Moving Beyond Description

Like others writing for this Communication and Sport forum, I review for a number of journals that focus on communication, sport, or both. And, as others also note, I’ve read an increasing number of manuscripts centered on (and I use “centered on” purposefully here) Twitter. If I were to tweet my general take, maybe I would write:

I see much of what I review as descriptive—learning more about what athletes/journalists/fans say, packaged neatly by theme.#whatsthemeaning.

There is, of course, value in such research. But my hashtag gives away my general sense about it: I’m sometimes left with little conceptual or theoretical substance about a social media platform that is important for what it facilitates, “a significant ‘demotic turn’ (i.e. ordinary people are able to break ‘news,’ produce media content, or voice their opinions publicly)” (Murthy, 2012, p. 1064).

Perhaps this is natural in the life cycle of our scholarship around Twitter and other forms of social media. To me, descriptive studies, most often involving limited content analyses, made perfect sense during the relative infancy of this mass messaging media service: We were trying to figure out what it is, how people use it, and for what purpose they use it. We needed to get a general sense—for benchmarking purposes, if for no other reason—about its prima facie differences with more traditional media forms. (And the irony of referring to Twitter as somehow having matured beyond its infancy—when it was launched only in 2006—is not lost on me. However, such is the digital realm.)

The next logical step after we have a good sense about those things is to pursue studies that put a much higher priority on the wider sociocultural context and on theory. In other words, providing much more substance about what all this tweeting really means and its implications for what we already know. What is consequential and how so?

From a pragmatic perspective, Twitter can be an easy media form to study, at least when it comes to straightforward, limited content analyses. Data collection is facilitated by easy-to-use digital tools. A researcher can pretty quickly compile what might be seen as a very impressive data set—upward of 20,000 tweets. Coding can also be simple and straightforward. For example, one recent study I read had reached acceptable to high reliability with 60 undergraduate coders. Yes, sixty. This seems unimaginable (or, at least, very difficult) with coding a video or texts much longer than 140 characters.

On the other hand, though, I would argue that as our analysis deepens, studies that employ Twitter should not, logically, remain so easy. I am not saying that research replicating earlier studies would not be useful (albeit because of the nature of Twitter, this is a more challenging prospect than it might seem), but the “low-hanging fruit” is gone, generally. As we consider what we already know and our questions become more sophisticated, so will our methodology. Despite the cursory form of its messages, Twitter is highly complex when we consider the scope of its users, increasing technological capabilities of its interface, its integrated functions (e.g., breaking news and marketing), and the role that it plays in the wider interpersonal–mass communication landscape. More comprehensive approaches that account for these features are necessary.

Asking questions that are more theoretically grounded will logically lead us to more complex and interesting approaches to Twitter. As we delve more deeply into the literature in areas such as sociology, psychology, informatics, and communication studies more generally, we will see those possibilities.

I will mention a few theoretical lenses that I have not yet seen in the Twitter-related research I’ve reviewed for this and other journals. I admit that these are frameworks of interest to my areas of inquiry. But I see them as useful in relating the central function of Twitter, self-production (Murthy, 2012), with issues of cultural power. I would start with a case for Erving Goffman, who has certainly been cited by many reading this forum—but not likely in tandem with Twitter. Murthy (2012) explores Twitter in light of Goffman’s interactionist work and points to three of Goffman’s themes around “talk”: ritualization, participation framework, and embedding, as useful frameworks (for more, see Goffman, 1981). Murthy’s work here is deliberately unfinished, and he provides enough insight into the Goffman–Twitter connection to provide a strong departure for subsequent research using an interactionist lens.

Research in journalism studies is also helpful (and I’m often surprised at how little we consult this literature). For instance, Lasorsa (2012) employs Bourdieu’s field theory to examine the intersection of gender and journalistic norms on Twitter; his analysis invites extension of field theory into further questions around social media, media production, and gender. The work of Foucault—especially his ideas around panoptic surveillance and governmentality—remains useful in considering identities, discourses, and social media such as Twitter (see Markula, 2014).

There are critical methodologies for understanding Twitter as a site of discourse around power and identity. For instance, Brock (2012) uses critical technoculture discourse analysis to explain “Black Twitter.” Such an approach—combining communication studies, technology studies, and critical race theory—could be a model for the complex issues that we address at the intersection of culture, discourse, identity, power, and bodily performance in the Twitterverse.

None of this matters, however, if we’re not convinced that social media such as Twitter have impact, either on individuals (a media effects approach) or more broadly, on the culture. In a sense, that is the ultimate question. Is Twitter really a game changer in the ways in which we think and interact? Is it consequential in our media industries and cultural discourse or is it just helping to fray the edges a little? We have anecdotal evidence of its influence on our “real lives” in the havoc caused on the U.S. stock market in 2013 by single hoax tweet—“Obama is injured”—after the Associated Press feed was hacked (Chozick & Perlroth, 2013). Scholars have started delving into issues of impact by looking at the relationship between Twitter activity and other forms of political engagement (Park, 2013). Questions about “media effects” will not be easy to tackle because of the very nature of the Twitterverse itself and the way it interacts with so many other forms of media (notably, television).

Others in this forum have addressed this issue in different ways, but I’ve attempted to underscore my final point by (mostly) avoiding a single, key word throughout this essay, one that appears many times in each issue of this journal and in its title. There is no doubt that our focus—communication and sport—is relevant; look no further than television viewership data or the number of tweets around mass audience events in the United States and abroad. However, what we study ought to interface more with the social sciences and the humanities. I would love to see more of that literature in the articles I review. The result would be more meaningful, better informed, and more relevant work—#goodresearch.