I’m delighted to share the news that my next book is now in production with NYU Press. Co-authored with Nancy Baym, it has been in the works for a while and it is a real labor of love. We can’t wait to see it out in the world!

Here is the draft blurb we have supplied to the press:

Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech. 

A new approach to understanding how we’ve ended up here is urgently needed. This short, lively book outlines and models the platform biography – a new, streamlined approach to understanding how social media platforms have changed over time. Through the intriguing, fast-moving story of Twitter, it illuminates the multiple forces, including business strategies, technological decisions, and user cultures, that come together to shape what Twitter has become, and helps us identify the turning points where things could have turned out differently. 

The book is organized around the stories of Twitter’s key features: the @, the hashtag, and the retweet. These features appear as living characters in Twitter’s story – full of inner conflicts related to Twitter’s identity crisis as it veered between being a platform for intimate sociability and being a platform for publicity and debate. 

In telling these often surprising, sometimes humorous stories, Burgess and Baym draw on extensive research, including oral history interviews with long-time users, and a range of archival sources. Through this approach, the book builds a rich narrative of how Twitter has evolved – from its origins as a personal messaging service, to its transformation into a global public communication platform, and onward to uncertain and competing futures. 

Written in an engaging and accessible style but based on robust original research, the book appeals to media industry insiders, journalists and general readers with an interest in the impact of social media on society. It will be essential reading for digital media, communication and internet studies scholars, as well as providing useful guidance to undergraduate, postgraduate and graduate research students in media, communication and information studies.