1. 1
TWITTERSPHERE #ausvotes
AUGUST 2012
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2. WHAT IS TWITTER? 2
• Twitter is a microblogging technology
• Handle: is your Twittername beginning with the @symbol
• Tweets: are statements of 140 characters shared in the Twittersphere
• Followers: are people on Twitter who subscribe to receive your tweets
• Following: are the people whose tweets you have subscribed to receive on
your feed
• Hashtags (#): are a key word added to a tweet which allows a community to
form around a topic for information and discussion
• Retweet is one of your tweets that a follower has forwarded to their followers
• @replies: are direct responses to your tweet, using your handle like an
address
• Direct Messages: are hidden emails you can send to your followers
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3. 3
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4. 4
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5. WHO IS USING IT – THE TWITTERATI? 5
• Celebrities
• Public personalities such as politicians, activists, journalists, academics, public
intellectuals
• Citizens
• Businesses, NGO’s and organisations (Amnesty etc)
• Joke/amusing (Kim Kierkegaardashian – Kierkergaard mashed with KK)
• Spam/adult
• Twitter can adapt to different needs for different personalities
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6. 6
THE SIX ELEMENTS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOUR THAT DRVE SOCIAL MEDIA
(http://www.businessesgrow.com/2012/02/21/the-six-elements-of-human-behavior-that-
drive-social-media/)
• Altruism
• Hedonism
• Homophily
• Memetics
• Narcissism
• Tribalism
• Can we think of any more? FOMO, Crowdpleasing/approval
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7. TRENDING 7
• Twitter monitors the use of hashtags and if they become popular enough, they
become a ‘trend’
• Twitter lists topics that are trending on the left of the screen
• Users can click on a trend and see the conversation that is taking place around
it
• Users can use trends to find like-minded users to follow
TRENDS
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8. ALGORITHMS, SPAMBOTS AND KLOUT 8
• Trends and suggested followees are determined by algorithms
• If a hashtag is mentioned by enough people to become popular, it is ‘trending’
• Trending is personalised according to your interests. This
was changed to make trending more relevant due to
excessive Bieber
• Why do random people follow me on Twitter?
• Visit:
https://twitter.com/Horse_ebooks
• Klout 3rd party app: ‘social influence score’ (uses other platforms too)
• Problem with Twitter: ‘too much noise’. Users have followed so many
accounts that they can no longer understand their own feeds
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9. HEY ‘TRENDING’ SOUNDS A BIT LIKE MARKETING - 9
#ausvotes AND TWITTER AS A SOCIAL RESEARCH TOOL
• Visit: Twitter followers for sale on ebay
http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p3984.m570.l1313&
_nkw=twitter+followers&_sacat=See-All-Categories
• Can they be used effectively?
• #ausvotes hashtag is the community for Australian political discussion.
• Visit: #ausvotes
https://twitter.com/#!/search/?q=%23ausvotes&src=hash
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10. BRUNS’ #ausvotes DATASET 10
• Article is example of gleaning information from a dataset
• Apps for gleaning data from Twitter include Twapperkeeper, Gawk and
Wordstat
• Fields analysed in the 2010 #ausvotes dataset were mentions, retweets,
@replies and connectivity
• Problems with the dataset: inability to capture follow-on discussion and
retweet fakery.
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11. BRUNS’ #ausvotes STATS 11
• #ausvotes tweets spike around big election events: election day, the debate,
some policy announcements
• An average of 22% of tweets contained URL’s
• 33% were retweets and 20% were @replies – ie. over 50% were responses
• Tweets around the big events were directed to the public discussion
• During breaking news such as a flood, @replying is less statistically prevalent
• Abbott is mentioned more than Gillard, Gillard had most traffic
• Twitter users particularly interested in NBN – stats reflect Twitter demographic
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12. OVERALL… 12
• Stats may be of interest to political pollsters though it seems Twitter discussion
is not driven by the direction of politicians
• #ausvotes was engaged with itself as a public
• Bruns concluded from the above information that #ausvotes was “subcultural
and fannish”, ie. subversive and parodic
• Users of #ausvotes are ‘hardcore’ or ‘diehard’. Also internet and Twitter users,
hashtag users.
• Formerly unconnected people meeting over hashtags? Possibly not, but at
least the group might encourage new voices
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13. LEADERS’ AND JOURNALISTS’ DATA 13
• The two nodes in the network which received the most amount of traffic
(replies and retweets) were Latika Bourke and Annabel Crabb
• These two journalists had the highest betweenness centrality, which is a type
of data representation or data visualisation that is becoming very popular on
the web.
• Betweenness centrality is based on the frequency with which a node is the
shortest point between two nodes in a dataset
• In this case continued use of an ‘information conduit’ would indicate some
faith in it
• This kind of data visualisation is forming the heart of what they are calling data
journalism
• Watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaGqOPxHFkc&feature=related
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14. CONCLUSIONS 14
• The article displays the potential for Twitter for infometrics.
• More conclusions will be able to be reached as the data becomes older
• The main potential for Twitter is enabling non-geographic communities and
live news gathering which have discursive aspects rather than a top-down
generation
• A study from a German election concluded that statistical dominance of
mentions of a leaders name was enough to predict outcome – not so in this
case
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15. QUESTIONS AND THOUGHTS 15
• Do the statistics and infographics tell us much about people in general, people
who use Twitter, or not much about people at all?
• What does the fuss around ‘trending’ really mean? Is popularity necessarily
admirable or desirable? What does it obscure?
• Is the organisation of progressive movements the real indicator of Twitter’s
democratic potential, or is the information it generates just more ‘tyranny of
the majority’?
• Need to consider infometrics in terms of epistemology – stay alert
• Discussion question: remember the 6 reasons for using social media I showed
before in relation to data journalism. What do you think we need to keep in
mind about the relationship between complex motivations and data?
THANK YOU
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