Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

(Un)Social Media: A Content Analysis Of The Centralized Self On Twitter, Julianna Jeanine Kirschner

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation critically assesses the social media posts that create, give life to and finally abandon trending topics on Twitter. Drawing on Baudrillard’s (1983) notion of simulacrum, the dissertation examines posts as performative discourse that reframes the trend within the personal simulacrum of the poster. Using digital humanities tools, a corpus of 102,532 tweets have been collected. A content analysis was performed to analyze themes and term frequency. Selected case studies indicated that posters persistently centered their online identity within content, reframing content as personal performance rather than dialogic engagement. The first case study examines social media posts responding to …