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The Culture of Connectivity - Jose Van Dijck - Chapter 4




Chapter 5 focuses on Twitter.

Originally the creators of Twitter were striving to create a utility. A piece of information infrastructure that was an everyday and unnoticeable part of our lives, like electricity or phones. Van Dijck says that this created a paradox in that is "presumes Twitter to be a neutral platform upon which users freely interact, much like the Web itself...indifferent to the contents they exchange" but that "the streams of data are engineered to promote certain uses and users over time" (p.69). Van Dijck says this paradox of "enabling connectedness while engineering connectivity" and "propagating neutrality while securing profitability" show up in every aspect of the platform. This is kind of a trend in all social media platforms as the start out about the user, but need to pay the bills...

The Twitter platform has has some pivotal contributions to the culture of connectivity (culture influence tech while tech influences culture). These contributions are of course the tweet, following, hashtags, and the trending topic. Twitter has pretty much become synonymous with micro-blogging and the fact that tweeting is a verb that people understand, much like the term googling, shows just how embedded Twitter has become. 

Van Dijck points out that where Facebook wanted to create tight communities and networks, Twitter never focused on that. Users tend to understand that the use of Twitter is not about privacy, but about (self) promotion and interacting with the bigger world as an "echo chamber of serendipitous chatter, a town hall of public dialogue, and an amplifier of suppressed voices" (p. 86). 

Van Dijck argues that Twitter's biggest asset is that they are able to generate massive amounts of data and that its use comes in the form of predictive and real-time analytics. Trend, mood, sentiment, and opinion mining are all forms of analytics that can work from this platform in many different fields usually economic or political, but there is possibility for others!  

Twitter has become the platform that I am most interested in for this reason (ironically it is one of my least used personally) and as I posted in my other post I will be looking into the possibility of analytics that might be helpful in the area of education policy.


Comments

  1. Jodie DoodleJune 22, 2020 at 12:25 AM

    I have enjoyed your Chapter reviews of the book. I had never used Twitter before this course, but I am going to keep it active after the course. I find a lot of interesting articles and useful resources on there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stephen BunnJune 25, 2020 at 7:35 AM

      Hi Jodie,

      Thanks for following! Sometimes I find Twitter a little overwhelming if I try to follow it all day, but I do think there is a lot of use and I find the platform itself very interesting. So far this has been my favorite chapter to learn about and I got some great research ideas form it.

      Delete

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