From ‘echo chambers’ to ‘chaos chambers’: discursive coherence and contradiction in the #MeToo Twitter feed

ABSTRACT

Using the example of the Twitter feed #MeToo, this paper argues that CDS, in its task to understand more about how social media can offer ways for voices to challenge ideologies from below, needs to explore the ideas of ‘nodes’ (KhosraviNik, M. (2017b). Right wing populism in the west: Social media discourse and echo chambers. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Majid_Khosravinik/publications) and ‘echo chambers’ in greater detail. Though #MeToo did provide an ideological challenge, I show how it is also discursively chaotic and partly driven by influencers who may have a range of other motivations to align with the moral capital in the feed. At another level, #MeToo is highly nodal in terms of affect and moral conviction. These features can be understood in regard to nodal power of affective connectivity (Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19(3), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697) and also in terms of major shifts in accepted norms of debating politics and society driven by social media. I consider what this means for CDS in relation to identifying discourses and discovering ideology in the social media landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• MeToo
• Twitter
• nodes
• echo chamber
• Critical Discourse Studies
• affect
• social media
• activism
• multimodality

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gwen Bouvier

Gwen Bouvier is Professor in social media and communication at Zhejiang University. Her main areas of research interest are social media and civic engagement from a multimodal critical discourse perspective.