437441
2012
DCM6210.1177/1750481312437441PageDiscourse & Communication
Article
Discourse & Communication
The linguistics of
6(2) 181–201
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
self-branding and co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1750481312437441
micro-celebrity in Twitter: dcm.sagepub.com
The role of hashtags
Ruth Page
University of Leicester, UK
Abstract
Twitter 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 reflects and
reinforces 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.
Keywords
Broadcast talk, hashtags, identity, micro-celebrity, participatory culture, self-branding, Twitter
Self-branding and micro-celebrity
The social media genres which developed from the mid-1990s into the first decade of the
21st century (such as blogs, wikis, social network sites) are contexts in which the contra-
dictory tensions of self-mediation are played out (Chouliaraki, 2010). On one hand, the
collaborative, dialogic potential of social media facilitated a shift towards participatory
Corresponding author:
Ruth Page, School of English, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
Email:
,182 Discourse & Communication 6(2)
culture (Jenkins, 1992, 2006), whereby the communicative balance between producers
and recipients was reworked, so that consumers were no longer passive but active in their
co-construction of texts and dubbed ‘produsers’ (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006). But participa-
tion 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 strat-
egies 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 micro-
celebrity (Marwick, 2010; Senft, 2008). In line with current work in discourse analysis,
the processes of self-branding and micro-celebrity understand identity as discursively
constructed through interactions with others (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006), where social
media genres are ‘technologies of subjectivity’ through which the self is written into being
(Ong and Collier, 2005). But self-branding and micro-celebrity place particular emphasis
on the construction of identity as a product to be consumed by others, and on interaction
which treats the audience as an aggregated fan base to be developed and maintained in
order to achieve social or economic benefit. The promotional culture of self-branding is
not an innovation of social media, but rather has emerged from the marketing literature of
corporations and is also narrativized by reality television (Hearn, 2008), whereby the
demotic turn (Couldry, 2002) presents fame and status as available to ordinary persons.
Indeed, self-branding and micro-celebrity are forms of labour undertaken by both elite
and ordinary persons in order to achieve the visibility and influence deemed necessary to
achieve status or fame in the offline world. Examples include the online interactions of
camgirls (Senft, 2008), use of Twitter by technology entrepreneurs (Marwick, 2010) and
celebrity practitioners (Marwick and boyd, 2011), and the amateur and professional
performers who now populate YouTube (Burgess and Green, 2009; Tolson, 2010).
Forms of self-branding and micro-celebrity operate on a spectrum which includes
corporations who personalize their identity (Chouliaraki and Morsing, 2009), the use of
branded products to signal status and identity (Marwick, 2010) and more generally, the
production of a public personae that can be treated as a ‘commodity sign’ that is con-
sumed and reproduced by others (Hearn, 2008). Although this self-mediation may draw
explicitly on marketing techniques, as did the fictional blogger Lonelygirl15 who helped
reshape the performativity of YouTube (Christian, 2009), self-branding need not be self-
consciously intentional in this way. Instead, self-branding is more generally embedded in
wider trends where discourse itself has become a valuable commodity as a form of
‘searchable talk’ (Zappavigna, 2011), which is exploited as a resource used by marketing
and advertising companies. To be made searchable is at once narcissistic (enabling the
self to be found by others, and gain an audience as a sign of status) and to become the
subject of surveillance (scrutinized in the service of a third party’s self-promotion).
The discourse contexts used for self-branding in social media genres are aptly
described by Bourdieu’s (1977) metaphor of the linguistic marketplace. Bourdieu’s meta-
phor draws attention to the social and ideological nature of language use, where linguistic
, Page 183
competence (in Bourdieu’s terms (1977: 648), using language appropriately in order to
command a listener) results in linguistic capital, which can, in some contexts, be converted
into actual economic value. Judgements about what kinds of language use are ‘appropriate’
can vary considerably, and while Bourdieu stressed the value of standardized language,
covert prestige can be associated with non-standard, creative or innovative forms, including
those used in computer-mediated discourse (Herring and Zelenkauskaite, 2009). Given
that self-branding and micro-celebrity require the individual to gain and maintain the
attention of their audience, we might ask what kinds of language are deemed most appro-
priate for the task of promoting visibility, focusing on the resources employed within a
specific virtual marketplace: Twitter.
