when talk is text: the performativity of working out loud on twitter
TRANSCRIPT
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When talk is text:
The performativity of working out loud on Twitter
Viviane Sergi ESG UQAM
Claudine Bonneau ESG UQAM
31st EGOS Colloquium, Athens, Greece, July 2-4, 2015
Sub-theme 16: Organization as communication: The performative power of talk
Introduction
For a great deal of individuals living in the 20th century, work has meant to be working for
someone, in an organization. During that period of time, ‘organization’ mainly took the shape of
either the factory, the bureaucracy, the corporation or the small business. But the recent decades,
with their fast-paced development of information and communication technology, have gradually
seen these forms of organization, these places where work was traditionally done, transform and
mutate. At some point, the post-bureaucracy was declared as having replaced the old, inefficient
bureaucracy; then virtual (Boudreau et al., 1998) and project-based organizations (Hobday, 2000)
appeared. Nowadays, we hear about the holacracy (Monarth, 2014), a much flatter and fluid form
of organization. Organization theorists followed these transformations, some of them
documenting them and other, going even further by venturing into rarely-considered territories,
when reflecting upon organizations: pirate organizations (e.g. Vergne & Durand, 2012), social
movements (e.g., Soule, 2012; Sutherland et al., 2014), self-managed collectives (e.g., Rossi, 2015),
among others, are now studied to think about organizations, despite their differences with more
traditional organizations. The traditional organization has been pronounced dead a few times,
and of recently, so is traditional, 9-to-5 regular work: indeed, what is called the ‘sharing’ or ‘on-
demand’ economy, emblematized by companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit1, is only the
most recent instance of change that has lead some to pronounce such radical judgements on
1 These companies define themselves as platforms, putting in touch customers in need of a service (e.g., a car ride)
and individuals available to offer this service (e.g., anyone with a car). In this context, most of company’s employees are contractual workers, who individually decide to make themselves available or not. Generally, the customers and those offering the service are connected though a website or via a mobile application. Recently, theses companies have attracted a lot of attention given their success and also the wide range of repercussions, especially in terms of employment, that are associated to their work practices. See Scholz (2013) for elements of discussion on the implications of digital work for work and workers.
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organization and work. Our aim in this paper is not to discuss such claims, but rather to take the
current context, one of various changes, as a starting point to investigate first and foremost work,
but organization too.
In this context, it is hence becoming a mere truism to affirm that work and its organization are
currently experiencing a wave of change, and that new forms of work are emerging. Without
resorting to grand claims about the ‘end’ of organizations and work, many researchers underline
the growing flexibilization of work, supported by IT (see, for example, the articles in the special
topic forum on work in Academy of Management Review, 2013). IT used to designate PCs,
networks and the web; but in the last ten years, we have seen social media rise to unsuspected
heights. Some commentators like to point that social networking services like Facebook and
Instagram have number of users that places them in the top-ten of countries2. Users play with
these tools, including blogs, for a variety of reasons, and work is one of them. Indeed, social
media are growingly becoming one location where new work is done, where the experience of
work is expressed and also where new forms of work are exposed. Social media and online
publication tools are indeed more and more commonly used by professionals to narrate their
work (Winer, 2000), allowing them to ‘talk’ about their work as it is happening in an open and
communal fashion, rather than having to select a priori an audience to address (Majchrzal et al.,
2013) and to interact with.
In this research project, we examine a specific emergent practice referred to as ‘working out loud’
(hereafter WOL; Bonneau, 2013), which can be described as a process of continuously narrating
the work during the course of its realization. When ‘working out loud’, workers talk about how
they go about their tasks at hand, ask questions and share their results as they are being produced,
instead of waiting until a final deliverable is ready to publish to a broader audience. What is
unusual about this narration of work is that it takes place on social media, in a very public
fashion. Moreover, in most instances, this practice is informal, and it does not correspond to any
form of organizational requirement. Workers talk about their daily work, what they are doing and
experiencing in a way akin to casual conversations that could take place besides the water cooler.
However, contrarily to these water cooler conversations, working out loud takes on a written,
textual form, and is broadcasted to the world. This practice is not entirely new and is currently
being vividly promoted by ‘enterprise 2.0’ consultants (Williams, 2010; Stepper, 2014, Bozarth,
2014), while an increased number of companies are these days launching corporate social 2 For example, as of May 2015, Facebook had 1,44 billion monthly active users, which makes it the largest ‘country’,
ahead of China. Source : http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
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networking services (SNS) and microblogging platforms behind their firewalls to encourage
employees to share information, locate expertise, and collaborate. However, if ‘working out loud’
is becoming a known and distinguishable phenomenon online (recognized by events such as the
‘working out loud week’, or WOLWeek, that happened for the first time last November, see
Hinchcliffe, 2015), the informal uses of social networking sites by workers to narrate their work
to people inside or outside their organization – people they, for the most part, do not know – has
yet to be studied. Indeed, most social sciences researchers interested in microblogging practices at
work have focused on enterprise SNS aimed at an internal audience (DiMicco et al, 2008; Zhang
et al, 2010) and on situations where companies prescribe such practice to their employees (de
Zwart, 2011). With this study, we adopt a different approach to explore this phenomenon, by
investigating the informal uses of one of these social networking sites, namely Twitter, by
workers to narrate their work to people inside or outside their organization, whether authorized
or not by their employers. Given the increased usage of personal smartphones by employees
(Archambault & Grudin, 2012) and the growing popularity of ‘bring your own devices’ (BYOD)
policies (Smith, 2012), employees can use Twitter during work hours, even when enterprises
prohibit access to external SNS from workplace computers (Zhang et al, 2014).
Therefore, our study investigates working out loud by starting directly from the web, on Twitter,
rather than stemming from the context of a specific organization. We have selected Twitter as
the focal site of our current investigation of working out loud because it is there that the practice
of working out loud has, in the last few years, gained more preeminence. As of May 2015, the
microblogging platform Twitter had more than 302 million monthly active users (Twitter, 2015).
Since its opening in 2006, it offers a fast and lightweight means for individuals to publish
information for personal and professional purposes (Huberman et al, 2009). When created, new
Twitter accounts are public by default, meaning that anyone can follow them without asking for
permission. Unless users configure their account to make it private, their publications and
conversations are visible, facilitating the discovery of users and messages through serendipity.
