THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION ARTS & SCIENCES THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF TWITTER DURING PUBLIC CRISES TOWARD A THEORY OF GENERIC CONSTRAINTS ELIZABETH THORNTON RUSH SPRING 2016 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in Communication Arts and Sciences and Spanish with honors in Communication Arts and Sciences Reviewed and approved* by the following: Kirt H. Wilson Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Communication Arts and Sciences Thesis Supervisor Lori Bedell Senior Lecturer in Communication Arts and Sciences Honors Adviser * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i ABSTRACT This thesis re-imagines Twitter as a genre of crisis rhetoric. As Twitter has developed into a journalistic platform that “reports” on public crises, it also has formed repeated patterns of communication to deal with the “social functions” that such crises necessitate. The discursive patterns that recur during moments of crisis exhibit several generic characteristics that result from people “acting together” on Twitter. Previous scholarly approaches to genre inform this study’s understanding of the fundamental human needs fulfilled on Twitter. In moments of violence and chaos, when a social order has been violated by human behavior, users take to the medium to fulfill three specific social functions: 1) to eliminate uncertainty; 2) to restore order by finding and punishing the party that is made guilty for the order’s violation; 3) to give everyday people agency, the power to contribute to the resolution. Identifying specific public events that sparked dramatic and highly emotional responses, this study explores Twitter as a service, a network, and an ever-evolving genre of crisis. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iv Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 A Brief History of Twitter ................................................................................................ 2 Contribution of Thesis...................................................................................................... 9 Research Questions .......................................................................................................... 10 Genre as Social (Media) Action ....................................................................................... 12 Chapter Preview ............................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2 The Case of the Boston Marathon Bomber ................................................. 18 In the Aftermath of the Bombing ..................................................................................... 18 Identifying Twitter’s Genre Characteristics ..................................................................... 23 Quality 1: Blaming ........................................................................................................... 24 Quality 2: Jumping to Conclusions .................................................................................. 26 Quality 3: Visual Enthymeme .......................................................................................... 28 Discussion & Implications ............................................................................................... 30 Chapter 3 Falling for the Ferguson Troll ..................................................................... 32 Police Shootings & Black Male Teens ............................................................................. 33 Tweets from the Troll ....................................................................................................... 36 Repeated Characteristics of Genre ................................................................................... 38 Quality 1: Blaming ........................................................................................................... 38 Quality 2: Jumping to Conclusions .................................................................................. 40 Quality 3: Visual Enthymeme .......................................................................................... 42 Discussion & Implications ............................................................................................... 46 Chapter 4 Understanding Critical Twitter Discourse as a Genre ................................. 48 Important Generic Themes ............................................................................................... 48 So Where Do We Go From Here? ................................................................................... 51 Appendix #BostonBombing ....................................................................................... 54 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................... 60 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Tripathi Family Facebook Page ................................................................................ 21 Figure 2. The Notorious White Hat ......................................................................................... 29 Figure 3. Screenshot of Huffington Post Deleted Article ........................................................ 36 Figure 4. The Troll's Big Reveal .............................................................................................. 37 Figure 5. Sebastian Murdock's Apology .................................................................................. 37 Figure 6. Gas Station Footage Still .......................................................................................... 42 Figure 7. Conspiracy Theories Abounding .............................................................................. 43 Figure 8. Christmas Eve Tragi-Comic ..................................................................................... 44 Figure 9. Appropriating the Most Interesting Man in the World ............................................. 45 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, thanks to my honors advisor Lori Bedell for riding this wave with me for three whole years. Lori finally convinced me that committing to one topic is not the same as summarizing all of my interests in one thesis, lifting my imaginary burden (and a million others). Thank you to my thesis supervisor Kirt Wilson for being remarkably patient throughout this process. By helping me to articulate my ideas and teaching me how to better structure my life for writing, Kirt made this entire project possible. Another thank you to Andrea Tapia, Nick LaLone, and Anthony Kim for offering my first taste of graduate-level research. And a final thanks to my mom and dad, always. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction I couldn’t sleep. It was Monday, a school night, and the red digital numbers of my alarm clock blinked 11:05 p.m. back at me. Surrendering to insomnia, I grabbed my iPhone and opened my Twitter app. As a junior in high school, I evaded sleep by scrolling through seemingly infinite tweets. Typically, I read jokes from my favorite comedians and checked out what my friends were saying. But this night was different. On May 11, 2011, Osama Bin Laden’s name pervaded Twitter. Years had passed without public knowledge of his whereabouts. Disbelieving my Twitter timeline, I clicked on the hashtag #osamadead and found myself exposed to every tweet about him in real time. From anonymous users to celebrities to professional journalists, seemingly everyone was updating the Twittersphere at hyper-speed. What was I seeing? As the feed grew before my eyes, I realized I was watching history unfold. In another sense, though, I was witnessing a communication phenomenon that I had never seen before. I wondered whether anyone else had recognized this form of discourse. Refreshing my screen became a compulsion. When no new tweets appeared at the top of my feed, I snapped back to reality, sprinting downstairs to ask my parents if they knew what was happening. We turned on the television to check CNN, but the news hadn’t broken yet. The people of the “Twitterverse” knew what broadcast television did not: Osama Bin Laden was—or might be—dead. Still, I couldn’t know for sure. Could the content of these tweets be true? Were these journalists and celebrities mistaken? Which source should I trust—the staid “talking heads” of broadcast journalism or the diverse and often irreverent voices of the internet? 2 For ten minutes, my parents and I waited in silence. Finally, Anderson Cooper announced that President Obama would address the nation at 11:35p.m. He suggested, further, that the president might be making an important announcement about the war on terror. Only when I heard the president confirm what Twitter users had already reported could I breathe a sigh of relief. However, in that moment, I had a second realization: Moving forward, Twitter would be a key player in the distribution of breaking news. A Brief History of Twitter Until 2010, the digital world had been accepted as an “elsewhere;” that is, the digital world was considered separate from our physical reality, and disconnecting from the digital meant reconnecting to the physical. Sociologist Nathan Jurgenson coined the alleged distinction as a “digital dualism” in his post “The IRL Fetish.”