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Abstract

Microblogging is an increasingly prevalent communicative practice for negotiating identity and engaging in networked publics. It is currently of particular interest to new media and communication theorists, due to the lens it provides to view ‘real-time’ expression of online opinion and sentiment about both public events and domestic life. While many studies have investigated microblogging in relation to large-scale political events and crises, this article focuses on the latter private domain, exploring the interfacing of the personal realm with mass communicative discourse. A million-word corpus of Twitter posts (MORPHEUS) will be used to investigate a form of ‘ambient affiliation’ that is enacted as microbloggers bond around expressions of the quotidian. This corpus features discourse in the semantic domain of sleep, a surprisingly frequent topic in microblogging posts. Drawing upon corpus linguistic methods, combined with close discourse analysis of communicative patterns, the focus will be on the role of hashtags in supporting ambient communion about the everyday.

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Ambient Affiliation in Microblogging: Bonding around the Quotidian

Abstract

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