Abstract
With over 600 million signed-up accounts worldwide, Twitter has become an important space tor the coverage and discussion of unfolding world events, from entertainment and sports to natural disasters and political crises. Especially as breaking news emerges, many of the platform’s participants begin to use it as a channel for ‘ambient news’ (Hermida, 2010): a space in which the collaborative efforts of thousands of contributors who share news links, comment on events and together ‘work the story’ (Bruns & Highfield, 2012) as it unfolds, serve to highlight the key issues of the day from the total volume of news coverage. This is an example of gatewatching processes (Bruns, 2005) as conducted on a distributed basis by a large number of users, each contributing only in possibly very minute, ad hoc ways.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anderson, C. (2006) The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand. Random House Business Books: London.
Bruns, A. (2005) Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, Peter Lang: New York.
Bruns, A. (2011, June 21) ‘Switching from Twapperkeeper io your Twapperkeeper’, in Mapping Online Publics. Accessed at: http://www.mappingon1inepublics.net/2011/06/21/switching-from-twapperkeeper-to-yourtwappcrkeeper/.
Bruns, A. & Burgess, J. (2011) ‘The use of twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics’, in European Consortium for Political Research Conference, Reykjavik, 25–27 Aug. 2011. Reykjavik. Accessed at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46515/.
Bruns, A. & Highfield, T. (2012) ‘Blogs, Twitter, and Breaking News: The Produsage of Citizen Journalism’,, in R. A. Lind (Ed.), Produslng Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production, Peter Lang: New York. pp. 15–32.
Bruns, A. & Stieglitz, S. (2013) ‘Towards More Systematic Twitter Analysis: Metrics for Tweeting Activities’, in International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16(2), pp. 91–108. DOI:10.1080/13645579.2012.756095.
Dablgren, P. (2009) Media and political engagement: Citizens, communication, and democracy, Cambridge University Press: New York, NY.
González-Bailón, S., Wang, N. & Rivero, A. (2012) ‘Assessing the Bias in Communication Networks Sampled from Twitter’. Accessed at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssm.2185134.
Habermas, J. (2006) ‘Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research’, in Communication Theory, 16(4), pp. 411–26.
Hermida, A. (2010) ‘From TV to Twitter: Now Ambient News Became Ambient Journalism’, in M/C Journal, 13(2). Accessed at: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjounal/article/view/220.
Kubitschko, S. (2011) ‘Networked Civic Life: issue Publics during Federal Elections in Germany’, in Communication, Politics & Culture, 44(2), pp. 112–132.
Marres, N. (2006) ‘Net-work is format work: Issue networks and the sites of civil society politics’, in J. Dean, J, W. Anderson & G. Lovink (Eds.,), Reformatting politics: Information technology and global civil society’, CRC Press: Hoboken, NT, pp. 3–17.
Morstatter, F., Pfeffer, T., Liu, H. & Carley, K. M. (2013) ‘Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming APT with Twitter’s Firehose’, paper at International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boston, July 2013. Accessed at: http://www.public.asu.edu/~fmorstat/paper-pdfs/icwsm.2013.pdf.
Phelan, J. (2012, March 7) ‘Twitter launches in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Urdu’, in Global Post. Accessed at: Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.tech/technology-news/120307/twitter-launches-arabic-farsi-hebrew-urdu.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bruns, A., Highfield, T. (2014). The Arab Spring on Twitter: Language Communities in #egypt and #libya. In: Bebawi, S., Bossio, D. (eds) Social Media and the Politics of Reportage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361400_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361400_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47230-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-36140-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)