Mini Ethnography
For my ethnography, I'm turning to Twitter. Initially, I thought I would study the greater than/less than phenomena. (> vs. < or even <<< and >>>). I'm not sure if that's too broad. My thought process after that is to study students from my high school on Twitter or Giants' players' wives. Genre - Microblog. Twitter is conversational, similar to texting but at times much shorter. 140 characters is the limit per tweet. It creates a space for focused thoughts. Hashtags are used to track trending topics, a fancy way of saying what people are tweeting about. For example, anything I tweet about my favorite baseball team, I hashtag with #SFGiants. Hashtags are neat because they open up a new world to Twitter users. One day, I tweeted with the hashtag #EnglishMajorProbs. Then it occurred to me, has anyone even used this hashtag? So I went to that hashtag, and there was plenty of tweets regarding that. So I followed some new people that looked cool and were English majors. Hashtags is a vehicle for community. Furthermore, it can track what's prevalent in people's lives at a point in time, as well as delivering breaking news. When Melky Cabrera was suspended for PEDs, I found out on Twitter before anyone even had time to write a blog about it. That is the value of microblogging. Role of literacy - you HAVE to tweet (i.e., I will unfollow you if you don't tweet). Contrary to what many who don't use Twitter think, the majority of Tweeters don't use it as a channel of constantly updating what he/she is doing. (e.g., I'm eating breakfast) Although Twitter may have started that way, it has evolved as a place to share constantly. It stands in contrast to Facebook, a platform that I see as used much less frequently. In essence, 20 tweets per day is perfectly acceptable, but 20 posts per day on Facebook would be considered annoying. Literacy on Twitter is diverse. I see everything from linguists who self promote their work to 14 year olds in the ghetto using AAVE. There is a whole world of fighting on Twitter (there is even a name for passive aggressive tweets about one's followers - subtweeting - in which the user is not named, but said tweet is clearly directed at him/her.) Leadership - Twitteracy played a huge role in the 2008 election. Hierarchy - Popularity on Twitter is measured by the amount of followers one has. Naturally, the more popular people on Twitter are those in the public eye: celebrities, musicians, athletes, etc. An interesting phenomena, though, is those who rise to prominence on Twitter (similar to YouTube vide going viral).
