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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Twitter is a household name, discussed for its role in national elections, natural disasters, and political movements, as well as for what some malign as narcissistic "chatter." The first edition of Murthy's balanced and incisive book pioneered the study of this medium as a serious platform worthy of scholarly attention. Much has changed since Twitter's infancy, although it is more relevant than ever to our social, political, and economic lives. This timely second edition shows how Twitter has evolved and how it is used today. Murthy introduces some of the historical context that gave birth to the platform, while providing up-to-date examples such as the #blacklivesmatter movement, and Donald Trump's use of Twitter in the US election. The chapters on journalism and social movements have been thoroughly updated, and completely new to this edition is a chapter on celebrities and brands. Seeking to answer challenging questions around the popular medium, the second edition of Twitter is essential reading for students and scholars of digital media.
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Seitenzahl: 388
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface and Acknowledgments
TEXT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Notes
1 What is Twitter?
Twitter and Social Media
Conclusion
Notes
2 Contextualizing Twitter
Contextualizing Twitter
Twitter and the “Global Village”
Conclusion
Notes
3 Theorizing Twitter
Twitter as a Digital “Object”
I Tweet, Therefore I Am
Twitter as Democratizing?
Twitter and the Event-driven Society
Twitter and Homophily
Telepresence and Immediacy
A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Twitter
Conclusion
Notes
4 Twitter and Journalism
Twitter as a News Environment
New Journalisms
Citizen Journalists Breaking News Through Twitter
The Rise of Twitter-based Citizen Journalists?
Twitter as Communal News Space
Digital Divides and Twitterized Journalism
Post-Fact Journalism, “Fake News,” and Twitter
Twitter and Journalism: A Blessing or a Curse?
Conclusion
Notes
5 Twitter and Disasters
Disaster as Socially Mediated
Information Technology and Disasters
Twitter Research and Disasters
The 2010 Pakistan Floods
Twitter and the 2016 Kaikoura, New Zealand, Earthquake
Conclusion
Notes
6 Twitter and Activism
Cairo Tweeting
Twitter Revolution?
“Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators”
Tweeting Information from #Syria and #Egypt to the World?
Twitter Didn’t Topple Dictators, But It Rattled Them
Marginalized Groups Having a Voice? The Case of #BlackLivesMatter
#BlackLivesMatter
From #BlackLivesMatter to #NoDAPL
Conclusion
Notes
7 Twitter and Health
Twitter-mediated Healthcare
The Shift of Health Information from Monologic to Dialogic
Potential Downsides: From Privacy Issues to Medical Misinformation
Cancer Networks and Twitter
Cancer Retweeted
Conclusion
Notes
8 Celebrities and Branding
Celebrity Engagement
The Case of Anthony Weiner
The Case of Stephen Fry
Twitter and Advertising
The Case of American Express
Conclusion
Notes
9 Conclusion
History and Theory
Voice and Influence
“Aware” Communities
Twitter as Mainstream, yet Unique
The Future
Notes
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
1.1 Twitter feed
2.1 The Notificator
3.1 Twitter attribution
4.1 Tweet from @Enrique_Acevedo discovering the missing Trump portrait
4.2 Miracle on the Hudson
5.1 Top 100 domain categories to which #Pakistan tweets linked (by percent)
5.2 Frequency of tweets per user with Pakistan trending topic tag
5.3 Frequency of @-mentions per user with Pakistan trending topic hashtag
5.4 “Stranded Cows” tweet
5.5 Word cloud of 33,800 Kaikoura earthquake tweets, produced using netlytic (Gruzd 2016)
5.6 Close-up of network of 33,800 earthquake tweets from 11,672 unique Twitter users (November 17–18, 2016)
5.7 Whole network of 33,800 earthquake tweets from 11,672 unique Twitter users (November 17–18, 2016)
6.1 Internet, Facebook, and Twitter users in Egypt
6.2 Egyptian population using Twitter (January and March 2011)
6.3 Use of communication media during the 25 January Revolution
6.4 Word Cloud of #BlackLivesMatter, produced using netlytic (Gruzd 2016)
6.5 Visualization of #BlackLivesMatter influencers based on 99,126 tweets collected November 17–26, 2016
6.6 Paul Ryan DAPL tweet
7.1 @ALSUntangled Twitter Stream
7.2 Frequency of tweets by cancer-related keywords
7.3 Frequency of tweets across all cancer-related keywords, December 2010–May 2011
8.1 Tweet to Kim Kardashian requesting a birthday reply
8.2 Stephen Fry’s “I want to leave the planet” tweet
8.3 @AskAmex tweet response to a customer
8.4 @AmexOffers confirmation tweet to a customer
8.5 American Express’ #SmallBusinessSaturday inspired tweet by @jgrosedesign
8.6 Personal analytics for tweets
9.1 Interactions of themes discussed in this book
List of Tables
5.1 Top 15 retweets with identifiable users
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 2nd edition
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle, The Internet of Things
Mark Deuze, Media Work
Andrew Dubber, Radio in the Digital Age
Charles Ess, Digital Media Ethics, 2nd edition
Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media
Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society, 2nd edition
Martin Hand, Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan, The Information Society
Tim Jordan, Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Leah A. Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter, 2nd edition
Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging, 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström, The Music Industry, 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Social Communication in the Twitter AgeSecond Edition
DHIRAJ MURTHY
polity
Copyright © Dhiraj Murthy 2018
The right of Dhiraj Murthy to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 2013 by Polity PressThis second edition first published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1253-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Murthy, Dhiraj, author.Title: Twitter : social communication in the twitter age / Dhiraj Murthy. Description: Second Edition. | Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2017] | Series: Digital media and society | Revised edition of the author’s Twitter, 2013. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017031442 (print) | LCCN 2017031887 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509512539 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509512492 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509512508 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Twitter. | Online social networks.Classification: LCC HM743.T95 (ebook) | LCC HM743.T95 M87 2017 (print) | DDC 006.7/54--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031442
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
For Kalpana, Deya Anjali, and AkashDedicated in loving memory of Nagavenamma and Venkatachala Shetty
You’re not reducing face-to-face time … You don’t choose to stay in and do Twitter. It’s like those spare moments on the Web when I’m doing another task I switch over to Twitter for literally 15 seconds. There is no fewer face-to-face, no fewer phone calls, there’s more awareness of other people in my life and maybe that even leads to further conversation with some people.
Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter(cited in Niedzviecki 2009: 132)
Preface and Acknowledgments
“What Hath God Wrought” – Samuel Morse’s first message, on May 24, 1844, on the newly completed telegraph wire linking Baltimore and Washington – was a mere 21 characters long. Alexander Graham Bell’s first message on the telephone to his lab assistant on March 10, 1876, “Mr Watson – come here – I want to see you,” was more liberal: 42 characters long. And 95 years later, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email, with the message “QWERTYUIOP,” from one computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to another computer sitting beside it. Tomlinson’s message: a spartan 10 characters.
In the past, technology determined the length and duration of the message. In the internet age of today, our ability to communicate is seemingly limitless. But the computer has ushered in a new era of brevity. Twitter is a digital throwback to the analog succinctness of telegrams. Yet what is the significance of this electronically diminished turn to terseness? Does it signal the dumbing down of society, the victory of short attention spans, or the rise of new virtual “me” cultures? Are we saying more with less, or just saying less? Or perhaps we are saying more about less. This position is well illustrated by “status updates,” short one- or two-line messages on the popular social networking platform Facebook. Though these short messages are often trivially banal (e.g., “mustard dripping out of my bagel sandwich”), they are elevated to “news,” which Facebook automatically distributes to your group of “friends,” selected individuals who have access to your Facebook “profile,” that is, your personalized web page on the site. Once the update percolates to your friends, they have the opportunity to comment on your update, generating a rash of discussion about dripping mustard, and so on. A photo of the offending bagel sandwich might be included as well. Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram prioritize the role of images, but brief comments remain very important to these media.
This form of curt social exchange has become the norm with messages on Twitter, the popular social media website where individuals respond to the question “What’s happening?” with a maximum of 140 characters. These messages, known as “tweets,” can be sent through the internet, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and text messages. But, unlike status updates, their strict limit of 140 characters produces at best eloquently terse responses and at worst heavily truncated speech. Tweets such as “gonna see flm tonite!” or “jimmy wil be fired l8r 2day” are reflective of the latter. The first tweet on the site, “just setting up my twttr”1 (24 characters), by Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, on March 21, 2006, perhaps led by example. This book emphasizes that Dorsey’s message, like that of Morse, was brief and, like that of Bell, was unremarkable – setting up one’s Twitter and asking the recipient to return.
After 11 years of 140-character tweets, Twitter decided to double this to 280 characters from November 2017. Before rolling the change out to the general public, Twitter began trialing this “feature” with a select group of users (Watson 2017), though initial testing suggested that only 5 per cent of the group opted to use over 140 characters in their tweets (Newton 2017). Critics (e.g., Silver 2017) argue that this will drown out Twitter timelines, compromising the platform’s uniquely succinct form of social communication.
