Baby We Were Born to Tweet

It is interesting how Twitter can be used to create communities for people with shared interests such as fans. Before the advent of Twitter and other online communities, the author discusses how fanzines were used for fans to contribute and to become more involved as a fan. Now, Twitter allows for an easier way to promote fans to connect based on their shared interest.

Twitter can promote more intricate fan communities with the usage of thick tweets by being allowed to use the "@" sign to respond to the person they are a fan of and to reply to other fans as well. In addition, thick tweets can allows fans to integrate photos and other media which deepens the meaning of the tweets.

It is fascinating how Twitter can serve as a narrative for fans to unite and to have a place to continuously update to share their ideas and views. Also, Twitter showcases archived tweets on what fans have previously mentioned. This space formed on Twitter facilitates documentation for the particular fan community. Documentation of these fan communities provides insight into the behaviors and thoughts ranging from the individual fans to the overall specific fan community. Similarly, Twitter bestows other groups of people with shared beliefs, values, viewpoints, interests, etc. to assemble strong unified communities.

A few thoughts came to mind while reading this study, data set collection, and their respective methodologies. First, until today I had always assumed that Twitter had the Retweet, Hashtag, and Reply functions from the very moment that the social network was created. That may have been naive of me to believe, but in fairness it all happened before my time on social media had even begun. It was surprising to learn that each of these now Twitter-centric functions were created by users of Twitter and then later adopted by the network itself. On the part of Twitter as a company, that was good business in terms of its ability to stay relevant in a time when technology was constantly upgrading. 

Second, Willwolff’s choice to use grounded theory when constructing his analysis was a smart one in my opinion. It may very well be the only option when attempting to look at a specific subset of data such as this, but it is also incredibly logical. When it comes to constructing my own data set and findings, I’ll very likely use this method (unless otherwise instructed). 

Lastly, the website presents an argument regarding whether a set of tweets can be called a community, and I think that discussion is a rather striking one. I have always identified hashtags as “group-forming” by the simple function for which hashtags are used, but I had never thought about the more specific “community” aspect. I don’t think there is necessarily a black and white dividing line, but when it comes to naming a group’s collective tweets - a fandom, political party, a particular career, etc. - considering them as a type of community seems feasible. However, like I said, some hashtags (ex. general expressions, broad-themed hashtags, etc.) are not as easily described. In the case of the 2008 Presidential Election, I agree that the whole data set for the event’s general hashtag cannot be noted as a community. I’m sure people participating would also disagree with their being involved in a community where such polarized views would inherently coexist. Moving forward, I’ll be interested to see how many of our projects analyze “groups” of tweets as opposed to “communities” of tweets. 

I really enjoyed this article, specifically reading about the methodology used. I'm a sociology major and took SOCI251 (research methods) last semester. We learned about how with qualitative data analysis, you have to create your system for encoding and decide your unit of analysis and all of those things so it was really cool to see such a well explained example of that. I think that using a grounded approach really benefitted the researcher. It's hard when not much is known about something to go in with a theory and I think that this allowed him to remain more open-minded.

I really liked the categories that he sorted each tweet into. I was a fan of him explaining the history and meaning behind the words that he chose. I also really liked the graph that displayed the main traits as well as when (before/during/after) they were tweeted. I think that visualization is key in making the data comprehensive to an average person. I want to replicate that idea somehow in my project. 

This article was written in a very easy to read way with a pretty casual tone. I think that this was a good choice as the topic is fairly complex and could have been written in a much more complicated way. I also appreciated the examples used for each code.

I find it interesting that Wolff believes Twitter has become a sophisticated style of writing. Whenever I think about tweets the first thing that I think about is mindless arguments. Arguments that don’t acknowledge other sides and are poorly crafted. But Wolff looks at it from a completely different perspective. He says that crafting a tweet is a complex style of writing, specifically because there is a limit on the number of words a person it allowed to use. People have to figure a way around this limitation by creating new vocabularies that everyone can understand.

