Short TitleSelf branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter
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AbstractTwitter is a linguistic marketplace (Bourdieu 1977) in which the processes of self branding and micro-celebrity (Marwick 2010) depend on visibility as a means of increasing social and economic gain. Hashtags are a potent resource within this system for promoting the visibility of a Twitter update (and, by implication, the update's author). This study analyses the frequency, types and grammatical context of hashtags which occurred in a dataset of approximately 92 000 tweets, taken from 100 publically available Twitter accounts, comparing the discourse styles of corporations, celebrity practitioners and 'ordinary' Twitter members. The results suggest that practices of self-branding and micro-celebrity operate on a continuum which reflect and reinforce the social and economic hierarchies which exist in offline contexts. Despite claims that hashtags are 'conversational', this study suggests that participatory culture in Twitter is not evenly distributed, and that the discourse of celebrity practitioners and corporations exhibits the synthetic personalization (Fairclough 1989) typical of mainstream media forms of broadcast talk.
KeywordsTwitter, hashtags, identity, self branding, micro-celebrity, broadcast talk, participatory culture
Biographical noteDr Ruth Page is a Lecturer in English Language at the University of Leicester. Her research interests include the language of social media, narrative analysis, language and gender, multimodality.
The linguistics of self branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags
SELF BRANDING AND MICRO-CELEBRITYThe social media genres which developed from the mid 1990s into the first decade of the twenty-first century (such as blogs, wikis, social network sites) are contexts in which the contradictory tensions of self mediation are played out (Chouliaraki, 2010). On one hand, the collaborative, dialogic potential of social media facilitated a shift towards participatory culture (Jenkins, 1992(Jenkins, , 2006, whereby the communicative balance between producers and recipients was reworked, so that consumers were no longer passive but active in their coconstruction of texts and dubbed 'produsers' (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006). But participation is neither neutral, nor is it distributed evenly. Instead, it is constrained by market forces and hierarchies of power that interweave offline and online contexts. Far from abandoning the neo-liberal capitalism that shaped e-commerce prior to the dot.com crisis in the early 1990s, interactions in social media contexts may enable self promotion strategies that result in social or economic gain. The forms such self promotion might take can vary considerably from one social media site to another. Nonetheless, visibility and attention have emerged as core properties necessary for accruing status and perceived influence.The resulting attention economy underpins the processes of self branding and microcelebrity (Senft, 2008;Marwick, 2010). In line with current ...
