Abstract
This paper examines how expert Twitter users showed alignment and disalignment with various people who constituted their readership at the time of the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis in 2011 in Japan, also known as 3/11. The scientific uncertainty involved in estimating the possible impact of the accident gave rise to a heightened sense of anxiety and mistrust of official information by the Japanese public. As such, specialist tweeters from various disciplines and professions became the core for discourse communities on Twitter characterised by shared concerns and values, among them physicists and freelance journalists. The interest herein lies in investigating the characteristics of these communities from a linguistic perspective, exploring what aspects in the language contributed to community formation around these two types of specialists. In my previous study, I compared the two groups in terms of kinds of knowledge and values they reciprocated to their readership on Twitter. In this study, I compare how these professionals negotiated their relationship with their readers, focusing on the aspect of ‘voice holders’, or the Sayer aspect of different kinds of ideas or opinions that constituted the society at the time of the crisis. In the process of this analysis, the function of resources from the honorification system, a lexicogrammatical system in Japanese also known under the label of referent honorifics, is re-defined from the perspective of engagement. An analysis of the tweets around the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis reveals the characteristics of the two communities formed around the two types of tweeters at the time of nuclear crisis in terms of their potential membership, one inclusive and the other exclusive.
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Notes
- 1.
Tann (2013) proposes the concept of identity icon to refer to a commonsense theory of social person as collectives. According to his theorisation, national identity is comprised of triangular notions of Gemeinschaft, or expression of sense of community as in ‘the Japanese’, Doxa, or shared values such as ‘compassionate empathy’, and ‘Oracle’, or celebrated things and people from history such as ‘Nitobe’ and ‘Bushido’. His study is based on analysis of identity discourses, in which identity construction is the focal topic of the texts, which cannot be applied in understanding how communities are construed via disaster communication.
- 2.
Twilog (http://twilog.org/) is an online service that allows Twitter users to automatically store tweet logs and present them in a blog format in a public Internet domain. The site allows access to the data beyond the limitation of Twitter’s display limitation of 3200 tweets. It also allows users to choose whether or not to store official retweets.
- 3.
Acronym for Nuclear Power Plant.
- 4.
Acronym for Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.
- 5.
Name of an online live broadcasting site.
- 6.
The Geiger counter is an instrument used for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation used widely in applications such as radiation dosimetry, radiological protection, experimental physics and the nuclear industry. (Wikipedia n.d.)
- 7.
Proper names, originally mentioned in this tweet and the other tweets presented in the data, are anonymised by the author.
- 8.
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Inako, A. (2019). Recognising Voices: The ‘Voice-Holder’ Aspect of engagement in Experts’ Tweets on the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis. In: Banks, D., Di Martino, E. (eds) Specialized Discourses and Their Readerships. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8157-7_3
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