Hashtag narrative: Emergent storytelling and affective publics in the digital age

Abstract

This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements from the networked interactions of users with the algorithmic structures of social media platforms. It identifies and anatomizes a new narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances of Twitter, a phenomenon dubbed ‘emergent storytelling’. In doing so, it seeks to explain: (a) the multiple concepts of narrative that operate at different levels of hashtag movements emerging from the dynamic forces that circulate in and through Twitter; (b) the interplay of narrative cognition with stochastic viral activity and the invisible design of social media algorithms; and (c) the varying rhetorical purposes that narrative is put to in public discourse about viral movements. Using #MeToo as a case study in the generation and reception of ‘affective publics’, it clarifies how iterative appeals to the experiential truth of individual stories manifest as narratable social movements in the networked public sphere.

Interpreting the changeable meaning of hashtags: Toward the theorization of a model

“…Dobrin's approach is culturalist, and the analysis highlights how the collective use of the hashtag has, over time, contributed toward changing the identity of the movement. Another effort in the analysis of narrative agency performed by Twitter hashtags is the one described by Dawson ( 2020 ), again for #MeToo. The scholar focuses on the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements and identifies a new narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances of Twitter, which he defines as “emergent storytelling”.…”

Rethinking affective publics as media rituals through temporality, performativity and liminality

“…The phatic nature of digital communication forms ‘an affective stage of togetherness’ (Lünenborg, 2020: 38) at which participants contingently narrate their imagined collectivity. From the perspective of discursivity, this process is grounded in signifying practices drawing the symbolic boundaries of identities vis-à-vis their cultural and political others, as exemplified by the gendered subject of #MeToo (Dawson, 2020) or anti-immigrant hashtag activism (Adlung et al, 2021). Besides, imagined collectivities are also discursively constructed through the making sense of belonging and solidarity, as illustrated by studies on the self-validation of non-heteronormative identities on Youtube (Lovelock, 2019), or #Occupy movements and the Arab Spring (Papacharissi, 2016; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012).…”

“…Recent scholarship on affective publics more or less takes these dynamics into consideration, despite barely conceiving of them as media rituals. To specify, networked communication is regarded as affective flows or waves that come to build and maintain digital communities through cultural narratives in the sense #MeToo activism (Dawson, 2020), the public outcry of anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany (Adlung et al, 2021), and lesbian gay and bisexual youth’s vlogging on Youtube as a journey of the self-validation of their identities (Lovelock, 2019). Among those, Papacharissi’s (2016, 2015a, 2015b) work comes to the fore as she conceives of digital storytelling as a liminal space ‘to describe stages of transition and in-between positions that liminal individuals occupy’ (Papacharissi, 2015a: 124).…”

A Narrativa Jornalística no Twitter de um (Não) Atentado em Portugal

“…Designa-se de "tweet" o tipo de publicações desta plataforma que, apesar de permitir imagens e vídeos, continua a privilegiar a escrita. Apesar da restrição de caracteres, o Twitter "apresenta elementos chave de narratividade" (Sadler, 2018, p. 3266), existindo autores como Dawson (2020) que defendem que as características específicas do Twitter possibilitam a criação de fenómenos narrativos, como o "storytelling emergente".…”