{"id":5155,"date":"2013-06-18T14:38:36","date_gmt":"2013-06-18T04:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=5155"},"modified":"2022-05-02T00:33:14","modified_gmt":"2022-05-01T14:33:14","slug":"confessions-of-twitter-sceptic-sallyymelbourne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/confessions-of-twitter-sceptic-sallyymelbourne\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of Twitter sceptic @SallyYmelbourne"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

The Twitter<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

By Sally Young<\/a><\/p>\n

I signed up to Twitter last year but, in the field describing myself, typed in \u2018Twitter sceptic\u2019. I signed up for a specific reason: I wanted to do a class experiment where my politics students could tweet me questions during a lecture I was giving on politics and new media. The idea was that I could answer the questions or engage in a conversation as I went along.<\/p>\n

Nice idea but the experiment didn\u2019t go well! After I put the Twitter feed of our class hashtag up on the big screen behind me during my lecture, up came the \u2018flames\u2019 and off-topic posings (sample: \u2018Julia Gillard: whatabitch\u2019; \u2018\u2026 After Exams Party anyone?\u2019).<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m willing to admit that bad first impressions may have coloured my opinions somewhat!<\/p>\n

And, while we\u2019re on confessions, I\u2019m also happy to acknowledge that I am a pretty inept user of the medium. I find Twitter difficult to navigate and even to understand. Confusingly, Twitter is both a form of personal communication between individuals and a broadcasting medium at the same time (which helps explain why people get themselves into trouble on Twitter because they say something silly when they\u2019re pulled along by its faux-intimacy).<\/p>\n

To the novice tweeter, it also seems much like any other large social gathering or schoolyard \u2013 a mix of friendship, support, useful information and interesting views, punctuated by inane comments, crass self-promotion and the odd spot of bullying.<\/p>\n

My attitude to Twitter also undoubtedly reflects my personality. I am not social in the way social media defines \u2018social\u2019. I feel no need or desire to frequently tweet my thoughts and experiences. So anyone who follows me on Twitter will be met with infrequent postings of not much.<\/p>\n

But now that I\u2019ve confessed my own experiences and shortcomings, I can get to the bigger problems with Twitter and those problems are less about the medium itself than about the huge hype surrounding it – the big claims and even bigger expectations about Twitter.<\/p>\n

The hype stems from around 2009-2010 when many journalists discovered Twitter and began heavily promoting it in news stories. This was especially the case for print journalists who gravitated towards Twitter because it is a medium that \u2018restored the centrality of the written word\u2019 and allowed them to compete in the breaking news arena with 24-hour TV news. As \u2018wordsmiths\u2019, they have \u2018a comparative advantage in making the best use out of Twitter\u2019 for breaking news and promoting stories (Ahmad 2010).<\/p>\n

But the hype about Twitter was so over-the-top that a study of the Guardian<\/i> newspaper found its \u2018remarkably flattering discourse\u2019 about Twitter hovered \u2018uncomfortably close to the border between journalism and advertising\u2019 (Ahmad 2010). Journalists were promoting Twitter in such a celebratory and uncritical way that Ali Nobil Ahmad concluded that the question \u2018is Twitter a useful tool for journalists?\u2019 should be flipped so that we instead ask \u2018has journalism become a useful \u201ctool\u201d for Twitter\u2019?<\/p>\n

One of the ways information capitalism has prospered in the new media era is by the remarkable success of corporate social networking sites to recruit labour to provide content for them \u2013 including YouTube, FaceBook and Flickr. Users put a good deal of labour, creativity and maintenance into these sites while the companies behind them profit from the unpaid labour of their content-makers.<\/p>\n

The interesting economic story about Twitter is that, in media tech company terms, it has been a financial failure in terms of capitalising on its massive user base. But in 2012, it began a determined push to change that by focusing on advertising. And Twitter now charges companies up to $120,000 for Promoted Tweets or $200,000 a day to buy a Promoted Trend. It\u2019s been reported that Twitter expects to reach $540 million in ad sales in 2014 capitalising on its massive asset base of over US$220 million.<\/p>\n

This relationship between users, content, free (but corporate) technology and the future of journalism interests me but so does the biggest fallacy about Twitter. The same fallacy was made about chatrooms, then blogs, then FaceBook – that Twitter has revolutionalised political participation.<\/p>\n

Again, it\u2019s the hype that has been the problem. Not a lot of academic research has yet been done on Twitter, but what has been done suggests that Twitter, like the internet in general, has largely been normalised into the traditional political and journalistic worlds with existing problems and inequities continued online.<\/p>\n

Some of the conclusions of several different studies are:<\/p>\n