Collective sense-making through the Twitter service during the 2011 Egypt revolution

Abstract

This study explores the role of Twitter during the 2011 Egypt revolution. Drawing on the body of literatures on collective behavior in general and social movement in particular, we investigate the concept of sense-making which is considered as a key aspect of collective behavior. Our special focus will be placed on analyzing the changing patterns of hashtags by applying the Markov-Switching Model. The analysis of hashtags is expected to explicate (1) how the collective sense-making process emerges over time through Hashtags, and (2) what the implications of those sense-making processes are in the particular situation of the 2011 Egypt revolution. A few theoretical and practical implications will be discussed.