Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
CIS 393
Jack Dorsey introduced his idea for the platform originally known as “twttr” in early 2006
during a brainstorming session.1 Together with Biz Stone and Evan Williams, Dorsey constructed
the system to use SMS to communicate with small groups. 2 As the platform came together the team
decided upon the name Twitter when they found “[t]he [word‟s] definition was „a short burst of
inconsequential information‟…And that‟s exactly what the product was.”3 Yet Twitter soon matured,
and in April 2007 Twitter spun off of Obvious Corporation to become its own company.4 Despite
the immense potential of the platform, the true success of Twitter was not glimpsed until the 2007
South by Southwest Interactive conference when daily posts jumped from 20,000 to around 60,000.5
Through 2010 the platform has experienced a boom of 1,500 per cent growth in registered users,
Politicians now seek to take advantage of the vast network Twitter offers for political
discourse. To discuss the political efficacy of Twitter one should realize the potential for candidates
1
Dom Sagolla, “How twitter was born.” 140 Characters, http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-
was-born/ (accessed April 7, 2010).
2
Andrew Lennon, “A conversation with twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey,” The Daily Anchor,
http://www.thedailyanchor.com/2009/02/12/a-conversation-with-twitter-co-founder-jack-dorsey/ (accessed April 7,
2010).
3
David Sarno, “Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site's founding document. Part 1,” Los Angeles Times,
February 18, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html (accessed April 7,
2010).
4
Lennon, “A Conversation with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.”
5
Nick Douglas, “Twitter blows up at SXSW conference,” Valleywa,. http://gawker.com/tech/next-big-thing/Twitter-
blows-up-at-sxsw-conference-243634.php (accessed April 7, 2010).
6
New Statesman, “Twitter registers 1,500 per cent growth in users,” New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/digital/2010/03/twitter-registered-created (accessed April 7, 2010).
2
to use the service to build or reach a constituency or a public. Michael Warner provides a means to
better understand what defines a public. Warner asserts that a public “enables a reflexivity in the
circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse,
a social entity,” and “an indefinite audience rather than a social constituency that could be numbered
or named” (11-12; 55-56).7 Warner deals with “the Internet and other new media” as a possible
public, and he notes the profound changes “they imply in temporality.” Warner rejects describing the
Internet as a public because, “[a]t the time of this writing, Web discourse has very little of the
citational field that would allow us to speak of it as discourse unfolding through time” (97).8 Warner
adds, “[o]nce a Web site is up, it can be hard to tell how recently it was posted or revised…Most sites
are not archived. For the most part, they are not centrally indexed” (97-98).9 The Twitter platform
provides a drastic change in Web discourse that is capable of satisfying Warner‟s qualms concerning
publics. According to Warner‟s own definition of a public, Twitter would satisfy both an indefinite
audience and allow for reflexive circulation among strangers. Each posting on Twitter can be shared
by a user with anyone who looks at their page or follows them on the site. As members begin to
discuss their opinions on issues and other tweets the posts become more interconnected as they move
amongst users.
platforms. If one campaign adopts a new medium—like Twitter—then all campaigns must follow.
But how does a campaign control the message using new media platforms? Twitter can blur the
distinction between a candidate‟s actual campaign and elements of the campaign that may or may not
7
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, (New York: Zone Books, 2002), pp. 11-12; 55-56.
8
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 97.
9
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 97-98.
3
candidate‟s campaign team to create a Twitter account aimed at appearing independent in an effort to
spread official messages in an unofficial manner. False Twitter accounts occur frequently and offer
another avenue for nefarious campaign opportunities. The opportunity for reprehensible actions
similar to the Swiftboat campaign and an updated form of whispering campaigns is an ever present
possibility on Twitter. As candidates enter the intense stages of their campaigns, Twitter affords
them a new avenue to dispense insidious campaign material. Whispering campaign techniques serve
to offer effective means for candidates to distribute their attack advertisements. Candidates can
merely post links to devastating stories regarding an opponent and the story will continue to spread
through the Twitter network from that point. Recently in the California gubernatorial race candidate
Jerry Brown has lambasted Meg Whitman by posting about her refusal to debate with him.
