Spaces of Public Discourse on Twitter

Gothenburg.
I must admit I missed the 8.20 a.m. sessions this morning – just couldn’t cope with the cold. So, we’re jumping right into the next session at AoIR 2010, which starts with Axel Maireder. He begins by noting the function of Twitter as a medium for public discourse; tweets can reach large audiences especially if retweeted widely (an average of 1000 users for each retweet).

Twitter is used for debate on public issues, of course – and Axel’s study has identified a number of typical themes (education and professional, spare time, everyday life, social relations, mottos and aphorisms, politics and world affairs, media and culture, products and services). Twitter debate is also connected heavily with mainstream news media sources – URLs to mainstream content are widely distributed (and make up some 40% of distributed URLs). This means that Twitter users who distribute such content act as intermediaries between mass media content and their fellow users. Of those URLs, some 60% link to sources which advocate specific points of view.

This can be linked with traditional public sphere conceptions, which have tended to be linked to national political entities (because media systems have been nationally organised, because people have identified themselves along local lines, because of shared language and other identity markers). However, critiques of this note that the media system is not the public sphere, and that identification is generated in the public sphere itself. Also, shared language is not necessarily a complete criterion, and different other forms of shared identity also exist. So, a new, softer conception of the public sphere defines it as the space(s) where shared discourses take place.

In that case, it becomes interesting to examine what discourse spaces Twitter opens up, and whether we are dealing then with largely segmented publics or with many overlapping publics – or with a range of personal publics that exist around individual users and bump into / connect with one another along multiple lines. Especially retweeting on Twitter can be seen as a way through which those spaces interconnect. We end up, then, with a range of connected and dynamic public spaces.

The Twitter discourse space overall is neutral to political entities as a whole, then; discourses are parallel to national media discourses and strongly connected to them. Identification is connected to personal networks, and transnational, pan-European discourse networks and public spaces can also emerge in the discussion.