The short length of tweets (140 characters) shapes how they are written and read, making it easy
to publish and skim large amounts of content quickly. The addition of the # symbol in front of
keywords (ex.: #work) to tag them is another convention developed by user for subject matter
categorization purposes. Called hashtags, they also affect the visibility of tweets, because users
can access all tweets using the same hashtag by clicking on it. They therefore facilitate the
articulation of collective narrative activities on a specific topic, which can lead to open
conversations between users sharing the same interests, even if they are not part of the same
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network. The asymmetrical attribute of connections – which can be unidirectional or
bidirectional – distinguishes Twitter from other SNS where ‘friendship’ has to be reciprocal to
access content shared. Twitter users can indeed follow users even if they are not following them
in return. ‘Following’ a user means that their tweets are displayed on the homepage’s newsfeed.
This broadcasting capability de facto creates high visibility and open communication to non-
targeted users since there is no need to indicate an intended addressee in the tweet. When
messages are retweeted, i.e. shared by other users, they can reach a larger audience than the
author’s own list of followers (Boyd et al, 2010). These functions make this platform less
intrusive than other direct communication tools such as instant messaging or email: no one is
forced to pay attention and no one needs to respond unless they wish to (Zhang et al, 2010).
Therefore, Twitter’s functionalities facilitate both ‘passive diffusion’ (by the author) and ‘passive
access’ (by the audience). While working out loud practice would be impractical with more
intrusive and direct communications tools, Twitter, provides an easy way for employees to make
their work behaviors, their expertise, the information they possess, and the activities they conduct
visible and known to others users inside or outside their organization, in a non-intrusive way.
In this paper, we start from the premise that what belongs to the ‘working out loud’
phenomenon is not only a practice (cf Nicolini, 2012), but that it is one that mainly adopts the
form of talk. We contend that working out loud is in fact a communicative practice that blends in
an intriguing way talk and text, a form of talk that incorporates elements commonly associated to
text, and a form of text that can adopt particularities of talk and conversations. We furthermore
approach this communicative practice from the stream of research identified as the
communicative constitution of organizations (hereafter, CCO), whose central idea is that
organization is a process of becoming stemming from communication (Taylor, 2009), rather than
being the location where communication happens; in other words, CCO starts from the
organizing properties of communication to address the fundamental question of the ontology of
organization, proposing that organization is constituted in communication (see for example
Taylor & Van Every, 2000; Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al., 2011). Generally speaking, CCO
aims to “[…] unpack the black box or the idealized abstraction that of an organization that is
rarely questioned.” (Putnam & Nicotera, 2009:161). As underlined by Brummans et al., “[w]hat
sets this research apart […] are its novel ways of theorizing and analyzing how organizations as
discursive-material configurations are reproduced and coproduced through ongoing
interactions.” (2014:173). CCO studies are all grounded in a performative view of language,
where the use of language is understood not simply as carrying meaning, but as doing things (cf
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Austin 1962). This perspective is currently characterized by three related, yet distinct, schools (see
Schoeneborn et al., 2014 for an explicit comparison). This study can be seen as belonging to the
tradition identified as the Montréal school. The Montréal school views organization both as an
entity (‘the organization’) and as a process (‘organizing’). In the Montréal school, the notions of
text and conversation, and more precisely, the movements between these two notions, have been
theorized as the building blocks of organization (cf Taylor & Van Every, 2000, 2011; see
Brummans et al., 2014 for an overview of CCO research, with special attention to the Montréal
school). As Aschcraft et al. have summarized, “[i]n other words, an organization is incarnated in
texts (e.g., documents, spokepersons) that speak in its name and through the conversations (e.g.
live exchanges) where these texts are (re)produced.” (2009: 20-21). As the quote from Brummans
et al. underline, the Montréal school proposes that organizational communication is at the same
time material and discursive (see also Cooren et al. 2012).
Moreover, the Montréal school is concerned with the question of the organization’s stabilization.
Notably, Cooren’s work (see, for example, Cooren 2004, 2006, 2010, 2012, Cooren & Fairhurst,
2009, Cooren & Matte, 2010, Cooren et al., 2012) has proposed that it is through a hybrid
understanding of agency – agency as extended to non humans, such as tools, documents, settings,
bodies, numbers and even more ‘abstract’ elements such as emotions and values, what he calls
‘figures’ – that we can shed light on how organization, through communication, achieve a form
of stabilization. Borrowing from Latour (1994, 2005), hybrid agency in CCO suggests that
‘communicating’ is not limited to human actors. In other words, constituting an organization
implies to create, assemble and mobilize elements (especially in textual form) that can hold on
and endure – elements that do so because of their capacity of to stay the same over time. This
property is especially highlighted by the contribution of texts (Cooren, 2004; Smith, 1984, 2001).
However, in the Montréal school as in CCO in general, the textual side of organization cannot be
separated from its conversational side (cf Taylor & Van Every, 2000): the organization is always
in movement (to what the verb ‘organizing’ refers to), but this emergence is always the result of a
variety of contributions by humans and non humans in interactions (cf Cooren & Fairhurst,
2009; see also Cooren’s idea of organization as plenum of agencies, 2006). Finally, it is through
these recurrent interactions in situation, which involve human and non human actors, that an
organization acquire a distinct entitative character, existing with an ‘identity’, possessing an
authority and ‘doing’ things through people speaking and acting on its behalf (in other words,
being authored; cf Taylor & Van Every, 2011). As Taylor and Van Every underline, “[t]he
mystery [of organization] is in the personification that occurs […]” (2011:2), and much of the
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studies conducted in this communication-centered perspective try to dissipate this mystery by
exploring how, in very detailed and empirical terms, the organization is accomplished and
achieved in mundane interactions – or, to use Brummans et al. formulation, “[to] explain how
generality emerges from performativity.” (2014:187).
This very broad and necessarily incomplete overview of CCO serves as the backdrop of our own
study, and allows us to problematize what is shared and appears on Twitter. Tweets, and
conversations that happen via the exchange of tweets, are usually not problematized as such: they
are taken for granted, considered de facto as talk and conversations, or in other cases, as texts.
