Since the emergence of microblogging platform Twitter in 2006, Twitter’s users have been drastically increasing (Arceneaux and Weiss 1264). As of February 2012, there are 500 million registered accounts, 100 million of which are active (“Twitter to Surpass 500 Million”). Twitter users post “tweets” on their account, which are publicly accessible (unless the user chooses to private it) and each of these “tweets” has a 140-character limit. The term microblogging refers to the collection of tweets on one’s Twitter page, which is essentially a “microblog”, a web “log” that is made up of short messages. The Twitter community relies on the interaction of its users. The most important one is that a user is able to subscribe to (known as “follow”) another user; so other people’s “tweets” would show up on their Twitter feed (the “timeline”) (Murphy 781). Twitter users can communicate with each other with the symbol @ followed by another user’s username. In addition, a tweet can be part of a broader discussion through the use of “hashtag” in which the symbol # is used with a keyword to indicate the topic of a tweet (Zappavigna 791).
Twitter exploded because of its ability to immediately spread news around the world through the Internet and it provides an outlet for “citizen journalism” where average citizens can publish stories happening instantaneously from wherever they are as long as they have a cell phone or Internet connection (Murphy 782). As a social media platform, Twitter has played a huge role in many socio-political events in the last few years. For example, the Arab Spring movement in late 2010 to early 2011 would not have been possible without Twitter (Howard and Hussain 35), or more recently, Invisible Children’s Kony2012 video went viral on various social networks, it has successfully grabbed the attention of millions of people and informed them about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s Lord Resistance Army (York, “Invisible Children”). Hence, the popularity of Twitter shows that there is an evident change in what people read and how they receive their information in comparison with the traditional reading society.
Interestingly, the subscription practice found in the 18th century is somewhat similar with the Twitter’s practice of following others’ tweets. Publishing by subscription in the 18th century was thought to have a democratizing effect on the book trade and encouraged entrepreneurship (Reid 7). Similar to a subscription list, readers have the decision to choose what they read, Twitter users have the freedom to follow whoever they want to and hence read what those people tweet about. Moreover, Twitter has gradually replaced the traditional forms of reading communities such as book clubs. During the 18th century, people gathered and formed book clubs where they discussed books, socialize and organized a circulating library (Sedo 3). Nowadays, not only do people read tweets (in addition to many other things they read), but can also discover new books through the Internet. For example, a tweet about a book can easily affect a reader’s decision on the book (Hoffert 22).
Traditionally, the fundamental reading material are books, but Twitter is able to draw a huge readership with merely 140-characters in each tweet. Authors used to write books but now everybody can be an author and write tweets, self-publishing on a microblog. Moreover, recent global events have proved that Twitter’s widespread impact cannot be ignored. The human society has been able to preserve information through libraries because information was stored in books. Yet, the new technology that are not constrained by the physicality of books need to find somewhere else to live on. Therefore, as the medium of information transmission changes, it is important for traditional archival techniques to adapt in order to accommodate the new medium. In 2010, the United States Library Congress acquired Twitter’s archive of public tweets, an attempt to protect the history of a new literary society for the future (Hesse A01). There are many difficulties to overcome in the creation of the ideal digital archive like finding the medium for permanent storage (Doueihi 121). Additionally, modern information retrieval (IR) practices need to solve problems like “entity search, sentimental analysis and modelling abstractions such as authority and quality” (Efron 996).
Works Cited
Arceneaux, Noah, and Amy Schmitz Weiss. “Seems Stupid Until You Try it: Press Coverage of Twitter, 2006-9.” New Media & Society 12.8 (2010): 1262-79. Print.
Doueihi, Milad. Digital Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.
Efron, Miles. “Information Search and Retrieval in Microblogs.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62.6 (2011): 996-1008. Print.
Hesse, Monica. “Your Dullest Details, Now Part of History; Twitter Archive Could Redefine Future Annals.” The Washington Post 6 May 2010, sec. A: A01. Web. 28 Jan. 2012.
Hoffert, Barbara. “Every Reader a Reviewer.” Library Journal 135.14 (2010): 22,n/a. Print.
Howard, Philip N. and Muzammil M. Hussain. “The Role of Digital Media.” Journal of Democracy 22.3 (2011): 35-48. Project MUSE. Web. 4 Mar. 2012. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Murthy, Dhiraj. “Twitter: Microphone for the Masses?” Media, Culture & Society 33.5 (2011): 779-89. Print.
Reid, Hugh. The Nature and Uses of Eighteenth-Century Book Subscription List. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2010. Print.
Sedo, DeNel Rehberg, ed. Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
“Twitter to Surpass 500 Million Registered Users Later Today.” Asian News International. 23 Feb. 2012. Web. 5 Mar. 2012.
York, Geoffrey. “Invisible Children’s Kory Campaign Goes Viral Just as Lord Resistance Army Is Dying.” The Globe and Mail. 9 Mar. 2012. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/invisible-childrens-kony-campaign-goes-viral-just-as-lords-resistance-army-is-dying/article2363751/>.
Zappavigna, Michele. “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter.” New Media & Society 13.5 (2011): 788-806. Print.