Narrative and interpretation on Twitter: Reading tweets by telling stories

Abstract

Existing research on communication on Twitter has largely ignored the question of how users make sense of the fragmentary tweets with which they are presented. Focusing on the use of Twitter for political reporting in post-revolutionary Egypt, this article argues that the production of mental stories provides readers with a mechanism for interpreting the meaning of individual tweets in terms of their relationships to other material. Drawing on contemporary narratology, it argues that Twitter exhibits key elements of narrativity, but that a creative reading process is nonetheless required to transform this incipient narrativity into coherent, sense-making mental narratives. This foregrounding of the reader’s creative role makes stories on Twitter highly fluid and dynamic. Through reference to classic critical theory, I propose that this nonetheless represents an evolution rather than a radical break from earlier forms of narrative reception, which in many cases demanded similarly creative reading practices.

Mapping Persian Twitter: Networks and mechanism of political communication in Iranian 2017 presidential election

“…Due to the importance of Twitter in political communication, researchers have substantially studied the ways that various types of users, from politicians to ordinary users are employing this microblogging network in formal (e.g., campaigns and elections) and informal (e.g., movements and protests) political events (Jungherr, 2017; Papacharissi, 2014; Sadler, 2018; Tufekci, 2017). Researchers asserted that by tweeting politics, as a micro-donation effort (Margetts et al., 2016), ordinary people construct networked publics that simultaneously take shape locally on streets and squares and globally on social media platforms (Poell and van Dijck, 2018).…”

From “thank god for helping this person” to “libtards really jumped the shark”: Opinion leaders and (in)civility in the wake of school shootings

“…This process left us with 5996 tweets, including retweets: 3959 associated with #FSUShooting and 2037 associated with the #OSUShooting. We kept retweets because we are interested in what kind of tweets were shared and whose ideas were shared since both play an important role in narrative construction (Sadler, 2018). Retweets allowed us to identify opinion leaders and their relative influence on narrative construction and civility.…”

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

“…Mendes et al (2019) analyse how ‘digitized narratives’ of sexual violence are mediated and shaped by the affordances of particular social media platforms, and the affective experiences these produce and facilitate, including the role of hashtags as a ‘narrative and connective device’ which functions as a ‘placeholder’ for direct accounts of an experience (2019: 1302). Neil Sadler (2018), on the other hand, emphasizes narrative interpretation as a way of reading Twitter in relation to the Arab Spring, whereby the affordances of the platform provide ‘incipient narrativity’ that becomes transformed into coherent mental narratives through creative reading. ‘In brief,’ Sadler argues, ‘hashtag incipience in sharing on a global scale arguably starts with the marking of a keyword via its recurrent and iterative use in microstory making practices, before it becomes an integral part of shared stories, transportable across contexts in association with different positions to the events’ (2018: 19).…”