However, informed by CCO and by our previous work both on WOL (Bonneau, 2013) and
textual agency (Sergi, 2013), we believe that there is more than meets the eye with tweets: what
are the tweets that give shape to the working out loud practice and, more precisely, what do they
do? Are the results they produce linked to the combination of talk and text that we see in tweets?
In other words, can talk be text, or can text be talk, empirically speaking? Previous studies have
led to reveal the organizing effects of talk and conversation (e.g. Boden, 1994; Robichaud et al.,
2004) and those of texts (e.g. Anderson, 2004; Callon, 2002). Do tweets resemble more talk, or
text? We thus aim to investigate what these tweets accomplish, for the persons who do work out
loud on Twitter, and to reflect on the form they adopt.
Exploring this empirical question will thus lead us to document, empirically, the variety of forms
that working out loud can take. We posit that working out loud does not correspond to a single
or unified practice, and that it can be practiced in many ways. Documenting this variety will allow
us to reflect on what this practice can generate for the people engaging in it. Given that working
out loud is not a formalized or mandatory practice, it must be productive in any way for the
individuals who do use Twitter in this distinctive manner. However, our empirical work here will
be limited to an investigation of the traces of this practice, as we will not conduct interviews with
these individuals. In this respect, we start from instances of talk to the textual, as we are
concerned with what happens once tweets are published; if understanding the motivations or
intentions of the individuals practicing working out loud, and discovering what they have
experienced as results stemming from this practice would be highly interesting to study, it is not
the focal point of this specific inquiry. In other words, our empirical work will lead us to identify
how working out loud can be practiced, and what results from the mise en circulation of these very
short texts that look and feel like talk. In this paper, we first propose to reveal the variety of
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forms that this practice can take, and we explore what, precisely, such a form of communication
might be producing and creating for the people engaging in it.
Behind this exploration of a rather new form of communicative practice, we also see the
possibility of pursuing a more theoretical inquiry. We explicitly place at the heart of our inquiry
the idea that tweets are not a banal and very short form of texts, but that this form of
communication, as any form of communication understood in a communication-centered
perspective, present performative properties: it does things (Austin, 1962). But when people talk
on Twitter, and especially work out loud, what is done, what is created, what is performed
through such instances of talk? And, more fundamentally, with this exploratory study, we wish to
explore a slightly provocative question: what results from talk that looks like text, or from text
that sounds like talk, empirically speaking? Taylor and Van Every’s ideas revolve around this
interplay between text and conversation, underlining that their separation is analytical: when we
turn to empirical, situated investigations, both are in constant relation. It is this interplay, the
passages from text to conversation, and from conversation to text, that create, sustain, transform
in a word, constitute – the organization. In their words, “[…] organization is generated in the
cross-over translation process from the more durable constructions of language, or texts, into the
fleeting processes of human interaction, or conversations, and vice versa.” (Taylor & Van Every,
2011:192). In the CCO perspective, in its most basic form, organization involves at least two
individuals (cf Taylor & Van Every, 2011), and some stabilization regarding roles, responsibilities,
hierarchy and the like (cf Cooren & Fairhurst, 2009). Other elements have been associated to
what an organization is, such as interconnected decision making, actorhood and identity, criteria
that Dobusch and Schoeneborn (forthcoming) have proposed to define what they call
‘organizationality’, a neologism that allows to expand and extent what can be labelled as an
organization. With this study, we acknowledge that are not fully located in what could be defined
as an organizational context. Rather, we are looking at tweets and conversations related to work,
that are about work. In this respect, a second, more theoretical concerns that we have with this
study relates to the relationships between work, communication and organization.
Intriguingly, work is not among the conceptual focus of most CCO scholars. Given the central
ontological question that they explore, that of the definition, existence and continuation of
organization, this is not surprising. At the same time, work is very much present, empirically
speaking, in CCO studies, as they tend to be richly and carefully illustrated with detailed examples
that showcase, essentially, people at work: these studies are, after all, dealing with organizational
communication, and organization is, most of the time, a place where people work (understood in
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a very broad way). But if CCO is about understanding, from a communication-centered
perspective, organization, then we consider that it could be fruitful to “bring work back in”, to
quote Barley and Kunda’s call (2001). Can work deepen CCO investigations around organization
and organizing? This question also drives our inquiry. By investigating a definitively work-related
communicative practice, but one that may or may not formally associated to an established
organizational setting, we will explore if this practice tell us something about the ontological
status of the organization. This is a second question that we will explore following our empirical
study of working out loud on Twitter.
Methodological approach
One key particularity of our research is that the forms of the WOL practice we are studying can
emerge as employee-driven initiatives and can be found in any organization and professional
field. In fact, up to now and based on our ongoing observations, the WOL practice appears to be
more informal than formal. It is only recently that some employees and consultants are referring
to this practice and are trying to make it more into an actual, more formalized, work practice (as
exemplified by the recent, and first, WOL week last November, see Hinchcliffe, 2015). Indeed,
working out loud is an activity that is available and accessible to any worker, employee or
professional, in all fields of activity possible and evolving in all settings imaginable, from
temporary self-employment in a one-person business to permanent employee in a transnational
firm. The only condition necessary to be working out loud, in the sense that we explore here, is
to be using Twitter to convey, in the form of tweets, comments, observations and material
related to the daily experience and processes of work. In this context, we cannot circumscribe
our data collection to specific organizations where it is encouraged or prescribed by the
employer, nor do we limit a priori our investigation to one professional community where
working out loud would already be quite common. Such an open-endedness pose methodological
challenges, especially in organization studies – as most studies in this field start from
organizations that already exists., which of course makes sense. If, ontologically speaking, CCO
studies challenge the existence of organizations as a reified entity that would exist independently
from situated and repeated interactions, concretely most research conducted in this line of
inquiry still aims at explaining how organizations that can be recognized, even those that can be
deemed fluid, such as online communities (e.g. Faraj et al, 2011), precarious, such as Anonymous
(e.g. Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015) or nascent (e.g., Chaput, 2012), hold over time (or not), and
express or achieve different features, like organizational identity. In a vast majority of cases, there
is an organization to explain. Our study clearly starts from a different point, outside any specific
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and formal organization, which does not exclude the possibility that working out loud may be
practice by someone who has a formal and contractual relationship to an organization via his or
her work.
