Emotional contagion, viral performativity, and the death of David Bowie

The (net)work of mourning

Peta Mitchell: peta.mitchell@qut.edu.au l Axel Bruns: a.bruns@qut.edu.auFelix Victor Münch: felix.muench@qut.edu.au

Twitter: tracking emotional content

• Mourning• Celebrity• Social media• Performativity

The Bowie dataset: overview• All tweets containing keyword ‘Bowie’• Total tweets: over 6.3 million• Tracking period: 15 days following the confirmation

of Bowie’s death (from 7.12 am GMT on 11 January to 5.48 am GMT on 26 January)

• Rate limited in early stages of tracking

The Bowie dataset: hashtags

The Bowie dataset: tweet types

The Bowie dataset: top retweets

Our focus: ‘meso-level analytics’• What’s shared: urls/images (65% of original tweets contained

URLs), words/text• Who’s talking, to whom, about whom, and how: @mention

network• And when?Network analysis and analysis over time as a ‘meso-level’ approach not only to look at the most shared/mentioned

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Bruns, A., Moon, B., Paul, A., & Münch, F. (2016). Towards a Typology of Hashtag Publics: A Large-Scale Comparative Study of User Engagement across Trending Topics. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), 20–46. http://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155328

Same story after Munich shooting

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Not the same story after Munich shooting

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From macro to micro: URL sharing

From macro to micro: URL sharing

https://twitter.com/celesteasaurus/status/686443194024722432/photo/1

http://dollychops.tumblr.com/post/107517113745/happy-birthday-david-bowie

Full @-mention network (3-core)

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Let Bowie ‘die’

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Full @-mention network without @davidbowiereal (3-core)

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Full @-mention network without @davidbowiereal

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Bruns, A. (2008). Life beyond the public sphere: towards a networked model for political deliberation. Information Polity, 13, 71–85.

Mutual @-mention network

Conclusion• Explorative analysis of case of mass public mourning on

Twitter• Meso-level, temporal network analysis seems promising in

assisting qualitative research needed to understand phenomenon of mass public mourning

Outlook• Refine methods to map, measure, and analyse spread of mourning

practices and mourning artifacts• Test hypotheses (e.g., regarding network centrality)• Extend analysis to other cases to identify common characteristics of

networked mourning practices in relation to mediated celebrity death.

Conclusion Damian Dempsey https://www.flickr.com/people/63906808@N0

Sharing of song lyrics

Sharing of song titles