Twitter as a linguistic marketplace
Twitter was founded in 2006, and since 2009 has been regarded as having gained main-
stream Internet use. Like all websites, the composition of its membership is constantly
changing, but in 2011 it was said to include 200 million registered users, with millions of
updates posted each day. Similar to social network sites as defined by boyd and Ellison
(2007), Twitter enables its members to construct a publically available profile, to con-
struct and to display a list of fellow site members with whom the member shares an inter-
est.1 As a site for self-mediation, Twitter is ideally suited to performances of self-branding,
for the default setting for profiles is public (an estimated 7% of users adopt privacy set-
tings). Although it allows interaction between any of its members without the mediation
of gatekeepers required in offline contexts, and foregrounds immediacy as a feature of its
‘fresh’ talk (Lister et al., 2009), Twitter is a front stage environment (Goffman, 1959)
where the members’ professional identity is performed (Page, 2012). Distinct from con-
temporary social network sites such as Linked In or Facebook, the default relationship
between Twitter members is non-reciprocal: that is, if member A chooses to follow
member B, this does not entail that member B will automatically gain access to member
A’s profile information. The asymmetric follow (O’Reilly, 2009) influences the pro-
cesses of self-branding and micro-celebrity, whereby the size of a follower list is taken
as a sign of status and one-to-many updates can be broadcast to an audience of poten-
tially millions, without necessarily requiring that the updater receive updates from the
audience in return.
Twitter has been described as an information-sharing site (Kwak et al., 2010), but it
also enables communication between its members, and so exhibits addressivity (Honeycutt
and Herring, 2009). Members communicate via short posts, known as tweets. Tweets are
multifunctional, and may be used to post an update or share a link, send a public message
directed to another member, or to forward a message posted by another to all the members
of a follower list. Communication in Twitter is asynchronous but fast-paced, and its mem-
bers have developed a number of conventions in order to keep track of the talk that
emerges. These conventions include the use of the prefix ‘@’ to signal another member’s
user name, the abbreviation ‘RT’ to indicate that a message has been forwarded (retweeted)
and the use of a hashtag (#) as a prefix to indicate a search term. All three resources can
be leveraged in the service of self-branding and micro-celebrity, for example, to display
connection with others or to signal influence (as indicated by the number of times a user
2012
DCM6210.1177/1750481312437441PageDiscourse & Communication
Article
Discourse & Communication
The linguistics of
6(2) 181–201
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
self-branding and co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1750481312437441
micro-celebrity in Twitter: dcm.sagepub.com
The role of hashtags
Ruth Page
University of Leicester, UK
Abstract
Twitter 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 reflects and
reinforces 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.
Keywords
Broadcast talk, hashtags, identity, micro-celebrity, participatory culture, self-branding, Twitter
Self-branding and micro-celebrity
The social media genres which developed from the mid-1990s into the first decade of the
21st century (such as blogs, wikis, social network sites) are contexts in which the contra-
dictory tensions of self-mediation are played out (Chouliaraki, 2010). On one hand, the
collaborative, dialogic potential of social media facilitated a shift towards participatory
Corresponding author:
Ruth Page, School of English, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK
Email:
,182 Discourse & Communication 6(2)
culture (Jenkins, 1992, 2006), whereby the communicative balance between producers
and recipients was reworked, so that consumers were no longer passive but active in their
co-construction of texts and dubbed ‘produsers’ (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006). But participa-
tion 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 strat-
egies 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 micro-
celebrity (Marwick, 2010; Senft, 2008). In line with current work in discourse analysis,
the processes of self-branding and micro-celebrity understand identity as discursively
constructed through interactions with others (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006), where social
media genres are ‘technologies of subjectivity’ through which the self is written into being
(Ong and Collier, 2005). But self-branding and micro-celebrity place particular emphasis
on the construction of identity as a product to be consumed by others, and on interaction
which treats the audience as an aggregated fan base to be developed and maintained in
order to achieve social or economic benefit. The promotional culture of self-branding is
not an innovation of social media, but rather has emerged from the marketing literature of
corporations and is also narrativized by reality television (Hearn, 2008), whereby the
demotic turn (Couldry, 2002) presents fame and status as available to ordinary persons.
Indeed, self-branding and micro-celebrity are forms of labour undertaken by both elite
and ordinary persons in order to achieve the visibility and influence deemed necessary to
achieve status or fame in the offline world. Examples include the online interactions of
camgirls (Senft, 2008), use of Twitter by technology entrepreneurs (Marwick, 2010) and
celebrity practitioners (Marwick and boyd, 2011), and the amateur and professional
performers who now populate YouTube (Burgess and Green, 2009; Tolson, 2010).
