Emotional contagion, viral performativity, and the death of David Bowie
The (net)work of mourning
Peta Mitchell: [email protected] l Axel Bruns: [email protected] Victor Münch: [email protected]
Twitter: tracking emotional content
• Mourning• Celebrity• Social media• Performativity
The Bowie dataset: overview• All tweets containing keyword ‘Bowie’• Total tweets: over 6.3 million• Tracking period: 15 days following the confirmation
of Bowie’s death (from 7.12 am GMT on 11 January to 5.48 am GMT on 26 January)
• Rate limited in early stages of tracking
The Bowie dataset: hashtags
The Bowie dataset: tweet types
The Bowie dataset: top retweets
Our focus: ‘meso-level analytics’• What’s shared: urls/images (65% of original tweets contained
URLs), words/text• Who’s talking, to whom, about whom, and how: @mention
network• And when?Network analysis and analysis over time as a ‘meso-level’ approach not only to look at the most shared/mentioned
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Bruns, A., Moon, B., Paul, A., & Münch, F. (2016). Towards a Typology of Hashtag Publics: A Large-Scale Comparative Study of User Engagement across Trending Topics. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), 20–46. http://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155328
Same story after Munich shooting
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Not the same story after Munich shooting
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From macro to micro: URL sharing
From macro to micro: URL sharing
https://twitter.com/celesteasaurus/status/686443194024722432/photo/1
http://dollychops.tumblr.com/post/107517113745/happy-birthday-david-bowie
Full @-mention network (3-core)
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Let Bowie ‘die’
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Full @-mention network without @davidbowiereal (3-core)
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Full @-mention network without @davidbowiereal
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Bruns, A. (2008). Life beyond the public sphere: towards a networked model for political deliberation. Information Polity, 13, 71–85.
Mutual @-mention network
Conclusion• Explorative analysis of case of mass public mourning on
Twitter• Meso-level, temporal network analysis seems promising in
assisting qualitative research needed to understand phenomenon of mass public mourning
Outlook• Refine methods to map, measure, and analyse spread of mourning
practices and mourning artifacts• Test hypotheses (e.g., regarding network centrality)• Extend analysis to other cases to identify common characteristics of
networked mourning practices in relation to mediated celebrity death.
Conclusion Damian Dempsey https://www.flickr.com/people/63906808@N0
Sharing of song lyrics
Sharing of song titles