Collective pragmatic acting in networked spaces: the case of #activism in Arabic and English Twitter discourse

• Autores: Thulfiqar Hussein Altahmazi
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 239, 2020
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper explores the theoretical and analytical advantages of conceptualizing hashtag activism as a collective pragmatic act. After analyzing a corpus of hashtag activism, the paper identifies two types of micro acts, constituting the pragmatic act of hashtagged political tweeting: communing affiliation round sociopolitical values, and legitimizing the sociopolitical claims associated with the hashtags. The communing act is performed by a hashtag associating attitudes with an idea representing the sociopolitical claim of the campaign. The content of the political tweet, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for the tweeters to legitimize their views and attitudes in relation to the topic of the hashtag via a deontic or epistemic legitimizing act. Tweeting under a hashtag carrying a sociopolitical claim allows meaning to be negotiated collaboratively by a group of politically active agents sharing common values. This turns any cluster of hashtagged political tweets into a macro collective act performed by a collectivity of actors. Such a conceptualization provides a collective perspective to Pragmatic Act Theory and explains how political engagement can be reinvigorated by the users’ sense of agency in networked spaces.