Hashtag Poetics: Political humour on Russian Twitter
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Ingunn Lunde
Summary
Ever since the Russian “Winter of discontent” in 2011/12, the role of social networks in the protest movement has been much studied. Researchers have analysed the emerging structures of online political engagement, the role of social networks in the organization of protest events, the interaction of old and new media, and new models of political leadership. Less attention has been paid to the form, style and rhetoric of online political talk and to the interaction of established models of political discourse with the affordances and constraints of new technologies. In this paper, I focus on political humour and analyse one Twitter event from 7 October 2011: tweets featuring the hashtag spasiboputinuzaeto (‘thankstoputinforthat’). I look at the origin and spread of the hashtag, the style of responses, variations and metacommentaries to it. I argue that #spasiboputinuzaeto is a particularly telling example of how established traditions of political humour are transformed and transmediated in a digital context.
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© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Aufsätze
- Preface
- Linguistic Violence in Contemporary Russian Public Discourses
- Objections Proffering Choices: Negation in the Co-Construction of Political Identity by Rival Partisans in the Russian State Duma
- Posing Questions without Asking
- Patriotyzm genetyczny, półka kulturowa and Palikotyzacja X-a – blends as catchwords in Polish political discourse
- Hashtag Poetics: Political humour on Russian Twitter
- Quotations, intertextual references, models and myths in the presidential debate of the Czech Parliament
- Interdiscursive strategies of metaphor-driven rhetoric in Romanian discourses on a political crisis
- Intertextual references in British, German and Russian political interviews and blogs
- Types and functions of intertextual references in the Russian State Duma
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Aufsätze
- Preface
- Linguistic Violence in Contemporary Russian Public Discourses
- Objections Proffering Choices: Negation in the Co-Construction of Political Identity by Rival Partisans in the Russian State Duma
- Posing Questions without Asking
- Patriotyzm genetyczny, półka kulturowa and Palikotyzacja X-a – blends as catchwords in Polish political discourse
- Hashtag Poetics: Political humour on Russian Twitter
- Quotations, intertextual references, models and myths in the presidential debate of the Czech Parliament
- Interdiscursive strategies of metaphor-driven rhetoric in Romanian discourses on a political crisis
- Intertextual references in British, German and Russian political interviews and blogs
- Types and functions of intertextual references in the Russian State Duma
