Twitter

Social Communication in the Twitter Age

Dhiraj Murthy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Twitter has become a household name, discussed both for its role in prominent national elections, natural disasters, and political movements, as well as for what some malign as narcissistic "chatter." This book takes a critical step back from popular discourse and media coverage of Twitter, to present the first balanced, scholarly engagement of this popular medium.

In this timely and comprehensive introduction, Murthy not only discusses Twitter's role in our political, economic, and social lives, but also draws a historical line between the telegraph and Twitter to reflect on changes in social communication over time. The book thoughtfully examines Twitter as an emergent global communications medium and provides a theoretical framework for students, scholars, and tweeters to reflect critically on the impact of Twitter and the contemporary media environment. The book uses case studies including citizen journalism, health, and national disasters to provide empirically rich insights and to help decipher some of the ways in which Twitter and social media more broadly may be shaping contemporary life.

CHAPTER ONE

What is Twitter?

Facebook is composed of my photos. MySpace is composed of my favorite music. Twitter is composed of everything inside my heart.

@GirlsProverbs

The tweet above compares three 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 reflection of “everything inside [one’s] heart,” but it is seen that way by some. 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.

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 the website has 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, mobile Internet devices, or through various websites. Twitter’s aim is for users to respond to the question “What’s happening?” in 140 characters or less.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 Facebook’s now well-known status update function, but provide public awareness of all users on the medium rather than being restricted to one’s friends. 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 @BarackObama or @CharlieSheen, 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.

There are 40 world leaders with verified accounts on Twitter, including Hugo Chávez (The Christian Science Monitor 2011), and it is estimated that more than 200 million tweets are sent every day (Schonfeld 2011). Though it is unclear as to how many of these tweets ever get read, the fact of the matter is that people are sending tweets and consider them to be meaningful. Twitter co-founders, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams,⁴ 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 most people in the world now have one (International Telecommunications Union 2011)) can quickly fire off a text message to Twitter’s mobile phone number. And because sending a text message has become a banal activity in scores of countries around the world (Ewalt 2003), the learning curve for using Twitter is relatively low for individuals familiar with “texting.” As even the most basic mobile phone can be used, the technology is potentially accessible even in impoverished countries. This is an important distinction of the medium to Facebook and other emergent social technologies. One does not need broadband Internet access or, for that matter, a PC 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 2010 soccer World Cup tweeted with both the #worldcup hash tag 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 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 (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. The technologies that most parallel Twitter in this way are Internet chat rooms and telephone party lines. In the case of the “ows” hashtag, it was a confluence of diverse Occupy Wall Street 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. 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 to see (see figure 1.1). Or there is no show at all. Rather, the ease of interaction offers a platform to voice a concern. For example, in this tweet, a user wants to convey his political opinions to Barack Obama and tweets: “@BarackObama. I know other countries need help. We have homeless and people in USA that we should help first, don’t you thank [sic.].”

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 one can see your tweeting history (from music 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. The barriers between public and private become extremely blurred as one 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)).

Figure 1.1 Runner’s Strip © Cait Chock www.caitchock.com

The function of following users in some ways mimics a TV 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 attention, 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, etc. 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).

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).

Is Twitter a Public Version of Facebook?

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 mediums are social, tend to elicit regular contributions that are not verbose, and are highly interactive. However, the two mediums are unique in many important ways. First, the distinction should be made between “social network” and “social media” technologies. The former, which encompasses Facebook and LinkedIn amongst others, is defined by boyd and Ellison (2008: 211) as providing web services which facilitate users maintaining a “public or semi-public profile within a bounded system” and through which they can “articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection.”

Social media has 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). Some elide social networking and social media together. The two are not mutually exclusive and social networks are important distribution venues for content produced in social media. Though there is overlap, it is more useful to make clear that social media is mainly conceived of as a medium wherein “ordinary” people in ordinary social networks (as opposed to professional journalists) can publish user-generated “news”/“updates” (in a broadly defined sense).⁵ Additionally, social media’s emphasis is not as “bounded” to communities of friends as social network sites are. Rather, social media is a publishing-oriented medium and the “social” part of social media refers to its distinction from “traditional” media (Murthy 2011b). Though Facebook and other social networking sites do multicast, this is not their emphasis per se. It is to foster friend connections through social sharing that is designed to keep ties between users active and vibrant. 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,⁶ Jaiku, Tumblr, Plurk, and Squeelr (an anonymous microblogging service) have also experienced exponential growth. 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, whereas many MUDs and some chat rooms had restricted access.⁷ This is an important distinction. Twitter has similarities to both blogs and chat rooms,⁸ 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 is a prime example of this). Social media are designated as broadcast media, whose intention is to publish content to networks known and unknown to the author (Twitter is the most prominent example of this). 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 communicati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 What is Twitter?
• 2 Contextualizing Twitter
• 3 Theorizing Twitter
• 4 Twitter and Journalism
• 5 Twitter and Disasters
• 6 Twitter and Activism
• 7 Twitter and Health
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index