What Happens to Tweets? Descriptions of Temporality in Twitter's Organizational Rhetoric

Proferes, Nicholas

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47313 Copy

Description

Title

What Happens to Tweets? Descriptions of Temporality in Twitter's Organizational Rhetoric

Author(s)

Proferes, Nicholas

Issue Date

2014-03-01

Keyword(s)

• Twitter
• Library of Congress
• organizational rhetoric
• content analysis
• temporality

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a content analysis of Twitter's organizational rhetoric. Focusing on the language generated by Twitter's founders in interviews and on the language that Twitter uses to describe its service on the Twitter.com website, this analysis establishes how these messages describe and depict the temporality of tweets and the Twitter platform. This study finds that nearly all of the organizational rhetoric sampled depicts a real-time nature of the medium while descriptions regarding what happens to tweets in the long-term are almost entirely absent. This finding is presented in juxtaposition with the Library of Congress's announcement of the acquisition of Twitter's full archive of tweets in 2010. Following this announcement, many Twitter users professed not realizing tweets were being saved. In light of the results of analysis of Twitter's organizational rhetoric and the Library of Congress comments, this paper discusses how Twitter's organizational rhetoric may provide users with an incomplete picture of the temporality of the service and of the long-term storage of tweets. This paper concludes by discussing the potential implications for users' abilities to self-direct and make informed choices about the use of the platform if this organizational rhetoric is taken uncritically.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2014 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

english

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/47313

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/14045

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 is held by the authors of individual items in the proceedings. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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