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New book: Twitter – A Biography
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…
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Twitter’s Changing Device Ecology
I wanted to briefly pick up on Tama Leaver’s comments on Tim Highfield’s excellent bit of speculative forensics* on Twitter’s hashflags — namely that the the use of these hashtag emoji for major events might have the side effect of further degrading the experience of using alternative clients like Tweetdeck. Just for fun**, for a while now I…
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Twitter (probably) isn’t dying, but is it becoming less sociable?
[cross-posted at Medium] Twitter’s demise has been announced so many times over its lifetime that it’s hard to keep track of all the premature eulogies (and this one from a year ago is actually pretty insightful), but there seems to be a new intensity in the circulation of decline narratives at the moment. A couple…
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#creativecitizens keynote: slides and speaking notes
I’ve had a wonderful time in an unseasonably sunny London this week, which has included a keynote presentation at the Creative Citizens conference at the Royal College of Art. As promised, below are the slides and speaker notes from my presentation, which covers the relationship between everyday creativity, citizenship, and digital media platforms over the…
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#asmc14 paper: Hashtag as hybrid forum: the case of #agchatoz
I’m posting this from the University of Amsterdam, where we are now well into the final day of a fantastic three-day conference called Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space. We have quite a gang of participants here from the QUT Social Media Research Group, and we’ll collect all our papers up and post…
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Twitter set to release all tweets to scientists? Not exactly.
This Scientific American article with the headline Twitter to Release All Tweets to Scientists has been circulating around our favourite microblogging platform recently, creating a mixture of “could it be true?”-style excitement and alarm. The article picks up on a discussion of the ethics of using ‘big data’ from Twitter for research prompted by this…
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My whereabouts, some recent media coverage
I’m writing this from Cambridge (MA, USA; not UK), where I’m a few days into my stint as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. I’m thrilled to be able to spend some quality time with the Social Media group here, including long-time colleagues like Kate Crawford (who has worked with us on our…
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a (very) short history of social media taglines
Lawson Fletcher has written a very insightful post about a funny little Twitter exchange I had with various people last night, prompted by some observations I made about the way social media taglines have changed over the past 5 years or so. Go over there to see how it all started. While it was mostly…
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Obligatory Google Buzz post
Cross-posted to the Air-l list. In a discussion about Google Buzz, surveillance and privacy, Christian Fuchs said: Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: “Ifyou have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnot be doing it in the first place”, which points towards a lack ofunderstanding of the online…