Humanity's Gone Viral

This dissertation explores the role that hashtags play in maintaining political, social, and technological inequalities in modern society. It argues that the use of what I call ‘collectivising hashtags’, i.e., hashtags characterised by their use of pronouns to inclusively identify with Others, affords new opportunities for self-expression that may simultaneously empower and compromise certain individuals. It is written in response to experiences of racism shared via the #TheyAreUs and #ThisIsNotUs collectivising hashtags that trended following the terror attack on Muslim communities in Ōtautahi, Christchurch in March 2019, and questions commonly held assumptions by privileged users about the non-discriminatory nature of Aotearoa New Zealand politics and society. Using #TheyAreUs and #ThisIsNotUs as my first case study, I demonstrate how collectivising hashtags involve forms of appropriation on the part of privileged users, reinforcing unequal social hierarchies and silencing marginalised bodies. I consider the New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s #ThatsUs campaign in my second case study, assessing the vernacular affordances of social media that enable or restrict affected and affecting bodies’ ability to respond to social and technological inequalities. I also explore the clever and imaginative ways that digital counterpublics subvert online interactions through strategic use of digital architecture, labour, visibility, and invisibility when addressing hashtags and social media platforms as racialised performances of self.

Users’ everyday online encounters with collectivising hashtags present an opportunity to challenge dominant conceptions of self. Following the critical feminist traditions of Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson, and Kate Schick, my analysis incorporates an ethic of vulnerability in order to interrogate underlying power relations and people’s location within them. My dissertation illustrates how hashtags are technologically created and structured in a way that affords certain bodies more political potential than others. I show that everyday performances of self via collectivising hashtag practices have the political potential to formatively shift who qualifies as ‘human.’To assess the affordances of collectivising hashtags, I used a multimodal analytic technique developed by André Brock called Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis. I also conducted in-depth interviews with hashtag users and analysed the soft structures of digital networks, social media platforms and processes, and hashtag functionalities and their affects. Drawing on Melissa Harris-Perry’s concept of the Crooked Room, I assert that collectivising hashtags operate within a ‘crooked platform’ which problematises the recognition of marginalised bodies. This analysis encourages users to think critically about the affecting nature of their online practices and privileges, or risk becoming complicit in the wider relations of power in which discrimination, oppression, and violence fester. As privileged users develop new practices of digital reconstitution in which an embodied online praxis is conceived in affective terms, I argue that they can instead embrace their own vulnerability, alterity, and precariousness, and move towards a fuller conception of what it means to be human.