Divided we tweet: The social media poetics of public online shaming

Abstract

This article explores the divisive nature of social media public culture in which impromptu communities of strangers affirm or antagonize one another in non-face-to-face interactions through memes, hashtags, and other posts. Drawing upon the work of Michael Herzfeld, specifically his notion of cultural intimacy and social poetics, this article analyzes contemporary politicized social media to demonstrate what I call social media poetics, briefly, public online shaming through which antagonists criticize one another and, in so doing, create their own identities; this process relies upon essentializing communities of posters that quickly become polarized. During social media acts of “creative shame,” people “become” their posts, making social media a vehicle for perpetuating both community and disunity based on social identities affirmed or antagonized when somehow “embodied” in the posts.