. Their study found
that language and politics is an invariable concomitant of the planning process.
Language affects the political process is when language been used by government
to control and achieve political result. Reay (1964), study about the bilingualism affects
the political process in some highlands area of New Guinea. She found that a political
17

entrepreneur who turned the advent of the Australian to his own advantage in political
purposes.
Language and politics are mutually interacted is a situation where language and
politic each affect each other. This relationship occurs when language policies are set by
governments or where language repertoires of communities are consciously manipulated
for political purposes.
2.8.2

English Language and Power

The purpose of this title is to explore various dimensions of the interrelationships

between language and power. Anand, Di Tella and Galetovic (2007) published a paper
which they shown that politician and celebrities often complain about the bias in the
media, the media always present some distorted points to serves their own benefits rather
than reporting the truth. Most of the time, the masses is concern the presentation of the
story, including the language used. This is one of the way how important the language
used as a tool to control people, and a story we call a truth is in fact an assertion base on
ourselves believe in (Beard, 2000, p.17).
Based on this study, I focus on the relationship between language and power.
Politicians behavior is articulates by the cause and effect relationship between the
language of politics (Tenuche, 2009). Fairclough (1989) stated that there are two aspect
of the language and power relationship, which is power in discourse and power behind
discourse. Power in discourse is concerned with discourse as a place where relations of
power are actually exercised and enacted. The section on power behind discourse through
how orders of discourse, how they shaped and constituted themselves by relations of
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power. Through the history of Malaysian election, we know that the power in discourse is
to do with powerful participants able to constraining the contributions of non-powerful
participants.
In Malaysian election, language is used to shapes their identities and interaction,
the politician (powerful participant) is required to conduct (content) some persuasive
speech, then operating (relations) in a particular situation to his non-powerful participants
and occupying (subjects) the subjects position of citizens (non-powerful participants).

In a democratic nation, the politician must win elections in order to gain power.
As Beard (2000) has stated that the persuasive purpose can be carried out by positive
method and negative method. The negative method might be where the candidates using
power to attack opponents but not sell themselves; and the positive method is the
candidates is not yet in power, so have to sell themselves as a brand new product through
persuasive discourse.

As we know, Malaysian politicians have their own ways to persuade people to

believe them, the more supporters they gain, and then the more power will be gained. As
social network is one of the popular tools in social life, Twitter is one of the usefulness
tools for politician to design and produce persuasive speech to receive attention and get
attention from masses, and also used to attack other politicians.

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