New book: Twitter – A Biography

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I’m delighted to share the news that my next book is now in production with NYU Press. Co-authored with Nancy Baym, it has been in the works for a while and it is a real labor of love. We can’t wait to see it out in the world!

Here is the draft blurb we have supplied to the press:

Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech. 

A new approach to understanding how we’ve ended up here is urgently needed. This short, lively book outlines and models the platform biography – a new, streamlined approach to understanding how social media platforms have changed over time. Through the intriguing, fast-moving story of Twitter, it illuminates the multiple forces, including business strategies, technological decisions, and user cultures, that come together to shape what Twitter has become, and helps us identify the turning points where things could have turned out differently. 

The book is organized around the stories of Twitter’s key features: the @, the hashtag, and the retweet. These features appear as living characters in Twitter’s story – full of inner conflicts related to Twitter’s identity crisis as it veered between being a platform for intimate sociability and being a platform for publicity and debate. 

In telling these often surprising, sometimes humorous stories, Burgess and Baym draw on extensive research, including oral history interviews with long-time users, and a range of archival sources. Through this approach, the book builds a rich narrative of how Twitter has evolved – from its origins as a personal messaging service, to its transformation into a global public communication platform, and onward to uncertain and competing futures. 

Written in an engaging and accessible style but based on robust original research, the book appeals to media industry insiders, journalists and general readers with an interest in the impact of social media on society. It will be essential reading for digital media, communication and internet studies scholars, as well as providing useful guidance to undergraduate, postgraduate and graduate research students in media, communication and information studies.

YouTube book: 2nd edition

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In case you missed it, the second edition of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture is now out in bookstores everywhere, with its snazzy new red cover!

Me and my latest book baby

Here is the Preface to the second edition:

The original aim of this book was, as we wrote in the Preface, ‘to work through some of the often competing ideas about just what YouTube is, and what it might or might not turn out to be for’. We completed the study that it was based on a full decade ago in 2007, with the book manuscript being delivered a few months later in early 2008.

YouTube has transformed significantly in the past ten years. It has of course continued to grow at dizzying rates, but it has also changed in terms of its business model, its interface and features, its cultural role, and the extent to which it regulates content and behaviour. It has evolved from a disruptive ‘Web 2.0’ startup to one of the most powerful platforms in a digital media environment that is dominated by them; and those early competing ideas about what it was, and what it was ‘for’, while far from settled, are now more widely understood. Given the scope of change since we completed the original manuscript, the project of preparing a second edition might at first glance seem quite daunting. But, despite these signifi- cant transformations of the platform, we believe that many of our original findings and arguments have stood the test of time quite well.

First, we stand by our original core argument that YouTube’s value – what it had turned out to be ‘for’ so far – was ‘co-created by YouTube Inc., now owned by Google, the users who upload content to the website, and the audiences who engage around that content’. The content contributors even back then were already a diverse group – ‘from large media producers and rights-owners such as television stations, sports companies, and major advertisers, to small- to-medium enterprises looking for cheap distribution or alternatives to mainstream broadcast systems, cultural institutions, artists, activists, media literate fans, non-professional and amateur media producers’. Each of these participants, we argued, approached YouTube ‘with their own purposes and aims and collectively [shaped] YouTube as a dynamic cultural system’. This is why we said then, and continue to say now, that YouTube was co-created by diverse and multiple interests.

We also said that YouTube was a site of participatory culture – and, as we emphasize even more strongly in this edition, participatory culture is YouTube’s core business. The cultural logics of community, openness, and authenticity are embedded in the YouTube platform and brand at all scales of commerciality, from everyday documentation through to those star YouTubers with six-figure incomes, billions of views and millions of subscribers. However, it is also true that the culture of YouTube – its structure of feeling, to borrow from Raymond Williams – has co-evolved with its growth in scale and commercial maturity. It is our task to tell that story of change over time, as well as to interrogate the emergent politics and contradictions of commercially mediated participatory cultures that the story of YouTube represents so clearly.