Our contemporary use of Twitter – in part a social, political, and economic information network – has evolved over more than a decade. So it may be some years before the impact of the 280-character expansion can be evaluated. Given that our behaviors on all social media platforms are interlinked, it may be that Twitter is answering a call for individuals to express themselves more fully, though in the context of these platforms more broadly, 280 characters is still relatively terse.
By drawing this line between the telegraph and telephone to Twitter, this book makes its central argument – that the rise of these messages does not signal the death of meaningful communication. Rather, Twitter has the potential to increase our awareness of others and to augment our spheres of knowledge, tapping us into a global network of individuals who are passionately giving us instant updates on topics and areas in which they are knowledgeable or participating in real-time. In doing so, however, the depth of our engagements with this global network of people and ideas can also, sometimes, become more superficial. For example, policymaking by elected officials on Twitter may not only be superficial due to brevity, but also potentially dangerous due to a lack of context for foreign policymakers reading these tweets. Of course, the opposite can be true too where brief, superficial tweets are positive, serving as public evidence of continued political engagement.
Many of us would be worried if Twitter replaced “traditional” media or the longer-length media of blogs, message boards, and email lists. The likelihood of this is, of course, minimal. However, Twitter is also mediating access to these types of content for many. For example, Twitter’s “Moments” feature presents a selection of trending “news” for users to be able to easily navigate. Though aspects of Twitter such as this may be reducing information diversity or dumbing down what we consume (and this potentially has real effects on politics, economics, and society), this book concludes with the suggestion that there is something profoundly remarkable in us being able to follow minute-by-minute commentary in the aftermath of an earthquake, or even the breakup of a celebrity couple. This book is distinctive in not only having Twitter as its main subject, but also its approach of theorizing the site as a collection of communities of knowledge, ad hoc groups where individual voices are aggregated into flows of dialog and information (whether it be the election of Donald Trump or the death of Prince). The first edition of this book in 2013 was instrumental in starting this conversation, and this second edition continues the important work of thinking critically about Twitter.
Ultimately, Twitter affords a unique opportunity to re-evaluate how communication and culture can be individualistic and communal simultaneously. I also describe how these changes in communication are not restricted exclusively to the West, as any mobile phone, even the most basic model, is compatible with Twitter. Tweets can be quickly and easily sent, a fact that has led to the growth of its base to 313 million monthly active users with 79 percent of accounts outside of the USA (Twitter.com 2016a). This has been useful in communicating information about disasters (e.g., the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in New Zealand) and social movements (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter). At an individual level, tweets have reported everything from someone’s cancer diagnosis to unlawful arrests. For example, in April 2008, James Karl Buck, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was arrested photographing an anti-government labor protest in Mahalla, Egypt. He quickly sent a one-word tweet from his phone, “arrested,” which caught the attention of Buck’s Twitter “followers,” those who subscribe to his tweets. His one-word tweet led to Berkeley hiring a lawyer and Buck’s eventual release. There are, of course, many distinctions to be made between the tweets sent by Buck, or those sent during the Mumbai bomb blasts, and the more unremarkable, everyday tweets. Contrast the tweet Prasad Naik sent moments after the Mumbai bomb blasts, “Firing happening at the Oberoi hotel where my sister works. Faaak!” with Biz Stone’s third tweet, “wishing I had another sammich.”2 Though an intentionally striking and loaded comparison, it is just this absurdity that happens daily, hourly, and by the minute on Twitter. This combination of banal/profound, combined with the one-to-many – explicitly – public broadcasting of tweets, differentiates Twitter from Facebook and text messages.
Rather than selectively condemning Twitter (e.g., as a threat to democracy) or, on the other hand, praising it (e.g., a bringer of democracy), the book poses important questions to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of this new communications medium. Although I examine the practice of social media through specific Twitter-mediated events, this book’s emphasis is both explanatory and theoretical. Specifically, my prime aim is to better understand the meanings behind Twitter and similar social media through concise yet sophisticated interpretations of theories of media and communication, drawing upon a diverse array of scholars, from Marshall McLuhan to Erving Goffman and Gilles Deleuze to Martin Heidegger. Though this network of thinkers and scholars crosses several disciplines, their work sheds light on a problem of communication faced since the dawn of the modern age: unraveling the connections, to paraphrase McLuhan, between the medium and the message. The chapters present analyses of the shifts in which we communicate by exploring the role of Twitter in discourses of new media forms, communication, social formations, and digitally mediated communities. Early chapters introduce Twitter, historically contextualize it, and present theoretical frames to analyze the medium. Comparisons between historical media forms are made to highlight the fact that new media forms are not all that “new” in many of the ways in which they organize our social lives. For example, when the telephone began to get a critical mass in US households, there were similar feelings of anxiety that the “public” would erode the “private,” as anyone could call your house as you were having an intimate family dinner or in deep conversation with a visiting friend. The middle chapters include specific discussions of Twitter and its relationship to journalism, disasters, social activism, health, and celebrities/branding. The book then brings together theory and practice to make conclusions on the medium itself and its role in social communication within an “update culture,” a culture in which society has placed importance on updating friends, family, peers, colleagues, and the general public. The question of whether this pattern signifies “me-centric” rather than “society-centric” cultures is explored in the conclusion. At the start of each chapter, I single out an individual tweet to frame the forthcoming chapter.
