Conference Live-Tweeting: the Ultimate Frontier of Knowledge Dissemination?

Over the last decade, the affordances of new portable technological devices such as smartphones have been increasingly converging with those of computers. As a consequence, users have acquired the possibility of accessing the Internet whenever and wherever they wish. Constantly updating one’s status on social networks and taking part in virtual conversations has become a rather common practice. Live-tweeting, i.e engaging on the microblogging platform Twitter for a continuous period of time with a sequence of focused entries (“tweets” of 140 characters) in order to cover an unfolding live event (<https://dev.twitter.com/media/live-tweeting>), is rapidly spreading among many professional categories like scholars and academics. The latter exploit Twitter potentially ubiquitous and real-time communication to report about the conferences they attend, thus keeping their readers informed about what is being discussed and enabling them to virtually attend the conference. It is possible to assume that the receivers of conference tweeting will certainly include scholars, but possibly also lay readers, who bump into it while pursuing other interests. Since live tweets can potentially reach anybody who surfs the Net and there is no way of knowing who actually reads them, the term “networked audience” has been coined to refer to the stratified and interconnected audience of Twitter entries, which ‘consists of real and potential viewers’ of tweets and ‘who are connected not only to the user, but to each other, creating an active, communicative network’ (Marwick and Boyd 2010). So that it can reach such a heterogeneous audience, the information disseminated by presenters and contributors alike undergoes a process of re-contextualization as it is adjusted to fit the tweet format. In light of these considerations, this paper intends to approach the theme of knowledge dissemination through social networks, and particularly Twitter, addressing the following issues: 1. What is the communicative purpose of conference tweets? Are they meant primarily to fulfill an ideational or a relational function? And depending on this, can they be considered an emerging genre in knowledge dissemination? 2. What type of contents are most commonly disseminated via tweets, i.e. is it more likely to find a synthetic recapitulation of findings or a problematisation of issues? What cognitive processes are involved? This would in turn shed light on the epistemological role attributed to this medium. 3. How do the medium affordances impact on the cognitive and linguistic processes at stake? Are there any recurrent traits characterizing the structure of both single tweets and whole ‘discussions’? 4. In order to answer these questions, a sample of tweets will be downloaded, including live tweeting (both edited by a moderator and unedited), traditional asynchronous posts taken from conference pages and users’ profiles. Their content will be processed manually as well as with software for corpus interrogation, and whenever possible these materials will be considered alongside the original communicative event from which they originated (conference presentation slides or video recording). References Boyd, Danah / Golder, Scott / Lotan, Gilad. 2010. Tweet Tweet Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences HICSS-43, IEEE: Kauai, HI. <http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf>. Live-Tweeting Best Practices. Twitter.< https://dev.twitter.com/media/live-tweeting.>