Our overall aim in preparing this second edition, then, was to achieve a revised and updated account of the platform, without overwriting the historical record – and certainly without writing an entirely new book. For the most part, we have taken a comparative and additive approach – preserving, updating, and supplementing the original material – but we have tried to be explicit and detailed where possible about how and with what impacts the platform has changed over time. Accordingly, throughout the book we explicitly and reflexively refer to factual statements and arguments that we made in the first edition, and discuss how the scale, characteristics and significance of the phenomena they refer to have changed.

This comparative and additive approach is of particular importance in Chapter 3, ‘YouTube’s Popular Culture’, which leans heavily on the methods and findings of our original (and non-replicable) content analysis of YouTube’s most popular videos, which relied on and critically reflected on the plat- form’s metrics for measuring and representing popularity as they were in 2007. Rather than overwriting that work, we have framed the methods and findings historically, and updated some of the examples. We also show how some of contemporary YouTube’s most distinctive and embedded cultural forms, practices, and genres – from vlogging to gameplay and unboxing videos – have emerged from the dynamics of its early popular culture. Early YouTube’s popular culture was in turn generated out of the interactions among the affordances and business model of the platform, the activities and interests of content creators, the broader vernacular cultures of the Internet, and the consumption and engagement practices of audiences.

Throughout the book, we have revised the original material for style and tone, as well as updating terminology where it has become dated. For example, you will find fewer references to ‘new media’ and ‘Web 2.0’ than in the first edition, except where they refer back to the dominant discourses of the mid-2000s; similarly, we talk about YouTube mostly as a platform rather than a ‘website’, reflecting the migration to mobile apps and television screens that accounts for so much contemporary YouTube use. We adopt the now-pervasive emic or insider concept of a YouTube ‘community’ rather than talking about YouTube’s ‘social network’. Where appropriate, we talk about content creators and channels, rather than users and user profiles, reflecting changes in the way the platform works and the way its cultural logics have changed. Chapter 2 is now entitled ‘YouTube and the Media’, rather than ‘YouTube and the Mainstream Media’, because it no longer makes sense to situate YouTube as being separate from the ‘mainstream media’. First, YouTube is itself now a dominant media platform in much of the world; second, the broader media environment is now so distributed, digital, multi-platform, and diverse that it would be difficult to say what ‘the mainstream media’ (as opposed to new or digital media) is.

At the back of the first edition of this book we included two additional commissioned essays, one each by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley. They looked outward from our detailed study of YouTube, which was grounded in the contemporary moment of YouTube’s early years, to provide more expansive explorations of the challenges and opportunities that the plat- form represented to some of the central areas of concern in media and cultural studies – past, present, and future. While the new edition does not include these additional materials, we encourage you to revisit them, and we are forever grateful to Henry and John for contributing their distinctive scholarly insights into YouTube’s early cultural significance.

Looking back on Convergence Culture

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Looking back on convergence culture

It’s weird and slightly tiring to realise that it’s now more than ten years since Henry Jenkin’s book Convergence Culture was published (also precipitating Henry’s entry into blogging, by the way). Back then, it highlighted the potential as well as the pragmatic and political challenges of a changing new media landscape in which content was spread across media forms and platforms, and in which fans and ordinary audiences were actively participating as co-creators, distributors and influencers. The book and its related concepts, (like participatory culture) came in for a real beating from critical scholars, but it also sold like hotcakes and made a significant scholarly impact.

It seems a little odd now to think about the extent of the optimism and the curious ferocity of the opposition that were provoked by Jenkins’ take on that moment in digital culture in the mid 2000s— a moment when YouTube was barely a twinkle in Google’s eye, when there was no such thing as a tweet or an iPhone, and Facebook was a website for social networking among college students rather than the enabling infrastructure for Mark Zuckerberg’s domination of the whole damn planet. The trends Henry’s book picked up have in some senses become so much more pronounced; in other ways the concerns around fandom and cultural politics seem almost quaint, overshadowed by issues around surveillance, big data, and online hate.

So it was quite challenging but also fun and sort of nostalgic to be asked to write a short entry on the topic for Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray’s Keywords in Media Studies, out now with NYU Press. I thought it would be nice to share it more widely, so here it is (in final draft form, with academic referencing) below.

