Intertextuality Beyond the Hashtag: How Members of Rose Twitter Respond to Breaking News
Clairmont, Dylan T.
In this thesis, I examine the communal linguistic strategies that members of Rose Twitter, a loosely
organized community of socialists and leftists, employ when reacting to breaking news events. I
selected four breaking and evolving news stories during the year of 2020 and created a corpus of
tweets from 200 members of Rose Twitter. I use a framework of intertextuality to analyze the webs
of connection among the tweets and demonstrate how all tweets build upon past tweets and other
textual data to facilitate community building. I specifically analyze conventions of naming,
ideological phrase attachment, and joking. Ultimately, this thesis attempts to push back on claims
that Twitter fosters the creation of echo chambers by demonstrating the active process of
democratically building upon past tweets to form current opinions and language.
↧