A few days ago, I tweeted* a complaint to a public transport operator in frustration at how few people were wearing masks on their services and the seeming lack of enforcement by the operators. I was visiting my parents, who’ve been shielding since March and I was growing increasingly concerned that I was exposing them […]
There’s a simple question at the end of Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System which rewards serious thought. From pg 288: Today, we might ask whether the average citizen interested in influencing politics but without ambitions for high political office should join a political organization or create a Twitter account and start interacting with others […]
It’s going to be a while before I feel capable of writing something about this disaster of an election but I’m saving this thread by Guardian media editor Jim Waterson to come back to because it raises an extremely interesting point: to what extent can what many perceived as intentional bias on the part of […]
From Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine loc 1148: The vacancies of attention that we must fill appear during public transport journeys, on lunch and toilet breaks, during impasses in dinner conversation, or in those frequent interludes in working life where there is nothing to do but the employee is obliged to look busy. If we […]
From Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine loc 1467: A feed filled with topless mirror shots, gym photos, new hair, and so on, might be seen as a peculiar form of idolatry. But it is less a tribute to the user than to the power that the machine has over the user. A power which, without […]
My notes on Rainford, J. (2016). Becoming a doctoral researcher in a digital world: Reflections on the role of Twitter for reflexivity and the internal conversation. E-Learning and Digital Media, 13(1-2), 99-105 In this paper Jon Rainford brings together two of my favourite things, the internal conversation and Twitter. He uses the framework of the […]
What does it mean to take Twitter seriously as a form of intellectual production? This is the question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the last few weeks, as I start what I hope will be an extensive break from a platform I’ve been using daily for years. My immediate motivation for this is […]
My notes on Boath, E., Vigurs, K., & Frangos, J. (2018). Twittering Away-Is twitter an appropriate adjunctive tool to enhance learning and engagement in Higher Education?. Innovative Practice in Higher Education, 3(2). Twitter has often be framed as a potential tool for teaching and learning. It can be used for virtual peer support groups, developing […]
My notes on What image types do universities post online? Twitter has become a mainstream activity for universities in the UK and the US, with most institutions now having a presence. The platform has taken an image based turn over the last few years, since native photo sharing was introduced in 2011 and Twitpic et […]
I’ve edited the final two paragraphs of this post for clarity because an awful lot of people read it and thought I was criticising quote tweeting rather than one particular use of it. Imagine you were sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend. You greeted each other warmly when they arrived, you ordered coffees […]
Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our new edited collection *Twitter: Global Perspectives, Uses and Criticisms* to be published by Nova Science (New York). We are interested in new research and perspectives on, as well as criticisms of *Twitter communication*. Topics being covered (though not limited to these) include: · […]
Until Tyler Shores demonstrated it earlier today, it had never occurred to me that the wonderful Wayback Machine could be used to view the history of your social media feeds:
Over the last five years, I’ve managed a vast assortment of institutional social media feeds. These have included academic departments, research projects, journals, research networks, academic blogs and event series. I’ve included a selection of Twitter accounts I’ve solely or jointly managed below and I’ll show some of these in the session I’m doing at […]
How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire output on the platform as […]
Foremost amongst the guidance offered about Twitter is the claim that it is fundamentally a conversational platform. One shouldn’t simply ‘broadcast’. It’s for discussion and engagement. There’s an element of truth in this but it’s one which can be lost through repetition, as the status of received wisdom stops us from thinking critically about why everyone agreed with […]
This excellent essay by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books raises an important issue about the forms of political mobilisation facilitated by social media: Trump has called himself the Hemingway of the 140 characters. He has ‘the best words’. He loves Twitter, he says, because it’s like having one’s own newspaper, but without […]
This is apparently growing rapidly: why pay staff to do this when you can get desperate graduates to do it for free? Want to jump start a social media marketing campaign for your business but don’t have the time or social media savvy in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs or similar sites? Try this twist on […]
There’s a lovely reflection in Les Back’s Academic Diary, released soon by Goldsmiths Press, concerning the role of Twitter in academic life. He suggests that Twitter sometimes facilitates our “inhabiting the attentiveness of another writer” by providing “signposts pointing to things going on in the world: a great article, an important book, a breaking story”. […]
In his fascinating book Spam: a Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton offers an example on pg 23-24 of how the early ARPANET was local in a way that is no longer the case. in September 1973, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock used his ARPANET connection in Los Angeles to get back the electric razor […]
In a number of books, Nikos Mouzelis offers a really important critique of the tendency to equate ‘micro’ with face-to-face and ‘macro’ with impersonal and international. He cites an international summit, Yalta if I remember correctly, as an example of a face-to-face encounter that is very much macro. I was thinking about this when reading […]
