Stance and Identity in Twitter Hashtags
Main Article Content
Abstract
Hashtags on the social media microblog Twitter were originally intended to indicate categories, topics, or keywords in users’ tweets, but the use of this affordance has shifted to become its own interactional communication. This study examines users with social Twitter accounts to understand how stance-taking – the act of evaluating objects during a dialogic exchange – is enacted tweet-by-tweet, analogous to face-to-face initiation and response. By applying conversation analytic frameworks focused on stance (DuBois, 2007; Myers, 2010), individual tweets are analyzed as dialogic expressions to address the relationship between tweet content and hashtag. The findings indicate that the Twitter users in this study appropriate hashtags to communicate in a particular way: Users often enter into dialogue with themselves by taking a stance through evaluation, positioning, and alignment. This stance-taking over time can contribute to identity construction.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Licensing and Reuse: Unless another option is selected below, reuse of the published Work will be governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). This lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the Work non-commercially; although new works must acknowledge the original Language@Internet publication and be non-commercial, they do not have to be licensed on the same terms.