Twitter

Dhiraj Murthy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509512539
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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.

CHAPTER ONE
What 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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 Celebrities and Branding
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement