Enacting identity in microblogging through ambient affiliation

TLDR

Social media affiliation can be ambient, occurring through mass hashtagging and meme iterations without direct interaction. The study investigates how Twitter users perform relational identities and form ambient affiliations within shared value communities. The authors analyze three bonds—self‑deprecation, frazzle, and addiction—by examining a 100‑million‑word corpus and a user‑specific Twitter stream.

Abstract

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds ( self-deprecation, frazzle and addiction) using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user.