Coffeetweets: Bonding Around the Bean on Twitter
Abstract
This chapter explores how we use social media to communicate our experience of the world and bond with others by forming communities of shared values. Microblogging services such as Twitter and Weibo are a form of social media allowing users to publish streams of length-delimited posts to internet-mediated audiences. As such they afford new kinds of interpersonal interaction via the conversation-like exchanges that occur (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009). An example of a length-delimited post (hereafter ‘micropost’) is the following. It contains one of the most common patterns in microblogging, an expression of thanks for personal endorsement:
@Tim I love #coffee too
This post is addressed to Tim using the @ symbol before the name, a construction which can also function as a reference to the person (e.g. @Tim makes great coffee), and contains a hashtag, the # symbol, which acts as a form of metadata labelling the topic of the post so that it can be found by others. This chapter will consider microposts such as this in terms of how they illuminate the way microblogging as a practice creates alignments around shared quotidian experiences by conferring upon the private realm of daily experience a public audience. The kind of personal expression of the everyday that we see in microposts has never been subject to real-time mass dissemination in the way that we are currently witnessing on Twitter. This chapter focuses on one such personal domain, coffeetalk, that is, discourse relating to coffee as consumed in everyday life.1 I will consider this discourse from two
... First of all, the majority of interaction on Twitter happens through text, lending itself nicely to analysis of interactions [172]. Furthermore, when trying to understand communities or social phenomenons online, Twitter is often used as the platform of choice [3,75,90,155,199,231,273,303,306,311]. ...
... As the Internet evolved, social media did too, yet the sense of community stayed. Twitter allowed people from all over the world [155] to connect with others -with similar interests [231,269,311], shared goals [49,56,58,97,101,199], or just to meet other people. Participation in these communities can lead to a sense of identity [311]. ...
... Twitter allowed people from all over the world [155] to connect with others -with similar interests [231,269,311], shared goals [49,56,58,97,101,199], or just to meet other people. Participation in these communities can lead to a sense of identity [311]. Other people choose to use Instagram and see many of the same benefits. ...
Throughout history, the destinies of dogs and humans have been intricately woven to-
gether. As we invent new technologies, explore new ideas, or undergo fundamental changes
in society, the lives of our dogs change as well. Dogs have gone from being primarily used
for hunting or protecting to be mostly for companionship. Current literature poses a view-
point that the relationship between dogs and owners is fluid and can transition between
the roles of children, objects, or dogs. This thesis seeks to validate this viewpoint as well as
extending these concepts to social media; how do relationships between dogs and owners
(and dogs and other people) change when dogs are ventriloquised online?
The empirical work reported in this thesis is subdivided into three interconnected studies.
The first examines the relationship between dogs and dog owners through a series of sur-
veys addressing aspects of the person’s life with their dog and their feelings towards their
dog. The second study follows on from findings on from the first study, but examining
the dog-human relationship through a “new” platform: Twitter. Using #dogsofTwitter as
a central point, this study explores how technology is mediating and shaping how people
connect with dogs online. The third and final study undertakes a more in-depth examina-
tion of Twitter, conducting a focused analysis of Twitter accounts posing as dogs. When
brought together, these studies examine how the blending between online and offline rela-
tionships affect the relationship between dogs and humans, and how social media can act
as a hindrance or a help to connect with dogs.
Collectively, these studies present a comprehensive understanding of ventriloquism of dogs
online: why people make accounts for their dogs, how the accounts change their relation-
ship with their own dogs, potential effects on the dogs, and how the existence of these
accounts can affect unrelated people. By underpinning these findings with the dog-human
interaction model from prior Sociology of Literature and empirical work, the thesis also
raises questions of the use of objectification of dogs and how social media can help people
understand the less-pleasant but typical aspects of dog ownership.
... 1.1. Microblogging Zappavigna (2014) defines Microblogging as "a highly social activity involving communicative practices in which conversational reciprocity is central" (p.141). Hence Microblogging affiliation might be considered "ambient" in the sense that micro bloggers do not have to communicate directly to align around a similar value (Zappavigna, 2014, pp.141-142). ...
... Hence Microblogging affiliation might be considered "ambient" in the sense that micro bloggers do not have to communicate directly to align around a similar value (Zappavigna, 2014, pp.141-142). Instead, they can indirectly express their alignments by presenting specific patterns of evaluation, or they can do so explicitly using resources like hashtags (e.g.#Qur'an_burning #Sweden #doublestandards) (Zappavigna, 2014). ...
