Studying the relationship between purpose of use and characteristics of cues in text-based CMC

Abstract

Our textual communication across platforms is facilitated by the presence of various cues like emojis, GIFs, stickers, acronyms, lexical surrogates, voice notes, silence etc. These cues can be broadly divided into four categories – visual cues, textual cues, audio cue and chronemic cue. Each one of us use these cues to fulfill our own different purposes. The inherent features of the cues help us to fulfill these purposes as we use them. The paper studies the relationship between purpose of use of cue categories and their characteristics in text-based CMC from the lens of the demographic parameter of gender. Purposive sampling method was used and the data was collected through a questionnaire. Gender was found to be associated with purpose of using textual cues and visual cues. Purpose of using cues were found to be associated with only some of the characteristics of each cue category.