Critical investigation of media artifacts in American popular culture

Media Artifact in American Culture

Twitter: An Arising Media Artifact in American Culture

In the course of an average year in viewing mainstream American culture, an innumerable amount of fads come and go, gaining their respective fifteen minutes of fame on the stage that is set by the American media industry. After spending what is often a brief time in the spotlight, these media trends tend to fade out nearly as abruptly as they blossomed. The capacity of a media artifact to truly transform American culture is far less likely than the capacity for that artifact to become a blip on the radar screen.

However, there are a select few instances of media artifacts extending far beyond the generally-allotted fifteen minutes of fame and moving into the realm of game-changing cultural phenomena. Such an instance can be seen in the creation of the social networking site, Twitter, which has quickly become a staple in American society. From politicians to comedians, clergymen to school-teachers, this media application has been significantly embraced and has taken the world -- and particularly the American population -- by storm. Its rooting in the field of communication allows observers to understand the depth of which Twitter has changed American society and culture, and can be understood further in the field of communication through many different theories, including that of symbolic convergence.

Twitter as a Rising Force in American Culture

Twitter is an online social networking and blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known to the mainstream public as "tweets." Created in 2006 by software architect, Jack Dorsey, Twitter rapidly gained global popularity, attaining over 200 million users by 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day (Sagolla, 2009, p.1). The basis of the launching of Twitter was simple: allow users a way to represent themselves to the public in a way that is both unlimited and limited at the same time. Unlike other social networking applications such as Facebook, which allow users to include aspects of nearly every facet of their lives into one personalized web-page, Twitter placed a limit on the capacity for its users to share. Rather than including every aspect of their daily routine into their Twitter, users find themselves limited. Say what you will, but think about how you say it. In forming and communicating brief 140-character messages, status updates and thoughts with the world through Twitter, users are forced to edit themselves for content and clarity in order to get right to the point. It is in this manner that topics are quickly generated and tweeted out into the "Twitterverse," allowing the world brief insight into the minds behind the messages.

Twitter got off to a slow start but began to generate significant media attention when politicians and celebrities began praising Twitter as an efficient way to relay information. However, despite this media focus on celebrity use, Twitter was largely marketed to the "every-man" who encompassed the majority of the Twitter population. The tipping point for Twitter into the realm of cultural and communication phenomena is largely cited as the March of 2007 South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day, all due to marketing strategies set in place within the festival boundaries by Twitter executives (Douglas, 2007, p.1). Newsweek's Steven Levy noted, "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways of the festival, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," which attracted the attention of nearly every concert-goer (Levy, 2007, p.1). He continued, "Hundreds of concert-goers kept tabs on each other via constant tweets . . . Panelists and performers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it" (Levy, 2007, p.1).

From this point on, media attention and word of mouth continuously added to Twitter's growing user population, allowing the site to achieve the vast amount of users that it has today. In only a few short years, Twitter has evolved from a blossoming media site aimed at providing brief messages to the world into a cultural and communicative phenomena upon which trends, political commentary, media, arts and entertainment, religion, and national and global events are communicated. Twitter has become a facet of American life that cannot be ignored, even by those who have maintained the notion that web-based social media is unnecessary. Nearly every journalistic endeavor that makes the national news is rooted somehow in the world of Twitter. From entertainment to news, Twitter continues to hold its own. In the past year alone, NASA astronaut Mike Massimino made headlines by sending the first tweet from space, the media disaster surrounding Charlie Sheen led him to break into the Guinness Book of World Records for most Twitter followers reached in one week, and tweets up and down the American East Coast traveled faster than the seismic activity created by the movement of a late-August earthquake. Clearly, the presence of Twitter in so many facets of the average American's life is both evident and undeniable.

Basis in Symbolic Convergence Theory

Some researchers within the field of communication have found that Twitter holds a basis in the Symbolic Convergence Theory, which is based on a belief that meanings, emotions, values and the motives for action are found in the realm of people trying to make sense out of a common experience. First proposed by Ernest Bormann in the early 1970s, the theory offers an explanation for the appearance of a group consciousness, consisting of shared emotions, motives and meanings (Bormann, 1996, p. 81). Symbolic Convergence is based on the belief that all people who are working together to reach a common goal almost always exchange fantasies proposed by group members in an effort to create social cohesion within the group. In the context of Twitter, fantasy and social cohesion can be expressed in user's inclusion of stories or jokes that contain or reveal emotion rather than pertaining to what is actually going on within the group at that given time (Griffin, 1997, p. 15).

While some may argue that Twitter does not exist in the basis of fantasy, researchers who accept this belief wholeheartedly disagree. While a select few members of the Twitter community actually tweet relative to the experiences they take part in within certain social contexts within the world, other Twitter members who take part in the "trending" of these topics by commenting on these messages or creating their own messages to put forth into the realm of Twitter are largely only commenting on an idealized notion they have developed within their own minds. Rather than commenting on an aspect of life that they themselves have experienced, Twitter allows individuals to take part in the fantasy of direct-involvement by grouping these like messages into categories that tend to make fact and fantasy hard to discern.

