Identity, Belief, and Stance in Digital Self-Presentation: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis of WhatsApp “About” Profile Texts

Abstract

Although digital self-presentation has been widely examined, existing scholarship has largely 
focused on interactive discourse such as posts, comments, and status updates, with limited 
attention to non-interactive profile micro-texts. In particular, WhatsApp “About” descriptions 
remain underexplored, especially within Nigerian academic contexts where the platform plays a 
central communicative role. This study addresses this gap by examining how identity, belief, and 
stance are linguistically and pragmatically constructed in WhatsApp “About” profile texts within 
a Nigerian academic community. Data are drawn from the 2025/2026 NCE Regular Teaching 
Practice WhatsApp platform of the Federal University of Education, Zaria, comprising over 500 
members. A purposive sample of 50 profile descriptions was selected for qualitative analysis. 
Grounded in socio-pragmatics and informed by theories of indexical identity construction and 
stance-taking, the study investigates how meaning in short, persistent digital texts is shaped by 
shared cultural knowledge, academic community norms, and communicative intention. Findings 
reveal that identity is constructed selectively through professional labels, relational priorities, 
moral positioning, and aspirational self-representation rather than extended narrative. Religious 
belief—both Islamic and Christian—emerges as a dominant pragmatic resource, functioning not 
only as devotional expression but as a marker of moral alignment and communal affiliation. 
Stance-taking is primarily moral, evaluative, and motivational, with users positioning themselves 
around humility, faith, resilience, and social responsibility. Through declaratives, aphorisms, 
implicature, and multilingual expressions, users maximise meaning within minimal textual space. 
The study extends socio-pragmatic inquiry to non-interactive digital micro-texts and contributes 
to African digital discourse scholarship by foregrounding WhatsApp profile descriptions as 
culturally embedded sites of identity performance in Nigerian academic settings.