Old genres, new media

Collective witnessing and social memory-making on Argentine Twitter

Bibliographic Data

ID2286453
AuthorsSeán J Martins (0009-0009-7190-1328, University of South Carolina Columbia South Carolina USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume34
Issue3
Pages470-492
Publication date2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Linguistic Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1055-1360 • E-ISSN: 1548-1395
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jola.12444
OpenAlexW4404148516
LanguageEN
References cited71

Through a linguistic anthropological lens of interdiscursivity, this article analyzes the semiotic and historical development of the testimonio genre of #Cuéntalo ("tell it [your story]"), a 2018 Twitter movement that began in Spain to protest sexual violence and evolved when the hashtag traveled to Argentina. The recognition of #Cuéntalo tweets as a genre helped to put the narratives on the public record by offering a paradigmatic frame that invited participation and poetic variation, producing a sense of performance of witnessing and memory-making. I argue that this endeavor was ultimately a successful intervention due to the following factors: the infrastructure and participation frameworks of social media, the historical precedent of women's and feminist movements in the region, the genre's allowance for first-person storytelling by other narrators, and the subsequent archival efforts and media recontextualizations. The large quantity of tweets-iterations of a similar story-demonstrated the truth and severity of the issue, as each tweet was simultaneously narrated by the victim, the tweet's author, and society as a whole. In the case of #Cuéntalo testimonios, the individual and the aggregate came together via hashtag activism in a collective witnessing of social injustice that was archived as subaltern social memory

Cognitive science · Collective memory · Media studies · Political science · Social media · Social memory · Sociology · Digital Communication and Language · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Media and Politics

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Open DOIOpen Access