I also find it interesting to find out how the @ symbol gained its use. The symbol helped create a sense of community on the platform. The platform went from a person just posting tweets about their lives to actually communicating with people and having conversations. The hashtag was also soon implemented to help create that sense of community because people could use a tag and then be grouped up with other people that are talking about the same things.

Just like capecod, I’m interested in how Twitter has become a platform for different communities to come together. And just like reaway17 I had assumed the Retweet, Hashtag, and Replay functions had always been there, and learning that it had taken time to implement these things helps me understand the process of evolution of social media.

The evolution of Twitter over time is absolutely astonishing and intriguing. To see it now versus how it was before is something quite spectacular. Today, Twitter is used to do a plethora of things including having in-depth conversations with people around the world, but when Twitter was first created, that wasn't the case. Now, Twitter gives individuals -- such as Bruce Springsteen fans -- the ability to '@' other people and 'RT' (retweet) others as a more fluid way of communication. Using it now, it is hard for me to imagine the platform without the ability to retweet and respond to others. 

The author seeks to analyze the ways that fans communicate and react online in response to a particular Bruce Springsteen concert. It is interesting to hear about the way people (fans) tend to communicate and post on Twitter whether it be to describe their own experience or to talk to others and share experiences together. To read the results of this study and see how Twitter is utilized to unite others makes me think more objectively about how I use Twitter in a similar manner. A group of fans tweeting about a particular concert brings meaning to the concert. Fans seem to have the desire to create permanent recollections and writings that everyone can see and add to as part of the experience. 

Fan communities truly have a place to thrive on Twitter. The platform gives them the ability to interact in just about any way they want to and it is still evolving as time goes on. It will be interesting to see where Twitter goes from here and to see how fans assign meaning to different events. Twitter is a great platform for expression and freedom of speech, but it does create conflict quite often, so I want to see how Twitter evolves in the future to potentially promote more discussion and less argument. 

Upon reading the article, "Baby We Were Born to Tweet," there are a couple of things I found interesting. First, when Twitter was first released in 2006, it was created with the intent to update status report and personal thoughts. However, with time, Twitter became a place of public, microblogging, and a social network where individuals can post and interact with one another, informally. Another thing I would like to mention is the evolution of Twitter. When I first used the social media site, I originally thought that the function of Retweet, Hashtag, and Reply was functions that were already built into the website at first designed. However, it isn't. These functions were created and suggested by the users of Twitter, then later adopted, and became central parts of Twitter itself. Another thing is that due to the nature of Twitter, it has created communities for individuals with similar interest or ideas to come together and build upon one another. 

As someone who doesn't use Twitter, I only have for this class (& Engl 480), reading about how Twitter has changed throughout the years is rather fascinating. My knowledge of Twitter was very limited, so when I look at Twitter now it's hard for me to believe that it hasn't always functioned this way. In my mind, Twitter is a place that can be used politically, socially, and creatively. Politicians use Twitter to promote their political platforms, Doctors use twitter to push back against anti-vaxxers, fans use it to come together and express their deep love of something, and some people simply use it to share the random thoughts that float through their brains. Twitter has so many uses that it's hard to believe that it was simply created to share status updates. It's hard to imagine Twitter without the iconic retweet. 

This study focused on how Twitter could be used to bring people together and how fans used Twitter to create their own little communities. I enjoyed how the author went into detail about why he chose certain words. It helped show his thought process throughout this project. While using Twitter to build a community is a great thing, I am also interested in the ways that Twitter can be divisive. I'm sure that this is something that we will get into more when we start looking at the hashtags that we picked for the Twitter project. Twitter is a great way to quickly get your thoughts out to a wide audience, at the same time it also allows people to quickly retaliate with their own thoughts and opinions. 