Whispering campaigns and attack advertisements may prove one of the most prominent uses of
Social media as a whole have received a great deal of attention and energy during recent
election cycles, but Twitter is unique in the sense that posts will sometimes appear in Google search
results. A search for Jerry Brown, for example, includes his Twitter account in the first page of
results whereas no other forms of social media were present and thus as immediately visible to
someone seeking to learn about Jerry Brown. Also, anyone traversing the Web is able to view any
particular Twitter user‟s page without being an official follower, and as result of this ability, Twitter
fulfills the qualification of an indefinite audience despite the existence of follower counts. The
Library of Congress recently announced that it will begin to store all past and future tweets in its
database. By storing all tweets ever posted, the Library of Congress helps Twitter to satisfy Warner‟s
Political campaigns in the United States are usually reserved for those who are already
wealthy or who have access to significant monetary contributions. With their financial security they
will be able to run a successful campaign, and increasingly spectacular election campaigns continue
to block an average political hopeful. Without this de-facto cost barrier more citizens would be
capable of campaigning, and Twitter offers a free platform where candidates can share their
messages, essentially democratizing elections. Further, from a candidate‟s account page he or she
possesses the ability to connect visitors to all of the campaign material such, as an official website or
To understand how political candidates use Twitter, the California gubernatorial race serves
as a case study. Candidates from both of the major parties and one Independent candidate comprise
the cases. Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner are two Republican candidates. Jerry Brown and
Richard Aguirre are two Democratic candidates, and Chelene Nightengale is an independent
candidate. As the primary draws closer, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown are gaining ground and will
likely remain the front runners and their respective parties‟ candidates. Aguirre offers a nice case for
Twitter‟s democratizing ability. Steve Poizner runs a number of television advertisements which
caught my attention, and Chelene Nightengale serves as an example of the least politically powerful
candidate.
are limited to 140 characters of the users choice and known as tweets. Users learning to master
Twitter today find a plethora of options available to them which were not present when the platform
launched. By using the @ symbol users are capable of can providing both citations to other users
and denoting that a particular post is intended as a message for the username following the @, and
the user referenced is alerted to the mention. This simple cycle of citation and reference offers a
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means of creating a relationship of interconnectedness that is public, searchable, and citable. Twitter
offers the user another means to communicate from one user to the next through direct messages by
including a d followed by the username and through this private message users gain direct
communication opportunities in association with the mass communication all through the same
platform. Another feature of Twitter is the re-tweet which is invoked by typing RT in front of a
copied post from another user, and through RT users are able to spread posts to others—in the new
follower group—who would have otherwise not have seen them. For political candidates RT can
provide a means to bolster their own image by sharing positive comments from others, or the RT can
be used by people who read the candidate‟s posts to either continue the transmission of beneficial
messages or inversely any content which could harm the candidate. Despite fears over Twitter‟s
inability to support archiving and textual citation, but by including a # followed by any particular
word, a user can access all posts that contain the term, and the results can be accessed together as
Standard tweets do not allow users to place images in their postings, but Twitter offers image
hosting and linking through its twitpic service as a remedy for this shortcoming. Candidates use
these pictures for purposes ranging from showing people where they campaigned that day to posting
images of themselves fulfilling current government duties, for example California Attorney General
Jerry Brown. Also motivated by the character limit of each tweet, users often use their postings as a
gateway to other material. The California gubernatorial candidates provide links to their own
campaign pages, official news stories on their campaign website and other media outlets, their
Facebook profile page where they post stories and photos, and their official YouTube channel, a
popular option for Richard Aguirre. Twitter also offers users a search engine that will provide a full
text search of tweets for approximately the last week depending on how many tweets have been
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posted in that time period. The Twitter user‟s home page gives the user one place to view the most
recent activity of the people they are following, displaying the most recent twenty items. Twitter
recently implemented a new feature, promoted tweets. Promoted tweets allow Twitter to create
revenue by placing paid tweets at the top of searches, and they have the potential to influence
political elections by giving some candidates a higher likelihood of being seen. Notably, most of
these features were incorporated into the platform by users before Twitter officially provided support
for them, and through this user expansion the feature set has been expanded so that posts have
When the platform was introduced the question it posed was, “What are you doing?”