... 68 Zappavigna draws on systemic functional linguistics to examine microblogging posts (tweets) about everyday coffee consumption. 69 The author finds that people evaluate coffee and align with other tweet posters in ways that construct both marked with the hashtag #avotoast. 71 Recognizing that the avocado has become an icon for communicating values such as veganism, fitness, and "clean eating," the authors demonstrate how the posts' captions, tags, and images convey values associated with avocado toast, including pertaining to healthful and ethical eating, as well as to food's aesthetic value. ...
Linguistic and discourse analytic studies of food-related communication demonstrate how people construct identities and (re)create and contest ideologies that focus on food but extend well beyond it to issues of socioeconomic class, culture, gender, and privilege. Scholarship in this area considers how people engage in food-related communication across contexts, including in mealtime conversations, on restaurant menus and food packaging, in recipes, on social media, and as represented on infotainment food television. Analyzing the details of human interaction and texts also illuminates the role of specific linguistic and other communicative strategies—such as use of adjectives and metaphors—in constituting the food-related discourse that helps constitute human experience.
... And, as I discuss in the first article of my dissertation (Biri 2021), in a dialogue online, the writer is not only discussing their own perspective but also reflecting it to the viewpoints expressed by other writers in the online community. I see these phrases as part of interaction, because even when a writer is writing for their personal blog or profile, they have a specific reader or audience in mind (Marwick & boyd 2011;Zappavigna 2014), for example other people in the community, who are assumed to share the writer's stance or are perhaps invited to do so (see Martin & White 2005: 95). As example (1) shows, marking a viewpoint as personal, as the writer's own, acknowledges that there are readers, who may have their own viewpoints, whether similar or different. ...
The author defended her doctoral dissertation Stancetaking in interest-based online communities: A corpus pragmatic comparative analysis at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, on 11 November 2023. The opponent was Professor Birte Bös (Universität Duisburg-Essen) and the custos was Dr. Turo Hiltunen. The doctoral dissertation was published in the series Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis. The summary of the article-based dissertation is available at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-9453-4
... Highly dialogic: discussion-initiating posts, replies to posts, and replies-toreplies Communality General sociability (Phua et al. 2017); loose publics based around hashtags (Zappavigna 2011(Zappavigna , 2014 Community-building and information sharing in subreddits (Moore and Chuang 2017; Robards 2018; Leuckert and Leuckert 2020) Table 1 gives the central characteristics and key differences that impact the writing and sharing of posts on these two platforms. On a technical level, Twitter posts are on average shorter than Reddit posts due to Twitter's 280-character restriction. ...
This study analyses the functions of 'I know' and 'we know' in online discussions of climate change. These phrases locate the writer through the first-person pronouns and indicate epistemic certainty through the private verb 'know'. The constructions are analysed in a corpus of climate change related posts on the social media sites Twitter (currently X) and Reddit. As the writers discuss and argue for or against climate change being an environmental threat, 'I know' and 'we know' mark the writer’s subjective evaluation and how they position themselves with a like-minded audience: 'I know' has interpersonal functions and 'we know' is used to emphasise certainty by attributing knowledge to a larger epistemic community. This construction of knowledge situates the writer in the broader ideological climate debate.
In this chapter, the theoretical framework of SFL and the two analytical approaches of appraisal and DNVA are reviewed for underpinning the study of the news text-reader relationship in Weibo news package in this book.
This Element presents an investigation into the use of the gender inclusive strategy schwa in a corpus of tweets; the schwa is employed in Italian to overcome grammatical (feminine and masculine) morphological inflections, having at its core linguistic and social binarism. The investigation is set in a country where LGBTQIA communities still face institutional discrimination, yet it is contextualised in the growing work on inclusivity discussed in languages and contexts worldwide. The corpus is examined quantitatively and qualitatively, as well as read through a triangulation of two frameworks: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. The findings, obtained from corpus-assisted research and digital ethnography, show that the new linguistic strategy is used creatively, functionally, and not exclusively as a self-representation tool but is also a viable and powerful replacement for generic sexist language.
