Hashtag Publics

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#Acknowledgments

This collection came together in a whirlwind of enthusiasm from the contributors to write about the diverse political uses of the hashtag both inside and outside of Twitter as a platform. First and foremost I want to thank all of the authors, whose insights and research are what make this collection. It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to compile their work and to get to pore over all of their amazing contributions before anyone else. It is a fine honour to watch a field coalesce on your computer screen, and I was provoked and enriched by their insights on the political moments and affordances of hashtags—thanks, all of you, for your incredible and engaging work!

I would also like to thank my colleagues at Wilfrid Laurier. Their professional generosity, camaraderie, and scholarly energy both inspired me to pull this project together and gave me the time and space to pursue it. In particular, my department chairs Andrew Herman and Jonathan Finn helped create and sustain a space that nourished scholarly productivity (sadly, something all too rare in these neoliberal times), and as mentor, Jeremy Hunsinger helped spread the word about this collection and helped us find a publisher.

As a collection of authors, we are very lucky in our choice of publishers and series. Peter Lang has been generous in their support of this project, and we are honoured to be a part of the field-defining Digital Formations series. In particular we would like to thank series editor Steve Jones for all of his insightful comments and guidance, and Mary Savigar and Sophie Appel for keeping us all on track. ← ix | x →

Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, without whose patience and support I could never get anything remotely accomplished, and Zahra, without whom nothing would be worth doing.

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CHAPTER ONE

Twitter Hashtags from Ad Hoc to Calculated Publics¹

AXEL BRUNS AND JEAN BURGESS

INTRODUCTION

From its early beginnings as an instant messaging platform for contained social networks, Twitter’s userbase and therefore its range of uses increased rapidly. The use of Twitter to coordinate political discussion, or crisis communication especially, has been a key to its legitimisation, or ‘debanalisation’ (Rogers, 2013), and with the increased legitimacy has come increased journalistic and academic attention—in both cases, it is the hashtag that has been perceived as the ‘killer app’ for Twitter’s role as a platform for the emergence of publics, where publics are understood as being formed, re-formed, and coordinated via dynamic networks of communication and social connectivity organised primarily around issues or events rather than pre-existing social groups (cf. Marres, 2012; Warner, 2005).

The central role of the hashtag in coordinating publics has been evident in contexts ranging from general political discussion through local, state and national elections (such as in the 2010 and 2013 Australian elections) to protests and other activist mobilisations (for example, in the Arab Spring as well as in Occupy and similar movements). Twitter hashtags have also featured significantly in other topical discussions, from audiences following specific live and televised sporting and entertainment events to memes, in-jokes and of course the now banal practice of live-tweeting academic conferences.² ← 13 | 14 →

Research into the use of Twitter in such contexts has also developed rapidly, aided by substantial advancements in quantitative and qualitative methodologies for capturing, processing, analysing and visualising Twitter updates by large groups of users. Recent work has especially highlighted the role of the Twitter hashtag as a means of coordinating a distributed discussion among large numbers of users, who do not need to be connected through existing follower networks.

Twitter hashtags—such as #ausvotes for the 2010 and 2013 Australian elections, #londonriots for the coordination of information and political debates around the 2011 unrest in London, or #wikileaks for the controversies around Wikileaks—thus aid the formation of ad hoc publics around specific themes and topics. They emerge from within the Twitter community—sometimes as a result of preplanning or quickly reached consensus, sometimes through protracted debate about what the appropriate hashtag for an event or topic should be (which may also lead to the formation of competing publics using different hashtags). But hashtag practices are therefore also far from static and may change over time: the prominent role in organising ad hoc discussion communities which existing studies have ascribed to hashtags may now be changing as users are beginning to construct such communities through different means, and as Twitter as a platform curates and mediates hashtags more actively.

BACKDROP

Australia, 23 June 2010: rumours begin to circulate that parliamentarians in the ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP) are preparing to move against their leader, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Rudd was elected in a landslide in November 2007, ending an 11-year reign by the conservative coalition, but his personal approval rates have slumped over the past months, further fuelling his colleagues’ misgivings over his aloof, bureaucratic leadership style. In spite of the fact that opinion polls continue to predict a clear victory for the ALP in the upcoming federal elections later that year, that Wednesday evening, Labor members of parliament are considering the unprecedented—the replacement of a first-term prime minister, barely 2½ years after his election.

As rumours of a palace revolution grow, Australia’s news media also begin to cover the story—special bulletins and breaking news inserts interrupt regular scheduled programming. Amongst the key spaces for political discussion that evening is Twitter: here, those in the know and those who want to know meet to exchange gossip, commentary, links to news updates and press releases, and photos of the gathering media throng. The growing crowd of Twitter users debating the impending leadership spill includes government and opposition politicians, journalists, celebrities, well-known Twitter micro-celebrities, and ← 14 | 15 → regular users; by midnight, some 11,800 Twitter users will have made contributions to the discussion.³

Events such as this demonstrate the importance which Twitter now has in covering breaking news and major crises; from the killing of Osama bin Laden through the Sendai earthquake and tsunami to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flights MH370 and MH17, Twitter has played a major role in covering and commenting on such events. The most widely recognised mechanism for the coordination of such coverage is the hashtag: a largely user-generated mechanism for tagging and collating those tweets which are related to a specific topic. Senders include hashtags in their messages to mark them as addressing particular themes. For Twitter users, following and posting to a hashtag conversation makes it possible for them to communicate with a community of interest around the hashtag topic without needing to go through the process of establishing a mutual follower/followee relationship with all or any of the other participants; in fact, it is even possible to follow the stream of messages containing a given hashtag without becoming a registered Twitter user, and these days, a curated version of the hashtag stream may even be broadcast alongside television news coverage or displayed on a public screen. In its potentially network-wide reach, hashtagged discussion operates at the macro level of Twitter communication (Bruns & Moe, 2014), compared to the structurally more insular exchanges through the personal publics (Schmidt, 2014) of follower networks at the meso level, and to targeted public @replying between individual users at the micro level.