Taking a break from all the politics, Brenda Moon and I have examined everything that goes on in the Australian Twittersphere on a given day. We found that older, more sociable uses of Twitter persist in spite of everything. Our article is out now in The Conversation and Nordicom Review. The research was made possible by the TrISMA LIEF project, funded by the Australian Research Council and led by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.

The Nordicom Review article was published under an open access licence – here’s the full abstract:

Previous research into social media platforms has often focused on the exceptional: key moments in politics, sports or crisis communication. For Twitter, it has usually centred on hashtags or keywords. Routine and everyday social media practices remain underexamined as a result; the literature has overrepresented the loudest voices: those users who contribute actively to popular hashtags. This article addresses this imbalance by exploring in depth the day-to-day patterns of activity within the Australian Twittersphere for a 24-hour period in March 2017. We focus especially on the previously less visible everyday social media practices that this shift in perspective reveals. This provides critical new insights into where, and how, to look for evidence of onlife traces in a systematic way.