Keyword: Convergence

Convergence is a dynamic of change. In the most neutral and general sense, it describes the tendency for separate streams or pathways (whether of matter, of technologies, or of biological life) to come together. Its complement is divergence — the tendency for these same paths and streams to branch, fork, and drift apart.

In the context of media and communication, convergence is the tendency of separate media technologies, cultural forms, and/or social practices to come together to perform similar functions and make new hybrid media systems. In this sense, it is a key driver of economic, technological, and cultural change in the media environment. Convergence, then, is one of the constitutive dynamics of new media (Hartley, Burgess, & Bruns, 2013). To be able to describe and understand the different forms convergence takes is to begin to unravel one of the deepest and most longstanding issues in the history of media studies: the nature of the relationship between technological and sociocultural change.

From the late 1990s through the mid 2000s, the concept of media convergence was especially prominent. It featured in media scholarship, in popular reporting about the internet and digital media, and in media policy circles. There is even a well-respected academic journal that took its title from the concept and the dynamics of media change it represents: the title Convergence: The International Journal of New Media Technologies implicitly suggests that “convergence” is the primary dynamic of new media.

During this peak in the 2000s, the concept was strongly associated with a certain optimistic vision of participatory culture — springing especially from the fact that audiences and fans were now talking about, evaluating, curating, and remixing media content via the same digital networks that media producers were using to distribute and market it. Henry Jenkins is most famously associated with this model of media convergence, and he elaborated the concept in his influential and much-debated book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006).

Tracing the origin of the concept of media convergence to Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983), Jenkins begins with the most orthodox technological definition, which has two parts: on the one hand a single physical medium might perform a number of functions that were previously handled separately (in today’s terms, think of smartphones especially); while at the same time a single cultural function or service can be carried by several different technologies (think of “television” content, which we can now access in a dizzying variety of ways, including via “smart” television sets that run mobile operating systems and connect to app stores). Convergence Culture explores the changing relationships among cultural producers and consumers under these conditions, which are driven both by “top-down” and “bottom-up” logics (18), focusing particularly on the potential for these new relationships to lead to a more participatory culture — hence, the optimism. Jenkins does acknowledge the dangers of convergence, including concentrated media ownership, despite the lower barriers to cultural production afforded by new media technologies. He warns that the “cultural shifts, the legal battles, and the economic consolidations that are fueling media convergence are preceding shifts in the technological infrastructure,” and that “how those various transitions unfold will determine the balance of power in the next media era” (17).

However , other scholars have raised concerns about Jenkins’ approach to convergence — so much so that an entire special issue of the journal Cultural Studies was given over to scholarly critiques of the “overuse” and conceptual limitations of the term, some of which are directed at Jenkins specifically but also at “participatory culture” approaches more generally (see Hay & Couldry, 2011, for an overview). Across the twelve contributions to the collection, the recurring themes concern a perceived lack of attention to history and power — in particular, because of its focus on the ‘newness’ of new media, the contributors suggest that work on convergence and participatory culture in digital media suffers in comparison to the power of a “conjunctural analysis” of the kind associated with (British) Cultural Studies; as well as exhibiting a lack of understanding of the socially and environmentally destructive impacts of technological and economic convergence.

Given the acuteness and intensity of this debate in the mid to late 2000s and its focus on Jenkins’s work, the concept of convergence might seem specific to the digital era. But media and communications have always been shaped by convergence, and new media scholars have long been attentive to both the creative possibilities and the social dangers associated with it. On the industrial side, James Carey was concerned about the centralization of power associated with the ‘electronic revolution’ that was connecting and reconfiguring public, commercial and personal communication in the mid twentieth century (Carey & Quirk, 1970). On the consumer side, technological inventions have generated surprising new combinations — convergences — of practical uses not intended by their inventors. The telephone is an excellent example — intended for broadcast and business but taken over for intimate, personal communication — thereby transforming both the telecommunications infrastructure and the practices of everyday, domestic life (Marvin, 1997).

