Abstract

Deremetz and Scheffler devote their contribution to the analysis of communication structures in digital collectives using the debate about the General Data Protection Regulation (German: DSGVO) on German Twitter as an example. They first discuss current recollectivization theories, and in particular take up Michel Maffesoli's approach of neo-tribalism, which ascribes certain characteristics to »modern tribes«. Summarizing these characteristics, the authors conceive of them as the »retribalization hypothesis« and ask about its validity as well as its empirical testability in online discourses. The methodological goal of the article is to transform sociological, theory-based social diagnoses into verifiable hypotheses with the help of computer-assisted methods and to show ways of testing their validity. For this purpose, the authors propose an analytical framework to transform the retribalization hypothesis into network and corpus linguistic terms. They use the DSGVO debate on German Twitter over a period of 3.5 years (December 2015 to June 2018) as their object of study, based on which they examine whether a retribalization of social discourses is taking place. Using the methods developed, they show that the retribalization hypothesis must be rejected for this discourse, at least in part, and emphasize the importance of the interaction of quantitative computational and qualitative interpretive methods for multidisciplinary research projects of digital processes.