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AoIR 2014

Association of Internet Researchers conference, Daegu, Korea, 22-25 Oct. 2014

Exploring the Global Demographics of Twitter (AoIR 2014)

Association of Internet Researchers conference 2014

Exploring the Global Demographics of Twitter

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, and Troy Sadkowsky

In spite of the substantial international success of Twitter as a social media platform, reliable information about its userbase is surprisingly difficult to come by. Other than the 232 million “monthly active users” reported in the company’s disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its listing on the stock exchange, and some high-level breakdowns of account numbers across a number of key markets, most other assumptions about the Twitter userbase remain guesswork or are based on surveys with comparatively limited sample sizes. This paper takes a different approach to exploring the demographics of the platform: by undertaking a long-term crawl process across the entire Twitter user ID numberspace, we have gathered the publicly available details on every Twitter user account created between the platform’s emergence in 2006 and the conclusion of our crawl in 2013. By identifying the key patterns within this database of some 872 million accounts existing during our collection period, we are able to provide a much more comprehensive overview of Twitter’s footprint across the globe, its patterns of growth, and of typical user careers as listeners, followers, hubs and communicators than has been possible in any previous study.

Introducing Telemetrics: The Weighted Tweet Index (AoIR 2014)

Association of Internet Researchers conference (AoIR 2014)

Introducing Telemetrics: The Weighted Tweet Index

Darryl Woodford, Katie Prowd, Axel Bruns, Ben Goldsmith, Stephen Harrington, and Jean Burgess

This paper introduces a new methodology for analyzing and measuring engagement with television content by users of Twitter. Drawing on factors such as the network, viewing audience, and date of broadcast to establish a baseline expectation for volume of tweets around a television show, and applying techniques from the field of sabermetrics to create neutral volume figures (‘weighted tweets’) which exclude these variables, our metrics provide new insights into television’s social media presence. The methodology provides a variety of new measures for analysing the social media strategies of individual television programs, channels and networks, for comparing users’ engagement with programs, channels or networks, and for predicting future volumes of tweets.

Mapping Social TV Audiences: The Footprints of Leading Shows in the Australian Twittersphere (AoIR 2014)

Association of Internet Researchers conference (AoIR 2014)

Mapping Social TV Audiences: The Footprints of Leading Shows in the Australian Twittersphere

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, Tim Highfield, and Katie Prowd

Drawing on the results of a long-term research project into the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere, combined with an investigation of audience participation through social media in selected reality TV and political debate shows, this paper maps the location of the Twitter communities participating in the social TV components of the selected shows onto the underlying follower/followee network structure of the Australian national Twittersphere. In doing so, it addresses questions about the homology or distinctions between the social TV audiences for the different shows; the correlation between existing follower/followee relationships and participation in specific social TV activities; and the effects of Twitter activity related to specific shows in making these shows visible to the entire national Twitter network. The development of such network-based approaches to the quantification and visualisation of social TV engagement makes another important to the development of reliable and generally applicable metrics for social television.

Black Twitter's Engagement with #Scandal

The final presentation for AoIR 2015 is by Dayna Chatman and Kevin Driscoll, whose focus is on the communities and modes of social TV engagement with specific television texts. Their focus here is especially also on "black Twitter", a particular subset of the US Twitter population that has emerged in recent years: black American users on Twitter have been identified as a distinct group.

But black Twitter is actually a discursive phenomenon that is driven predominantly but not exclusively by black users in the US. The existence of this black Twitter community was detected especially through Twitter's trending topics, whose underlying algorithms were by accident especially well suited to detect the themes emerging from black Twitter, while "white Twitter" topics were not as prominently features.

Television Co-Creation with Social Media Users: #7DaysLater

The next speaker in our AoIR 2015 panel is Jonathon Hutchinson, who zooms in to a specific transmedia programme screened by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, #7DaysLater. The premise of the show is to create comedy programming within seven days, and to incorporate social media engagement practices into the show.

Such viewing is more than just subsequent watercooler discussions – it's about viewer co-creation practices. The challenge is to break through the noise barrier on social media, and to find the techniques for encouraging audience participation, especially in the context of a public service broadcaster.

Developing More Advanced Television Engagement Metrics for Twitter

The final AoIR 2015 session is our panel on social television, and starts with a co-authored paper presented by Darryl Woodford (slides to follow soon below).

Darryl begins by noting that raw social media engagement numbers for television are useful only to an extent: they are usually not normalised to account for specific factors, and simply offer raw quantities.

Nielsen SocialGuide's Twitter engagement statistics for social media follow that pattern, for example, and obviously shows on major TV channels do better than those on niche cable channels. Beamly's social media rankings are skewed by the Twitter terms they track: any tweet containing the letters 'yr' is counted as engagement with The Young and the Restless, for example, which is obviously wrong.

Identity Negotiations amongst Female and Minority Gamers

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Gabriela Richard, whose interest is in female gaming clans. She conducted an ethnographic study of the PMS Clan as well as interviews with gamers.

Overall, there are three waves of female gaming. The first wave identified gender difference in desire, interests, and playing styles; the second expanded the market to develop more female-oriented games; and the third explores more intersectionality between female and other identities (culture, race, sexuality, ...).

Understanding New Media Rupture-Talk

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Michael Stevenson, whose focus is on what he calls new media "rupture-talk". The idea here is to take what we often refer to as "mere talk" more seriously. Michael points to John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" as an example of this – new media as a radical break from the past.

The concept of cyberspace has been on the decline since its heyday in the mid-1990s, even in major booster publications like Wired. But other rupture-talk concepts, such as MOOCs or the "social graph" have emerged, and are also used to signify a radical break from the immediate past. Such terms are often understandably criticised as hype (Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion is an obvious example).

The Global Demographics of Twitter

This final morning at AoIR 2015 opens with my paper with Darryl Woodford and Troy Sadkowsky which explores the global Twitter userbase. Our slides are below:

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