Twitter & world literature: The development of hashtag communities as a global writing practice

Abstract

As a popular writing form, Twitter / X literature (“Twitter Literature”) seems to have come and gone without leaving a lasting impression, and even the use of Twitter by well-known writers reached its peak in the early to mid-2010s. Around this same time, a number of scholars hailed the advent of Twitter literature as the next big thing, and they began analyzing the unique structures and affordances of this new literary form. Yet as Simone Murray aptly puts it, the failure of these “predictions to come to pass is not reason to abandon the question of the digital's significance for literary culture.” Instead, Murray understands these failed predictions as examples of scholarly overreaching, and she urges that scholars of contemporary digital literature “provide better answers… attentive to the varied and sometimes contradictory permutations of contemporary digital culture.” As part of this effort to “provide better answers,” this article calls attention to the development of a new, global form of discourse that transcends social media publishing platforms: the hashtag.

The hashtag is a new symbol used in a performative act that calls into being a global community even as it stands as a descriptive signifier of a given text. This article examines the rhetoric and signification of the hashtag as a politically-inflected, transformative writing practice, specifically using the hashtag as a way of understanding the ambiguous writing practices developing on Twitter. By focusing particularly on the amateur writing community on Twitter, I analyze how this community has deployed hashtags to grow a global audience, advance political discussions, and circulate across linguistic borders, thereby creating a new kind of world literature independent of traditional and post-press publishing regulations.