1,721,067 research outputs found
The politics of twitter data
No full textOur paper approaches Twitter through the lens of “platform politics” (Gillespie, 2010), focusing in particular on controversies around user data access, ownership, and control. We characterise different actors in the Twitter data ecosystem: private and institutional end users of Twitter, commercial data resellers such as Gnip and DataSift, data scientists, and finally Twitter, Inc. itself; and describe their conflicting interests. We furthermore study Twitter’s Terms of Service and application programming interface (API) as material instantiations of regulatory instruments used by the platform provider and argue for a more promotion of data rights and literacy to strengthen the position of end users. 
Epilogue : Why Study Twitter?
No full textEach of the thirty-one contributions in this volume implicitly spells out its own answer to this question. Surprisingly perhaps even for such a highly interdisciplinary volume as this one, these answers vary considerably in their approaches, their objectives, and their underlying assumptions about the object of study. This diversity of scholarly perspectives on Twitter, barely half a decade since it first emerged as a popular platform, highlights its versatility. Beginning as a side project to a now-forgotten podcasting platform, rising to popularity as a social network service focussed around mundane communication and therefore widely lambasted as a cesspool of vanity and triviality by incredulous journalists (including technology journalists), it was later embraced by those same journalists, governments, and businesses as a crucial source of real-time information on everything from natural disasters to celebrity gossip, and from debates over sexual violence to Vatican politics
The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation
Full text link1 online resource (139 p.) : col. ill., col. charts.Libro ElectrónicoLa tecnología digital está impactando cada vez más en la manera de mantenerse informado, cómo nos comunicamos profesional y privadamente, y cómo iniciar y mantener relaciones con los demás. La función y el significado de nuevas formas de comunicación mediada por ordenador (CMC) debe ser negociada con las comunidades, instituciones y particulares. Estas son salas de chat y entornos virtuales adecuados para la comunicación empresarial. El correo electrónico es cada vez más un canal para la comunicación relacionada con el trabajo, formal y por lo tanto “para las personas mayores”, ya que los usuarios de internet especialmente los jóvenes acuden a sitios de redes sociales (SNS) Cornelio Puschmann examina las propiedades lingüísticas y retóricas del blog, otro género relativamente joven de la CMC, para determinar su función en la vida privada y profesional de comunicación. Analiza la función de los blogs sobre los autores y lectores, y se argumenta que los blogs corporativos, que, al igual que los blogs particulares, tienen una gran diversidad en cuanto a su forma, función y público objetivo, esencialmente imitan características clave de los blogs privados, todas las cualidades esenciales para las empresas que desee ejercer una impresión positiva en sus miembros y clientes. (Tomado de http://www.universoabierto.com/8095/el-blog-corporativo-como-un-genero-emergente-de-la-comunicacion/)Digital technology is increasingly impacting how we keep informed, how we communicate professionally and privately, and how we initiate and maintain relationships with others. The function and meaning of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not always clear to users on the onset and must be negotiated by communities, institutions and individuals alike. Are chatrooms and virtual environments suitable for business communication? Is email increasingly a channel for work-related, formal communication and thus "for old people", as especially young Internet users flock to Social Networking Sites (SNSs)? Cornelius Puschmann examines the linguistic and rhetorical properties of the weblog, another relatively young genre of CMC, to determine its function in private and professional (business) communication. He approaches the question of what functions blogs realize for authors and readers and argues that corporate blogs, which, like blogs by private individuals, are a highly diverse in terms of their form, function and intended audience, essentially mimic key characteristics of private blogs in order to appear open, non-persuasive and personal, all essential qualities for companies that wish to make a positive impression on their constituentsContents
1 Introduction 11
1.1 \Wait, what's a corporate blog?" 11
1.2 Issues of definition 12
1.3 Methods, data and approach 15
1.4 Preliminary theoretical considerations . 17
1.5 Aims and scope 20
1.6 Structure of this thesis 21
2 Formal, technical and pragmatic aspects of blogging 23
2.1 Proposing a hierarchy of community, purpose and text 23
2.2 A classification of blogs following Herring . 25
2.2.1 Medium factors 26
M1: Synchronicity 27
M2: Message transmission 29
M3: Persistence of transcript 29
M4: Size of message buffer . 29
M5: Channels of communication 30
M6: Anonymous messaging . 30
M7: Private messaging 31
M8: Filtering . 31
M9: Quoting . 31
M10: Message format 32
2.2.2 Situation factors . 33
S1: Participation structure . 35
S2: Participant characteristics . 36
S3: Purpose 37
S4: Topic or theme 37
S5: Tone . 38
S6: Activity 39
2.3 Users and uses of private blogs . 40
2.3.1 Update others on activities and whereabouts . 44
