From cotext to context? Discursive practices in Twitter

From cotext to context? Discursive practices in Twitter Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de Universität Hamburg, 18 Dezember 2009

Twitter, Inc ● founded 2006 in San Francisco ● originally modeled after multi-SMS services ● ranked third among social networking sites in terms of traffic, following Facebook and MySpace ● 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits ● API allows development of external applications and portability of data

Message presentation in Twitter ● each user's own messages (tweets) are shown in their timeline in reverse chronological order, mirroring a blog ● subscribing to other users' timelines (following) gives the follower a composite view of the followed users' tweets ● user connections in Twitter are not by default reciprocal ● timelines can be interwoven by various means ● Twitter presents itself as a pastiche of intersecting communicative spaces composed of: ● individual timelines ● dynamic combinations of other timelines (composite views such as “all friends” and search)

A user's timeline can be considered cohesive when read chronologically

A composite view visually suggests cohesion, but is textually incohesive

A formal typology of tweets and users (Java et al, 2006) Types of tweets: ● “daily chatter” ● “conversations” ● “sharing information/URLs” ● “reporting news” Types of users: ● “information sources” ● “friends” ● “information seekers”

Discursive practices Three strategies for interweaving timelines: ● Messaging: use of the @ character to address another user ● Retweeting: reposting another user's tweet (RT) ● Hashtagging: using hashtags to „label“ a tweet (#) Notes: ● forms can be combined (@ + RT + #) ● can realize different functions ● all three are strategies for creating co(n)text

@-Messaging (Honeycut & Herring, 2009) ● used primarily for conversation ● “noisy”, but short, dydadic convesations take place ● ”similar to instant messaging, but more dynamic” ● 31% of tweets with @ are about the addressee ● 51% of tweets without @ are about the twitterer

Retweeting (boyd et al, 2010) ● information sharing is a social practice ● “the practice contributes to a conversational ecology in which conversations are composed of a public interplay of voices that give rise to an emotional sense of shared conversational context“ ● allows “peripheral awareness“ ● 52% of retweets contain a URL ● 18% of retweets contain a hashtag

Hashtagging ● can “stitch together“ tweets from users who are cospatial (#ir10, #dgfs09, #hamburg) → spatial anchor ● can stitch together thematically related tweets (#linguistics, #unibrennt) → thematic anchor ● are also frequently used to provide a meta-comment on the content of the tweet (#fail) → comment-type

Creating shared context from shared cotext: “all friends” view users “all friends” view time(lines)

Creating shared context from shared cotext: @-messaging users user5 @user4 time(lines)

Creating shared context from shared cotext: retweeeting users retweet time(lines)

Creating shared context from shared cotext: hashtagging users #someevent time(lines)

Conclusions ● each user creates and controls his/her own timeline ● by contrast, anyone can put together a composite view by searching, creating a list etc ● @-messaging, retweeting and hashtagging are (among other things) strategies for interweaving timelines ● the arranged cohesion of composite views underpins the “emotional sense of shared coversational context” (boyd) ● cotext and context create and reinforce each other

Thanks for listening! Thanks for listening!

From cotext to context? Discursive practices in Twitter Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de Universität Hamburg, 18 Dezember 2009

From cotext to context? Discursive practices in Twitter

by Cornelius Puschmann

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From cotext to context? Discursive practices in Twitter Presentation Transcript