Walking with Bourdieu into Twitter communities: an analysis of networked publics struggling on power in Iranian Twittersphere

This paper offers some insights into Twitter as a political field, based on Bourdieu’s field theory. Networked publics, agents of this are competing overpower by performing networked practices. To investigate we focused two practices: framing and narrating. Persian in 2017 presidential election provides good context to analyze how such is constituted. Combining social-network analytic approach with discursive textual interpretations, analyzed corpus 2,596,284 tweets. We identified three main publics the retweet network: reformists, conservatives, diaspora users. Having most influential users each community PageRank metric, thoroughly investigated all their The results show that ordinary constituted major population conservative publics. reformist included mostly journalists lesser extent media. Findings also confirm used same strategies gain more power field. They produced quite frames narratives compete other. Moreover, battle was about routine electoral debates, not legitimacy or entity regime. Hence, none challenged hegemonic discourse Iran significantly.