In a similar fashion, most social studies of Twitter practices are focusing on individuals and/or
collectives sharing an interest, such as a political view, or auto-organized around an event, such as
a natural disaster (Weller et al, 2014). Their corpus can be gathered through specific search
criteria such as geographical location, subject matter, trend, keyword and/or hashtag. However,
these techniques cannot be used to collect data on distributed and heterogeneous phenomena
such as working out loud, because the boundaries of our ‘field site’ are fluid and situated. This is
due to the fact that the topics of those messages depend on the type of professional activities
being discussed. In other words, the content of WOL tweets is as diverse as work practices can
be. This means that we cannot use text mining functionalities to collect our data, simply because
it is impossible to predefine search queries using semantic or narrative patterns, nor specific
keywords or hashtags.
Because the boundaries of the ‘WOL field’ does not objectively pre-exist our inquiry, we needed
to devise a flexible methodological approach that would allow us to find what we cannot
precisely delineate in advance. To do so, we adopted a manual data collection strategy inspired by
ethnography (Hine, 2015). On an operational level, we use our own Twitter accounts to immerse
in the setting of WOL practice, by following users who publish work-related tweets and by
selecting tweets that correspond to our definition of working out loud, that we define in the
following fashion:
Any tweet narrating the work as it is being done, spontaneously published by any worker or professional that can take the form of observation, description, questioning, reflection or exclamation. The tweet can be directed (or not) to other people and can include pictures, videos and/or links to external web pages or online documents.
This definition is the main element that guides us through the ‘construction of the field’ (Amit,
1999). It is voluntarily inclusive to allow us to take account of a wide spectrum of work-related
tweets, but at the same time, it excludes tweets consisting of content curation (e.g. selecting and
sharing existing content, even if it is work-related) and promotion of finalized realization (for
instance, journalists or scholars referring to their latest publications).
Our data collection has been initiated in February 2014 and is still in progress. So far, we have
collected and analyzed a preliminary corpus of 200 naturally-occurring public tweets in English
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and French. This corpus was built through serendipity and bricolage. As a starting point, we
observed Twitter users who we were already following (mainly scholars, journalists and
knowledge workers). Using a snowball sampling approach, we were able to find new users
through their discussions and retweeted publications. In order to collect WOL tweets in other
professional areas, we also performed queries on Twitter’s internal search engine based on
intuitions made by asking ourselves: “who would share his work and what would they say to do
it?” We continuously refined our data collection strategy as our understanding of the WOL
practice developed and also to adapt it to unpredictable events. For instance, we discovered that
dedicated hashtags were adopted by some professionals (e.g.: #showyourwork, #shareyourwork,
#WOL, #WOLWeek) following the unexpected publication of books (Kleon, 2014; Bozarth,
2014), blogs (Stepper, 2014) and articles (Hinchcliffe, 2015) on the topic of working out loud.
The practice also started to get coverage from mainstream media – even though it is not always
explicitly designated by the term ‘working out loud’ – which drew our attention to users in
unexpected domains, such as farming (Beaudoin, 2015). We documented these new practices and
monitored them closely, while not limiting our selection to tweets found through those means.
All the tweets collected were documented in a log file, along with their date of publication, URL,
user’s professional status (if publicly available) and details about how we found them. The
recording of the tweet’s URL allows us to retrieve them back one month later in order to capture
interactions and discussions that followed their original publication. Our log file also includes our
field notes, where we record our impressions, provisional thought about what these observations
may mean and ideas about what to look at next (Hine, 2015).
Drawing on a qualitative and interpretative perspective, content analysis methods were used to
proceed to a thematic codification of all the tweets in order to identify preliminary categories
associated with their nature and possible outcomes. We drew on the conceptual lens of CCO and
specifically the related notions of textual agency and of performativity to make sense of the
emerging patterns. Focusing on a modest corpus of tweets allowed us to produce research
intuitions that could not be discovered through a quantitative analysis of a large dataset, that is,
the role that Twitter can play in workers’ lives. In the context of a ‘computational turn’ in social
sciences and humanities (Berry, 2011), and a growing appeal for ‘Big Data’ analysis in those
fields, it is essential to recognize the value of qualitative research based on small scale studies.
Considering the importance of context in the study of work practices, small datasets may be
combined with ‘thick data’, e.g. ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973 cited by Wang, 2013; Ford,
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2014) to provide more in-depth insights into social uses of Twitter and meaning-making
processes (Boyd & Crawford, 2012). To do so, in a following study we will conduct semi-
structured interviews with 30 users that were part of our preliminary corpus. This second phase
of our research will add a layer of ‘thickness’ to the data by allowing us to discuss digital practices
retrospectively, with the benefit of contextualization and reflexivity from the subjects themselves.
It will allow for a longitudinal aspect to emerge and provides space for new issues to be explored
and for interpretations to be checked (Hine, 2015). However, for the purposes of this paper, we
discuss only the textual traces found on Twitter, e.g., our preliminary corpus of 200 tweets.
The various forms of WOL talk and their effects
As mentioned previously, working out loud is a communicative practice that is made in and out
of talk3. This section of the paper aims to answer the empirical questions driving our research
efforts: 1) what are these different forms of WOL talk? 2) what are their effects? We first
categorize the corpus of tweets we collected in order to show the variety of these micro-instances
of talk, and we then interrogate what they are bringing into life.
The following table offers a first look at our ongoing analysis of the repertoire we are currently
building. Up to now, we have identified six distinct forms of talk that the working out loud
practice can adopt. Each form is described in the following table and illustrated with two or three
examples of tweets; the last column presents what effects are produced by these various forms.
Table 1. Emerging repertoire of WOL talk and their effects
Forms of WOL talk
Descriptions Examples Effects
1. Exposing Work in development
Post preliminary work, notes and sketches
It took roughly two hours to realize this sketch into the piece today. It's about 15 seconds of music. [photo of a music sheet] #showyourwork
Produce traces of work process
Difficulty Describe problems and obstacles
Oh crap - Google spreadsheet I’m using to capture #SAA2014 tweets has just about reached its max number of records
Interaction Depict exchanges, give credit
I asked @stipton for feedback on my session I did at #DevLearn. She's honest and fair. I haven't even opened the email yet. #ShareYourWork
2. Contextualizing Environment and resources
Present work setting
I've probably used up like one thousand sticky notes in the last week. #work #twork [photo of a wall covered with notes]
3 See Appendix I for details on how we distinguish ‘talk’ and ‘conversation’, given the specific forms that
conversations take on Twitter.
