The Covid-19 pandemic has not dampened online activity surrounding this year’s National Day.
On the contrary, National Day-related tweets have increased 2.5 times compared with the same period last year.
Although a smaller proportion expressed positive emotions – 61% this year in comparison to 66% last year – negative tweets also fell from 19% to 15%.
A bigger percentage were characterised as “neutral” tweets.
More markedly, more people this year emphasised the community and the everyday in a more “authentic and people-oriented” expression of joy, a significant departure from last year when the bulk of posts centred around the main event on Aug 9 evening at the Padang.
The Straits Times worked
with Quilt.AI, an artificial intelligence-powered research and tech company, to analyse more than 6,000 tweets – bots and retweets excluded – over the same two-week period before National Day last year and this year.
The captions and images of 400 National Day-specific Instagram posts in each year were also looked at, although a similar analysis of Facebook posts could not be done as it goes against the platform’s terms of service.
Posts were identified by National Day-related hashtags and through keywords such as “fun pack” and “parade”.
Both Twitter and Instagram showed a change in how people’s sentiments manifested online during this period, in a sign that “NDP 2020 has created a narrative of its own”, said Quilt.AI.
While about 40% of tweets in 2019 were characterised as “celebrating spectacle” – including in their post ideas such as “singing”, “concert”, “exhibition” – this had halved to just 20% this year.
Instead, a new category of tweets “celebrating home” emerged, with concepts like “baked goods”, “cuisine” and “home recordings” in line with the more heartland-based celebrations during this unprecedented National Day Parade.
Whereas these made up just one per cent of related tweets last year, this had increased to 16% this year.
Quilt.AI co-founder, anthropologist Dr Angad Chowdhry said of the results: “It seems that there is a shift from the need for spectacle to the celebration of common humanity this year.
“The pandemic has created an existential threat by removing access to familiar markers of identity (and) all of us are now connecting to something deeper,” Chowdhry said. — The Straits Times/ANN
On the contrary, National Day-related tweets have increased 2.5 times compared with the same period last year.
Although a smaller proportion expressed positive emotions – 61% this year in comparison to 66% last year – negative tweets also fell from 19% to 15%.
A bigger percentage were characterised as “neutral” tweets.
More markedly, more people this year emphasised the community and the everyday in a more “authentic and people-oriented” expression of joy, a significant departure from last year when the bulk of posts centred around the main event on Aug 9 evening at the Padang.
The Straits Times worked
with Quilt.AI, an artificial intelligence-powered research and tech company, to analyse more than 6,000 tweets – bots and retweets excluded – over the same two-week period before National Day last year and this year.
The captions and images of 400 National Day-specific Instagram posts in each year were also looked at, although a similar analysis of Facebook posts could not be done as it goes against the platform’s terms of service.
Posts were identified by National Day-related hashtags and through keywords such as “fun pack” and “parade”.
Both Twitter and Instagram showed a change in how people’s sentiments manifested online during this period, in a sign that “NDP 2020 has created a narrative of its own”, said Quilt.AI.
While about 40% of tweets in 2019 were characterised as “celebrating spectacle” – including in their post ideas such as “singing”, “concert”, “exhibition” – this had halved to just 20% this year.
Instead, a new category of tweets “celebrating home” emerged, with concepts like “baked goods”, “cuisine” and “home recordings” in line with the more heartland-based celebrations during this unprecedented National Day Parade.
Whereas these made up just one per cent of related tweets last year, this had increased to 16% this year.
Quilt.AI co-founder, anthropologist Dr Angad Chowdhry said of the results: “It seems that there is a shift from the need for spectacle to the celebration of common humanity this year.
“The pandemic has created an existential threat by removing access to familiar markers of identity (and) all of us are now connecting to something deeper,” Chowdhry said. — The Straits Times/ANN
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