Analysis of metadiscourse across CUNY subreddits provides empirical validation for Michael Warner’s theoretical framework that “a public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse,” revealing how 4,447 instances of students discussing Reddit itself, subreddit norms, and community boundaries constitute the exact mechanism through which digital campus communities transform from technical platforms into experienced publics. The computational detection of reflexive discourse—posts where students engage in discourse about discourse—demonstrates Warner’s “concatenation of texts through time” through empirical patterns: pre-pandemic establishment with 356 metadiscourse items (2011-2019), pandemic transition acceleration to 718 items, and post-pandemic intensification to 2,804 items tracking precisely with platform adoption curves, suggesting that publics require temporal accumulation rather than instantaneous formation. Baruch’s remarkable metadiscursive density (2,015 items representing 45.3% despite smaller total corpus) alongside CUNY’s pan-campus coordination function (1,509 items, 33.9%) reveals institutional variation in public formation, where reflexive attention rather than sheer volume determines community maturity—Baruch students engaging in proportionally higher self-aware discourse about their discursive space itself.

The five thematic categories emerging from metadiscourse analysis directly map to Warner’s theoretical mechanisms: welcoming/orientation posts like submission_1f2vui9 (“Welcome New Students!”) presuppose future circulation by addressing readers who don’t yet exist; boundary-making discourse (“wrong sub, try r/Baruch”) creates what Warner calls “social space” through spatial differentiation defining what discourse belongs where; norm establishment threads demonstrate “presupposition of previous discourse” when 2019 posts reference 2016 precedents that 2022 posts then invoke; pure metadiscourse about “this subreddit” exemplifies reflexive circulation where the public addresses itself as public; and community identity formation (“this sub saved me”) shows transformation from platform to collective through sustained reflexive attention. The methodological achievement extends beyond theoretical validation to demonstrate that computational analysis can detect and measure social phenomena previously accessible only through qualitative interpretation—Warner’s abstract “reflexive circulation” becomes quantifiable through 4,447 metadiscourse instances distributed across temporal phases, institutional contexts, and thematic functions. Most significantly, the emergence of CUNYuncensored during Spring 2021 protests as documented through splinter metadiscourse suggests Warner’s counterpublic formation occurring when dominant publics feel constrained, while the discovery that metadiscourse must precede crisis discourse (students need functioning publics before they can circulate support) reframes our understanding of how pandemic support networks emerged—not spontaneously but through already-constituted publics capable of rapid intensification precisely because reflexive circulation had already created the social space necessary for crisis response.

Evidence Base:

  • Query: 25 metadiscourse patterns including “subreddit,” “this sub,” “r/CUNY,” “post here,” “belongs here,” “wrong sub”
  • Results: 4,447 total items (1,614 submissions, 2,833 comments) across 5 CUNY databases
  • Distribution: Baruch 45.3% (highest density), CUNY 33.9% (coordination hub), temporal acceleration post-2020
  • Key Evidence IDs: submission_1f2vui9 (welcoming presupposition), submission_dtafk4 (norm petition, 101↑), comment_iyy1lux (“wrong sub,” boundary-making)
  • Files: databases/current/scripts/ch2/metadiscourse_reflexive_circulation_20251023_091942.md