Hashtags: #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and the Temporalities of a Meme Event

Frassinelli, Pier Paolo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-62057-2_4

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…However, this hashtag was also used as a representation of the movement and of a specific understanding of history, symbolising the demand for change and the rejection of colonialist symbols. The injunction 'must fall' mobilised the conceptual metaphor of falling to express both the political desire to bring the statue down, and the broader struggle for the decolonisation of memory (Frassinelli 2018).…”

Section: Hashtags and Mnemonic Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media: studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

Adriaansen

2024

Mem. Mind & Media

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This article explores the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities within the context of social media platforms and proposes to identify mnemonic communities using hashtag co-occurrence analysis. The article distinguishes between ‘explicit’ and ‘latent’ mnemonic communities, arguing that while some digital mnemonic communities may exhibit characteristics of offline communities, others exist latently as discursive spaces or semiospheres without direct awareness. On platforms like Instagram, hashtags function as semiotic markers, but also as user-chosen indexes to the content. As hashtags link the social and semantic aspects of community formation, hashtag co-occurrence analysis offers a robust framework for understanding and mapping these communities. This method allows to detect and analyse patterns of hashtag use that suggest the presence of networked community structures that may not be apparent or conscious to the social media users themselves. Additionally, a metric is introduced for determining the degree of ‘latentness’ of communities that quantifies the cohesion within communities compared to their external connections. The article demonstrates this approach by applying hashtag co-occurrence analysis to a dataset of Instagram posts tagged with #Juneteenth, a popular hashtag used to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. It identifies 87 mnemonic communities that reflect the diversity and complexity of how platforms facilitate memory-sharing practices and the role of semiotic markers in forming (latent) mnemonic networks.

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Section: Hashtags and Mnemonic Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media: studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

Adriaansen

2024

Mem. Mind & Media

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“…Because mobile phones had spread so rapidly across African countries, hopes for a new democratic wave through sub-Saharan African countries, an "African Spring," started to arise (Harsch 2012, 45;Mutsvairo 2016a, 7). Indeed, protest movements which made use of the internet have been a phenomenon in African countries in recent years, much-cited examples being the South African movements #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall (Bosch 2016;Daniels 2016;Frassinelli 2018).…”

Section: The 'Technology Of Freedom' Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

'Technology of Freedom' or 'Technology of Inequality'? Smartphones, Activism, and the Digital Divide in Senegal

Gupper¹

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The internet has often been considered a 'technology of freedom' – a nearly revolutionary tool believed to flatten social hierarchies and democratize access to media by 'giving voice' to everybody equally. Contradictory to this point of view, research has shown the existence of a 'digital divide,' the phenomenon that access to and use of the internet, as well as the outcomes derived from this use, correlate with pre-existing inequalities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among activists in Dakar, Senegal, this thesis analyzes how inequalities shape and are shaped by the relationships between activists and smartphones. Do smartphones indeed flatten social hierarchies, or are inequalities rather reproduced – or even reinforced – through them?

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Directions of Political Communication in Africa: Methodology for the Search of an African Model and Epistemology

Ijere

2020

Social Media and Elections in Africa, Volume 1

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Hashtags: #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and the Temporalities of a Meme Event

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media: studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

Latent and explicit mnemonic communities on social media: studying digital memory formation through hashtag co-occurrence analysis

'Technology of Freedom' or 'Technology of Inequality'? Smartphones, Activism, and the Digital Divide in Senegal

Directions of Political Communication in Africa: Methodology for the Search of an African Model and Epistemology

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