Convergence is more significant and challenging than ever, both in economic and critical terms. Since the mid-2000s, social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have — each in their own distinctive ways — created new forms of cultural convergence among the modes of communication and self-expression formerly characterized as personal media (self-portraiture, daily journaling) or public communication (journalism, news distribution). Zizi Papacharissi and Emily Easton (2013: 171–82) have discussed how technologies of social convergence like Facebook and Twitter produce a new habitus — a new way of living in and through media that emphasizes authorship, “accelerated reflexivity,” and the blurring of boundaries between cultural production and the practice of everyday life, and that have normalized the very idea of living in a state of constant newness. The boundaries between public and private have always been both constructed and dynamic — think of the quasi-public sharing of holiday photographs via the humble slide projector and the vernacular form of the slideshow on the one hand; and the public exposure of private information through “gotcha” tabloid journalism on the other — both of which predate digital media by many decades. But social media combine public communication with interpersonal communication and self-expression in specific ways, not only across platforms but also single platforms like Facebook, leading scholars to talk about new concepts like a “private sphere” (Papacharissi, 2010) for the circulation of public communication via personal stories, or “context collapse” for the convergence of our public and private personae (Marwick & boyd, 2011), for example.

The logics of industrial convergence are having profound and concerning effects in the social media moment too; and the “platform paradigm” is a crucial and distinctively contemporary form of this (Burgess, 2015). Mega-platforms like Facebook and Google are seeking to provide more and more of the services that used to take place in other platforms. From scrappy start-up to search giant to global connectivity and digital services company, a single Google sign-on can connect your workplace (through Google Drive and Gmail) to your personal entertainment system (through Android TVs, tablets and mobile devices), and your most intimate relationships (through geolocative dating apps, for example). From being a place for college kids to meet up and hang out, as part of its Internet.org infrastructure project Facebook is planning to beam their own version of the internet from the sky to developing countries — indeed, Facebook arguably wants to supplant the open web in favor of its own operating system. For Uber and other “sharing” economy businesses, the convergence of personal transport coordination and workforce management within a mobile app is only the beginning of a historically significant disruption of our employment and civic infrastructures and how they are managed and governed.

Convergence, then, is a dynamic of new media that operates technologically, socially, and industrially. It is neither a revolutionary event that can be located in the mid-2000s, nor a state that can be permanently achieved — it’s a persistent tendency, but never a fact. As Papacharissi and Easton note, the dynamics of new media are “founded upon the premise and the promise of constant change and permanent evolution” (2013: 171). In the restless logics of the digital economy, there needs to be enough apparent stability to enable us to integrate new media into our everyday lives and for cultural entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley startups to build new cultural forms and viable business models around them, but there also needs to be enough change and disruption (which can come from media consumers as much as from tech companies) to enable new new media to emerge.

Works cited

Burgess, J. (2015). ‘From “Broadcast Yourself” to “Follow Your Interests”: Making Over Social Media.’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(3), 281–285.

Carey, J. W., & Quirk, J. J. (1970). ‘The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution.’ The American Scholar, 395–424.

de Sola Pool, I. (1983). Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hartley, J., Burgess, J. & Bruns, A. (2013). ‘Introducing Dynamics: A New Approach to “New Media”.’ In Hartley, J., Burgess, J. & Bruns, A. (Eds.), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (pp. 1–11), Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hay, J. & Couldry, N. (2011). ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’ Cultural Studies, 25(4–5), 473–486.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Marvin, C. (1997). When old technologies were new. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marwick. A. & boyd, d. (2011). ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.’ New Media & Society 13.1 (2011): 114–133.

Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Papacharissi, Z. & Easton, E. (2013). ‘In the Habitus of the New: Structure, Agency and the Social Media Habitus.’ In Hartley, J., Burgess, J. & Bruns, A. (Eds.), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (pp. 171–84), Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Upcoming talks and workshops

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Next week I’m heading off for an intense month of research travel to the UK, Germany, and Brazil. Here’s the list of presentations, conferences and workshops I’m involved in.

