CoffeeTweets: bonding around the bean on Twitter

Abstract

This chapter explores how we use social media to communicate our experience of the world and bond with others by forming communities of shared values. Microblogging services such as Twitter and Weibo are a form of social media allowing users to publish streams of length-delimited posts to internet-mediated audiences. As such they afford new kinds of interpersonal interaction via the conversation-like exchanges that occur (Honeycutt {\&} Herring, 2009). An example of a length-delimited post (hereafter `micropost') is the following. It contains one of the most common patterns in microblogging, an expression of thanks for personal endorsement:@Tim I love {\#}coffee tooThis post is addressed to Tim using the @ symbol before the name, a construction which can also function as a reference to the person (e.g. @Tim makes great coffee), and contains a hashtag, the {\#} symbol, which acts as a form of metadata labelling the topic of the post so that it can be found by others. This chapter will consider microposts such as this in terms of how they illuminate the way microblogging as a practice creates alignments around shared quotidian experiences by conferring upon the private realm of daily experience a public audience. The kind of personal expression of the everyday that we see in microposts has never been subject to real-time mass dissemination in the way that we are currently witnessing on Twitter. This chapter focuses on one such personal domain, coffeetalk, that is, discourse relating to coffee as consumed in everyday life.1 I will consider this discourse from two