IN-GROUP IDENTITY IN ONLINE MASS MEDIA A CASE STUDY OF ‘CITY OF PIGS’ BLOG POSTING

Abstract

‘City of pigs’ is a blog posting that once was a trending topic in Indonesia as it addressed the dirtiness of Bandung. This topic was not new since many newspaper has published news and articles about the some places in Bandung that is consistently dirty. However, what made this posting a trending topic was the author’s background (she was a foreigner), the text itself, and readers responses. Pros and cons did take place. As for the cons, many believe she addressed to specific communities, and established herself as separate group. In this paper I seek to describe how such assumption was derived. By using corpus approach, the text was processed and pronouns (with the contexts) were retrieved and analyzed. Pronoun reference analysis shows that some of the references are made exophorically, causing the readers have to use their metalinguistic knowledge, in this case the superiority of Caucasian race. At this point, multi interpretation is more likely to occur. The references for some pronouns are also generalized such as Muslims, People of Bandung, Asians and Indonesians, though some are implied. Quantitatively, the generalization is not much, but for some readers, this tends to be a crucial importance that cause them to respond the posting negatively. Keywords: blog, discourse, group identity, pronoun, text processing, keyword in contexts