Edward Mischaud has studied whether or not most users sought to answer the particular question
only to find that many chose to expand upon the original question. Eventually Twitter officially
changed its question of purpose to “What‟s Happening?” in order to offer a better indication of the
With the insight that users are choosing to answer altered question I would like to take a look
at how politicians use their Twitter accounts.11 Chelene Nightingale relies almost entirely on
external links as her means of communicating a message.12 Some of her posts were simple and
consisted of only a request for users to check her Facebook page to see her new photos, but every one
of her posts save two include a link to another story or website that expands on her post. For some of
the posts on her page, the link is meant to expand upon what she has included in the 140 character
10
Edward Mischaud, “Twitter: Expressions of the whole self an investigation into user appropriation of a web-based
communications platform,” (master‟s thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007). ; Biz
Stone, “What's happening?” Twitter blog, http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/whats-happening.html, (accessed April 7,
2010).
11
In order to evaluate how they used their accounts, the last 100 postings as of March 22, 2010 at 10PM were
downloaded and examined.
12
Nightengale4Gov, [Twitter page], Retrieved from http://twitter.com/Nightingale4Gov on 22 March 2010.
7
limit tweet, but in other cases, the entire post is a particular link or the text offers nothing beyond a
Richard Aguirre also primarily uses web links; however, his execution is different from
Nightingale‟s.13 Many of Aguirre‟s posts act as portals to his various YouTube videos, which have
become free advertisements to project Aguirre and his political stance on issues. His links to
YouTube allow people to view his campaign advertisements that he would have no chance of
playing on television because of the prohibitive costs. Aguirre re-posts the same links occasionally
in an effort to guarantee that they appear on the users screen when they view his page, because only
the most recent 20 tweets appear on your home page and it is cumbersome to load previous tweets
ten at a time. Also, Aguirre‟s posts contain a common focus on the environment; adopting
renewable forms of energy is one recurring element. He is also adamant about California‟s need for
desalination projects in order to provide water for all those who need it, and this trend continues
Jerry Brown provides a minimally more diverse range of use for his Twitter page.14 He uses
twitpic to show a picture of himself finalizing his nomination for governor, but he is likely trying to
elicit the most support from the old pictures he provides to show the many actions he undertook in
the 1970s during his first two terms in office as Governor during a prior stint before President
Reagan took office. He could potentially seek to elicit feelings of safety in those who check these
pictures: because these images show him performing important aspects of the Governorship, people
have the chance to see all of the positive things Brown accomplished during his first two terms,
13
Aguirre2010, [Twitter page], Retrieved from http://twitter.com/Aguirre2010 on 22 March 2010.
14
JerryBrown2010, [Twitter page], Retrieved from http://twitter.com/JerryBrown2010 on 22 March 2010.
8
making them more likely to support his new campaign.15 Jerry Brown also uses his Twitter page to
highlight the recent work that he has done as the Attorney General of California. He accomplishes
this task by providing the reader with a short snippet of information regarding some action that he
has recently taken in his capacity as Attorney General. Most of these posts are followed by a link
which directs the reader to a more detailed story on the Jerry Brown website. One of the most
striking aspects of this is the fact that every story has a picture of the official seal of the Attorney
General. These stories do not directly relate to any of the actions which he would undertake as
Governor, but they do serve to create a positive image of a man who places justice in a high position.
Meg Whitman creates an impression of hope and advises Californians to look forward to a
bright new day with her account backdrop which depicts one of California‟s rolling hills with fields
of flowers and bright dawn sunlight.16 Steve Poizner appears to evoke an image of resolution and
determination with his background depicting Poizner attentively looking into the distance towards
California‟s future.17 Greater number of posts to one‟s account has the possibility of increasing
awareness for the candidate‟s campaign because anyone following the particular candidate receives a
notification on their main page whenever someone they follow posts a new entry. Poizner seeks to
take full advantage of this fact, there are several occasions where he posts significantly in one day,
whereas Whitman for the most part posts consistently once a day. A comparison of the two accounts
reveals that they were both at the same NASCAR race in Fontana California on February 21st;
however, Poizner provided seven posts on the event and Whitman provided only two. This
discrepancy could indicate that Poizner wants to ensure that people know that he was also at the race
because Whitman was more publicly visible as the official flag holder who is recognized for the
15
Jerry Brown is able to run for Governor again because the laws limiting a governor to two terms was not in
existence at the time that he first held office.
16
Whitman2010, [Twitter page], Retrieved from http://twitter.com/Whitman2010 on 22 March 2010.
17
StevePoizner, [Twitter page], Retrieved from http://twitter.com/StevePoizner on 22 March 2010
9
whole crowd and given the right to officially start the race. Whitman employs the RT on at least six
occasions mostly to share positive comments or news stories another user has written, and most of
these re-tweets are from a user named CAmpMeg2010. Poizner distinguishes himself due to his
gratuitous use of the # tag. He uses #CAGov in nearly all of his last thirty posts in order to link any
of the comments that he writes to the overall conversation regarding the California gubernatorial
race. He is thus able to expand his audience and make it easier to find what he deems directly
Twitpics, links to extended articles of Facebook pages, re-tweets, # tags, all can comprise
elements or the entirety of a tweet; however, users cannot incorporate all of these into a single post
and therefore need to decide the most beneficial use of their 140 characters. In my analysis of the
five Twitter styles, each projects a slightly different message to the reader, with re-tweets
representing an attempt to highlight another user‟s writing. Chelene Nightingale and Jerry Brown
both rely heavily on linking to other sites or longer stories with varying levels of success.
Nightingale's efforts come off in a way that makes her posts seem haphazard and simple, a fact
which is no doubt a result of her lack of an intensive campaign team as a minor candidate who likely
runs all of her own campaign efforts. With his campaign team at hand Jerry Brown produces a more
polished implementation of linking but the his posts are also repetitive in their form in a manner that
makes his next post predictable and less interesting. Linking can work effectively to present the
reader with a quick means to access potentially polished stories and articles that are impossible given
the limits of a tweet. Richard Aguirre heavily uses YouTube to create and distribute campaign
videos which he would have no chance of presenting on TV because of costs, and he uses his posts to
direct users towards these videos by re-posting links to them in order to make the links appear on
follower‟s pages several times. Campaign TV ads present some of the most beneficial and harmful
10
messages during campaigns and Aguirre employs links to publicize his ads. While each approach
has its own benefits individually, the most effective users offer a balance between linking, status
updates, and pictures while also incorporating the means to find and track their posts in the overall
Certain styles of tweeting may prove more efficacious than others, but at present, there are no
concrete ways to measure this efficacy. One possible way to gauge efficacy is to track the number of
times a candidate‟s posts. Looking at the number of followers over time and evaluating when and
possibly why users started or stopped following a candidate, sometimes based on the number of
followers gained or lost after a particular tweet, serves as another possible marker. Promoted tweets
also offer a new opportunity to estimate the efficacy of Twitter because if a candidate pays for his or
her tweets to be promoted, Twitter collects data regarding the “resonance” of the particular post and
only continues to promote and charge the candidate if users are clicking on and interacting with his
or her tweet. The grand question is whether or not Twitter is worth candidates‟ money to pay people
to maintain. These cases favor a positive response to this question because Twitter offers a platform
that affords access to an ever expanding feature set and far-reaching public. With this in mind, in
order to gain an even greater understanding of Twitter‟s political efficacy we need a tool that can
aggregate all of the areas mentioned and offer a measure of its value in concrete monetary terms.
11
Bibliography
Lennon, Andrew. “A conversation with twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.” The Daily Anchor.
http://www.thedailyanchor.com/2009/02/12/a-conversation-with-twitter-co-founder-jack-
dorsey/.
Mischaud, Edward. “Twitter: Expressions of the whole self an investigation into user appropriation
of a web-based communications platform.” Master‟s thesis, London School of Economics and
Political Science, 2007.
New Statesman. “Twitter registers 1,500 per cent growth in users.” New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/digital/2010/03/twitter-registered-created.
Sarno, David, “Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site's founding document. Part 1,” Los
Angeles Times, February 18, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/ 02/twitter-
creator.html.
Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.