Since writing the first edition of this book in 2011–13, the arguments I had made in terms of Twitter being a place to update the world about one’s experiences, thoughts, and reflections have now become part of mainstream understandings/engagements about the medium. Pop culture has often interrogated why Twitter has become part of our daily lives. The Comedy Central television show South Park compares leaving Twitter to suicide (T. Parker 2016) and the celebrity Alec Baldwin makes a cameo appearance as a social media addict who posts compulsively on Twitter, ultimately opting to have antenna implants in his head in order to broadcast his thoughts without even typing (T. Parker 2013). Their parody highlights serious public concerns over the seamless broadcasting of what people are thinking (what Mark Zuckerberg termed “frictionless sharing” (Payne 2014), and such practices may be crossing over into the line of what is colloquially referred to as “Too Much Information” (TMI).
This is an important aspect of public perceptions of Twitter and what role it plays in society. Some argue that the medium has blurred the private and public too much and that the private needs to be more ring-fenced. Others argue that this blurring of public and private is a net positive in the context of Twitter. For example, the medium could potentially be changing citizen activism in countries with no freedom of the press, or providing women with a public sphere to discuss intimate partner violence (IPV) (Cravens, Whiting, and Aamar 2015). Twitter has become the subject of very large social questions and the medium has been placed right in the middle of many prominent debates.
What is noteworthy is that privacy cuts both ways as some argue that they do not want to know what someone had for breakfast a particular day, but at the same time want individuals to be broadcasting live updates during disasters, activist events/social crises, celebrity breakups, and presidential elections. This is tricky terrain. The case of Lisa Bonchek Adams, a mother of three who had terminal cancer and tweeted over 176,000 times, is a good example. With many intimate tweets that explicitly conveyed to her followers her experiences with cancer, she mostly drew support, but also condemnation. On the one side, the argument was that individuals such as Adams should be encouraged to use Twitter in these ways as often patients of chronic illnesses such as terminal cancer need high levels of support and Twitter enables new ways to support these types of individuals both by other cancer patients and survivors, as well as by the public at large (Murthy and Eldredge 2016). Others, such as the journalists Emma and Bill Keller, publicly argued against her approach (Elliott 2014). This case provoked a sharp controversy about the public and the private, and what role Twitter should play in our lives. In an age where some perceive that everything is posted on social media, this case highlights how boundaries are being negotiated and redrawn all the time. And my book too had to be rewritten!
My work on this book has been shaped by generous input and encouragement from family, friends, colleagues, and scholars. I am very grateful for their involvement in the development of this book. Students in my classes over the years have been taught material from early versions of chapters, and offered engaging and highly useful feedback. I am also indebted to my students for providing me with a treasure trove of examples of interesting Twitter users and tweets. Thank you to my former research fellow, Macgill Eldredge, who imported the data sources in chapter 7 into a standardized format and produced the spike data histogram, and my graduate students – Kyser Lough for shooting the image used in figure 1.1 and Jordon Brown for proofreading assistance. The reference librarians at the British Library patiently helped me navigate archives regarding the telegraph, material which fundamentally shaped the historical context of the book. I have greatly benefited from input from my colleagues at Bowdoin College, Goldsmiths (University of London), and The University of Texas at Austin. I would also like to thank Andrea Drugan, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Mary Savigar, and the rest of the Polity team for their invaluable support in making this project a reality. Screenshots of tweets are used where possible to provide a fuller context.3
TEXT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Parts of chapter 3 have previously appeared in “Towards a sociological understanding of social media: theorizing Twitter,” Sociology 46(6) (2012): 1059–73, and parts of chapter 4 have previously appeared in “Twitter: microphone for the masses?,” Media, Culture & Society 33(5) (2011): 779–89. Parts of chapter 7 have previously appeared in “Who tweets about cancer? An analysis of cancer-related tweets in the USA,” Digital Health 2 (2016).
