Examining Everyday Uses of Twitter

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 is the one I’m in as well – but we start with Stine Lomborg, whose interest is in relationality on Twitter. This build on my concept of produsage, and examines this especially for the case of mundane, ordinary conversational activities. To engage in such communication, Twitter users must establish networks with each other – but such networks are non-symmetric, as followees won’t necessarily always follow back. This creates a particularly interest network structure.

Stine examined the activities of six Danish Twitter users, and captured their tweets and @replies over the course of a lengthy period of time. How does the Twitter network shape the emergent communicative practices on the site; how does an individual user’s network affect their negotiation of topics and purposes of interaction, and what types of relationality do Twitter-based networks facilitate?

Some users of Twitter simply follow the site’s RSS feed, as a source of updates on friends or topics; some use it to broadcast the self (using the site as a personal archive, and/or for self-branding, with limited social interaction); some use Twitter for information-sharing (connecting around topics of shared interest, seeking advice, or networking for professional purposes); finally, there are also uses of Twitter for pure sociability and small talk (and of course there are overlaps especially between these last two uses – they’re not meant to be mutually exclusive types of usage).

These functions can be plotted across a matrix with two axes: from the instrumental to the emotional, and the self-directed to the other-directed. Personal archival use is then mainly emotional and self-directed, perhaps; pure sociability emotional and other directed, seeking advice instrumental and other directed, self-branding instrumental and self-directed, for example – but Stine also notes that is is probably best assessed on the basis of each individual tweet, as users’ uses may change from tweet to tweet. At any rate, there’s the network as communicative infrastructure on the self-directed, and the network as social circle on the other-directed side.