You are here:

Is Twitter an Individual Mass Communication Medium?
PROCEEDINGS

, , Dept. Social Learning / TU Graz, Austria ; , Computter and Information Systems / TU Graz, Austria

Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, in San Diego, CA, USA ISBN 978-1-880094-78-5 Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Waynesville, NC USA

Abstract

According to the theory of action, the use of the web-based microblogging service ,Twitter’ seems to be a postmodern form of traditional social activity. In this way traditional communication appears through the development of virtual social networks. Within the never ending flow of tweets there is a wide range of different forms of communication: private messages, directed messages using the @-symbol, directed conversation through re-tweets and communication in general in forms of simple status reports of the users. These different forms of communication can be related to Littlejohns basic communication forms (2002). The fact that tweets are public and directed to an undefined public assumes that twitter is a mass media which can be therefore used by individuals. Following the field model of mass communication by Maletzke (1963) we can show the characteristics of communication on twitter and link them within this traditional model.

Citation

Wiesenhofer, H., Ebner, M. & Kamrat, I. (2010). Is Twitter an Individual Mass Communication Medium?. In D. Gibson & B. Dodge (Eds.), Proceedings of SITE 2010--Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1712-1717). San Diego, CA, USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 18, 2024 from .

Keywords