First up is the YouTube conference at Middlesex University, where I’m doing the opening keynote:

YouTube’s Platform Biography

The contemporary media environment is in part shaped by a relatively small number of proprietary platforms, several of which are the lead characters in stock narratives about the journey from scrappy Web 2.0 startup to media megacorp – and YouTube is a paradigmatic example. In this presentation, I outline the challenges of empirically studying these platforms – these new media institutions – especially as they change over time. I illustrate the problem by revisiting my early empirical work on the popular cultural forms and practices that were emerging via the platform as it was in 2007; and the practical impossibility of repeating the exercise now. I then propose a solution to this problem of studying change over time: the Platform Biography approach. Building on this model, I revisit the story of YouTube’s evolution from informal videosharing service to major media player. I argue that the competing uses and ideologies that have structured YouTube from the beginning provide a compelling narrative of change, and an explanatory framework for both YouTube’s cultural generativity and the ongoing challenges that it faces – as a business, a digital media platform, and a cultural institution.

I’m stopping by Oxford on the27th and 28th, to catch up with all my wonderful colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute. Meetings, but no talks!

On 29th September, I’m stopping by the University of Sheffield to deliver the Digital Society Network annual lecture:

Doing digital media research over time and across platforms: Lessons from studies of YouTube, Twitter and games culture

Contemporary digital media and communication scholars use methods that both critically interrogate the digital media technologies or platforms that mediate cultural participation and public communication and are grounded in the digital traces that such activities leave behind. Because of this dual focus on sociotechnical critique and digital methods, the sociocultural aspects and technologies of both media and methods have significantly and productively transformed each other. But there remain significant challenges, not least among which are the difficulties of studying public communication and cultural participation across platforms and the challenges of engaging with the ways that ephemeral and proprietary digital media platforms change over time. In this talk, Professor Jean Burgess discusses these challenges and illustrates them through three recent and ongoing projects.

First, Jean provides a narrative of YouTube’s transformation from relatively underdetermined video-sharing service to major, multilevel media platform. In doing so, she reflects on her early empirical study of YouTube’s most popular videos and the impossibility of repeating it now. Second, Jean outlines the ‘platform biography’ approach (jointly developed with Nancy Baym) as a way to study platforms as they change over time. In this case Jean tells the story of Twitter’s oldest key features: the @reply, the #hashtag, and the Retweet, showing how they act as mediators between multiple media ideologies, individual human desires, and business logics, as they co-evolve throughout the history of the platform. Third, Jean draws on a recent case study of the controversy around an episode of Law and Order: SVU around violence in videogame culture to demonstrate the necessity and challenges of tracking public controversies across digital media platforms, especially in the context of ‘born digital’ controversies bound up with the cultural politics of the internet itself.

It’s off to Berlin that evening, to gear up for the Association of Internet Research Conference (program here) where I’m doing a whole lot of things:

  • A full-day pre-conference called Digital Methods in Internet Research: A Sampling Menu jointly organised by QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative. Last I looked there were 88 people signed up for this! I’ll be presenting with Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez on our Multiplatform Issue Mapping work, based around the version we’ve delivered previously at our DMRC Digital Methods workshops and the Digital Methods Summer School.
  • A panel jointly organised with Nancy Baym called Platform Studies: The Rules of Engagement, featuring Anne Helmond and Taina Bucher, Nicholas John, Stuart Cunningham and David Craig, as well as our own paper “@RT#: Towards a platform Biography of Twitter”. It’s based on work we’ve been doing together for a couple of years now, and which we’re turning into a monograph for NYU Press.
  • The Sharing Economy and Its Discontents – a panel featuring Mary Gray, Jack Qiu, Ben Light and others, including a DMRC paper on Uber’s discursive legitimation and social media traces of material participation in that process, by me, Nic Suzor, Patrik Wikstrom, and Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez.
  • A roundtable on Feminist Data Visualisation put together by Helen Kennedy and featuring such an all-star line-up of international speakers that it had to be split into two sessions (here’s the other one).

After that, Axel Bruns and I are off to Brazil for the second visit of our funded research exchange with colleagues a the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, or PUC-SP for short. The project focuses on the development of shared methodologies for researching networked political practices, and on this visit we’ll be crunching, visualising and analysing huge volumes of data relating to the local elections that are about to kick off there–and using this process to reflect on the challenges and next steps in truly cross-national political communication research based in social media data analysis.

Then, finally, home.

