Love in the time of Twitter

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the use of Twitter labels or hashtags related to lovediscourse circulation. There is a continuity between the use of hashtags in Twitter and the postulates of Roland Barthes in “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” (1977), where the author proposes different figures that lover’s discourse repeats and reviews. The hasthags and the tweets length restriction in (140 characters) are useful to analyze how these lovediscourse figures work today. With this tool, the speaker relates his statements to other statements, resulting in a statements chain that are answered and recovered, making explicit the relation between statements according to Bajtin theory (1979).