Twitter is a linguistic marketplace in which the processes of self-branding and micro-celebrity 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. 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 typical of mainstream media forms of broadcast talk. (shrink)

Stone & Wang collate the nascent research examining the mnemonic consequences associated with social media use. In particular, they highlight two important factors in understanding how social media use shapes the way individuals and groups remember the past: the type of information (personal vs. public) and the role (producer vs. consumer) individuals undertake when engaging with social media. Stone and Wang investigate those two features in relation to induced forgetting for personal information and false memories/truthiness for public information.

The aim of this article was to explore identity struggles related to the experience of living with medically unexplained symptoms in illness narratives of patients with MUS. These patients pose therapeutic and communication challenges as their symptoms do not have an obvious underlying diagnosis. Previous studies have shown that their stories can best be described as ‘chaos narratives’, lacking a chronological development of symptoms or ‘legitimacy narratives’, through which patients seek to legitimize their invisible symptoms. The study draws on 21 (...) interviews with MUS patients. The examples were selected from two contrasting cases in order to show how the patients accomplish their identity struggles through distinctive discursive tools, such as metaphors, modality, personal pronouns, evaluative devices, as well as characteristic interactional structure, navigating around the three identity dilemmas: continuity and change, self and other, and agent or undergoer. (shrink)