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Position Share location information
I'm in China all this week, so please look for me on @pearson, where I'll check in remotely.
Create ambient
awareness Expertise Exhibit skills Shared @AdobeConnect virtual session tips w/instructor from another dept. teaching online 4 1st time - he was pleasantly surprised
3. Documenting Progression Report
completed actions
Gosh, 18 months of village fieldwork over. Ethnography plus we interviewed 370 individuals, now comes the writing.
Plan the course
of action
Method Communicate strategies and choices
Going for flesh coloured rectangles over the eyes as the `cleanest' mode of anonymising the photos for the What They Post book.
Goal Formulate intentions
I think things are pretty much in place. Now I just have to fill the cracks and make it read better. #nanowrimo
4. Teaching Lessons learned Solve
problems I implemented the edge-sorting algorithm and tried it with real data. Lesson: separate connected components first.
Transform
experience into reusable
knowledge
Best practices Show samples of work
Everyone loves code! I wrote some more today -- it's way complicated because.. JavaScript! Which is cool. ;-) [link to code]
5. Expressing
Feelings Express emotions
Just realised I hadn’t sent the examiners report I wrote 3 weeks ago. Now feel bad for keeping student in suspense for no reason.
Create a cathartic space
Mockery Use sarcasm, humor
I'm beta-testing a new game today called "How long will it take to get to the bottom of my inbox after a week-long vacation." #amworking
Complaints Whine about work
There must be better ways to do conference calls. #frustration
6. Reflective thinking
Consideration Evaluate and recognize
so creating a curriculum for a new undergraduate #UX program is not as easy as it seems. Prereqs & sequencing are killing me.
Make judgments
about what has happened
Dilemmas Describe inner struggle
Tough meeting @tobylanzer in Maban. Refugees who had no role in killing aid workers are the 1st to suffer the impact of NGO withdrawals.
Assessment Consider the situation and make decision
Between doing my annual review and replying to a mentor about what I’ve been up to, I think I need some “say no” counseling soon.
1. Exposing. This form of WOL regroups tweets that are generating tangible manifestations of
work throughout its execution. External links to ‘work in progress’ documents, pictures or videos
are often included to share concrete traces of the work at the moment it is done. In the example
shown in Figure 1, a music composer publishes a sketch of a music sheet written during the day
and explains that it took him more than two hours to produce 15 seconds of music. This tweet
demonstrates how the process unfolds and how the deliverable evolves. It gives visibility to
backstage work (Star & Strauss, 1999) that is usually not accessible to people who are not in the
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situation. Drawing on a ‘work in progress’ culture, some workers no longer think that something
has to be finished before they let strangers see it. Working in such an open manner can generates
input on preliminary, incomplete and imperfect iterations. Professionals can test drafts and
prototypes and improve them based on the feedback received.
Figure 1. Example of WOL tweet exposing work in development
2. Contextualizing. The tweets belonging to this form of WOL describe and/or show the
context and the place in which work unfolds. Figure 2 shows a tweet in which a hockey coach
gives details about his spatial and material setting, by posting a photo of his office wall covered
with numerous sticky notes. Other workers provide information on their availability, schedule
and geographical location. We also found examples where expertise and credibility are
demonstrated through the narration of actions. These information fragments have the potential
to build and maintain a common ground, thus facilitating the interpretation of work practices by
others. They promote the work observability needed to maintain the ‘ambient awareness’ of
workers’ environment and activities (Ellison et al., 2011; Leonardi & Meyer, 2014).
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Figure 2. Example of WOL tweet contextualizing work environment and resources
3. Documenting. Through these tweets, workers keep a record of milestones accomplished and
decisions they have taken. They describe their methods and ways of doing thing. In the example
shown in figure 3, an ethnographer reports on the work completed (field work and interviews)
and announces his next step (writing). Others formulate intentions, project ideas, goals and
objectives, therefore articulating the planning and continuation of actions. The tweets belonging
to this category are mainly descriptive and follow patterns similar to those found in project team
discussions (for example, in project status meetings) and reports. However, their style is less
formal.
Figure 3. Example of WOL tweet documenting progression of work
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4. Teaching. This category of WOL tweets displays features of work in ways that are designed to
make them observable and somehow reproducible. Workers expose details of their trials and
error, indicate how to solve a problem and expose their best practices. For example, an
information architect discusses the results of his experimentations with a data-sorting algorithm
and explicitly formulates the lessons learned (separate connected components first). These types
of WOL tweets display work practices in ways that are designed to attract the attention of readers
to the activity or certain features of it. By articulating their thoughts for themselves and others
(Fayard & Metiu, 2014), these workers transform their experience into explicit knowledge that
can become a learning resource for a potentially global audience.
Figure 4. Example of WOL tweet teaching lessons learned
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5. Expressing. So far, the examples we presented were mainly talking about the work itself. But
we also found a great amount of tweets in which workers verbalize and exteriorize their
emotions and feelings, whether positive (ex.: happy moments) or negative (ex.: frustration,
regrets). Hence, this fifth form of WOL practice is more expressive rather than simply
informative. Humor is often use when complaining about work, as it is the case in the example
shown in Figure 5 where a freelance editor complains on the impressive amount of emails
received while on vacation. In that sense, this WOL practice may have a cathartic function, where
Twitter provides and emotionally supportive environment where workers can ‘blow off steam’ in
order to reduce stress and tensions. In this same example, another user responded to the initial
tweet to say she is experiencing the same situation.
Figure 5. Example of WOL tweet expressing mockery
6. Reflective thinking. Although tweets are very short texts and presumably written in a quick
manner in-between tasks, we found instances where workers take the time to step back, think
and share their considerations with their audience. In these tweets, workers are commenting
inwardly about a situation, in the sense that they seem to be talking to themselves, while at the
same time opening these inner reflections to others. Hence, these tweets not only have a
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communicative function: they also allow workers to be more conscious of their own experience.
