Brennan Letz - NBA
Creating Community and Policing Identity on NBA Twitter
Social media has been an omnipresent factor for over a decade now, bridging the gap between real life and online interactions. One community of practice spearheading this relationship is NBA Twitter on the platform X. My research project uncovers patterns taken from NBA Twitter and looks at how community is created and maintained as it traverses across digital and physical realms.
By: Brennan Lentz
Nominator: Prof Velda Khoo
Course: ANTH 4800 Language and Culture
My data collection started with participant observation, using lurking as my main form of collection. Lurking, a practice that has risen alongside the advent of social media, is similar to a “bystander role” in physical conversations. This approach allowed me to see how different communities interact with each other under the wider umbrella of NBA Twitter. To avoid personal bias, I excluded posts that talked about my favorite team, the Chicago Bulls, and used X/Twitter’s bookmark tool to collect and revisit posts over time.
I started by investigating how groups are created, drawing on the concept of communities of practice (CoP). Mary Bucholtz’s 1999 summary of CoP calls for an approach to identity in a more fluid way rather than relying on fixed social categories. Communities of practice are defined by shared practices, on NBA Twitter, this includes the social actions of users to show their fandom.
- Visual and Textual Signs of Team Affiliation
One of the most important patterns amongst NBA Twitter members are the use of visual and textual signs to mark one’s affiliation to their team even before any interaction happens between fans. In both of the screenshot images above, fans display New York Knicks jerseys and caps in their profile pictures, or refer to former Knicks legend Charles Oakley in their usernames. Lastly, the tweets themselves also help these Twitter users create community, for example, the image on the left extends a well-known NBA meme to a Knick context, while the image on the right offers live game commentary on a Knicks vs. Pistons game. These accounts and their posts might look very different from each other, but they are vital to the construction of the CoP as they show which users you connect with as a fan of a specific team.
- The Nickname Meme
Beyond account and profile curation, memes also play a huge role in the NBA Twitter community, as they allow users to connect intertextually, across old and new contexts. I focus here on the memeification of NBA player nicknames, as shown in the screenshots above. The first image features Milwaukee Bucks player Giannia Antetokounmpo, nicknamed “The Alphabet”, and the second image, Miami Heat player Bam Adebayo, or “The Onomatopoeia”. These nicknames gain their social meaning because they both follow the same template of “The Anomaly”, a nickname given to Boston Celtics player Jayson Tatum a couple of months earlier. In this sense, these nicknames are a demonstration of a meme’s intertextuality: a “text” can be lifted from one context, entextualized in a new setting, and then take on fresh meaning within that community. The nickname trend has now surpassed NBA Twitter, as nicknames that started out as memes have stuck to players as their “official” monikers, for example, “The Great Barrier Thief” for Australian Atlanta Hawks player Dyson Daniels. The official Portland Trailblazers basketball team also ended up getting in on the action, posting “The Abnormality plays the Anomaly tonight” to publicize an upcoming matchup. These NBA Twitter to NBA meme paths show clearly the interdependence between these two entities. Interactions on NBA Twitter act as a spoke in the wheel of the NBA, and remind us that the fans are as much a part of the sport as players are.
- Policing of NBA Twitter Membership
Now that I have shown how a community is established, the next question becomes how is membership policed? Here, I turn to Bucholtz and Hall's (2005) sociocultural framework of identity, specifically, the three complementary identity relations that make up tactics of intersubjectitvity. The first relation, adequation and distinction, describe how members position themselves as sufficiently similar to insiders, while suppressing similarities with outsiders. This was demonstrated above with the Knicks fan accounts that unite through team affiliation.
More explicit forms of policing can be explained by the relation of authorization and illegitimation. When a Pistons fan account intrudes on a Knicks dominated thread, Knicks fans responded by dismissing and mocking the fan through comments like “imagine being a PISTONS muse 😂😂😂”, as seen in the screenshot above.
Even within the Knicks community, policing can also occur. A Knicks content creator’s fan identity and fandom gets illegitimized by fellow fans for being too critical, as seen above (“Are you even rooting for the Knicks?”). Other commenters tell him to “shut up” or “just go away”.
Through an analysis of the memes and posts on NBA Twitter, I have outlined how fan “groupness” is created on X, and underscored how online communities are just as intricate and meaningful as in-person communities of practice. This sense of groupness is especially important on social media platforms—while some people may leave, many stay as there are social aspects of NBA Twitter that just cannot be replicated.
References:
Bucholtz, M. (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society, 28(2), 203-223.
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.