Notes About the Culture of Twitter

Have you ever noticed how divided opinion is on Twitter? I was firmly in the DO NOT WANT camp after having used it for a while with a personal account.

Earlier... I : Twitter :: Doge : Brocolli

But when I took over as Webmaster at KTUH and realized the station wasn't using Twitter at all, I was taken aback. Not having a personal Twitter account is well and good, but for a media organization, Twitter's indispensable anymore. So I set out to engage with the Twitter community and increase our presence there. 

Being a student of information science, I took it upon myself to do some research and develop a media strategy. There turned out to be plenty of juicy academic research papers on the subject. With a better understanding of the Way Twitter Works®, I was able to more than double KTUH's following, and we're still growing. If you're there, follow us at @KTUH, mmkay?

For your entertainment and edification, here is a list of the qualitative observations I found most interesting and relevant from the various studies I read. I hope that by reading it you will have new insights into the dynamics of the weird and frankly often maddeningly ugly and insipid place we call Twitter:

Key Observations About Media and Society

• Meyrowitz theorized that electronic media eliminated walls between separate social situations, contributing to the rapid social change that characterized the United States in the 1960s.
• Papacharissi describes the personal homepage as ‘a carefully controlled performance through which self presentation is achieved under optimal conditions’
• Through the process of labeling connections as ‘Friends’, social network sites require participants to publicly articulate connections, thereby enabling them to write their audience into being (Boyd, 2006b).

How Twitter Users Imagine Audiences

• Part of the difficulty is that ‘friends’ is an overloaded term in social media (Boyd, 2008).
• Emphasizing ‘me’ (as opposed to 'I') may be a self-conscious, public rejection of audience.
• Using Twitter to carefully construct a ‘meta-narrative and meta-image of self’ (Hearn, 2008) is part of what Jodi Dean (2002) calls the ‘ideology of publicity’.
• Publicity culture prizes social skills that encourage performance (Sternberg, 1998); people are rewarded with jobs, dates, and attention for displaying themselves in an easily-consumed public way using tropes of consumer culture. In contrast, tweeting for oneself suggests a true-to-self authenticity, untainted by expectations.
• The strategies of micro-celebrity are not only used by people with large numbers of followers. Many users consciously use Twitter as a platform to obtain and maintain attention, by targeting tweets towards their perceived audience’s interest and balancing different topic areas.

How Twitter Users Navigate Multiple Audiences

• The large audiences for sites like Facebook or MySpace may create a lowest-common denominator effect, as individuals only post things they believe their broadest group of acquaintances will find non-offensive.
• Twitter users negotiate multiple, overlapping audiences by strategically concealing information, targeting tweets to different audiences and attempting to portray both an authentic self and an interesting personality.
• Individuals work together to uphold preferred self-images of themselves and their conversation partners, through strategies like maintaining (or ‘saving’) face, collectively encouraging social norms, or negotiating power differentials and disagreements.
• Goffman maintained that this becomes a process of ‘impression management’, where individuals habitually monitor how people respond to them when presenting themselves… Self-monitoring leads people to emphasize or de-emphasize certain things, responding to further feedback in a dynamic, recursive process.

Balancing Expectations of Authenticity

• The authentic is always manufactured, and always constructed in ‘contradistinction to something else’.
• We observed Twitter users using two techniques to navigate these tensions: self-censorship and balance.
• For Twitter users trying to build audience, personal authenticity and audience expectations must be balanced.
• "Social networks are a personal platform.  By not sharing personal information I’m not building a strong relationship with my audience."

• We might ask if ‘public’ space is becoming synonymous with ‘commercial’, and if alternative models of publicity and attention can thrive within the networked audience environment.
• The broadcast audience: As a result [of new media], the idea of the ‘audience’ as a stable entity that congregates around a media object has been displaced with the ‘interpretive community’, ‘fandom’, and ‘participatory culture’, concepts that assume small, active, and highly engaged groups of people who don’t just consume content but produce their own as well
• The networked audience: combines a person’s social connections, revealing the fiction of discrete face- to-face audiences. 
• Social contexts we used to imagine as separate co-exist as parts of the network.

Social Network or News Media?

• We have classified the trending topics based on the active period and the tweets and show that the majority (over 85%) of topics are headline news or persistent news in nature. A closer look at retweets reveals that any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet.
• Twitter diverges from well-known traits of social networks: its distribution of followers is not power-law, the degree of separation is shorter than expected, and most links are not reciprocated. But if we look at reciprocated relationships, then they exhibit some level of homophily.
• It is hard to interpret their [news agencies'] rise in retweet ranking, but their rise speaks that followers of these media think that tweets of these media are worth propagating.
• If we interpret the act of following as subscribing to tweets, then Twitter serves more as an information spreading medium than an online social networking service.

Impact of Retweets

• Retweet is an effective means to relay the information beyond adjacent neighbors.  Up to about 1,000 followers, the average number of additional recipients is not affected by the number of followers of the tweet source.  That is, no matter how many followers a user has, the tweet is likely to reach a certain number of audience, once the user’s tweet starts spreading via retweets.
• Individual users have the power to dictate which information is important and should spread by the form of retweet, which collectively determines the importance of the original tweet. In a way we are witnessing the emergence of collective intelligence.
• People only retweet from a small number of people and only a subset of a user’s followers actually retweet… retweets reach a large audience and spread fast.
• Ranking by retweets exposes the influence of other media in a novel perspective.