Consciousness differentials, social regulation and discursive forms: Twitter as a battlefield of moral stances

Abstract

Abstract Twitter constitutes an arena in which moral stances and appeals for action, including discourse, fight for recognition. Bernstein's theory of codes was used to construct categories for the classification of tweets favoured by followers of a Mexican poet. Data analysis shows the conformation of two groups of users: on the one hand, those ‘insiders’ who can appreciate a critical discourse and who can free themselves from structural length limits (only 140 characters per message) and appreciate fragmented forms of distributed cognition syntagmatically joined; and, on the other, ‘outsiders’ who do not appreciate those forms of critical discourse and prefer self-contained messages such as aphorisms with unitary forms of distributed cognition, which ultimately depend upon the agglomerating pull of everyday language. Even if Twitter does not impose structural limitations to prevent the development of horizontal social relationships, the findings show that boundaries and cleavages are created by discourse itself. Unitary forms of distributed cognition, associated with ‘outsiders’ deal with knowledge beyond theoretical reach; whereas fragmented forms, associated with insiders, deal with a complex mix between theoretical generalisation and practical reasoning.