For example (figure 6), a professor in the middle of the creation of a new program curriculum
evaluates and recognizes the complexity of such endeavor. Others share their assessment of a
situation and communicate how they have faced dilemmas forcing them to make difficult
choices. This opportunity for ‘reflection in action’ and ‘post-mortem’ evaluation allows workers
to make judgments about what happens in their work.
Figure 6. Example of WOL tweet with reflexive thinking
Based on this preliminary analysis of the empirical material we have collected so far, we can
already propose that this specific practice happening on Twitter present distinct characteristics,
especially when explored under a communication-centered perspective. Even though we consider
that these tweets represent a form of talk, we recognize that this talk may appear rather
unconventional, so to speak: it is not conversations in which talk would be directed toward an
identifiable individual or group, which could, in turn, answer in a direct fashion. In these various
examples published on public Twitter accounts, we see that they are close to the form of a diary
or a message sent in a bottle (i.e. not addressed to anyone in particular but to everyone who
might be interested). When these tweets lead to interactions, they have to potential to transform
an individual intuition or observation into a discussed idea. At the same time, we are intrigued by
the ‘talk-like’ form these tweets adopt. Though they are in a written form, these short messages
denote a specific way of saying things that is close to the oral form. Working out loud is done in
a very personal voice rather than scripted like a press release, a promotional link or a formal
report. Twitter can be use by workers to broadcast work-related information that they likely
would not do otherwise through corporate channels, either because such channel with equivalent
functions is not available within their work environment or either because they feel that the
content and/or tone of their messages would need to be smoothen or altered. While Twitter
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poses several constraints, it also authorizes creative and free(r) form of talk. Possibilities,
perspectives and feelings are explored and exposed by professionals in voluntarily and innovative
ways. In the next section, we will see that this form of talk not only allow them to describe and
conduct their work, but also to construct their professional identities.
Discussion: the performativity of WOL talk
As mentioned earlier, our empirical investigation is anchored in the idea that language is
performative. In the previous section, we have shown the variety of forms that the working out
loud practice can take. We have also revealed, through our analysis, that these instances of
‘textual talk’ can produce effects that can all be seen as benefitting, in one way or another, the
overall work process. Effects diverse as creating ambient awareness, transform experience in
reusable knowledge and make judgements about what happened can help the person with his or
her work, current or future. WOL talk is performative because it contributes to the individuals’
work, in an active way: it makes a difference. Using Twitter in this manner extends what an
individual can accomplish: to paraphrase Latour (1994), the person with the Twitter account,
using it to work out loud is not the same agent as the one without: he can do more, or differently.
Working out loud thus adds something to the person’s work. Each tweet that belong to the
working out loud category performs elements for the unfolding process of work. Beyond the
effects documented in the previous section, these tweets are performative because they produce
something for the continuation of action; and as table 1 revealed, this contribution is to make
visible and to inscribe materially, in texts (cf tweets) on a given online platform (Twitter) things
that otherwise tend to remain hidden, private or difficult to reveal in an explicit or formalized
way.
More precisely, we propose that working out loud tweets contribute in performing specific
professional identities and also in performing the work done by the individuals talking about
what they are doing and experimenting. By engaging in any of the forms that the WOL practice
can take, individuals gain something that helps them, first on an individual basis, to go on, to
continue their work. Through these micro-instances of communication, they are indeed
performing: 1) their professional identity; 2) the work in itself and 3) the legitimacy of their work.
Given the performativity of language, these effects can both be ascribed to talk and to text; what
is interesting in our case is not that it reveals such performativity, but that this performativity of
talk is linked, as we propose, to its textual form and, more precisely, to the visibilizing properties
of texts, which in turn give a more durable basis to these effects. In a few words, we propose that
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the performativity of working out loud tweets materializes talk while visibilizing professional
identity and work, with the overall effect of contributing to establishing the legitimacy of both
the professional and his or her work. We suggest that these are the ‘extras’ that are generated by
the performativity of working out loud tweets, and that these extras help workers with the
ongoing production and continuation of their work.
In many professional domains, some crucial features of work go unnoticed, because they are
invisible in the ‘physical sense’, i.e. they do not produce material traces, or they happen behind-
the-scene and are not accessible to people who are not in the situation, and also because they
may not be part of anybody’s job description (and thus are not formally recognized). In this
context, narrating the work in a written form produce material traces of contemporary knowledge
work. It is in this sense that working out loud on Twitter leaves textual traces of the work as it is
being performed, as it is happening. We could say that intermediary steps and products of work
are thus exposed through being textualized: there is a conversion of work in text through this
process of talking about it. At the same time – in a single tweet and over the accumulation of
tweets – individuals are presenting themselves, as the professionals they are4. By making visible
what they are doing, what they are experiencing, what they are struggling with and how they are
solving issues, for example, these individuals are making sense of their work and also making
themselves, as professionals, visible. However – and contrarily to commonly held beliefs about
social media – we contend that these persons are not solely or mainly exhibiting themselves in a
narcissistic move. Rather, these individuals are constructing their professional self, in order to be
better recognized for who they are, what they do and how the behave, professionally. Again, we
see that there is a visibility issue behind working out loud, as was is not visible cannot be
acknowledged. In relation to professional identity and to the process of work, legitimacy can
therefore by constructed as an overall effect of tweets that present the person behind the work,
and the work itself.
These effects lead us to the broader question of what these tweets are. When we are looking at a
tweet categorized as ‘working out loud’, are we in front of an instance of talk or of a conversation
– or are we reading a very short form of text? At this point in our larger inquiry into working out
loud, our answer lies in-between these two possibilities. It is the properties exhibited by these
4 Some argue that the use of social medias lead people to ‘tweak’ their identity in order to appear in a better light, or
to select only the parts of them that they wish to present, to showcase only their best side. While acknowledging that these effects could be at play when people do work out loud, here we are not concerned with the authenticity of what people choose to present via their tweets. However, the issue of authenticity is highly important on social media, and it would be interesting to take it into account in further explorations of working out loud.
