Social media platforms of reality drama: A study of selected Facebook accounts

This article undertakes a linguistic description of the spontaneous and ‘on-demand’ conversational language on social media platforms, using some Facebook accounts to explicate its pedagogical and aesthetic values from the premise that art is both instructive and entertaining. The spontaneous and on-demand conversational language of the Facebook is what this article refers to as ‘real-time’ language. This has become a major part of the inherently essential style of the Facebook and which qualifies it as a narrative similar to reality drama, if not exactly so. This study uses the personal Facebook chats of four Nigerians to affirm that the popularity of the Facebook Internet phenomenon in Nigeria is partly, but significantly, due to the artistic function of its conversational language and its dramatic potentials apart from the democratization, portability, accessibility and the interactiveness of the new media.