Blurb:

This chapter considers the difficult problem of interpreting how people forge alignments when they are not necessarily directly interacting, a key concern in interpreting online communication, particularly social media communication. It draws on Zappavigna’s recent work on ‘ambient affiliation’ in relation to Twitter and Instagram. The notion of coupling explained in chapter 3 is revisited in order to consider how particular couplings are pitched, promoted and finessed, a communing process referred to as ‘convocation’. The data considered is a corpus of Twitter and Instagram posts tagged #momguilt aimed at coordinating with the kind of discourse analysed in chapters 3 and 4.