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tweets that lead us to this provisional conclusion. Indeed, these tweets can simultaneously be
seen as presenting properties that are associated to both talk and text. On the textual side, these
tweets are texts that render talk visible, but also more durable and mobile. Once ‘said’ on Twitter,
a sentence will not dissipate as would talk: it become at the same time more stable (once written,
it will not change, unless its author deletes it; modifications to tweets are not allowed by Twitter)
and it gains in mobility, because it can easily be shared through its URL, or by being retweeted. In
this sense, tweets resemble Latour’s idea of immutable mobiles (1986). However, this talk does
not fully become textual: the possibility of conversation remains, in a way that is not typical of
texts. Texts can spark conversations, but these conversations are with them, on them or around
them. In the case of these tweets, the text is the conversation, as the conversation materializes in
text.
Moreover, we note that these tweets seem to embody simultaneously characteristics associated to
talk and to text, characteristics that are usually mutually exclusive. First, these tweets are both
visible and invisible. All tweets sent form a public account have the potential to be visible by the
whole world; yet, while remaining available through their unique URL, many tweets will only be
seen by a few pairs of eyes, disappearing quickly into anonymity and being completely lost in the
volume of traces produced on a daily basis through social media. But other tweets have a
different fate, and either by the conversations they trigger or by the volume of retweets, they will
remain under the spotlight for a longer period of time, having lasting effects for those who sent
them5. Hence, some tweets can be seen only by a limited audience, while others can receive
widespread attention through the process of retweeting. When publishing a tweet, workers are
more or less conscious that it has the potential to be seen by a large audience, and they also
cannot easily evaluate the future ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ status that their tweet will achieve. This
result is dependent on the reactions and interactions that the tweet sparks, which are themselves
linked to other factors, like the author’s notoriety.
Second, and linked to this visible/invisible duality, we see that tweets can be ephemeral (like talk
that is not recorded can be) while being persistent (a feature of texts). The experience of Twitter
spans different forms of temporality: on the one hand, ephemerality was built in the platform
5 An example of this is the story of Judith Sacco, PR professional, who tweeted a racist comment before boarding a
plane, creating a very intense negative reaction that was quickly and massively amplified. A few hours later, when her plane landed, she learned about what ensued following her comment, discovering at the same time that she had been fired by the firm employing her. The following article offers one of the many overviews of this story, one that speaks about the amplification power of Twitter: http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/20/how-a-racist-tweet-caused-an-internet-meltdown-and-got-a-pr-woman-fired/
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(Weller et al, 2014). The publishing of tweets is immediate, and the ante chronological display of
tweets has been described as a ‘stream’, in the sense that the updates continue to be refreshed as
new tweets come in. Reviewing past tweets requires more efforts, because they are continuously
replaced by newer and are relegated to less frequented spaces. But on the other hand, their
‘digitalization’ and referencing through search engine such as Google make them persistent, as
they are archived for a long time, and can be retrieved through the use of such search engines.
The co-presence of features that are associated to talk and text leads us to propose that working
out loud tweets are instances of talk that take on a textual form. However, these intriguing dual
features require further investigation and theorization.
In sum, to the general twin questions we asked in the beginning of this paper, can talk can be
text, and can text by talk, we would like to suggest that in some cases, like ours, the answer is
more complex that simply ‘yes’ or ‘no’. First, we have discussed that these tweets embody
properties and can have effects that are respectively associated to talk and to text. Second, we
argue that depending on what happens after a tweet has been published, these tweets will either
lean more toward the textual, if no conversation ensues, or more toward the conversational, if
exchanges unfold. If our inquiry in WOL tweets lead us to propose that some text can be talk,
and some talk, be text, this is not a question of equivalence. There are differences between the
textual and the talk-like form, and these remain even in cases such as our where the borders are
blurred: indeed, we can still, conceptually and empirically, distinguish them. But our case reveals
that an oscillation between both is possible, that some communicative instances can be, more or
less, both, depending on what ensues. Such an oscillation is not commonly seen in more
traditional instances of talk (e.g., the exchanges during a meeting) or of text (e.g. an annual report
or a procedure). Of course, in organizational contexts, talk and text are intertwined, enmeshed,
woven into one another (which is one of the fundamental ideas on which CCO’s definition of
what an organization is rests), and one of the key empirical focal points of CCO is the processes
that generate this intertwinement, and those that arise in and around them. But what we see here
with the working out loud tweets, is text that speak and talk that is written, and – more
importantly – the possibility of being more of less of one another. We thus contend that working
out loud tweets can be seen as participating to the constitution of professional identity, legitimacy
and work, but that such effects derive from their dual ‘talk-text’ potential. Once set ‘into the
wild’, WOL tweets as textual traces can either remain a very short text, a written mark lost among
billion of other marks left on the web, or it can spark conversations. As we will explore in the
conclusion, we believe that WOL tweets have another potential: that of ‘moving out’ of their
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written, textual form, to become conversations and even to morph into precursors to
organization.
Conclusion: triggering organization?
Through the investigation of the communicative practice of working out loud on Twitter, we
have documented how these tweets have a constitutive effect for work. In the opening of this
paper, we mentioned how work is less conceptually preeminent in the CCO perspective. If our
study of WOL tweets reveals the links between communication and work, the relationship with
organization is much more tenuous, at least based on the evidence we have accumulated so far.
Yet, we believe that the visibilizing properties of tweets can create opportunities for organization.
This is an idea that we will explicitly tackle in our next wave of empirical work around working
out loud, which will include interviews and longitudinal study of individuals for whom working
out loud is an integral part of their daily work life. As a conclusion, we will thus explore in a
theoretical way this potential for organization that we suspect with the working out loud practice.
