Walking with Bourdieu into Twitter communities: an analysis of networked publics struggling on power in Iranian Twittersphere

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper offers some insights into Twitter as a political field, based on Bourdieu’s field theory. Networked publics, as agents of this field, are competing overpower by performing networked practices. To investigate this field, we focused on two networked practices: networked framing and narrating. Persian Twitter in 2017 presidential election provides a good context to analyze how such a field is constituted. Combining a social-network analytic approach with discursive and textual interpretations, we analyzed a corpus of 2,596,284 tweets. We identified three main networked publics in the retweet network: reformists, conservatives, and diaspora users. Having identified the most influential users in each community based on PageRank metric, we thoroughly investigated all of their tweets. The results show that ordinary users constituted the major population of conservative and diaspora publics. The reformist community included mostly journalists and to a lesser extent media. Findings also confirm that all networked publics used the same strategies to gain more power in the field. They produced quite the same frames and narratives to compete with each other. Moreover, the battle was more about the routine and electoral debates, not the legitimacy or entity of regime. Hence, none of the networked publics challenged the hegemonic discourse in Iran significantly.