the "twitter thread" as a genre fascinates me. I have so many curious questions about it. when was the first cohesive thread of posts created on twitter? who wrote it and about what?
threaded tweets are a reaction to the restrictions of the platform. it's like adapting the limited microblogging form to serve a longer form of writing. combining a handful of tiny posts into something bigger-- like building a tower out of toy blocks.
twitter added an official thread-making feature to its platform not that long ago. but threads (in the computer/internet sense) have been a thing for way longer than that. although etymonline doesn't mention this newer usage--perhaps it's too new-- in its word history of "thread," Merriam Webster does, interestingly. I guess regular dictionaries have a stronger incentive to keep up with the times than etymological dictionaries do.
I learned the internet meaning of thread on online bulletin boards, where a thread is an asynchronous
conversation contained under a heading within a specific discussion forum. multiple
people can post to a forum thread. everyone's replies are timestamped,
linkable, quotable, reply-to-able, and it's all very organized.
a twitter thread is different. sure, the usual "any string of posts-and-replies" does technically constitute a twitter thread... but that's not really what anyone is talking about when they use "twitter thread" as a specific noun. any old string of posts and replies on twitter is more likely to be referred to as a conversation or an exchange. the connotation of "a thread" (often with an introductiony colon, like "a thread:") on twitter involves a string of posts written by a single author, on some focused topic, typically (but not always) within a short span of time. there can be replies, but they feel separate from the twitter thread itself.
a twitter thread is different. sure, the usual "any string of posts-and-replies" does technically constitute a twitter thread... but that's not really what anyone is talking about when they use "twitter thread" as a specific noun. any old string of posts and replies on twitter is more likely to be referred to as a conversation or an exchange. the connotation of "a thread" (often with an introductiony colon, like "a thread:") on twitter involves a string of posts written by a single author, on some focused topic, typically (but not always) within a short span of time. there can be replies, but they feel separate from the twitter thread itself.
so if we want to delineate the twitter thread genre, what are its requirements and hallmarks? and what are its conventions? every genre has conventions-- sometimes very strong ones. memos and emails should have subject lines, letters can have letterhead, and academic articles have references lists at the end. twitter threads have their own rules, too.
we expect a twitter thread to include at least three tweets linked together by topic, structure, and the platform's formatting. there are usually twice that many, if not more. sometimes there is a narrative feel to the thread, and other times it's more list-like. often the thread is announced and introduced as such in the first post, whether or not the ensuing thread is planned out or more off-the-cuff. at the end, especially if the thread has been shared repeatedly and garnered a lot of attention, the author may add a concluding postscript with a link to somewhere readers can donate or otherwise compensate the author's writing work in some way.
[content of tweet...] 1/12[content of tweet...] (1/12)(when the total number of tweets is known at the outset)[content of tweet...] 1/[content of tweet...] 1/x
[content of tweet...] (1)(when the total number of eventual tweets is not known-- this mode seems more common)
I've been collecting twitter thread examples (a whole sixteen of them!) for a while now in anticipation of exploring these numbering conventions a bit more. the end-of-the-tweet positioning is the most common numbering style I've seen, overall. but it's not the only one. on rare occasion, the numbers may come first. plenty of threads don't including numbering at all.
so I have sixteen tabs-worth of twitter threads open next to this blogpost draft right now (I'll link them all at the bottom, pseudo-reference-list-style), and while such a random sample of course can't be truly representative of all the twitter threads that have been created in recent months, they at least give me the beginnings of some general insights into twitter thread numbering conventions.
my main finding? the convention of numbering the tweets in a thread on twitter is dying.
at the very least, it's become a marker of formality, more than a useful signal to readers about the order or length of the composition. numbers seem to be less important to a thread's legibility now that the twitter platform supports and displays threaded tweets so smoothly for most people.
I'm surprised by this, for some reason.
but of these sixteen example threads, only 4 include fully numbered tweets (3 at the end as shown above, and 1 at the beginning). another 10 forego numbering altogether, and 2 include numbering for content within the thread, but not as a marker for each separate tweet.
so there you have it. some really, really informally-gathered data about a quirky little internet genre.
it's interesting, right? it is to me. twitter is a culturally powerful and maddeningly ephemeral discursive
space. how conventions emerge and spread and morph a little over time is fascinating in any genre or medium. looking at how it seems to be working on twitter helps me think of twitter as not so special. sure, it's different, but it's mostly made of humans just the same way email chains and academic journals are.
and speaking of platforms and their power...author Robin Sloan makes a good argument here (and a cleverly presented one at that) about how social media could work vs. how it currently works.
as promised, the twitter threads I referenced in this random exploration of mine, listed here in chronological order. I'll add a note that linking them here like this takes them out of context. they may or may not make as much sense from outside the constant/endless/fast-paced nature of twitter as experienced by those who spend too much time scrolling around within it.
No comments:
Post a Comment