Understanding the 'mess' in text messages : An analysis of humorous text message exchanges shared in social media platforms

Abstract: The concept 'mess-understanding' has circulated in online media and is so prevalent that it is now included in the Urban Dictionary. The folk concept of mess-understandings is a pun for misunderstandings arising in an online media context. Posting one's own or others' miscommunication and/or typographical errors has grown to be a popular way of sharing humor via cross-platform sharing on the Internet. The aim of this paper is to analyze short message service (SMS) dialogues shared in social media, with a special emphasis on those with the highest degree of 'shareability' and/or popularity. The study specifically focuses on understanding linguistic and communicative reasons behind these dialogues being treated as humorous by users. As such, the study aims to shed light upon current cultural conceptions of communication and humor. Data was collected from the photo sharing website Pinterest from users who had posted or reposted 'screen shots' from their own or others' SMS conversations. In order to collect as much valuable data as possible, a manual search strategy was developed with three different word strings which resulted in a corpus of 160 dialogues. Content analysis of the data revealed certain recurrent humor themes, such as allusions to sexual conduct or bodily functions, generation gaps, technology difficulties, and lexical ambiguity.