CONSTRUCTION OF EROTIC NUANCES ON WHATSAPP AND BBM BY NIGERIAN STUDENTS

WhatsApp and BBM are popular instant messengers among Nigerian youths, particularly those of tertiary education age. Both applications are used by different shades of people across both genders as means to achieve different end. This study investigates how both apps are used in the construction of erotic conversations. The study is exploratory in nature and is intended to sketch initial understanding from different pictures painted by individual participants. Consequently, semi-structured interview of the qualitative method was used to extract responses from 20 participants, 10 each from both genders. All participants were drawn randomly from National Diploma (NDI) students of Mass Communication Department of Lagos State Polytechnic, Isolo Campus, Nigeria and year three and four students of Mass Communication Department of Olabisi Onabanjo University Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria. Findings revealed that for technical, operational and financial reasons, participants prefer WhatsApp to BBM. Majority of their erotic experiences occur on WhatsApp, involving, largely, chat buddies they have physical familiarity with. Also, most of the participants received more of nude, sexually explicit pictures of a chat buddy at some point in their erotic chat experiences in addition to pornographic films and sexually charged voice notes.