medium is the message or something like that

The Medium is the Message or Something Like That

"The medium is the message," a phrase that is hard to miss if you are doing research on communication. In "The Logic of Connective Action" Bennett and Segerberg made a similar point about the importance of the structure of the medium for the communication it fosters (Bennett and Segerberg, 2011).

Twitter is medium. It is medium that is now used for posting 230 million messages a day (Dugan, 2011). Between January and September of 2011 the number of messages posted each day increased 110%, and the messaging continues to increase by leaps and bounds.

As simple as Twitter seems it has a number of distinctive structural features.

Each account begins with a user name and a profile. The user name is chosen by the individual setting up the account. The individual may choose any name. You may present yourself as yourself or you may present yourself in some other fashion. That posed one problem that Twitter solved with 'authenticated accounts.' Celebrities did not want to have others presenting themselves as the celebrity. So, authenticated accounts are off limits. There are good reasons an individual might want to present him or her self as another. Imagine using Twitter to protest against tyranny when you are under the gun of the tyrant or in any other way need anonymity (Evans, 2011). Anonymity differentiates Twitter from the two other giants of new media -- Facebook and Google+.

The profile is public and contains a modest amount of information, Only the personal information the person chooses to post is included in the profile. That includes a picture. ManyTwitter users post a photograph of themselves. Some post photographs of other 'objects.' You are able to present yourself as you choose. Twitter adds information about use of the medium to the profile.

Messages are no longer than 140 characters. That makes them easy to write and easy to read, which is certainly part of the appeal of using the medium. That has led, as with other constrained communication, to specialized linguistic procedures such as 'weird' abbreviations and specialized linguistic constructions. This has all the air of 'insider' communication; I am an insider!

Messages are by default public. There are ways to make the messages private, but for the most part people seem happy to have their messages public. Twitter is public communication. It is unlike email, text messaging, and the variety of other ways people choose to communicate privately. What people post to Twitter becomes the public domain.

There are two ways to find messages you want to read. One is to follow other individuals who are posting messages. The follower has automatic access to all the messages posted by the individual followed. There are a few celebrities who have millions of followers (see twitaholic for a listing). They are exceptions to the general pattern, however. Most twitter users have few followers. Another exception to this general pattern is individuals who post Twitter messages about politics. (Boynton, 2010) For the searches I have done on this point persons posting Twitter messages about political subjects have more than 1,000 followers on average. Persons posting messages about the Repubican candidates in 2011 have substantially more than 1,000 followers on average. For example, over the last several months 5,375 individuals posted one or more messages about Romney. Those 5,375 people had 13,571,282 followers. While it is a skewed distribution, with some having many followers and many havng a few followers, it is the case that messages about Romney are available to millions of followers. In politics, the reach of following is very substantial.

Search is the second way one can find twitter messages to read. Initially Twitter did not provide for searching Twitter messages, and a number of firms provided this missing service. For two years Twitter has also provided search capability. If someone writes about a subject of interest to you you will find them if you do a search.

But language is very flexible, and in a 140 character constained medium search can miss what you are seeking unless something is added to facilitiate the search. So, Twitter users invented hashtags. Hashtags have the form #characters. An example is #OccupyWallStreet. On September 17, 2011 a group of protestors took to Wall Street to protest the influence of corporations in US politics and the results of the influence. They used #OccupyWallStreet as the designation of their movement in Twitter messages. If you wanted to post a message about the protest the way to be confident people would find it is to use the hashtag. The rest of the 140 characters can then be devoted to the message. The result of the widespread use of this convention is the emergence of domains of communication. If you want to communicate about the protest in Wall Steet this is the way to get into that public discussion. And the hashtag is as available to those who oppose the protest as those who favor it. There is no monopoly control on hashtags. (Boynton, 2011) The hashtag acts as a 'gathering place' for a public discussion of the topic -- for individuals who share a perspective and for individuals who have many different perspectives.

The sign for identifying a reference to a Twitter user is the @. So the president is @barackobama. If you write barackobama there is little doubt about what you have in mind. But what about a less well known figure? If you write @TheNewDeal it will be clear that you are addressing a person whose user name is TheNewDeal -- who is a person who cannot stop pointing out inconsistencies such as "0 Bankers Were Arrested After Purposely Crashing Our Economy. Nearly 1,000 Have Been Arrested for Speaking Up About it." He or she aso uses FDR as the photo image.

People are reading and writing via Twitter. And they wanted a fast way to pass on what they particularly liked of what they were reading. So they invented the retweet. The form of the retweet is RT @username [original message]. A retweet is an attributed quotation. The twitter message above was a retweet. Its full form was

"caty_belle RT @TheNewDeal 0 Bankers Were Arrested After Purposely Crashing Our Economy. Nearly 1,000 Have Been Arrested for Speaking Up About it."

@caty_belle passed along a tweet she had read to her followers, and she attributed it to @TheNewDeal so her followers would know where it came from.

Finaly, url shorteners. If you want to include a url in a Twitter message you have a real problem with space. Urls have many characters. 140 characters is not much space. So shorteners were invented. You give the original url to the firm doing the shortening and they return a short url that points to the same location as the original full url. Only very recently has Twitter started providing that service. This is important because people want to point to external sources. It is 'footnote' in 140 characters or less. At least for political use of Twitter the use of the url could be called the news move. (Boynton, 2011) The url plays three roles in the communication. First, it informs the reader that the external source is there. It recommends the external source positively or negatively. Finally, it serves as justification for my Twitter message. If you doubt me see x.

It is a short list. It is a list replete with possible communication combinations. First, is the public character of the communication and well developed procedures for following streams of messages of interest. The public domain has been opened up to, currently, 230 million messages a day. Mainstream media are now only one in the public domain. The potential for personal anonymity and public messages creates obvious possibilities that are not available in other structures of communication. Following creates a network relationship that does not exist in most other communication structures. When you add retweeting you have Tinker to Evers to Chance, as baseball fans used to say. Together the two produce very strong structural arrangements fostering networking. Urls, which needed to be shortened to be used, do three things in the communication.

There is much more constructed in these simple structural features than I can put in a concluding paragraph. I have written a large number of analyses, and they are all aimed at examining how the structure of Twitter communication plays itself out in politics. You can find the 'clickable' list at http://www.boyntons.us/website/new-media/new-media.html.

References:

Bennett, W. Lance and Alexandra Segerberg (2011)The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics, paper presented at 6th General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research.

Boynton, G. R. (2010) Audience: the reach of political messaging on Twitter, http://www.boyntons.us/website/new-media/analyses/audience-twitter/twitter-followers.html

Boynton, G. R. (2011) #AttackWatch -- There is no monopoly control when it comes to hashtags, http://www.boyntons.us/website/new-media/analyses/attackwatch/attackwatch01.html

Boynton, G. R. (2011) The 'News Move' in Twitter Messaging http://www.boyntons.us/website/new-media/analyses/news-move/news-move.html

Dugan, Lauren (9/9/2011) 230 Million Tweets Per Day, 50 Million Daily Users And Other Twitter Stats http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/230-million-tweets-per-day-50-million-daily-users-and-other-twitter-stats_b13518

Evans, Jon (10/102011) For Those Who Don't Want to Believe, TechChrunch, http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/01/for-those-who-dont-want-to-believe/

twitaholic at http://twitaholic.com/