Poggers in the Chat : En kvalitativ analys av Twitch-chattens kommunikativa ritualer

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this Bachelor thesis was to investigate how communities can be formed online. By applying Randall Collins theory of Interaction Ritual Chains to live chats in the Just Chatting and esport categories on Twitch.tv, we aimed to explore how communities on the website are established through interaction rituals. By identifying and mapping them we hoped to not only find differences between streams and their live chats, but also to find universal rituals that can be applied to chats across Twith.tv as a whole. As our method, we used a digital ethnographic approach, often referred to as netnography, where the data later was processed by using a qualitative data analysis. This study found several interaction rituals in live chats on Twitch.tv, where communities met with mutual focus. Channel specific emotes, jargons and internal references acted as barriers to entry as well as methods of confirming shared moods. The study also found that while esport streams were dominated by expressive rituals, Just-Chatting streams were defined by conversing rituals that invited users to two-way communication.