The performance of publicness in social media: Tracing patterns in tweets after a disaster

This paper sets out to contribute to the critical understanding of public communication in social media by studying the use of Twitter after a severe earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. It also sets out to contribute to methodologies for studying this particular kind of publicness. It argues that the contours of the ‘social imaginary’ of the public (Taylor, 2004), that are usually so hard to delineate and can be approached only in fragments or typical form, can be identified a little more clearly in the traces that people leave behind in their social media communication at critical, reflexive moments such as in the aftermath of disaster. The paper draws on computer-assisted discourse analysis, specifically a corpus-linguistic-informed analysis of half a million tweets, in order to describe four main public discursive moves that were prevalent in this form of public communication. This is not to claim to describe a stable set of norms, but in fact the reverse. The paper suggests that empirical, large-scale analysis of public communication in different situations, different media and different places opens up a project in which the varying norms of public communication are described and critiqued as they emerge in a range of discursive situations