This article explores the use of screenshots as a form of visual evidence on social media platforms. It considers their role in YouTube videos that spread misinformation and disinformation about the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire and an internet hoax, the Momo Challenge. The article draws on two social semiotic frameworks, legitimation (Van Leeuwen in ‘Legitimation in discourse and communication, 2007) and affiliation (Knight in ‘Evaluating experience in funny ways’, 2013, and Zappavigna in ‘Searchable Talk and Social Media Metadiscourse’, 2018), to analyse how screenshots and accompanying voiceovers construe technological authority and propagate social values. Seven key forms of screenshots are identified in the dataset, alongside the key social bonds that are made visually salient in the screenshots. Overall, this research contributes to how we understand the role of screenshots in instances of misinformation and disinformation, highlighting the importance of identifying the affiliation potential of the screenshot in order to determine its veracity.
How do the affordances of microblogging platforms, such as visibility to imagined audiences, shape the nature of ‘everyday talk’? Drawing on a qualitative study of tweets posted during the COVID-19 pandemic and containing the acronym WFH (working-from-home), we draw on Habermasian theorisation of deliberative democratic systems to show how Twitter (X) can act as a third space in which everyday talk about socio-political issues emerges alongside relational talk seeking ambient affiliation. Our analysis shows that tweets expressing already-established political positions that are amenable to reductive symbolism—using memes, images and shorthand stories—gain ‘likes’ and are amplified on Twitter. However, we argue that the desire for ambient affiliation combined with the imperative of reductive symbolism has a constraining effect on public debate, by encouraging the reproduction of established political tropes at the expense of ideas that are novel, controversial or require more complex exposition.
Analyzing 20 comments posted in response to YouTube videos wherein two Asian American young women share their “lunchbox moment” stories, or first-person past-oriented accounts of how their (white) classmates at school reacted negatively to food that they brought from home for lunch, we demonstrate how posters collaboratively transform individual offline experiences of marginalization and difference into online moments of inclusion, solidarity, and shared identity. Integrating research on “second stories” ( Sacks 1992 ), “story rounds” ( Tannen 2005 ), online storytelling ( Page 2011 , 2018 ), and online-offline interconnections (e.g., Bolander and Locher 2020 ), we show how commenters of diverse backgrounds accomplish “adequation” ( Bucholtz and Hall 2005 ) between their different minority identities in how they convey their own lunchbox moment stories. By using metadiscursive terms (e.g., “story”), “constructed dialogue” ( Tannen 2007 ), ethnic category mentions, heritage languages, familiar address terms (e.g., first name), and emojis, YouTube posters create inclusion online and across cultural, ethnic, and spaciotemporal lines.
This thesis is concerned with the construal and the recontextualisation of primary social science knowledge in hypermedia texts. More specifically, it provides an account for the relations between verbiage and image in web-based multimodal interactive leaning materials, known as Multimodal Interactives (MIs). Based on the linguistic description, the thesis offers insights into the ways in which knowledge is construed and recontextaulised in the emerging electronic multimodal discourses.
The general theoretical orientation of this thesis is that of systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA). Within the framework of SF-MDA, the thesis proposes a complementary perspective on intersemiosis, which treats relations between verbiage and image as patterns formed during the unfolding of a text. To capture this type of intersemiotic relations, the thesis develops a logogenetic model for SF-MDA. The defining feature the model is the temporal axis (time), which serves as the main reference point for determining semiotic units (logogenetic units) and describing semiotic patterns (logogenetic patterns).
The logogenetic model is applied in studying five MIs. The basic logogenetic unit used in analysis is Critical Path, the shortest traversal through a MI. Two types of logogenetic patterns along the Critical Paths in the five MIs are examined in detail, including intersemiotic ideational coupling and clustering. There are five basic types of verbiage-imaged coupling emerged from the analysis, including Naming & Identifying, Representing, Classifying & Co-classifying, and Circumstantiating. The analysis of ideational clustering shows the different ways in which participants and activities form clusters in each MI.
By analysing intersemiotic coupling and clustering, the thesis shows that language and image construe the keys notions of primary social science such as people, place and community through three fundamental principles—abstraction, generalisation and specification. The study also demonstrates the possibility of achieving different degrees of pedagogic framing in hypermedia environments.
This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.
Focusing on the introductions to research articles in a variety of disciplines, the author uses appraisal theory to analyze how writers bring together multiple resources to develop their positions in the flow of discourse. It will be most useful for researchers new to appraisal, and to EAP teachers.
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
IntroductionDisciplining the Passions: Towards the Invention of the CriminalLombroso's CriticsCriminalistics, Rational Criminals, and Irrational MassesTechnologies and CrimeWomen and Crime; Race and CrimePopular and Literary Perspectives of CrimeConclusions
This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories.