Forms of self-branding and micro-celebrity operate on a spectrum which includes
corporations who personalize their identity (Chouliaraki and Morsing, 2009), the use of
branded products to signal status and identity (Marwick, 2010) and more generally, the
production of a public personae that can be treated as a ‘commodity sign’ that is con-
sumed and reproduced by others (Hearn, 2008). Although this self-mediation may draw
explicitly on marketing techniques, as did the fictional blogger Lonelygirl15 who helped
reshape the performativity of YouTube (Christian, 2009), self-branding need not be self-
consciously intentional in this way. Instead, self-branding is more generally embedded in
wider trends where discourse itself has become a valuable commodity as a form of
‘searchable talk’ (Zappavigna, 2011), which is exploited as a resource used by marketing
and advertising companies. To be made searchable is at once narcissistic (enabling the
self to be found by others, and gain an audience as a sign of status) and to become the
subject of surveillance (scrutinized in the service of a third party’s self-promotion).
The discourse contexts used for self-branding in social media genres are aptly
described by Bourdieu’s (1977) metaphor of the linguistic marketplace. Bourdieu’s meta-
phor draws attention to the social and ideological nature of language use, where linguistic
, Page 183
competence (in Bourdieu’s terms (1977: 648), using language appropriately in order to
command a listener) results in linguistic capital, which can, in some contexts, be converted
into actual economic value. Judgements about what kinds of language use are ‘appropriate’
can vary considerably, and while Bourdieu stressed the value of standardized language,
covert prestige can be associated with non-standard, creative or innovative forms, including
those used in computer-mediated discourse (Herring and Zelenkauskaite, 2009). Given
that self-branding and micro-celebrity require the individual to gain and maintain the
attention of their audience, we might ask what kinds of language are deemed most appro-
priate for the task of promoting visibility, focusing on the resources employed within a
specific virtual marketplace: Twitter.
Twitter as a linguistic marketplace
Twitter was founded in 2006, and since 2009 has been regarded as having gained main-
stream Internet use. Like all websites, the composition of its membership is constantly
changing, but in 2011 it was said to include 200 million registered users, with millions of
updates posted each day. Similar to social network sites as defined by boyd and Ellison
(2007), Twitter enables its members to construct a publically available profile, to con-
struct and to display a list of fellow site members with whom the member shares an inter-
est.1 As a site for self-mediation, Twitter is ideally suited to performances of self-branding,
for the default setting for profiles is public (an estimated 7% of users adopt privacy set-
tings). Although it allows interaction between any of its members without the mediation
of gatekeepers required in offline contexts, and foregrounds immediacy as a feature of its
‘fresh’ talk (Lister et al., 2009), Twitter is a front stage environment (Goffman, 1959)
where the members’ professional identity is performed (Page, 2012). Distinct from con-
temporary social network sites such as Linked In or Facebook, the default relationship
between Twitter members is non-reciprocal: that is, if member A chooses to follow
member B, this does not entail that member B will automatically gain access to member
A’s profile information. The asymmetric follow (O’Reilly, 2009) influences the pro-
cesses of self-branding and micro-celebrity, whereby the size of a follower list is taken
as a sign of status and one-to-many updates can be broadcast to an audience of poten-
tially millions, without necessarily requiring that the updater receive updates from the
audience in return.
Twitter has been described as an information-sharing site (Kwak et al., 2010), but it
also enables communication between its members, and so exhibits addressivity (Honeycutt
and Herring, 2009). Members communicate via short posts, known as tweets. Tweets are
multifunctional, and may be used to post an update or share a link, send a public message
directed to another member, or to forward a message posted by another to all the members
of a follower list. Communication in Twitter is asynchronous but fast-paced, and its mem-
bers have developed a number of conventions in order to keep track of the talk that
emerges. These conventions include the use of the prefix ‘@’ to signal another member’s
user name, the abbreviation ‘RT’ to indicate that a message has been forwarded (retweeted)
and the use of a hashtag (#) as a prefix to indicate a search term. All three resources can
be leveraged in the service of self-branding and micro-celebrity, for example, to display
connection with others or to signal influence (as indicated by the number of times a user