In essence, the ability for Twitter members to communicate amongst one another allows them to both create and maintain their shared identity. This is the exact notion that Bormann created when his theory was founded. Bormann posited that significant symbols are shared by group members and referred to these symbols as fantasies, not as a judgment upon their existence but as a recognition of the power they hold within a group (Rozell, 2009, p.152). The fantasy of the group is not based in reality as the members of the group experience it; instead they share a story that chains outward into the minds of others, allowing more and more people to be drawn into the conversation, and therefore into the group itself (Rozell, 2009, p.153). Such a dynamic is clearly apparent in the realm of Twitter, especially in understanding the chain-reactions of communication that are set off when one individual chooses to bring a new topic into the forefront for distribution and continued communication, allowing Twitter to be viewed not only as a media artifact but as a basis for the continued study of Symbolic Convergence within the communication field.

Twitter as a Media Artifact

In being able to understand Twitter as both a media artifact and as a facet of the Symbolic Convergence Theory, one is better able to assess what exactly the influence Twitter has had on society means. Not only has Twitter affected the American masses in terms of communication and culture, but its ability to infiltrate the minds and homes of these Americans has made Twitter a viable form of marketing and agenda setting for institutions, industries, political factions and the like. The fact exists that Twitter has the ability to change the way people think, but the question remains as to whether our thinking is based on fact or on a facet of the fantasy that is embodied in the realm of Twitter and the messages encompassed within it.

Content delivered via Twitter comes from areas and agencies that one would rarely associate, but all have the capacity to engrain their messages into the minds of readers due to their massive numbers of respective followers and the content of these messages. For example the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been using Twitter to provide updates regarding the H1N1 situation, while the U.S. Army utilizes its Twitter to recruit soldiers (Case and King, 2011, p. 97). In the same vein, JetBlue uses Twitter as part of its corporate communications function, while companies such as K-Mart, Sears and Dell use Twitter to answer customer service questions (Kulviwat and Sledgianowski, 2009, p. 81). The responses such corporations, for example, receive can either be attributed to extremely good content and marketing tactics, or to the capacity for Twitter users to become interested in creating a more unified space for themselves through their aligning with such promotions in a manner attributed to the previously-noted Symbolic Convergence Theory. Whether right or wrong, the ability for groups such as the aforementioned corporations and organizations to rally support, customer patronage and the like can be criticized as being a poor representation of the ability of the American public to draw their own conclusions and form their own opinions without the herd mentality that is often associated with Twitter and other social networking sites.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

In coming to an understanding about whether or not Twitter is good, bad or mediocre in the context of American culture and society, one must look at the benefits and setbacks that Twitter presents to the general context of American culture and society respectively. In viewing the benefits, it must be noted that Twitter has opened up the ability for individuals to become immersed in areas of knowledge and opinion to which they would be unexposed in other settings. For instance, Twitter has become a utilized tool in many American classrooms in order for teachers to better bridge the gap between teaching current events in the classroom and asserting that students fully understand the importance of what they are being taught. In connecting current-events to social media sites like Twitter, teachers have viewed a higher level and capacity for long-term memory in students who not only have the ability to learn something within the context of the classroom, but expand upon it within the context of Twitter (Cluskey, Elbeck, Hill and Strupeck, 2011, p.3). However, with this increase in general knowledge, Twitter does little to frame opinion and content which can alter the experience from one of learning to one of desensitizing, some scientists say.

In a society which tends to be obsessed with the notion that bigger and faster is always better, Twitter has the capacity to damage American society should we become too immersed in its consistent use. Some scientists have found that the fast-paced media that Twitter embodies has the ability to make us indifferent to human suffering. These researchers have found that emotions linked to moral sense are slow to respond to news and events and have failed to keep up with the modern world (Telegraph, 2009, p.1). The cultural standards of years passed that once involved prominence in activities such as reading books and meeting friends -- which allow people the space to define their morals -- have instead been overtaken by news snippets and fast-paced social networking which has the capacity to desensitize people to news and events that would otherwise cause mental anguish.

In a study published by the National Academy of Sciences, researcher Mary Helen Yang noted, "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality" (Telegraph, 2009, p.1). Such a belief is a concern amongst some, but the general opinion surrounding Twitter and its stance as a game-changer in the area of American culture and society is that of acceptance and excitement. Overall, Twitter has made its users excited to explore new content and become what they believe to be "actively involved" in facets of American life that they would otherwise be separated from. Take the current Occupy Wall Street movement that has taken the media and Twitter by storm in the past few weeks. Users far outside the boundaries of New York City have aligned themselves with the causes rallied for by the individuals who have taken their fight to the streets. However, the question of how really involved these Twitter followers are, again, comes highly into play in viewing the debate between fantasy and reality. Are these supporters existing in a fantasy world, based in the technologically-limiting world of communicating via their computers, or are they truly involved in the cause, "actively" participating in a new form of valid communication?