Enjoy your snags Australia ... oh and the voting thing too #ausvotes #auspol: Iconisation and affiliation in electoral microblogging.

During elections, alongside more serious political comment, members of the public will use microblogging services such as Twitter to express their feelings about being a voter. This paper explores forms of ambient solidarity that are enacted by such metadiscourse about voting. In particular I focus on the role of iconisation in this discourse - in other words, the discursive processes by which micro-bloggers align around shared values materialised as 'bonding icons' (Martin & Stenglin, 2007; Martin, 2007). The texts considered are a corpus of tweets containing the hashtags #ausvotes and #auspol posted to Twitter during the 2013 Australian federal election. A salient icon in this corpus is the 'sausage sizzle' (a form of outdoor barbeque), employed as a humorous symbol of camaraderie in the context of communal complaints about the voting experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]