Twitter: #virtualagora of political participation and (re)production of public opinion
Abstract
This paper considers how Twitter can empower citizens and serve as an alternative to traditional forms of engagement in political conflict. It analyses a corpus of 105 protest-related tweets posted between the December 2014 enactment of the Ley Pulpín – a law which aimed to curtail labour rights for Peruvian youth in Peru – and its repeal in January 2015. The article derives four key categories for classifying these tweets. It argues that these criteria can serve for future linguistic studies analysing Twitter as a digital discursive genre and considers the network’s role as an alternative forum for socio-political activism. Finally, it concludes that the conventions of Twitter as a textual genre are basic tools for understanding the dialogic space in which users interact.
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