Government communication: Deletion as stagecraft and statecraft

Focusing on three separate interpretive communities in the United States—federal employees, journalists, and civic spectators—this dissertation examines Twitter as a site of ongoing mnemonic contestation, where people argue not only over what democratic institutions should say but also what they should save. It explores how ephemeral acts performed by the U.S. administrative state prompt spectacle and provoke divergent moments of remembrance, record-making, and resistance. This project raises fundamental questions about the tenuous and evolving relationship between memory, government data, and the role played by journalists and other people who treasure what certain state actors seek to treat as trash. It reveals that the act of deleting by U.S. federal agencies fosters a variety of counter-acts, multiplying the records that accompany erasure, turning evidence of ephemerality into props that travel far beyond the state’s stage, and generating their own counternarratives.