Notes
1
. See <
https://twitter.com/jack/status/20
>.
2
. See <
https://twitter.com/biz/status/40
>.
3
. The “screenshot-driven” perspective (see Bonneau, C. (May 2015), “Pursuing the legacy of Aaron Swartz, one tweet at a time. A screenshot-driven essay,” M@n@gement 18: 363–9) sees the method of examining screenshots of tweets one at a time as allowing one to “make tangible and visible actions that are often conducted in the form of behind-the-scenes work that is usually not accessible to people outside these situations.” Screenshots of tweets with no embedded images are treated as “public domain by the licence of agreement between Twitter members and Twitter” (see Crook, T.,
The UK Media Law Pocketbook
, Routledge, 2013, p. 156). Per Polity Press policy, tweets with posted images are only included if explicit permission was granted by the Twitter user posting the image.
The tweet above compares four popular online social spaces. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, the following chapter explores what the medium is, how it is structured, and how people use it. Twitter may not be a mouthpiece but it is seen that way by many. Others see the medium as facilitating support communities and some have used it for speed dating. The following chapter provides a basic introduction to Twitter as a communications medium.
CHAPTERONEWhat is Twitter?
It’s funny because I actually started drinking late in life, at like twenty-two or so. So my parents who live in St. Louis never really knew that I started drinking. I was with Ev and we were drinking whiskey and I decided to Twitter about it. And my mom was like, “I knew you drink cider sometimes, but whiskey?” (Jack Dorsey, talking with Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder, cited in Niedzviecki 2009: 130)
Blair (1915), in his popular twentieth-century stage song, “I hear a little Twitter and a Song,” was, of course, referring to birdsong. However, so ubiquitous has the social media platform become, that for most internet-using adults, to hear a twitter today refers to one of the largest and most popular social media websites.1 Twitter allows users to maintain a public web-based asynchronous “conversation” through the use of 140-character messages (the length of text messages) sent from mobile phones and mobile devices, including tablets and watches, or through its website. Twitter’s aim is for users to respond to the question “What’s happening?” in 140 characters or fewer.2 These messages on Twitter (termed “tweets”) are automatically posted and are publicly accessible on the user’s profile page on the Twitter website. Tweets are a public version of the types of updates found on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. One important distinction is that tweets are fully public, rather than being restricted to one’s friends. And like these other platforms, tweets can include emoticons and emojis as well as embedded hyperlinks, images, animated gifs, and/or video. The dialogue between Twitter users occurs through the at-sign (e.g., a user can direct tweets to another user by prefixing a post with an at-sign before the target user’s name). Anyone can post a tweet directed to @KimKardashian, @real DonaldTrump, or @BrunoMars, and many do. Additionally, anyone can instantly see a tweet and respond to it.3 One does not even need to “know” the other user or have their permission to direct a tweet at them. Around 4.8 percent of users make their tweets “protected,” a status by which only approved “followers” of their tweets have access to them.4
According to Lüfkens (2016), there are “793 Twitter accounts belonging to heads of state and government in 173 countries, representing 90 percent of all UN member states.” Twitter has 313 million monthly active users with 79 percent of accounts outside of the USA (Twitter.com 2016a). Though it is unclear how many of these users’ tweets ever get read, the fact is people are sending tweets and consider them to be meaningful. Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams5 believe that the medium’s appeal is due to “its ease of use, its instant accessibility, [and] its short bursts of seemingly unimportant chatter” (Niedzviecki 2009: 129). As these founders of Twitter highlight, one factor that has facilitated the popularity of the medium is its ease of use. Anyone with a mobile phone – and 63 percent of people in the world now have one, while 151 countries have 4G networks (GSMA Intelligence 2016) – can quickly fire off a tweet. And because sending a text message has become a banal activity in scores of countries around the world (Kohut et al. 2011), the learning curve for using Twitter is relatively low for individuals familiar with “texting.” The ubiquity of the platform has contributed to this accessibility. As even the most basic mobile phone can be used, the technology is potentially accessible even in impoverished countries, as Twitter allows users to tweet via text in scores of countries, including sub-Saharan Africa (Twitter.com 2016b). This is an important distinction of the medium from Facebook and other emergent social technologies. One does not need broadband internet access or even a computer to regularly use Twitter (this is not to say that Twitter’s uptake crosses traditional social boundaries and inequalities). Additionally, the time commitment required to post a tweet is minimal in comparison to posting a blog or publishing other material on the internet. As Twitter creator and co-founder Dorsey (cited in Niedzviecki 2009: 129) puts it, Twitter’s attraction is premised on “connection with very low expectation.” Indeed, the contribution itself can be of “low expectation.”