Twitter’s Changing Device Ecology

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I wanted to briefly pick up on Tama Leaver’s comments on Tim Highfield’s excellent bit of speculative forensics* on Twitter’s hashflags — namely that the the use of these hashtag emoji for major events might have the side effect of further degrading the experience of using alternative clients like Tweetdeck.

Just for fun**, for a while now I have been playing around with the ‘source’ field in the metadata attached to the just over 1.1bn indexed tweets posted by accounts that we have identified as Australian since 2006. I’ve been doing this to get a sense of how the Twitter device ecology has changed over time. It’s also a small part of the book project I’m working on with Nancy Baym.

Please consider this a very informal sharing of early findings rather than proper science. There are many caveats with this dataset (basically, it covers the full period of Twitter’s existence, but it is incomplete in various ways due to deleted accounts and the need to comply with Twitter’s API rules, but this is improving over time). Rather than repeating the disclaimers here, though, I’ll refer you back to this earlier piece of mine which also links back to theoriginal blog post by Axel Bruns for some of the information about it. Despite these caveats, there are some very clear patterns which I would expect to broadly hold up at the more dramatic end of the scale regardless of some lumpiness in the data.

To set the scene, here is the chart just showing the total tweets in the dataset for each year:

Total tweets indexed for each year posted by accounts identified as Australian (partial years in 2006 and 2016)

And here’s the pretty one showing the proportion of tweets that we have indexed for each year that were sent using each client (or ‘source’):

Twitter clients (the “source” field in the dataset) by percentage of total tweets indexed for each year posted by accounts identified as Australian (partial years in 2006 and 2016).

First, the migration (back) to the official mobile apps from the browser (and apps for PC or Mac) is unmistakeable. So too is the evidence that Twitter’s strategy to streamline its brand identity and user experience by channeling users into the ‘official’ clients (whether for the PC browser, iOS, or Android) is clearly working. You’ll recall that, foreshadowed by stern messages to developers and changes to the API rules in 2011, in mid-2012 Twitter made quite significant changes to the API which impacted quite severely and quite deliberately on third party development, particularly the development of apps that provide viable alternatives to the official clients.

As you can see from the pretty rainbow stripes, there are literally thousands of ostensibly distinct tweet sources in the dataset (more than 52,000 by my count), most with less than half a percent of the total tweets for a given year. But many of these are simply the widgets that individual websites use to allow you to tweet directly from their pages. The brief heyday of the alternative third party client was in 2010–2011 and was over by the end of 2012, the year of that infamous crackdown.

So we may have real evidence that the early proliferation and significant take-up of ‘unofficial’ clients like Tweetbot and Echofon, especially for mobile, has become very muted from 2013 on — the API restrictions and the changes to the display rules that were wrapped around them had a real chilling effect, as we’d expect.

And you might be as interested as I was to note that Tweetdeck, the power user’s client of choice, was only ever a niche experience, and while it is a significant niche, it seems to be shrinking in the past couple of years — and it will be interesting to see what happens now that Twitter has reportedly killed off support for the Windows version.

*I think ‘speculative forensics’ should be thing, don’t you?

**Concept of ‘fun’ may be somewhat loosely deployed.

Our collective response to Bowie’s death is as real as it gets

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[Cross-posted to Medium]

On social media, the scale of the response to Bowie’s death has been astonishing. It also seems to have been as emotionally intense and widespread across countries and demographics as it was high in volume.

We threatened to break Spotify’s servers when the whole planet went straight to the Bowie back catalogue and kept it streaming all night long, as did radio stations and cafes all over the world.

Chart by David Yanowsky via Quartz

My Facebook feed is a continuous stream of fan-curated Bowie videos; for a day or so it seemed like everyone was living inside YouTube; and even the Twitter community’s interests were so closely aligned for once that nobody needed bother with hashtags or even direct references to get their point across.

Inevitably, there are those who are discomfited by or (rightly) suspicious of highly emotional crowds. There are those who see participation in public expressions of grief for popular celebrities as superficial to the point of pathology, and cultural snobs who want to apply some kind of fandom threshold test before we’re allowed to participate. And there are those who see our interest in celebrities like Bowie as symptomatic of a broader tabloid culture that has blurred the boundaries between entertainment and information, between media spectacle and what in commonsense understandings is called the ‘real world’: which means the world of politics and business.

