Guitar Forums

This week we decided to change our theme from social media apps to a very different but a simple one: music. It's something we all like, it's part of our everyday life and we thought it would be an easy topic to blog about. But anyways, more about the assignment we got for this week!

Since we changed our theme to music, we chose Guitar Forums as our "asynchronous online discussion forum". As the name tells you, it's all about guitars and everything guitar related. The forum has four sections: General with discussions that have something/nothing to do with guitars and music, Skills with discussions from guitar playing techniques to music theory and songwriting, In the Studio that has all kinds of recording and software discussions and The Gear which is obviously to talk about playing equipment such as guitars themselves etc.

A picture I took at a Haloo Helsinki! show a few years ago

The forum is mainly aimed at guitarists and of course to everyone interested in guitar playing and wanting to become a guitar player. It has 65,537 members total, but only 253 are active members that use the forum frequently. There is 34,334 threads and 517,919 posts and right now as I'm writing this post, there is 102 users online.

As a guest user, like me, you can read the discussions and scroll through the forum but not actually take part in the discussion. To do so you have to register and make an account. The forum has moderators who make sure the discussion stays clean and reasonable.

What comes to the linguistic characteristics of the forum, our group member Juho did a very great job on analyzing the lexical, syntactic and textual levels of it.
Lexical: The language used on the forum is quite standard. There's no signs of "internet language" or any swear words etc. The use of emotional words is also very rare. If we separate the terms ' an emoticon' and 'an emoji', no emoticons were used but a few emojis could be found.
Syntactic: The Guitar Forums seems to be rather careful grammar-wise, which is quite surprising since it's the internet after all! Most users write full sentences with proper English: every sentence starts with a capital letter, people use punctuation and apostrophes are where they belong. The whole forum has a very "grown up" feeling.
Textual: There wasn't really any slang or colloquial vocabulary found on the forum since the discussion is so formal and well written. Not really any signs of humor or wordplay either.


E.T