Twitter and the Future of Microblogging

Michele Zappavigna, author of "Ambient Affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter," published Online First in New Media and Society, and Eszter Hargittai and Eden Litt, authors of "The tweet smell of celebrity successs: Explaining variation in twi... also published Online First in New Media and Society, shared their insights about the value of Twitter and the future of microblogging.  

What inspired you to conduct studies on Twitter rather than any other social media website, such as Facebook or LinkedIn?

Eszter: I myself have conducted studies on other social network sites (SNSs) as well, such as Facebook and MySpace. My first related paper came out in 2007 looking at what explained different levels of adoption of various SNSs by race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. The data set upon which this paper draws includes information about the use of other SNSs as well. We focused this article on Twitter due to its recent rise in popularity and unanswered questions about what explains its adoption.

Michele: As a linguist I am particularly interested in the pressure placed on language, particularly on interpersonal meaning, in character-constrained environments such as Twitter. More pragmatically, Twitter was appealing due to the affordances of its API, with which I have been able to build both specialized corpora (e.g. hashtag corpora, meme corpora etc.) and a large scale 100 million word corpus, HERMES. An additional motivation was my interest in the practice of hashtagging, whereby users label their tweets with a form of metadata. Since hashtags are often the target of evaluative language in tweets, the practice offered a quite concrete study of how people bond around particular values, forming ambient communities where what is shared is feeling about ideas and not just the ideas themselves.

Do you have twitter accounts? If so, did you have them before writing these articles, and what has been your experience of the site as a user?

Eszter: Both Eden and I have Twitter accounts. I signed up for Twitter in 2006, but didn't start using it actively until a couple of years later once more people joined.  I have found it helpful for finding out about information I may not otherwise encounter and for communicating with people otherwise not in my networks. I will be eager to see how Google Plus influences people's use of Twitter.  I suspect some of the activity may shift over to that network especially once they open up account creation and more people are able to use it.

I'll let Eden tell you when she signed up and what her experiences have been.

Eden: I was a bit of a late Twitter bloomer. I began using the service in 2009. I worked for a digital communications agency and joined Twitter to get to know it better for my clients. Now that I study social media, I find the service extremely valuable in keeping up-to-date on the latest research, researchers, and related news. It's also been great for serendipitous finds. Admittedly, most of my friends and family are part of the large percentage of non-adopters and have not signed up for the service. 

There are a lot of changes taking place right now in the area related to both social network site users and services--like Eszter and Michele, I am particularly interested to see how Google+ will make its way into people's daily repertoires and influence the overall social network site scene.

Michele: I signed up for Twitter prior to this research and I generally use it to follow other linguists and social semioticians. I enjoy the novel window on research that microblogging affords, where those aspects that usually remain tacit (e.g. the degree of frustration engendered by writing a paper!) are more openly discussed. It is also very useful for finding out what is going on within a particular community of interest, with colleagues posting links to their latest presentations or blog posts. I tend to use Facebook for more personal microblogging.

As Eszter mentions, it will be interesting to see the impact that Google+ has on other social networking services.

Eszter and Eden, your study examined systematic patterns in the adoption of Twitter. Did you expect certain patterns to arise before you began the study? Were you surprised by your findings?

Eszter: Based on prior research I had done about the differentiated adoption of various other SNSs and also other people's work about Twitter adoption rates in particular, we expected to see differences across population groups. We did not know up front, however, that we'd be able to explain away the racial and ethnic differences completely with information about people's prior topical interests. That was an exciting finding.

Michele, in your conclusion you note that “Criticism of Twitter as a service facilitating inane and frequent status updates about users’ activities seems to have missed the social point of twittering.” Do you think that Twitter usage will continue to increase? How do you predict that the use of language within Twitter will evolve?

Michele: I think microblogging as a practice will increase. Whether Twitter or some other platform will be the dominant channel remains to be seen.

Microblogging and related practices seem to be about offering potential bonds to the ambient network. As this kind of ambient sociality develops, online discourse is moving toward what I term ‘searchable talk’. I think we will increasingly see people incorporating forms of conversation-supporting metadata, such as hashtags, into their language to make their discourse more findable by others. Novel ways of packing interpersonal meaning into increasingly brief formats is also likely to be important.

Do you have plans to continue research regarding Twitter, social media, or online communities?

Eszter: Eden and I both continue to work on projects on how people's background, social context of use and Internet skills influence their online behavior. One of our current projects concerns updating prior measures of Internet skill to encompass social media skills.

Michele: Yes, I find electronic discourse fascinating and would like to continue working in this area. I have just finished a book, ‘Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web’ (Continuum, 2012), which investigates how people forge interpersonal bonds with Twitter. This work employs HERMES, a 100 million word Twitter corpus, alongside a number of specialized corpora to look at the linguistic patterning of microblogging including evaluative language, slang, humour, memes, and political discourse. I am currently working on a topic close to the heart of many academics – coffee – and am looking at affiliation in relation to how people ‘bond around the bean’ in tweets about coffee.