Ipsographing the Dubject; or, The Contradictions of Twitter

#Briefing Twitter (http://twitter.com) is a ‘microblogging’ program that US programmer and entrepreneur Jack Dorsey launched in 2006. It is similar to earlier ‘Web 2.0’ applications like blogs, podcasts, and social networks like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com): the service is free to use, and with it a user can send short text messages of up to 140 characters in length. The brevity of Twitter’s message capacity has prompted its description as a ‘micro-’ blog service; however, as corporate media and communications scholars have recently learned, it is the combination of soundbite-ready brevity, adaptability to portable devices, and broadcast reach that have distinguished Twitter’s specific contribution to the Web 2.0 mediascape. It’s like a digital telegraph system, except that your telegraph can be broadcast, not just sent to one recipient. Twitter messages, or ‘tweets,’ tend to be much shorter than average blog posts; they can be sent from computers, mobile phones, and other portable digital devices; and— depending on how a user sets one’s account—tweets can be either reserved only for one’s private circle of contacts, or published to the publicly available Web. The service has a strong bias towards public tweeting: the user who would only let ‘approved’ people follow one’s tweets is advised that ‘you WILL NOT be on the public timeline.’ For users who leave their tweeting public (the default setting), all messages are displayed and archived at a web address unique to the user (for instance, my Twitter page is twitter.com/sonicfiction). In addition, message topics are also flagged by keyword and ‘hash tags:’ tagging a topic with # as a prefix (e.g. #IranElection) links it to all other messages that include the same tagged topic.