Twitter's Projection on Identities and Realities of University Graduates

Big data and social media studies have been regarded as prevailing source of information. However, such studies tend to overlook on data and numbers rather than grounded and contextual turn. The present study used a contextual and qualitative analysis to investigate the identities and realities of university graduates through recurring themes and patterns in Twitter. Data for this case study was a corpus compiled from 345 tweets of 35 Twitter accounts of graduates from English Department in a private university in Indonesia. The corpus contained 4,966 tokens and was analyzed using AntConc.3.5.8 (2019) for the recurring lexical use and collocations. Results showed that university graduates posed themselves as personally engaged, while formal addressing was used in rhetorical style. The graduates were also embalmed with issues related to work, parenting, marriage, and the current pandemic. The corpus also revealed the commonly collegiate style. The use of code-mixing between Indonesian and English in the tweets also further revealed the shared identity of the graduates. It could be concluded that social media postulated the lives and world of graduates and qualitative study of big data analysis could bring more comprehensive results. Implications for educators and university administrators in preparing students for life after university were included in the discussion.