Analyze the Following Tweets - Essay Example

Analyze the Following Tweets Essay: Journalism, Mass Media and Communication Social Audience Enabled by Tags Introduction The advent of online social network has created an audience that instantly shares in real time their communication needs using the mobile phone as an interactive tool. Moreover the inter-audience interaction has taken on the form of having no boundaries as it has created in the audience the need of being a part of mass shared experience. This ubiquitous interactive process has been effectively facilitated by the like-wise ubiquitous presence of the mobile phone phenomenon which have low barriers of entry in terms of members accessing data services by affordable data plans on mobile networks, facilitated by widespread connectivity that employs wi-fi networks. This has equipped users with different methods of engagement based content (Ramzan, 2013). In the same vein, there has been a dramatic rise in social media services such as twitter and facebook amongst others that have facilitated important links into existing social networks, thereby enabling their users to create invariable forums geared at debates about a range of topics, gossip channels around prominent or media personalities, and /or share news and exchange comments. Particularly, twitter as a social media network has put excitement into the frenzy by its ability to enable users share topics through ‘hashtags’ and ‘retweets’. Twitter recent introduction of a new service called “twitter Discovery” which enables it audiences to engage with current social buzz content on their mobile phone device has also made it more easier to retweet and include hashtags with prepopulated tweet windows, thus bridging the gap between users by providing the means to browse stories and read retweets. Imagined Audience Imagined audience is a person’s mental conceptualization of the people with whom he or she is communicating. The concept of the imagined audience has not been an unusual thing in peoples lives for instance when a novelist writes his story he is guided by a picture of the audience he or she is reaching unto through his story. But in today’s world of social media where public spaces has taken on a different conception in terms of how users navigate through potentially large and invisible audiences: imagined audience has taken on a completely different meaning aspect that has transformed how society views social and cultural factors in the matrix of the hyper-sensitization of self, performance, and the imagination(Abercrombie & longhurst,1998).It has transformed perception in that life is now viewed as a constant performance where we are both actors and audience at the same time and everybody is an audience all the time(Abercrombie & Longhurst,1998).This has grown to the extent that it has become an obsession which has paved way to the invention of tools of popularization that has given people the opportunity and ability to get into contact and therefore interact with many individuals at a given time, thus, taking into greater heights the aspect of performer and audience relationship. These tools consequently developed by social media that has been at the heart of this phenomenal perception include social network sites, blogs, and microblogs. The construction of the audience in general was restricted within the consumers of media products such as television programs within a given setting, but recently the concept of audience has shifted focus to encompass everyday interpersonal communication on different social media platforms, such that the person involved, has the extent of his or her involvement defined by the individuals with whom he or she in interacting with, the audience with whom he or she considers as part of the interaction, and how together they navigate through, in the process the difficulties that are inherent in social media environment. Definition of the Imagined Audience Imagined audience is defined along the lines of what such an audience plays in everyday face to face communication. It takes into considerations aspects of self presentation, and the impression that others form and how the individuals therefore in interacting adapt there behaviors based on cue given off by this audience. Thus, according to Cooley, (1902) imagined audience is the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating, our audience. He goes further to add that it is one of the most fundamental attributes of being human. In interacting with larger audiences and making exchanges in mediated contexts especially when they are invisible, the more those individuals in their imaginations become dependent, thereby becoming more reliant on their imagined audience in situations of mediated communications such as email and letter writing or communicating through phone. This is because audiences are not discrete, but a fantasy conceptualized by our perceptions and what we intend to actually convey. This is something that technology has complicated in terms of space and time by conveniently shaping the belief that audiences are separate entities from us and each other. Individuals understanding of social media is constrained by the fact that though they believe that the audience is limitless, in reality their behaviors’ and perceptions make them act as if it was the opposite. This has led to participants looking for and gleaning cues from social media environment in order to get to flow with the language, cultural referents and style, so that they can be able to present an appropriate online identity that will be acceptable with the audience. As a result the imagined audience might take on an entirely different profile from the actual readers of a blog or tweet. Social media platforms allow individuals to present themselves in their own personal homepages where they create their profiles online. This enables them to effectively manage their unique identity presentations and therefore make fixed and singular self-conscious ways where they optimize on features such as regular updates to improve their status to their audiences (Cross, 2014). Stemming from the aspect of greater involvement and interaction with readers, social media writers take into consideration audience awareness when constructing their writings, paying closer attention to the vocabulary, technique, subject matter and goals. This is because bloggers write for a cognitively constructed audience, an imagined group of readers