I enjoyed this article, it was an informative look at the history of twitter. It was interesting to read the development of twitter when the internet was extremely young. I was really young when twitter first came out, and so hearing that it didn't always have things like hashtags or retweets was something I've never really thought about, since it's such a fundamental part of twitter today. I also think it's interesting to comment on the ability to start conversations on twitter, given the cultural impact that it has today. On top of that, fan groups being able to connect through hashtags is something that was potentially unintended, but still a vibrant part of the twitter community today. 

In the future, I'll be interested to see how twitter is historicized. If it is no longer in use, will twitter archives be used to research pop culture like we are doing in class? Will presidential tweets be studied like letters and documents are in history classes? 

Once again, I enjoyed the article. The way it was written made it easy to read, and its conversational tone was a lot better than the previous article. The person who wrote this article seemed genuinely interested in the culture of the internet and the communities which have sprouted because of the hashtags. In the future, I will likely analyze and sort my tweets in a similar way to the author. It made our project seem feasible and understandable. 

The conversational nature of Twitter and the sorting or emphatic uses of hashtags are what the previous article was missing. The movement away from "shallow" tweets was actually faster than this author suggested - Twitter began to lend itself to debate very early. It's also fun to read this in light of the recent conversations on extreme toxicity on the platform. The latest citation I see is 2013, so I'd date this circa 2014 or 2015, about two years before discourse over the corrosive conversations on Twitter came to the forefront. I wonder how the author would slot his analysis into that? 

As a person who created my Twitter for the sole purpose of communicating on a platform with other fans, I thoroughly enjoyed this article. Often times fandoms and fangirls are portrayed with a negative connotation in society as members of these communities are labeled as naive, unintelligent and childish. This article works to disprove that connotation and paints fans as creatives, innovators and intellectuals. The author follows the timeline of early fandoms, marking that Frank Sinatra was one of the first major icons to create fandoms. Personally, I feel as though the author should've elaborated on the role of early Rock n' Roll groups and solo-singers because they are essential to understanding how fan culture is today and how it operates. 

The most important remark I came across was how the author credited fans for creating their own ecology and culture on platforms like Twitter. I truly think it is remarkable the reach Twitter has, linking millions of fans from all over the world. I would love to see a follow-up article on current fandom Twitter with figures that aren't Bruce Springsteen. An academic approach on live-streaming/tweeting concerts, how a # for an album release works and positively impacts discussion on Twitter, and how different fandoms have created their own cultures. Overall, I enjoyed reading through Baby We Were Born To Tweet. 

I thought this was a fascinating article that gave the readers a good summary of how twitter has grown since it started. Twitter has been around since 2006; since then, the platform has evolved quite a bit. I was unaware that the feature of the hashtag and the retweet had been added later on after twitter had been established. It seemed to me that twitter had always embraced the news and status updates. As the hashtag can categorize news for people to discover what is trending in the world today as well as capture a feeling, etc. I enjoyed reading this article and found it interesting to see the culture of twitter written about.

As mentioned in the previous comments, twitter may be used as a historicized platform. As technology is evolving, maybe instead of framing newspapers and significant events, we will print out tweets. It will be interesting to see how long twitter is around and if culture is studied with it.

Before I read this article, I associated Twitter as a way for people to argue and debate controversial topics. Since I didn't want participate in any heated debates online, I have avoided using Twitter until this class. This article showed me that Twitter is also a place where people can just express casual ideas (like their excitement for attending an upcoming concert). I also thought it was interesting how people could completely change the original function of a tweet. For example, instead of using hashtags to help clump a tweet with others like it, people now use hashtags to express their emotions. I saw this phenomenon happen on Instagram as well. I also like how a lot of thought can be given to tweets; it's as if tweeting is like writing a paper where you have to worry about diction, syntax, and style. The messages posted may be extremely short--sometimes just a few words--but the audience can be large given the proper usage of links, usernames, and hashtags. 

I find it interesting that while Twitter is not necessarily a formal and professional method of communication, many people from various backgrounds use it. It has become one of the fastest ways to share ideas and feelings on any subject. Fans use it, large businesses use it, and even world leaders use it. Everyone can post their private ideas for the public to see. 

