Hashtagging as persuasive storytelling

Abstract

This chapter outlines the landscape of social media in contemporary culture and identifies how it is possible for narratives to be constructed and curated from the social media hashtag milieu. To use or add a hashtag to a social media comment has a function much greater than simple categorisation. It is to inscribe affiliation with a 'co-present, impermanent community by bonding around evolving topics of interest.' This medium of expressing personal evaluation to a large, ambient, and dynamic audience facilitates the identification of narratives of communal responses in real time to key events. This chapter introduces the argument that social media narratives are therefore a useful tool for evaluating and critiquing law as deeply constituted in culture and suggests that not only is legal meaning constructed and transformed by social media narratives, but that the aggregate of individual comments on social media helps to shape (and impacts upon) forms of legality.