Fandom versus citizenship: the “weirdisation” of politics

Abstract

This paper examines occurrences of humour in Twitter-fed celebrity-follower communities. Using a small, one-month sample of the Twitter feeds of 12 British celebrities, we examined political and humorous content of celebrity tweets and the first five responses from their followers. From this preliminary study, we found that the notion of “weirdisation” strongly emerges, together with the new conceptual tool of “shards of humour”.

Keywords

• Twitter
• celebrities
• networks
• tribalization
• fandoms