Though restricted to 140 characters, Twitter has simple yet powerful methods of connecting tweets to larger themes, specific people, and groups. This is a unique aspect of the medium. Specifically, tweets can be categorized by a “hashtag.” Any word(s) preceded by a hash sign “#” are used in Twitter to note a subject, event, or association. Hashtags are an integral part of Twitter’s ability to link the conversations of strangers together. For example, people during the 2016 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament tweeted with both the #worldcup hashtag as well as tags to indicate teams (e.g., #eng for England and #ned for the Netherlands). Similarly, tweets pertaining to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement generally used #occupywallstreet and #ows. By including a hashtag in one’s tweet, it becomes included into a larger “conversation” consisting of all tweets with the hashtag. The structure of communication via hashtags facilitates impromptu interactions of individuals (often strangers) into these conversations. It is for this reason that Twitter has been considered useful in social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter (see chapter 6 for more detail). Because hashtags represent an aggregation of tagged tweets, conversations are created more organically. Just because people are tweeting under the same hashtag, this does not mean they are conversing with each other in the traditional sense. Rather, the discourse is not structured around directed communication between identified interactants. It is more of a stream, which is composed of a polyphony of voices all chiming in. Group chats in other, private, social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook can have some similarities to Twitter feeds. Older technologies that most parallel Twitter in this way are internet chat rooms and telephone party lines. In the case of the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag, it was a confluence of diverse #BlackLivesMatter tweets that contributed to engagement by individuals. Either serendipitously or by reading through scores of tweets appearing second by second, individuals and groups interacted with each other after seeing relevant tweets.
Because tweets can also be directed to specific individual(s), even if she/he is a stranger or a celebrity, Twitter is unique in facilitating interactions across discrete social networks. For example, individuals can and do tweet @KatyPerry, the American pop singer and most followed Twitter user (with over 100 million followers). This form of directed interaction is powerful in that all discourse is public and its audience is not limited to the explicitly specified interactants. Often, individuals tweeting are putting on a show for others. Or there is no show at all. Rather, the ease of interaction offers a platform to voice a concern. For example, referring to the November 2016 shootings at Ohio State University in the USA, @lauriehandler tweets: “It speaks VOLUMES that @realDon aldTrump spent the whole day having a tantrum and never once acknowledged the tragic events at @OhioState.”6 Not only does this tweet emphasize the direct communication of the medium, but also its real-time nature.
A user’s profile page, known on Twitter as a timeline (see figure 1.1), includes all tweets (whether or not they are directed to another user). This shapes Twitter because anyone can “lurk” (i.e., observe profiles without their target knowing of this lurking). Not only does this encourage the theatrical aspect of profiles, but it also presents a different picture of consumers of a profile. Specifically, it facilitates new forms of consumption of a user’s feed. Because anyone can see anyone else’s tweeting history (from music tastes to the fact that one forgot to do the laundry), it not only presents a different view of users, but also allows consumers of a profile to follow “leads” they find to be interesting (e.g., a tweet about a charitable event or a band). On the other hand, this also presents issues of privacy (Murthy 2012). The barriers between public and private become extremely blurred as anyone can see very specific conversations between individuals, which are many times intended to be private but are tweeted nonetheless (given the medium’s ability to foster this (see chapter 3)).
The function of following users in some ways mimics a television guide, where you can see a list of channels with some limited information of what is being broadcast on the channel at that moment. If the channel piques your curiosity, you can stay tuned in. On Twitter, one can tune into the timelines of particular Twitter users who can be people you are interested in (from A-list celebrities to your neighbor), a professional organization, a magazine/journal, a company, and so on. The relationship of following and followed within Twitter shapes the consumption of tweets and user profiles. It has become commonplace to be “friends” with others on various websites. “Friendship” tends to indicate some level of familiarity with that person. However, on Twitter, one does not need to be on a first-name basis or even “know” the user to follow them. This relational structure leads to Twitter users following popular users (often celebrities or news organizations). Recall the television channel analogy; these popular Twitter users are followed because people would like to tune into these channels (regularly or at least once in a while).
