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Twitter: What is happening

There can be no doubt that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with.   It goes beyond being a simple means for social networking.  

In a considered piece in Le Monde diplomatique, Mona Chollet records that Twitter has taken a different approach from the other social media. It seems to be turning into a public news agency, faster and more collective than traditional media.
"Internet use became commonplace at least 15 years ago, but some people still cannot grasp that it is a user-created medium. The web is presented as a convergence of pre-existing means of acquiring information, but French researcher Dominique Cardon objects to that view; he thinks it just applies traditional media models, including editorial control, to the net, and regards the public as passive (1).

Yet the nature of the internet has become clear, especially with the advent of Web 2.0 and its user-friendly tools. Thanks to blog platforms, users with no programming skills can self publish. The resulting standardisation of websites has disappointed pioneers, since it is a long way from the creative vigour of the early days. The popularity of social networks such as Myspace (popular with musicians), Facebook and Twitter has further extended the number of content producers. The social internet “allows users with less cultural capital to promote themselves in much shorter, lighter and easier ways than by writing a blog” (2). A month after Google+ was launched this June, it had 25 million subscribers. It took Facebook three months to achieve that number, and Twitter 33 months. After its August capital increase, Twitter was valued at $8bn, leading to warnings about speculative bubbles because of the site’s economic model.

Twitter has pushed the degree of appropriation allowed by the collaborative internet to its limits. It improvises constantly, redefining itself and validating users’ initiatives. When it was first set up in 2006, the question on the homepage was “What are you doing?”. Some users ignored it and devoted their 140-character tweets to producing their own reviews, commenting on current events (sometimes in real time), responding to each other’s comments, announcing gatherings, sharing photos and videos, placing small ads. So in November 2009 the company replaced the question with “What’s happening?” Then, because users had got into the habit of passing on tweets, preceded by “RT” (retweet), Twitter created a retweet button."


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