who may actually read the blog (Boyd, 2006).The imagined audience exists only as it is written in the text, through stylistic and linguistic choices (Scheidt, 2006).Social media sites has enabled users through their requirement and web applications that enable the connections and labeling of other users as friends to effectively mould audiences into being. Twitter This is a microblogging site accessible to a number of devices such as mobile phones, desktop computers, smart phones and other devices. Originally developed foe mobile phone users, it is designed for users to post short 140-character text updates or tweets to other users network. Tweets can easily be posted or read on the web, through SMS, or via third party clients on desktop computers and other devices such as smart phones. They allow for posting of photos, real time reports and instant replies to other users. Having been launched in 2006 and gaining mainstream prominence between 2008-9; twitter prompts users to certain salient question that accord users a constantly updated timeline such as: ‘What are you doing?’ This allows for a range of real-time responses that further are directed to friendship models streamed into user’s own group of followers. Social and Communicative Properties of Imagined Audience Interestingly, communication using tweet has certain salient properties. For instance the actual readers of tweets have high possibility of indifference from what the writer of the tweet imagined as audience. Through the use of direct messages (DM) individuals are allowed by twitter to send private messages to their followers although the practice has a dominant public presence as a practice. Moreover, users can model a conversation by targeting a particular user, except that the tweets can be accessed by other people through simply searching twitter.com, or through the sender’s twitter page. This process is enabled by users employing a convention known as the @reply(consisting of the @ sign together with user name)(Honeycutt & Herring,2009).While followers in tweets can indicate the number of audience but more often than not it is not factual. This is because when the account of an individual is made public; it means that anyone who is a follower of not can read their tweets in as long as they are on the site. The majority of twitter accounts which are public therefore creates a disconnect between the followed and follower. Likewise to those who choose to protect their accounts only limit the number of potential audience for their tweets. The activity of reposting tweets or retweeting through individual accounts spreads further the tweet to potentially vast majority with the result of introducing the content to new audiences (Boyd et al, 2010).However, retweeted massages can be slightly changed or loose original reference of the author. Of particular interest is that twitter provide for its users the tools that enable them to forward tweets through emails or just copy and paste them into different communicating channels such as MySpace, blogs and Face book. What individuals are posting and saying online has given rise to interpersonal function of search, in that more people don’t search for content but concentrate on what people are saying online. Therefore an emergence of searchable talk has become part of online discourse among online communities where individuals affiliate together around a topic of interest (Hartley,2010). In tweet the hashtag (#) marks the topic of a tweet. They are used on twitter as data about data that is integrated into the linguistic structure of the tweets. Therefore they inscribe a keyword in a tweet as metadata hence referencing the topic of the message as assigned by the user (Barefoot, 2010). For example, the following tweet contains the tag ‘#TeamNigella’ indicating the subject matter of the tweet: “Making Nigella’s birthday cake as an act of solidarity and not greed honest.#TeamNigella”. Thus other users also can adopt the tag as a key word for a tweet on the same topic, therefore allowing for a form of verbal indexing. Metadata as it is used differs greatly from the inline metadata in that as part of the text of the tweet it is visible directly to the user. Extensive mark up language (XML) as used in metadata usually separates form from content, whereas social tagging such as twitter eliminates this separation. Thus, tweets of the following kind where metadata is marked by a hashtag inside a clause is possible: “#TeamNigella sexist men use all words to their sly advantage don’t you trust them#misogyn. In the online linguistic structure, the hashtags also perform functional roles of encoding the structure and meaning of a particular unit for example: “#TeamNigella sexist menuse all words to their sly advantage#misogyn.” Therefore this audience has in their communication using tweets evolved tweet as linguistic medium as well as the hashtag as language about language thus affiliative function (Barefoot, 2010). Conclusion Twitter is a microblogging service created in 2006.It enables people to share short textual messages otherwise referred to as tweets, with each other using the system. Originally tweets were designed to be shared using SMS with a maximum length of words containing 140 characters. Over the years going by the rise of its popularity, it has evolved to include other users such as web and desktop members. it makes use of elements of social network sites and blogs but with a few differences. Twitter pages show all their pages in reverse chronological order just like the blogs but without the ability to comment on a user’s post. The salient feature of twitter which is seen by users when they log in, is a stream of tweets posted by those they follow. Participants choose who they follow for instance celebrities, personal friends, relatives politicians etc. References Abercrombie, N., & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination. CALIFORNIA: Thousand Oaks, Boyd, D. (2010). . Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. New York: : Routled. Barefoot, D., & Szabo, J. (2010). Friends with benefits: A social media marketing handbook. San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press Cooley, C. (1902). Human nature and the social order. New York: . New York: Charles Scribner’s Son. Cross, M. (2014). Social media security: Leveraging social networking while mitigating risk. Gupta, R., & Brooks, H. (2013). 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