Managing Participation through Modal Affordances on Twitter

Abstract

Fawn Draucker and Lauren Collister, 'Managing Participation through Modal Affordances on Twitter ' (2015) On Twitter, retweets function as a method of reporting speech and spreading the talk of other users. We propose that changes to the interface and mechanisms of Twitter have led to the coexistence of two complementary forms of retweeting. The Preserving Retweet, enabled by the Twitter interface, directly reports speech and retains attribution to the original author, but it does not allow for any modification or indication of stance.The Adapting Retweet, a user-created norm studied by boyd et al. (2010), allows users the option to add comments to pre-existing tweets but resulting in confusion in attribution. Using an updated form of Goffman's participation framework, we analyze the use of these two types of retweets and their impact on attribution. Draucker and Collister: Managing Participation through Modal Affordances on Twitter 2 IntroductionAll language use builds on previous instances of what Becker (1995) calls 'languaging'; therefore all talk is implicitly connected to the voices of past experiences. One way for speakers to negotiate the history of their talk is by using the resource often referred to as reported speech. Reported speech, while not necessarily an exact repetition of a previous speaker's words, is used by speakers to explicitly assign responsibility for portions of their talk to prior voices. Goffman's (1981) approach to participation, discussed in more detail below, has laid the groundwork for many studies investigating this tangle of voices in spoken discourse (e.g. Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004;Hill & Zepeda, 1992;Irvine, 1996;Levinson, 1988). Few studies, however, focus on the ways that reported speech and participation function in rapidly changing computer-mediated conversational environments.In this study, we describe the dialectic relationship between the evolution of the interface of the microblogging platform Twitter and the extant practices and needs of its user base regarding reported speech. In 2009, the designers of Twitter added a new feature to the medium to accommodate the user-created manual practice of sharing prior text from other Twitter users, most often using the notation 'RT' to indicate that the material was being 'retweeted.' This interface change allowed tweeters to more easily share others' tweets with their own followers through the simple click of a button, with minimal imposition of the user's own voice on the prior text. We focus here on this change to the Twitter interface and its impact on the practice of sharing prior texts on this platform, attending to the ways in which users incorporate the new feature into their extant practices and how this allows them to negotiate the interplay of voices and the assignment of responsibility in ways that are particular to Twitter.We begin with an introduction to Twitter as a platform of communication to situate the analysis in context. Following this introduction, we provide background information on reported speech, a ...

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