Twitter

Interpretative Flexibility

In a global sense, Twitter's relatively fast diffusion rate is partially explained by its usage of earlier technologies that had already gained familiarity with the public. Twitter's status update format was built around the convention of short messaging system (SMS) technology developed in the mid-1980s for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) phones. Twitter, widely referred to as a microblogging application, is intimately related to blogging through its display of tweets in reverse chronological order and by the fact that today, many bloggers use Twitter as a vehicle for driving traffic to or extending the conversation on their blogs. Parallels exist between Twitter and instant messaging (IM) applications such as Yammer, Aim, and Google Talk; however, unlike other IM applications where correspondence is not public and often one-to-one or within small groups, Twitter assumes that a user's instantaneous status updates are public and many-to-many. Unless users specify that their status updates are private, their updates appear in Twitter's public timeline enabling other Web publics, search engines, and third-party Web applications to harness Twitter data.

Twitter's simplicity as an application is a good example of what Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker term interpretative flexibility, through allowing users of differential skill to socially shape the technology. From the outset, Twitter presented few forced linguistic rules, resulting in such user-derived conventions as using the @ sign for conversing directly with others, the RT and VIA convention for rebroadcasting other users' updates, and the hashtag sign (#) for organizing tweets along topical lines. Twitter's open architecture, built on a publicly accessible application programming interface (API), has enabled external developers to create third-party applications, programs, and widgets that extend Twitter's functionality beyond the limits of the 140-character update. These third-party applications also interact with Twitter's data, transforming the seeming disorganization of Twitter's status updates into filtered, relevant news streams.

In a social sense, it has been argued that Twitter's noisy informational stream can obfuscate higher-quality news and information, thus increasing environmental distractions and reducing user overall efficiency. Scholars refer to this fragmented form of attention through such related concepts as continuous partial attention (CPA), multitasking, or information overload. Scholars who disagree with applying these theories seek to emphasize that Twitter places primacy on connections and conversation as opposed to a strict measurement of efficiency viewed through the metric of task completion. For example, drawing on a former interdisciplinary theory of ambient awareness, individuals are said to [Page 886]gain a more intimate and hyperconnected sense of those they follow through being privy to their daily minutia.

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