Before reading this article I was not aware of Twitter’s evolution since its founding, which was very interesting to me. The change from status updates to conversations is certainly noticeable today, especially when celebrities become engaged in arguments with one another entirely on twitter for the world to see. I also had not thought of the learning required to utilize twitter because I have lived my life surrounded by social media platforms, although I had never used twitter until entering this class. 

The grounded theory approach to studying Bruce Springsteen fan tweets is interesting in that the studiers decide on a theory to examine after one emerges from the data being examined rather than entering the study with an assumption or hypothesis. This is useful for an approach taken to twitter because a large group of people can be linked by various things other than their love for Bruce Springsteen and may share things in common that would not be easily noticed. 

The discussion of conceptual ad rhetorical choices of twitter users intriguing because a choice such as to not include a widely used hashtag keeps a tweet more private and doesn’t link the tweet to other similar tweets. Although that seems obvious, I have not taken the use of hashtags as making my posts on instagram more public into account although it certainly is a big consideration. 

The visualization of keyword searches being somewhat interconnected shows the huge array of tweets made about the concert, but then when compared to the tweets about Springsteen’s concert in Leeds seems to not be very large at all. The data also shows that most tweets were in fact retweets and there was not much conversing. I would have expected attendants of the concert to discuss their experiences with one another and respond to similar tweets. 

What the author presents and attempts to answer in the article is how twitter came to be the way it is. An interesting point the author makes is that there were/are no instructions on how to tweet. Twitter never really made a manual for its platform. Rather, the community made twitter into what it is. The author chronicles how twitter has changed over time and more correctly identifies its effect on language. 

The author's examination of the conversational side of twitter provides insight into the argumentative roots of today's twitter usage. The author uses the phrase "conceptual and rhetorical choices" that provide an explanation for why people tweet the way that they do. From the character limit to the accessibility of the message, we are closer to understanding the emotive and opinionated aspect of the website. 

I was immediately struck by the difference in tone between this scholarly investigation and the rant that we read previously. Wolff is clearly very receptive to the idea that Twitter - and all of its idiosyncrasies, including the hashtag - is a unique form of communication that provides added texture to both language and culture. This is clear from his investigation subject: by highlighting the tweets of Springsteen fans at a concert, he is able to isolate the cross-section of a cultural event and community with their communication to the outside world. This is fascinating, and Twitter allows for this in a virtually unprecedented manner.

As a long-time Twitter user, I have seen many of the developments within the application as they have been implicated. I have been able to see Twitter shape cultural discourse and vice versa. Thus, I am receptive to Wolff's arguments. As he points out, the Twitter landscape and interface is rather open-ended. This has allowed users to shape the content that fills the app, as well as the delivery mechanisms. This allows communities to form around similar ideas and/or styles; furthermore, it allows communities to interact with each other more effectively. In my opinion, any medium that allows for stronger human communication is a net positive, so I am certainly in favor of Twitter and tweeting.

After reading born to tweet, the first thing that comes to mind is how different people act on twitter vs how they write on school assignments. It is crazy how the text and twitter culture arises just by a simple click of a key. A quote that stuck with me is the use of the Grounded theory which was explained as qualitative research where theories of the object of study emerged from the data itself. It is very interesting that it is much different then other theories. The reason it is so different is because usually when there is a theory you go and test it out but rather in this situation the grounded theory to me is when you let the information come to you.

Secondly, thinking about the evolution of Twitter is very interesting as well. It started as something that was used like facebook; something to update, and almost brag about your everyday life. Twitter has transformed into something that shows mindless thoughts paired with people who have a temper. Twitter has caused many headaches for people, but has also helped spread information using the hashtag. Without the hashtag, news would have trouble being rapidly moved. I used to enjoy going on twitter everyday and just reading peoples tweets who I liked to learn from. Today, I go on just to see arguments about why a certain star is engaging in a certain activity. The use of Twitter has changed completely over time, and it is bound to change more each day.