The pragmatics of rebroadcasting content on Twitter: how is retweeting relevant?

Social media networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter depend, for their success, on the willingness of users to share digital content with other users in their network. To this end, they often have sharing functionality built into each new post by default. With one or two clicks, a user can rebroadcast another user's post or content to their own followers or subscribers. In this article, I consider the pragmatics of online sharing of third-party content, and I analyse these acts of rebroadcasting using the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95). I establish that rebroadcasting is an ostensive act of communication. Furthermore, I suggest that rebroadcasting is attributive in nature, and may, like other attributive uses, achieve relevance in a variety of ways. I consider the communicative intentions that lie behind acts of rebroadcasting on Twitter, aligning relevance-theoretic analyses of attributive use with self-reported motivations for retweeting as identified by boyd et al. (2010). I show that the categories of attributive use that we find in ostensive acts of communication more generally are also represented in acts of retweeting.