Chatting through pictures? A classification of images tweeted in one week in theUKandUSA

Abstract

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.

Gender and image sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp in the UK

“…On Twitter, photographs are the most commonly shared type of image, typically of one or a few people. Screenshots and hybrid or layered images are also sometimes shared (randomly selected U.K. and U.S. images from a week in 2014: Thelwall, Goriunova, Vis, Faulkner, Burns, Aulich, et al, 2016). On Instagram, the most common images are selfies (24%), friends (22%), activities (15%), gadgets (11%), food (11%), pets (3%) and fashion (3%) (20 recent photos from each of 50 regular active users connected to popular accounts Hu, Manikonda, & Kambhampati, 2014).…”

Visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images

“…As such, they challenge the feasibility of cross-platform analysis and have thus far marked its limits. Social media research has continued a broader trend in social research of privileging unimodal approaches focused on text (Bruns & Burgess, 2015) over multimodal approaches acknowledging the importance of visual content (Highfield & Leaver, 2016;Thelwall et al, 2016). However, while the visual poses particular analytical challenges, we argue that images play a pivotal role within the richly multimodal nature of many platform vernaculars.…”

Which image types do universities tweet?

“…Twitter is widely used for image sharing (Thelwall et al, 2016) and has supported the rise of citizen journalism, aided by the fact that most Twitter users can share information virtually instantaneously on their mobile phones from wherever they happen to be (Murthy, 2011). In 2009, for example, an ordinary user's tweet was the first to broadcast an image of US Airways flight 1549 after a successful emergency landing in the Hudson River.…”

“…percent of the images were of famous people or related to them in some way. However, the purpose for posting an image was rarely clear (Thelwall et al, 2016).…”

“…Approximately 9 percent of images tweeted from the UK and USA in one study contained text, such as chat dialogue or sayings, and another approximately 15 percent of the images were screen grabs from phones to share what the users were currently doing on their phone (e.g., listening to music, playing games, reading text messages, checking social media services, or looking at the weather) (Thelwall et al, 2016). Screenshots have been described as a virtual form of photography (Moore, 2014).…”