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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Going “Rogue”: National Parks, Discourses of American Identity and Resistance on Twitter

Authors : Joanne Marras Tate, Vincent Russell, Rachel Larsen, Ellie Busch

Published in: Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter examines three ‘alternative’ national parks Twitter accounts created in response to censorship about climate change imposed by the Trump administration in 2017. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and theory by Fairclough (Language and power. Longman, London, 1989), Tracy and Robles (Everyday talk: Building and reflecting identities. The Guilford Press, New York, 2013) and Foucault (The archaeology of knowledge. Pantheon, New York, 1972), this chapter finds that the tweets call upon ideas of US national identity through the use of themes like pristine wilderness, historic legacy and wisdom by past American leaders. The authors identify Twitter as a platform that allows a space for protest and collective resistance. The tweets engendered civic participation around a perspective counter to the official line, and in doing so, foregrounded a romanticized sense of national identity.

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previous chapter Communication in the Age of Twitter: The Nature of Online Deliberation
next chapter Political Candidates’ Discussions on Twitter During Election Season: A Network Approach
Footnotes
4
When elected representatives would not answer phones, the accounts encouraged people to send faxes. They implemented the hashtag #faxtivism to encourage participants to act outside of the online platform.
 
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Metadata
Title
Going “Rogue”: National Parks, Discourses of American Identity and Resistance on Twitter
Authors
Joanne Marras Tate
Vincent Russell
Rachel Larsen
Ellie Busch
Copyright Year
2020
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Book
Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41420-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-41421-4

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_2