Figure 1.1 Twitter feed; reproduced with permission of Kyser Lough
This structure of channels and consumers of channels of information draws from notions of broadcasting (Allen 1992). Specifically, Twitter has been designed to facilitate interactive multicasting (i.e., the broadcasting of many to many). Television and radio are both one-to-many models where a station broadcasts to many consumers. Twitter encourages a many-to-many model through both hashtags and retweets. A “retweet” (commonly abbreviated as “RT”) allows people to “forward” tweets to their followers and is a key way in which Twitter attempts to facilitate the (re)distribution of tweets outside of one’s immediate, more “bounded” network to broader, more unknown audiences. It is also one of the central mechanisms by which tweets become noticed by others on Twitter. Specifically, if a tweet is retweeted often enough or by the right person(s), it gathers momentum that can emulate a snowball effect. This is all part of interactive multicasting, wherein many users are vying for the eyes and ears of many users. Again, this is in distinction from the more limited set of broadcasters in traditional broadcast media. Additionally, interactive multicasting blurs the role of consumers on Twitter as these consumers simultaneously become producers when they add a phrase and retweet a news story they find interesting. Even if they do not modify the original tweets, a retweet rebroadcasts the tweets to their many followers – though not production, it is broadcasting. Hashtags themselves are emblematic of interactive multicasting in that many users are broadcasting to many users on the topic. The “interactive” part refers to the multimedia content embedded in tweets (including hyperlinks, photographs, and videos). Recipients do not inherently passively consume these tweets. Rather, they can actively navigate this content or they can cross the blurred boundary and become content producers if they comment on the original content or tweet back to the original tweeting user (i.e., the original broadcaster).
Twitter and Social Media
Twitter is often compared to Facebook and sometimes considered as a public version of the popular social networking site. This comparison has some truth to it. Both media are social, tend to elicit regular contributions that are not verbose, and are highly interactive. However, the two media are unique in many important ways. The number of Twitter’s daily active users is dwarfed by Facebook’s count of more than a billion (Molla 2016). Their business models also differ hugely, with Twitter sticking to light forms of sponsored advertising, compared with Facebook’s highly targeted method of not only increasing time spent within the platform, but also tailoring ads based on sophisticated models of their users. This resulted in Twitter’s stock price plummeting, a bevy of takeover rumors, and a general bashing of the company on Wall Street. This has led to it being called a “pinata” (Molla 2016). From the perspective of social relations, Facebook involves bidirectional relations. When a friend request is accepted, the friendship is mutual. On Twitter, one can unidirectionally follow someone (which is exemplified in the case of following celebrities). Next, what you post on Twitter has a certain expectation of being public. Barring public Facebook groups, there is a certain level of expected privacy on Facebook timelines. This is not to say that Facebook content is fully private, but there is some general level of expected privacy, however minimal. (The same is true of the popular Instant Messaging platforms WhatsApp and Telegram.)
Twitter is a social media platform. Social media have been broadly defined to refer to “the many relatively inexpensive and widely accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information, collaborate on a common effort, or build relationships” (Jue et al. 2010: 4). Social media tend to be publishing-oriented media and the “social” part of social media refers to its distinction from “traditional” media (Murthy 2011). Though Facebook and other social networking sites do multicast, this is not their emphasis per se. Rather, the intention is to foster friend connections through social sharing in a way that is designed to keep ties between users active and strong. Social media’s emphasis is broadcast-based and encourages the accumulation of more and more followers who are aware of a user’s published content (e.g., tweets).
In other words, Twitter is markedly distinct from Facebook’s friend-centered social network model. Twitter, in many ways, shares similarities with blogs, albeit the posts on Twitter are considerably shorter. However, once one’s tweets are aggregated, a new structure emerges. This is not merely a technical consideration, but rather the organization of communication as a series of short communiqués is qualitatively different from examining tweets individually. As a corpus, they begin to resemble a more coherent text. Granted, the corpus is disjointed, but narratives can and do emerge. For this reason, Twitter is best considered as a “microblog,” a “blog” that consists of short messages rather than long ones (Java et al. 2007). It is considered the most popular microblogging service, though others such as FriendFeed,7 Jaiku, Tumblr, Plurk, Sina Weibo (Chinese-language), and Squeelr (an anonymous microblogging service) also experienced exponential growth shortly after their launches. Microblogs differ from blogs in terms of the length of posts (a factor which also influences the frequency of posts in the two media). Ebner and Schiefner (2008) usefully compare this relationship between blogs and microblogs to that between email and text messages. In their study of blogs and microblogs, respondents saw the former as a tool for “knowledge saving, coherent statements and discourse,” while the latter was most used for “writing about their thoughts and quick reflections” (Ebner and Schiefner 2008). However, the length of microblog posts should not be viewed as inherently deterministic of their communicative function. A key difference between blogs and microblogs is their social organization. Twitter, for example, implements a complex social structure which tweets support and foster. Tweets as “quick reflections” help keep social networks active on Twitter, whereas blogs are inherently more egocentric in focus.
