[Air-L] Twitter hashtags used without searching in mind

[Unger, Johann]

Hi Neil,

There’s quite a lot of broadly discourse-analytical work on this in linguistics and related disciplines. Here are a few references for starters:

Bruns, A., & Moe, H. (2013). Structural layers of communication on Twitter. Twitter and society, 89, 15-28. (see also the chapter by Halavais in the same volume)

Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 181-201.

Marwick, A. E. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New media & society, 13(1), 114-133.

Zappavigna, M. (2011). Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New media & society, 13(5), 788-806.

Zappavigna, M. (2012). Discourse of Twitter and social media: How we use language to create affiliation on the web. A&C Black.

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that tweets like the ones you describe are necessarily created with or without searchability in mind. Something like #justsayin/#justsaying or #ThankYouStephenHarper can have multiple functions, both as an (ironic) stance marker for the individual tweet and as a searchable hashtags of similar tweets...

Best, Johnny.

On 20 Oct 2015, at 10:40, Neil Sadler <neil.sadler at postgrad.manchester.ac.uk<mailto:neil.sadler at postgrad.manchester.ac.uk>> wrote:

Hi everybody,

Has anyone come across any research looking at when hashtags are used on Twitter, apparently without having searchability in mind?

I'm thinking about when users employ hashtags (or create new ones) to be used in just a single tweet for rhetorical purposes and with no expectation that they will be searched for or that they will link in to a broader debate via the hashtag.

For example, the hashtag #toldyouso is used fairly often but it seems unlikely that users employing it have much expectation that other users will search for that hashtag for information about it. Rather, the focus seems to be on the rhetorical impact of the individual tweet in which it is used.

Any thoughts or recommendations for reading would be much appreciated!

Best,
Neil

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