SELF-ACKNOWLEDGEMENT PORTRAYAL OF INDONESIAN READERS THROUGH MOJOK.CO ‘CURHAT’ SECTION

Abstract

For years, scholars have been researching the quarter-life crisis. Quarter-life crisis (QLC) is a popular term for developmental crisis episodes that occur during early adulthood. It occurs when a person is switching or has just switched from a life structure that is unstable, open, and exploratory to one that is more settled, more predictable, and more rooted in productive roles (Robinson, 2019). A considerable amount of research had successfully spotlighted the existence of QLC in Indonesia. However, limited studies really explained to what extent QLC is projected in society. In addition, none of the studies above managed to show QLC projection through electronic discourse. Experts believe that technology offers opportunities for linguistic research. Electronic communication is considered an important linguistic means that covers every phase of human life (AbuSa‟aleek, 2015). Here lies the reason why the writers decided to use the corpus to see the projection of QLC through the „Curhat‟ section of Mojok.co. This online-news portal is chosen for the study since it has become a preferred platform for young adult readers mainly ranging from 18-34-year-old readers (Sokowati & Junaedi, 2020; Saraswati & Hastasari, 2020; Utomo, 2015). Reflecting on the section name, the readers share their problems in this section to get suggestions from the editorial in return. However, to see the insight of the readers‟ life experience, this study only analyses the writing from the users. Data for this case study was a corpus compiled from 179 correspondences written by Mojok.co users from November 2016 to October 2020. To analyze the data, this study applies a corpus approach since corpus studies have been used to analyze the representation of life issues from different platforms such as newspapers, Twitter, and fiction (Bednarek, 2020; Simanjuntak, et al., 2020; Pace-Sigge, 2018). First, the data was fed to AntConc, and it resulted in 64,862-word tokens and 7173-word types. Afterward, the writers checked the word list feature. Among the word types, this study focuses on the top 50 most frequent words used in the correspondence. Then, the writers carefully selected the words associated with QLC based on QLC theory from Robinson, Wright, Smith, and Arnett that had been summarized by Agarwal, et al (2020). To examine the issue, the collocation of each word was checked by using the level features. From the concordance line, it can be seen how the words collocated in the readers‟ text. As to the scope and the limitation, this study focuses on one of QLC's developmental features, which is self-acknowledgement. The study showed that the subject of the issues were the users themselves who projected negative emotions such as confusion and helplessness. Furthermore, the most projected problems are correlated with the developmental features one and three: feeling trapped in between and instability in roles and relationships.