Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
Summary
In the paper “Why We Twitter” the authors look to understand the usage and connections amongst a set of users of twitter that range all around the world. They took a sample of 76,177 users from all around the world during the time frame of April, 1st 2007 to May, 30th 2007. They want to look at the correlations of users between users that are closer to one another as opposed to farther apart. They also want to look at the behaviors of users that fall into the categories of “Information Source, Friend, or Information Seeker”. Information Source’s tend to have more followers but possibly not as many people they are following. They hold a sense of power because their words and posts reach a large group of people. Friends are users that use Twitter to keep up with their friends lives and their friends follow them back for similar reasons. Lastly Information Seekers tend to have fewer followers themselves but follow a large amount of users, seeking to know about a great many other users. The article also found that users posts fall into categories themselves, “Daily Chatter, Conversations, Sharing Information, and Reporting News”. Of these categories “Daily Chatter” by far outweighed the others in terms of post pertaining to it. Overall this article gives the reader a sense that Twitter users tend to follow other users closer to them and majority follow to learn about others lives. They will reciprocate and tell others about their lives as well.
In the paper “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” the authors set out to look at and understand the main subject that twitter users tend to talk about with their posts. They split these subjects up into multiple categories that range from Information sharing to Anecdote(both for yourself and others). Specifically these categories look at if the information in the tweet is about yourself or others. Do you tend to share about yourself, your feelings, your life, your opinions. Or do you share information about others, events, world news, things that inform others about events that do not revolve around yourself. Through the observations and data analysis that the authors did they found that overwhelmingly most users tend to share things about themselves. Twitter users are predominately sharing events about their own lives. But this also shows that the few users that share about the events of the rest of the world tend to have more followers in total because they share information that a larger base of users want to hear about.
Reflection
I thoroughly enjoyed both of these articles because they both bring forward the large glaring detail that people love to share their own lives. The largest category of user of twitter from both articles is the friend user. The friend user is someone who follows their close set of friends and wants to keep track of their lives and whats going on but more importantly they want to share their life and the events that have happened to them with the people they care about. It really brings to light just how much of a social creature humans are. We crave to share our lives, feelings, opinions, and beliefs with others. We also want to know, know about the people we care about and keep track of what is going on in the world so that we can contribute to conversations amongst those people. This thirst for knowledge, be it intellectual or just plain gossip, is one of the key wants for humans as a whole. Through this exercise I have come to an interesting question, do humans crave this thirst for knowledge and to share their own lives out of a want to help others or simply fulfill a need we all feel? It is glaringly apparent from the data that twitter users are very focused on themselves. Sharing details about their own lives and opinions instead of sharing about the world as a whole. Does this mean that these microblogs could be encouraging people to focus solely on themselves and the image they present to others? Or are they helping the spread of information and making people more aware of the big picture?
Questions
- Do humans crave this thirst for knowledge and to share their own lives out of a want to help others or simply fulfill a need we all feel?
- Are microblogs encouraging people to focus more solely on themselves and the image they present to others?
- Are they helping the spread of information and making people more aware of the big picture?
- How much effect do the large twitter accounts with the most followers truly have?
- How much are cross cultural and continental connections affect cultures around the world through Twitter?
- Is this amount of information sharing too much? Could it be damaging to users instead of helping?
