Formatting online actions: #justsaying on Twitter

Abstract

The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter’s global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered ‘translingual’ framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused on the specific kinds of communicative actions it marks and organises. I shall use the notion of formatting as the point of departure: hashtags, as part of an innovative online scripted register, can be seen as formatting devices that introduce, proleptically, a recognisable framing effect on the statement (the tweet), often as a reframing response to other statements giving keys for complex and multiple but equally formatted forms of uptake. The hashtag, thus, appears to have powerful interactional structuring effects in formatting specific lines of action.