Abstract

VELA DELFA, Cristina; CANTAMUTTO, Lucía  and  NUNEZ-CANSADO, Marian. An Analysis of the Hashtag #MeQuedoEnCasa: Digital Conversations in Twitter® Amid the Emergency produced by COVID-19. Íkala [online]. 2021, vol.26, n.2, pp.365-384.  Epub June 27, 2021. ISSN 0123-3432.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v26n2a08.

The COVID-19 sanitary crisis came along isolation measures, among which was the lockdown that triggered multiple responses in social media. This article aims to examine digital discussions that took place through the hashtag #MeQuedoEnCasa (Spanish for “I’m Staying Home”), between the 20th and 27th of March 2020. The study is set around a mixed methodology in which social media mining techniques are combined with qualitative strategies, inherent to discourse analysis. From a theoretical point of view, we draw on Framing and Appraisal theories. Our results point to a positive framing of the lockdown through semiotic traits at different levels: lexical, semantic and pragmatic. The most influential accounts bent their discursive production towards the positive polarity. The empirical analysis allows us to conclude that the discursive framework of this digital conversation combines two semantic axes (community and health), two enunciative axes (here and now) and one emotional axis, which implies that hashtags such as #MeQuedoEnCasa works as signs of social identity, enunciative indexing marks, and instruments to promote individual responsibility from positive values.

Keywords : COVID-19; framing theory; linguistic analysis; social media; appraisal theory; Twitter®; digital conversations.

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