This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.

Susanne Mühleisen, University of Bayreuth:
Daria Dayter’s Discursive Self in Microblogging presents a highly original and detailed investigation of the complexities of group membership negotiation in a ballet Twitter community. The particular strength of this study lies in the careful documentation and qualitative analysis of her target group material – 1,000 tweets of ballet aficionados – while tackling larger issues of positioning through self-disclosure and narratives in a formally restricted electronic medium. The focus on self-praise – so far significantly under-researched – and third party complaints provide new insights into the significance of such speech acts for group membership status negotiation. Written in a clear and accessible style Dayter’s study will be an important resource for students and researchers with an interest in CMC and Twitter, speech acts and narrative discourse.