The ways in which microblogs organize social communication may feel new. However, Twitter uses technology developed from earlier internet media such as text-based gaming in Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), Instant Messenger (IM), and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRC and MUDs were early synchronous precursors to Twitter. A difference between these earlier technologies and Twitter is that the latter is almost always in the public domain,8 whereas many MUDs and some chat rooms had restricted access.This is an important distinction. Twitter has similarities to both blogs and chat rooms,9 but its emphasis on accessible dialogic communication in the public domain is unique.
Understandably, one may find the differences between microblogging, social networks, and social media difficult to discern. Indeed, the boundaries are often blurry. However, it is important to draw some lines between these categories. At the simplest level, social networks are friend-based networks where maintaining and developing friendship ties are critical (Facebook and WhatsApp are prominent examples of this). Social media are designated as broadcast media, whose intention is to publish content to networks known and unknown to the author (Twitter and Instagram are prominent examples of this).10 There are different types of social media such as image-and-video-oriented social media. Twitter is one example of a microblogging-based social medium. For the sake of clarity, I define microblogging as an internet-based service in which: (1) users have a public profile where they broadcast short public messages/updates whether they are directed to specific user(s) or not; (2) messages become publicly aggregated together across users; and (3) users can decide whose messages they wish to receive, but not necessarily who can receive their messages; this is in distinction from most social networks where following each other is bidirectional (i.e., mutual). The boundaries of public and private are critical to understanding microblogging as well as its predecessor technologies. Rosenthal (2008: 159) helps make this distinction by observing that “[n]ewsletters by e-mail are still newsletters, but blogs bring personalized and interpersonal communication into the public domain.” Microblogs like Twitter follow a similar logic in that they consist of very short updates that can be read at the individual update level (i.e., at the level of the tweet) or as an aggregation of tweets.
Like blogs, microblog entries can be on anything of interest to the author (from interpreting current events to daily trivialities). Microblogs, as a medium, depend on the regularity of content contribution. Niedzviecki (2009: 130) argues that Twitter “works because of its constancy and consistency, [factors which lead you to …] stop thinking about what you’re revealing and who’s on the other end, reading about your mundane life.” Microblog services group lists of users together based on interests, and their microblogs throughout the day are able to sustain discernible conversations. As DeVoe (2009) succinctly argues, “successful microblogging depends on having an audience.” And tweets have an audience – whether followers of the tweet’s author, or strangers. Dorsey (cited in Niedzviecki 2009: 130) believes that Twitter users feel as if they are “writing to a wall” and they feel that “there’s not much of an audience with Twitter.” However, as Niedzviecki (2009: 130–1) highlights, this is purely a perception and, even if the audience is not “obvious or apparent,” that does not translate to an absence of an audience with tweets disappearing into the ether. Rather, like any responsebased medium, users would discontinue using the medium if they felt that they were not receiving the level of response they deemed important to them. Additionally, exceptional tweets are regularly highlighted in the media.11
Users of social media often consume media produced by people they are not acquainted with, but have found of interest. This is especially true of retweets and trending topics on Twitter. This can lead to interactions with strangers and, albeit more rarely, celebrities. In my research on new media and Muslim youth subculture (Murthy 2010), a respondent of mine recounted how he posted a tweet disparaging Deepak Chopra, only to find that Chopra himself responded and invited my respondent to have a meal with him (an offer which was taken up).12
Though instances like this one involving Chopra are the exception rather than the rule, they appear side by side with the hordes of more “normal” tweets. Of course, social network sites can include the banal and profound together (e.g., a Facebook user posts about their breakfast and later announces they are pregnant). However, a key difference here between social media and social network sites is the design of the former to be explicitly public and geared towards interactive multicasting. Combine the two – as Twitter does – and you have real-time public, many-to-many broadcasting to as wide a network as the content is propagated by its users. Though the tweets are aggregated into a microblog stream and constitute a corpus as a whole, they are still individual units. Tweets are analogous to bees in that they exist both as individuals and as part of a collectively built whole (i.e., the hive). And, like bees, a single tweet is a self-functioning unit in and of itself. Indeed, a single tweet can also pack a powerful sting! Ultimately, if an individual tweet is perceived as important to other users, it can travel far and wide, crossing many networks in the process. This is particularly true of tweets in social activism (see chapter 6).
