Tag: twitter

  • Looking back through your Twitter history

    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:      

  • The meaning of @realdonaldtrump

    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 […]

  • Why it’s fine to ‘broadcast’ on Twitter

    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 […]

  • Social media and populism 

    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 […]

  • The growth of the Twinterns

    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 […]

  • Using social media to ‘inhabit the attentiveness of another writer’

    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”. […]

  • is Twitter making the Internet local again?

    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 […]

  • digital micro-politics and digital macro-politics 

    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 […]

  • the coming copyright wars on twitter

    This is a very interesting trend, though one I suspect could lead in some unfortunate directions: Ever been the victim of plagiarism on Twitter—or, dare we say, the shameful purveyor of it? The social network seems to be putting an end to those pirated tweets by cracking down on users who steal jokes to inflate their […]

  • #TwitterGate: the ethics of live tweeting

    Some useful resources: A storify of the hashtag If you don’t have social media, you are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risks isolating other The Academic Twitterazzi An idea is a dangerous thing to quarantine Tweeting out loud: ethics, knowledge and social media in academe Some live tweeting policies and […]

  • How to live tweet effectively at academic conferences

    This useful post on the Pickle Jar blog offers some pointers about effective live tweeting. I agree it’s important to remember that most (?) people reading your live tweets won’t be in the room with you and thus will be confused by any features of the context you take for granted in your tweets. In […]

  • Stewart Lee on Twitter

    Thanks to Neil McGuire for including this in his workshop introduction yesterday. It’s excellent:

  • Using social media to improve the student experience: creating a departmental back channel for undergraduates

    A few years ago when I was running the Twitter feed for the Sociology department at Warwick, I noticed how readily first year undergraduates tweeted practical questions to the account during their first few weeks of the first term. Students tweeted questions intermittently throughout the year but it was particularly marked at the start of […]

  • Resonance and subjectivity on twitter

    In four years of using Twitter regularly, I’ve often found others tweeting things that resonate with me and vice versa. In fact one could plausibly suggest that these experiences play an important role in making continued use of the service appealing. What do I mean by ‘resonate’? I mean knowing where someone is coming from, understanding the […]

  • “I have no idea what to tweet about!”

    Are you a social researcher who feels this way? Here are some ideas which might help: Have you read any interesting papers recently? Link to them and briefly explain why you liked them. Are you going to any conferences soon? Tweet that you’re going and ask if anyone else is. Are there any new stories which connect to […]

  • How not to use twitter as an academic

    I usually tend towards the view that there’s no right or wrong way to use social media. These evaluations only make sense relative to some prior purpose and so I’m sceptical when blog posts pronounce on the right way to use Twitter or parallel claims with other platforms. However I realise there are a few things which I do see as intrinsically negative […]

  • Bourdieusian Hipsters Explain Foucauldian Memes

    After a couple of years using Buffer to maintain the @soc_imagination twitter feed and occasionally looking through the analytics, I’ve noticed lots of key words that inevitably lead to a click through rate far higher than usual: Consider this post a crude experiment to test whether what I’m coming to think is true actually is. There are […]

  • Help: different approaches to managing departmental twitter feeds

    I just discovered that the Psychology department at Salford University has an innovate approach to maintaining their department twitter feed. Each week a different person tweets from the department, encompassing all students and staff. This has left me interested in the different approaches that departments can take to managing their twitter feeds. These are the ones […]