2.3.2 Express opinions and in
uence others . 47
2.3.3 Seek others' opinion and feedback . 48
2.3.4 Thinking by writing . 49
2.3.5 Release emotional tension 50
2.4 Blogs and the organization of time . 51
2.5 The blog as a virtual discourse situation 53
2.6 Canonical software features of blog publishing tools 546 Contents
2.7 Chronology in data and discourse 56
2.8 Blog macrostructure . 58
2.9 Blog microstructure . 60
2.10 Self-directed discourse and the deictic center 62
2.11 Audience design . 65
2.12 Audience scope 67
2.13 Ego blogging . 69
2.14 Topic blogging 69
2.15 Differences in function and intended audience . 72
2.16 Audience mismatch 74
2.17 Conversational maxims, relevance and politeness in blogs 74
3 The corporate blog as an emerging genre 79
3.1 Aspects of organizational communication . 79
3.2 Issues of corporate communications on the Internet 80
3.3 Origins of corporate blogging 82
3.4 Perceived advantages of corporate blogging 88
3.5 A typology of corporate blog subgenres 92
3.5.1 Product blogs . 93
3.5.2 Image blogs 97
3.5.3 Executive blogs 99
3.5.4 Employee blogs / blog hubs . 99
3.6 A comparison of private and corporate blogs 100
3.7 Pragmatic aspects of corporate blogs 106
3.8 Flogging 108
3.9 Linguistic aspects of corporate blogs 109
4 Corporate blogging case studies 115
4.1 One Louder (Microsoft) . 115
4.2 Jonathan's Blog (Sun Microsystems) 117
5 Discussion 123
A CBC/Corporati corpus statistics 12
Twitter and society : an introduction
No full textSince its launch in 2006, Twitter has turned from a niche service to a mass phenomenon. By the beginning of 2013, the platform claims to have more than 200 million active users, who “post over 400 million tweets per day” (Twitter, 2013). Its success is spreading globally; Twitter is now available in 33 different languages, and has significantly increased its support for languages that use non-Latin character sets. While Twitter, Inc. has occasionally changed the appearance of the service and added new features—often in reaction to users’ developing their own conventions, such as adding ‘#’ in front of important keywords to tag them—the basic idea behind the service has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. This leads to the formation of complex follower networks with unidirectional as well as bidirectional connections between individuals, but also between media outlets, NGOs, and other organisations. While originally ‘microblogs’ were perceived as a new genre of online communication, of which Twitter was just one exemplar, the platform has become synonymous with microblogging in most countries. A notable exception is Sina Weibo, popular in China where Twitter is not available. Other similar platforms have been shut down (e.g., Jaiku), or are being used in slightly different ways (e.g., Tumblr), thus making Twitter a unique service within the social media landscape
Metaphors of big data
No full textMetaphors are a common instrument of human cognition, activated when seeking to make sense of novel and abstract phenomena. In this article we assess some of the values and assumptions encoded in the framing of the term big data, drawing on the framework of conceptual metaphor. We first discuss the terms data and big data and the meanings historically attached to them by different usage communities and then proceed with a discourse analysis of Internet news items about big data. We conclude by characterizing two recurrent framings of the concept: as a natural force to be controlled and as a resource to be consumed
Metrics for Understanding Communication on Twitter
No full textAs the systematic investigation of Twitter as a communications platform continues, the question of developing reliable comparative metrics for the evaluation of public, communicative phenomena on Twitter becomes paramount. What is necessary here is the establishment of an accepted standard for the quantitative description of user activities on Twitter. This needs to be flexible enough in order to be applied to a wide range of communicative situations, such as the evaluation of individual users’ and groups of users’ Twitter communication strategies, the examination of communicative patterns within hashtags and other identifiable ad hoc publics on Twitter (Bruns & Burgess, 2011), and even the analysis of very large datasets of everyday interactions on the platform. By providing a framework for quantitative analysis on Twitter communication, researchers in different areas (e.g., communication studies, sociology, information systems) are enabled to adapt methodological approaches and to conduct analyses on their own. Besides general findings about communication structure on Twitter, large amounts of data might be used to better understand issues or events retrospectively, detect issues or events in an early stage, or even to predict certain real-world developments (e.g., election results; cf. Tumasjan, Sprenger, Sandner, & Welpe, 2010, for an early attempt to do so)
Structural layers of communication on Twitter
No full textTwitter is used for a range of communicative purposes. These extend from personal tweets that address what used to be Twitter’s default question, “What’s happening?”, through one-on-one @reply conversations between close friends and attempts at getting the attention of celebrities and other public actors, to discussions in communities built around specific issues—and back again to broadcast-style statements from well-known individuals and brands to their potentially very large retinue of followers
- …
