Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community
Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman and Yuri Takhteyev
American Behavioral Scientist 2011 55(10): 1294–1318
Article Abstract
The notion of “community” has often been caught between concrete social
relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the
Internet has refocused our attention on this ongoing tension. The Internet has
enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook,
to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric
microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that
connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more
followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of
interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis
of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even
though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities.
Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication
technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.