The lived experience of place in a Twitter affinity space around the death of sports celebrity Maradona 1

Abstract

Recent research has focused on the social and affective meanings of place in online and offline discourse. However, discourse studies of place in online communication, especially in Spanish, are still scant. This chapter explores the lived experience of place in a specific Twitter affinity space. The study adopts a corpus-based discursive pragmatic perspective to examine the inventory of place-related semiotic resources for place reference such as deixis and place names and to explore their functionality, that is, the social practices users engage in, the identities they construct, and the associated discourses and ideologies. The chapter draws from the Maradona corpus of tweets posted following the death of football player D. A. Maradona. Findings reveal users’ varied, and even divergent, lived experiences of place and the use of the Twitter affinity space both as a site of mourning and bereavement and a site of protest and resistance.