Open AccessIntersecting matters: #GeorgeFloyd and #COVID19
Author(s) -
Jenny Davis,
Tony P. Love
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
first monday
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.533
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1396-0466
pISSN - 1396-0458
DOI - 10.5210/fm.v27i4.12581
Subject(s) - narrative , social media , sociology , injustice , identity (music) , indexicality , media studies , convergence (economics) , banner , social injustice , racism , political science , gender studies , history , aesthetics , politics , epistemology , law , linguistics , philosophy , economics , economic growth , archaeology
In the late spring of 2020 amid a global pandemic, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggering mass protests under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement. We take this moment of coinciding crises as our point of analysis observed through the lens of concurrent hashtags on Twitter. Social media content both reflect and construct the social meanings of topics and events. We thus draw from social media to understand how George Floyd and COVID-19 inform and inflect each other, building a dataset from ∼20,000 tweets that unite prevalent hashtags associated with each. Analyses reveal a repeating set of symbolic hooks — death, breath, masks, and voice — encompassing dense and competing narratives about justice and injustice, systemic inequality, degrading trust in institutions, and the changing identity of a nation. These narratives are anchored in the events under study and indexed through co-occurring social media registers. In addition to substantive findings, the study introduces and applies hashtag convergence, a novel methodological approach based on user-generated indexical pairings.