Cover not available
Article published In:
Networked Practices of Emotion and Stancetaking in Reactions to Mediatized Events and Crises
Edited by Korina Giaxoglou and Marjut Johansson
[Pragmatics 30:2] 2020
► pp. 179–200

Affectivity in the #jesuisCharlie Twitter discussion

ORCID logo | University of Turku
| University of Turku

The Twitter discussion with the hashtag #jesuisCharlie was a large-scale social media event commenting on the tragic terrorist attack that took place in Paris in 2015. In this paper, we analyze French tweets compiled with language technology methods from a large dataset. Our qualitative approach determines what types of affectivity are expressed. According to our results, first, core emotions are shared, and they are based on the identification with the internet meme je suis Charlie (I am Charlie). In them, participants show their commitment to democratic values and freedom of speech, as well as grief. They build up a we-agency and togetherness between the networked participants. Second, participants disalign from those who do not share the same values or who are a threat to them. Here, the emotions range from irritation and doubt to anger and disgrace, manifesting awayness. They contain protest against how democratic values are violated.

Keywords: affectivity, emotions, Twitter, togetherness, large-scale data, #jesuisCharlie, positioning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research on #jesuisCharlie and large-scale Twitter discussions
  • 3.Affect in context
    • 3.1Affect and emotions
    • 3.2Affective stance and positioning
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Large scale data and clustering of tweets
    • 4.2Qualitative analysis
  • 5.We-agency: Shared emotions, values, and identification
    • 5.1Solidarity and grief
  • 6.The limits of group belonging
    • 6.1Shared values and anger against the other
    • 6.2Distancing from group belonging: Doubts and irony
  • 7.Threats to shared values
    • 7.1Irritation, anger, and repulsion
    • 7.2Disgrace and condemnation
  • 8.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 6 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18066.joh
References
Ahmed, Sara
2015 The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, New York & London.Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2008 Emotion Talk Across Corpora. Basingstoke England, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan
1989 “Styles of Stance in English: Lexical and Grammatical Marking of Evidentiality and Affect.” Text 9 (1), 93–121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bouko, Catherine, Laura Calabrese, and Orphée De Clercq
2017 “Cartoons as Interdiscourse: A Quali-quantitative Analysis of Social Representations Based on Collective Imagination in Cartoons Produced After the Charlie Hebdo Attack.” Discourse, Context & Media 151: 24–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruns, Axel, and Yuxian Eugene Liang
2012 “Tools and Methods for Capturing Twitter Data During Natural Disasters.” First Monday 17 (4). [URL]. Accessed May 15, 2016. DOI logo
Dayter, Daria
2016 Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech Acts, Stories and Self-praise. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cock, Barbara, and Andrea Pizarro Pedraza
2018 “From Expressing Solidarity to Mocking on Twitter: Pragmatic Functions of Hashtags Starting With #jesuis Across Languages.” Language in Society 47 (2), 197–217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Divjak, Dagmar, and Nick Fieller
2014 “Clustering Linguistic Data.” In Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy, ed. by Dylan Glynn, and Justyna Robinson, 405–441. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John
2007 “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse. Subjectivity, Evaluation and Interaction, ed. by Robert Englbretson, 139–182. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Derek
1999 “Emotion Discourse.” Culture & Psychology 5 (3): 271–291. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Derek, and Jonathan Potter
2017 “Some Uses of Subject-side Assessments.” Discourse Studies 19 (5): 497–514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enfield, Nick J., and Anna Wierzbicka
2002 “The Body in Description of Emotion.” Pragmatics and Cognition 10:½: 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Firth, John Rupert
1957 “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930–1955. In Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952–1959, ed by. Frank Robert Palmer, 168–205. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Giaxoglou, Korina
2018 “JeSuisCharlie? Hashtags as Narrative Resources in Contexts of Ecstatic Sharing.” Discourse, Context & Media 221: 13–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giglietto, Fabio, and Yenn Lee
2015 “To Be or Not to Be Charlie: Twitter Hashtags as a Discourse and Counter-discourse in the Aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo Shooting in France.” In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts, ed. by Matthew Rowe, Milan Stankovic, and Aba-Sah Dadzie, 33–37. Florence: CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org). [URL].
Ginter, Filip, Jan, Hajič, Juhani, Luotolahti, Milan Straka, and Daniel, Zeman
2017 CoNLL 2017 Shared Task – Automatically Annotated Raw Texts and Word Embeddings. Prague: Charles University, LINDAT/CLARIN Digital Library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. [URL]
Gries, Stefan Th
2012 “Behavioral Profiles: A Fine-grained and Quantitative Approach in Corpus-based Lexical Semantics.” In Methodological and Analytic Frontiers in Lexical Research, ed. by Gary Libben, Gonia Jarema, and Chris Westbury, 57–80. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hepp, Andreas, and Nick Couldry
2010 “Introduction: Media Events in Globalized Media Cultures.” In Media Events in a Global Age, ed. by Andreas Hepp, Nick Couldry, and Friedrich Krotz, 1–20. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johansson, Marjut
2017 Everyday Opinions in News Discussion Forums: Public Vernacular Discourse. Discourse, Context and Media (19), 5–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johansson, Marjut, Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen, Filip Ginter, Lotta Lehti, Attila Krizsán, and Veronika Laippala
2018 ”Opening Up #jesuisCharlie Anatomy of a Twitter Discussion With Mixed Methods.” Journal of Pragmatics 1291: 90–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaufman, Leonard, and Peter J. Rousseeuw
1990 Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to Cluster Analysis. New York: John Wiley. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Linell, Per
2009 Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically. Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.Google Scholar
Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller
2013 “Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2): 169–187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mikolov, Tomas, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean
2013 “Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space.” In ICLR Workshop.Google Scholar
Moisl, Hermann
2015 Cluster Analysis for Corpus Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nugier, Armelle, and Serge Guimond
2016 « Je suis Charlie » New Findings on the Social and Political Psychology of Terrorism. International Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 45–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor
1996 “Linguistic Resources for Socializing Humanity.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. by John J. Gumperz, and Stephen C. Levinson, 407–437. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi Schiefflin
1989 ”Language Has a Heart.” Text 9 (1): 7–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Page, Ruth
2012 “The Linguistics of Self-branding and Micro-celebrity in Twitter: The Role of Hashtags.” Discourse & Communication 6 (2): 181–201. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “Saying ‘Sorry’: Corporate Apologies Posted on Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 621: 30–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Papacharissi, Zizi
2015 Affective Publics. Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smyrnaios, Nikos, and Pierre Ratinaud
2017 “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of a Political Controversy in English and French.” Social Media + Society 3 (1): 1–13. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salmela, Mikko, and Nagatsu, Michiru
2017 “How Does It Really Feel to Act Together? Shared Emotions and The Phenomenology of We-Agency”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 161, 449–470. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Straka, Milan, and Jana Straková
2017 “Tokenizing, POS Tagging, Lemmatizing and Parsing UD 2.0 with UDPipe.” In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, 88–99. Vancouver, Canada: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele
2017 “Twitter.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 201–224. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “Enacting Identity in Microblogging Through Ambient Affiliation.” Discourse & Communication 21: 209–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter.” New Media & Society 13 (5): 788–806. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Harju, Anu A. & Jukka Huhtamäki
2021. ‘#hellobrother needs to trend’: methodological reflections on the digital and emotional afterlife of mediated violence. International Review of Sociology 31:2 ► pp. 310 ff. DOI logo
Zentz, Lauren
2021. “I AM HERE AND I MATTER”. Narrative Inquiry DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.