But there is nothing more real than this massively emotional media event. Bowie’s death is about the story of art, culture and music in the twentieth century and beyond — in that history, Bowie is a significant figure in his own right; but in his passing he stands in for a bunch of other things as well. He’s a metonym, a lightning rod — or even a reliquary, if you prefer. The cultural practices of this moment are about telling the stories of the bodies and identities of real people who grew up with Bowie’s fierce and astonishing presence in their media world and his music in their heads, just as much as they’re about recalling and remaking the story of Bowie himself.

Not only do we humans use art, culture and music to work through our own identities, connect to one another and tell our own stories, and not only are art, culture and music forever and always deeply, inextricably entangled with our everyday lives: art, culture and music (and, yes, even religion, Richard Dawkins) are how our entire species — as beautiful and strange and hopelessly tragic as we are — makes sense of the whole damn mess of our existence.

Politics and business don’t have any special claim to the ‘real world’; in fact, maybe they’re just the management layer…man.

Twitter (probably) isn’t dying, but is it becoming less sociable?

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[cross-posted at Medium]

Twitter’s demise has been announced so many times over its lifetime that it’s hard to keep track of all the premature eulogies (and this one from a year ago is actually pretty insightful), but there seems to be a new intensity in the circulation of decline narratives at the moment. A couple of weeks ago there was quite a bit of heat on umair haque’s Medium story, in which he proclaimed:

Twitter’s a cemetery. Populated by ghosts. I call them the “ists”. Journalists retweeting journalists…activists retweeting activists…economists retweeting economists…once in a while a great war breaks out between this group of “ists” and that…but the thing is: no one’s listening…because everyone else seems to have left in a hurry.

Haque went on to offer his theory of the source of the trouble — abuse, incivility, and a lack of care on the platform’s part:

Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit. And while there are people who love to dive into mosh pits, they’re probably not the audience you want to try to build a billion dollar publicly listed company that changes the world upon.

Leaving aside the problem that “we” is unspecified there’s a strange contradiction here (hint: when ‘we’ is offered unreflexively it usually means ‘people like me’ — and who said we wanted it to be a town square anyway? Why not a cosy corner of the pub?) Haque’s image of death seems to involve a ghost ship populated only by blind, mutually retweeting ‘-ists’, while ‘everybody else’ has left the building; and at the same time a writhing mosh pit populated by a seething mass of too many of the wrong kind of users. I don’t want to diminish the feeling being expressed, but there is also a certain amount of early adopter angst here — it’s a structural imperative that self-defined cultural avant-gardes throw their hands up in disgust when their scenes go mainstream.

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Do Communication Technologies Define a ‘Generation’?

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I’m privileged to have been invited to speak in the opening plenary at this year’s International Communication Association conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The panelists were asked to speak to the question ‘Do Communication Technologies Define a ‘Generation’?’ – this is how I tackled it! Speakers’ notes and key images from the slides in-line below.

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#creativecitizens keynote: slides and speaking notes

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I’ve had a wonderful time in an unseasonably sunny London this week, which has included a keynote presentation at the Creative Citizens conference at the Royal College of Art. As promised, below are the slides and speaker notes from my presentation, which covers the relationship between everyday creativity, citizenship, and digital media platforms over the past ten years or so.

Speakers’ notes after the fold:

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#asmc14 paper: Hashtag as hybrid forum: the case of #agchatoz

jeanburgess

I’m posting this from the University of Amsterdam, where we are now well into the final day of a fantastic three-day conference called Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space. We have quite a gang of participants here from the QUT Social Media Research Group, and we’ll collect all our papers up and post them over at that website soon, but in the meantime here are the slides and notes from my paper (co-authored with Theresa Sauter). It’s the first public outing of new work I’ve been doing in collaboration with Theresa and also Anne Galloway, which will come out in due course as part of a book project that Nathan Rambukkana is putting together for Peter Lang (the book has the working title ‘Hashtag Publics’).

Speaker Notes after the fold.

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