If, as developed by the CCO stream of studies, communication is the site for
organizing/organization, we can ask the question of what is created, in terms of organization, by
the micro-communicational events that the working out loud tweets represent? Can an
organization emerge out of recurrent instances of working out loud? Based on what we have
documented here, we propose that the visibilizing power of the working out loud practice not
only contributes to work, but that it also has the potential to trigger organization. For most of
CCO scholars, one of the central mysteries to elucidate is the organization’s perpetuation,
through action and interaction. As stated by Robichaud & Cooren, “[f]rom an ontological
standpoint, an organization is thus brought into being as it is performed, acted out, as it becomes
literally an event.” (2013:xiv). But how does an organization make its first apparition on the stage of
interactions? Nicotera (2013) has argued that the birth of organization has been less the focus of
CCO scholarship. She also discusses the idea that it is only when we do move from ‘we’ to ‘it’
that an organization emerges out as an entity: as she writes, “[i]f the organization exists in
communication (Taylor & Robichaud, 2004), and that it is made present in interaction
(Brummans et al., 2009), then its moment of conception is the first moment that communication
presentifies the entity” (p. 76). Moreover,
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“Language unites individuals in collaborative activity. Collaborative activity defines collectivity. Collectivity creates the ground for representation and the emergence of an organizational entity” (2013:84)
It is in Nicotera’s arguments about organization’s genesis that we locate our reflection on the
potential of working out loud tweets to trigger organizations into existence. In the case of
working out loud, we are not primarily located in an organization; that is, the working out loud
tweets are not, centrally, communication whose aim is to presentify, maintain, perpetuate or
transform an organization whose birth would be a thing of the past. These tweets are voluntarily
generated, more closely related to one’s work practice, tools used and preferences . Since each
tweet we collected can be seen as a communicative event – a micro and almost trivial event –,
and that these tweets have the potential to open up conversations, to foster interactions and to
establish relations, we propose that with the investigation of tweets that belong to the working
out loud category, we have the potential to study the emergence of organization, from its
inception. Indeed, as discussed previously, from a CCO point of view, it is communicative
practices, in all their variety, that “scale up to compose an organization” (Brummans et al.,
2014:177). A good deal of the studies conducted in this line take on the challenge of
understanding how already existing organizations, of all kinds, do exist and continue to do so, in
one way or another; if a few studies address the creation of organizations (e.g. Chaput, 2012) or
organizations that are characterized by their fluidity (e.g. Dobush & Schoeneborn, forthcoming),
an organization is still there – understood as a collective of more than one person, working
toward a form of stabilization. But can focusing on a communicative practice that is
accomplished by a single individual without, most of the time, a defined interlocutor and without
(in most instances) any formal requirement to do so lead us to identify how an organization
appears, thus allowing us to study this process of scaling up? If our current empirical work does
not allow us to give well-illustrated answer to this question, we still see in our analysis on working
out loud the seeds of a broader reflection. As indicated by the second quote from Nicotera,
collaborative activity based on language is the key in communication as in the genesis of an
organization. We propose that working out loud tweets can open up to collaborations between
people who may not previously have known each other, that that these collaborative endeavours
have the potential to be constituted into work projects – in other words, in temporary
organizations.
However, not all WOL tweets can have this effect: in many instances, this possibility of triggering
organization into being only remains a potentiality, and one that will never blossom. Some of the
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tweets we considered in our study do not lead to exchanges and conversations. In this context,
WOL tweets may be producing effects for those engaging in this practice, but organization is not
one of them. Yet, there are other examples where instances of WOL did lead to interactions
(fortuitous, serendipitous, unplanned), and these interactions created conversation on work,
which draw on properties both from talk and conversation (interactivity, exchange of ideas,
decision making, etc.) and text (durability, mobility, reliability, etc.). Therefore, in terms of
contributions to the CCO scholarship, the question we think that can be investigated from the
WOL practice is not “what is an organization?”, but rather “what triggers an organization into
existence?”. With the WOL tweets we have collected so far, we are still situated in very specific
circumstances, located at best in the context of micro-conversations. Yet, the required
distanciation and textualization needed to create an organization appears very close. Recent
studies on collaboration on the web (e.g. Baumer et al., 2011; Falgas, 2013) lead us to suspect that
such collaborations can be created via practices like working out loud. This could allow us to
explore the question of what, exactly, happens before an organization is made present for the very
first time. This hypothesis calls for further empirical work, but our current investigation of WOL
tweets lead us to propose that because language can be conceptualized as performative and that
working out loud on Twitter is a communicative practice, WOL tweets have the potential to
spark organizations into existence. What remains to be studied with great attention is this
triggering process, and what stems out of it.
Venturing even further into the questions opened by a CCO approach to working out loud on
Twitter, can this case allow us to explore different forms of organizations, different degrees of
organizationality, as suggested by Dobusch and Schoeneborn (forthcoming)?. Could the new
ways of working based on flexibility, the emergence of what is deemed the ‘on-demand’ economy
and the new tools available to use while work is being done, contribute in creating organizations
that are different than the one we tend to study? Starting from the very individualized practice of
working out loud, we suggest that conversations can arise from tweets, that these conversations
can create relationships, and that these personal relationships can evolve into professional ties,
moving from transient and circumstantial interactions to more formalized collaboration
agreements. We thus contend that these formalized collaboration agreements can give rise to
projects, and that the moment such a collaboration (what ‘we’ do together) becomes spoken of as
a common a project (‘it’), we will be witnessing the birth of an organization, temporary or even
more permanent. It is these intuitions that our next round of inquiry into working out loud on
Twitter will explore.
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Appendix I: Distinctions between ‘talk’ and ‘conversation’ on Twitter We consider ‘talk’ as a broader category regrouping all instances of communicational events presented in this paper. However, we can distinguish instances where ‘talk’ becomes a conversation. On Twitter, conversations can be detected through specific characteristics, which are illustrated in examples presented in this appendix. WOL tweets can remain in a ‘monologue’ form, as shown in Figure 7. In these case, ‘talk remains talk’, since we cannot see any interactions following their publications. Other are retweeted (i.e. they are re-published by other users to their own audience) or ‘favorited’ (Figure 8), creating what can be argued as a form of conversation, although a limited one. Finally, some tweets open the door to more conventional conversational exchanges (Figure 9). Figure 7. Talk without
conversation
Figure 8. Talk becoming limited conversation
Figure 9. Talk becoming conversation
It is important to note that even though Twitter was not designed primarily for conversation, the marker of addressivity (i.e., the inclusion of @username to direct a tweet to a specific user) is an example of innovation by users who wanted to take advantage of Twitter for discussion purposes. Some authors (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009) even consider that only tweets containing such marker of adresssivity can be categorized in the “conversation” category. However, not all Twitter conversations start by a message including an @ sign: messages can be broadcasted to the user’s audience with the hope that they reach appropriate recipients, whether they are known or not. Therefore, we think it is important to also include tweets that are ‘becoming conversation’, as shown in Figure 8 et 9. At this point of our research, we formulate the hypothesis that these ‘conversations to be’ may result in serendipitous opportunities for cooperation, whether or not the user intends to cooperate in the first place.