Twitter issue response hashtags as affordances for momentary connectedness

Rathnayake, Chamil and Suthers, Daniel D. (2018) Twitter issue response hashtags as affordances for momentary connectedness. Social Media + Society, 4 (3). pp. 1-14. (https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118784780)

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Abstract

Framing online collective behaviour within theoretical frameworks developed to describe offline phenomena is common in social media studies. This can limit the scope of analysis, because the interplay between user capabilities, intentions, and platform architecture makes online exchanges different from offline interaction. We introduce a novel conception of online publicness, momentary connectedness, which is a structure of polymorphic computer-mediated sociality that includes transactive as well as non-transactive phenomenological online activity. We suggest that Twitter issue-response hashtags can be seen as affordances for momentary connectedness where Tweets that display broad and vague audience dimensions, as well as clusters with different interactional orientations co-exist within the same topical network. We illustrate this polymorphism of momentary connectedness with a case study of an issue-response network.

ORCID iDs

Rathnayake, Chamil ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1964-2639 and Suthers, Daniel D.;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:64173
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    31 July 2018
    Published
    19 July 2018
    Published Online
    14 May 2018
    Accepted
    Keywords:social media, publics, communities, momentary connectedness, Social Sciences, Communication
    Subjects:Social Sciences
    Department:Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > School of Humanities > Journalism
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:29 May 2018 11:28
    Last modified:27 Nov 2022 03:39
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/64173
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