A Study of Apologies as Perlocutionary Effect of Injurious Speech Acts in Pakistani Social Media

Abstract

This qualitative study aims to investigate how Pakistani social media celebrities utilize Public Apologies as a tool of reversed blaming strategies to negotiate accountability and reinforce class hierarchies, looking especially at the dehumanization of lower professional workers and marginalized communities in recent Pakistani digital media. For this purpose, the relevant excerpts of apologies particularly of Iqrar-Ul-Hassan, Ali Khan Tareen, Fiza Ali, and Nida Yasir, were taken through purposive sampling technique from a Pakistani social media platform "YouTube". The selected videos and comments were taken from the mentioned celebrities' official YouTube channels. Through the purposive sampling technique, the commentary either in the form of written comments or in the form of the trending memes on TikTok or YouTube regarding these celebrities' injurious speech acts has been discussed to highlight these celebraties' apologies as perlocutionary effect of their injurious speech acts at different levels or moments. The selected videos, written comments, and trending memes of TikTok, were analyzed at both micro and macro levels. At micro-level, the lexical and semantic features of the utterances are studied and at the macro-level, the socio-political environment in which the ordinary Pakistani people (low professionals) are victimized psychologically, and how blaming reversed technique is used by these social figures, is discussed. The selected videos of apologies in Pakistani society are the manifestations of wounded -psychology of ordinary professionals and how a specific community is marginalized by injurious speech Acts of such celebrities. The findings of this study demonstrate that in order to remove injustice and dehumanization, there is need to emerge as retaliative rather than apologetic.