Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community

Abstract

The notion of “community” has often been caught between concrete social relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the Internet has refocused our attention on this ongoing tension. The Internet has enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook, to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.

Knock, Knock. Who's There? The Imagined Audience

“…He concluded, ''solitary faces occur for the same reasons as public ones, if only because when we are alone we create social interactions in our imaginations'' (p. 238). In Imagined Communities, Anderson (2006) also highlights the role and importance of our imagination arguing that because it is nearly impossible to determine all of a nation's members, it is the imagination of its existence that is important-an argument that has been extended to the media realm (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998), as well as the social media platform Twitter (Gruzd, Wellman, & Takhteyev, 2011).…”

“…The self-report technique may also prove problematic if the imagined audience has the ability to fluctuate between when the content was posted and how one might interpret his or her imagined audience during reflection. Relatedly, since most research now explores the imagined audience at one point in time and on one type of platform or service (Brake, 2012;Gruzd et al, 2011;Marwick & boyd, 2010;Stern, 2008), future work should assess the construct across multiple services and platforms to see how envisioning audiences may alter between different environments and individuals.…”

Twitter as Popular Journalistic Platform – Similarities and Differences Between Jutarnji List and Večernji List

“…Twitter is specific for its asymmetry in followers because users can follow whoever they want but it does not mean that same users will follow them back (Gruzd, Wellman, Takhteyev, 2011, p. 1296. Twitter is also known for emphasizing key terms used in a tweet via hashtags that enable users to collect similar tweets and their subjects according to the frequency of use and relevance.…”

“…Hashtags also give users the possibility of public debate especially when it comes to current and striking events (Highfield, Lind, 2012, p. 24). Although Twitter is known as a social network or social media, by definition it is also a microblogging service, mainly because of the tweets -messages limited to 140 characters (Gruzd, Wellman, Takhteyev, 2011, p. 1296.…”

Structuring an Action Net of Public Library Membership

“…Although Putnam (2000) suggests that the historical decline in community-based voluntary membership associated with leisure activities such as "bowling alone" reflects the shift to participation through online communities and networks, others note that online communities are constituted in many different ways, both "real and 'imagined'" (Gruzd, Wellman, andTakhteyev 2011, 1313).…”