The Construction of Facebook as an Affective Prosthesis

Abstract

The current use of Facebook has developed a series of changes in the agents’ communication practices. This article identifies the solid changes that have occurred from a students’ population in one public school in Bogotá. The following research gathered data from participants’ Facebook Wall and in-depth interviews in order to highlight these transformations. This research was framed within a qualitative approach and phenomenological methodology. The results showed that for the majority of this student group, Facebook became an affective prosthesis, which allowed users to virtualize their emotions linguistically withinthe dynamics of a linguistic market.

Keywords

• communication practices
• computer-mediated communication
• Facebook
• linguistic market
• virtual socializing