Pope, interrupted. A qualitative study on memes, hashtags, and speech chains

Abstract

This article investigates the reaction, on Twitter, to Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation announcement. Specifically, this is a qualitative study in linguistic anthropology of how memes and hashtags circulated on Twitter between the day of the announcement of said resignation and the Pope’s last day in office, and identifies the speech chains created by them. The analysis of the corpus showed that Twitter users' deployment of hashtags serves two purposes: on the one hand, it creates a topic/comment structure that is later reproduced, modified or abandoned by other users. On the other hand, hashtags function as performative acts that create online ad hoc communities. In addition, this article also claims that English and Romance-language users created and circulated image and text-based memes differently, thus establishing two language-based speech chains. In sum, this article contributes to discussions on informational flux on online platforms by demonstrating that said flux does have constraints, and that those constraints are related to language-based communities of practice.

Keywords

• Twitter
• Speech chains
• Hashtags
• Memes