Held on 18 December 2009 in Hamburg. I thank Jannis Androutsopoulos for inviting me.

1. From cotext to context?
Discursive practices in Twitter
Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de
Universität Hamburg,
18 Dezember 2009

2. Twitter, Inc
● founded 2006 in San Francisco
● originally modeled after multi-SMS services
● ranked third among social networking sites in terms of traffic,
following Facebook and MySpace
● 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits
● API allows development of external applications and portability of
data

3. Message presentation in Twitter
● each user's own messages (tweets) are shown in their timeline in
reverse chronological order, mirroring a blog
● subscribing to other users' timelines (following) gives the follower a
composite view of the followed users' tweets
● user connections in Twitter are not by default reciprocal
● timelines can be interwoven by various means
● Twitter presents itself as a pastiche of intersecting communicative
spaces composed of:
● individual timelines
● dynamic combinations of other timelines
(composite views such as “all friends” and search)

4. A user's timeline can
be considered cohesive
when read chronologically

5. A composite view visually
suggests cohesion, but is
textually incohesive

6. A formal typology of tweets and users
(Java et al, 2006)
Types of tweets:
● “daily chatter”
● “conversations”
● “sharing information/URLs”
● “reporting news”
Types of users:
● “information sources”
● “friends”
● “information seekers”

7. Discursive practices
Three strategies for interweaving timelines:
● Messaging: use of the @ character to address another user
● Retweeting: reposting another user's tweet (RT)
● Hashtagging: using hashtags to „label“ a tweet (#)
Notes:
● forms can be combined (@ + RT + #)
● can realize different functions
● all three are strategies for creating co(n)text

8. @-Messaging (Honeycut & Herring, 2009)
● used primarily for conversation
● “noisy”, but short, dydadic convesations take place
● ”similar to instant messaging, but more dynamic”
● 31% of tweets with @ are about the addressee
● 51% of tweets without @ are about the twitterer

9. Retweeting (boyd et al, 2010)
● information sharing is a social practice
● “the practice contributes to a conversational ecology in which
conversations are composed of a public interplay of voices that give
rise to an emotional sense of shared conversational context“
● allows “peripheral awareness“
● 52% of retweets contain a URL
● 18% of retweets contain a hashtag

10. Hashtagging
● can “stitch together“ tweets from users who are cospatial (#ir10,
#dgfs09, #hamburg) → spatial anchor
● can stitch together thematically related tweets (#linguistics,
#unibrennt) → thematic anchor
● are also frequently used to provide a meta-comment on the content
of the tweet (#fail) → comment-type

11. Creating shared context from shared cotext:
“all friends” view
users
“all friends” view
time(lines)

12. Creating shared context from shared cotext:
@-messaging
users
user5 @user4
time(lines)

13. Creating shared context from shared cotext:
retweeeting
users
retweet
time(lines)

14. Creating shared context from shared cotext:
hashtagging
users
#someevent
time(lines)

15. Conclusions
● each user creates and controls his/her own timeline
● by contrast, anyone can put together a composite view by searching,
creating a list etc
● @-messaging, retweeting and hashtagging are (among other things)
strategies for interweaving timelines
● the arranged cohesion of composite views underpins the “emotional
sense of shared coversational context” (boyd)
● cotext and context create and reinforce each other

16. Thanks for listening!
Thanks for listening!

17. From cotext to context?
Discursive practices in Twitter
Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de
Universität Hamburg,
18 Dezember 2009