twitterverse and visual capital
TRANSCRIPT
Twitter(di)verse and visual capital: a methodology to analyze
visual(counter)cultures on Twitter
Agnese Vellar Università degli Studi di Torino Department of Social Science
Marina Micheli Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
PhD student in Information Society
2010 IVSA Conference July 21, Bologna, Italy
Visual Culture of the Internet
digital taste cultures
(Nakamura, Digitizing Race, 2008)
designers interface
social practices users
visual identity
multilingual - multicultural - multimedia
profiles as digital body
whitenessmaleness
disembodied self
Digital aesthetics
?
social practices users
visual identity
(Nakamura, 2008; Lialina, 2007; Boyd, 2007)
clean, modernintuitive, universal
white, neutralthe “shiny floor” look,
glossy round edged style, candy-colored plastics,
translucent
Twitter: microblogging
Status update140 characters
List of contacts:Following and
Follower
Following’supdates
Trending topics
Research on Twitter
• Social Network: Java, Finin, Song, Xiaodan and Tseng, 2007;
Huberman, Romero and Fang, 2010.
• Content: Mischaud, 2007;
Honeycut and Herring, 2009;
boyd, Scott, Golder, and Gilad, 2010.
heads all messed up today, need to get myself straight sometime soon....
i like this news! http://tinyurl.com/yva9v0 Google buys GrandCentral
soooooooooooo jealous of @strebel and his nap...
@korinuo: I guess is ok to delete the last parts of the message to make it fit and substitute with . . .
@PeterKretzman: best judgment—but NOT text msg style!
Research DesignResearch questions: which are the techniques employed to customize profiles? do visual taste cultures emerge? how they relate with the Twitter aesthetic?
Data:1.500 Twitter profiles collected in one mounth
500 worldwide (worldwide trending topics); 500 english speaker (US trending topics); 500 italian speaker (Twitteritalia.it).
Methodology: analysis with NVIVO 8 to identify cluster of profiles with a similar style.
avatar and background style visual cultures
Animal
Character
Celebrity
Graphic selfportrait
Illustration
Logo
Photo object or place
Selfdetail
Selfportrait
Selfportrait elaborate
Self with other
Avatar
Background
Color
Graffiti
GraphicBusinessCard
Logo
Miscellaneous
Photo - animals
Photo - place
Photo - celebrity
Photo - object
Photo - personal
Wallpaper
Wallpaper - Twitter
Background custumization
customization services
simple
Style(semi)professional
minimal
twitter basic
amateur
dark
Graphic elaboration
Web 2.0 aesthetic vernacular
inventive
pinky
pop
sunny
Visual cultures in the Twitterverse
Style (semi)professional amateur
Visual Culture 2.0 (web developer, marketer,
blogger, designer, …)
fans (pop music, movies, Tv shows,
…)
“nigga” (afro-american)
Geography Transnational Transnational National (US)
Visual material Graphic Business Card
Mass media picture repeted and mashup
Personal picture repeted
Representation of the body
Face Face and/or star bodies Whole body
2.0 culture: (semi)professional
glossy round edged style candy-colored plastics
clean, modernintuitive, universal
whiteneutral
“graphic business card”
Fan culture: self with celebrity
mashupgraphical elaboration
user’s face star’s face/bodymass media images
textual references
“Nigga” culture: personal picture
personal pictures (with friends)low-fi technolgy (cameraphone)
whole body - gesture
vernacular English
Twitterdiversity
web 2.0 culture
nigga culture
fan culture
mass media images
customization services
self produced images
technological affordances
visual aesthetic
multilingual
afro-american vernacular
English
english
Explorative researchresearch field:
an Web 2.0 online platformencounter of
unexpected cultures
in depth study of the visual cultures
nigga
fan culture
2.0 culture difficult to interpret visual material without knowledge of the specific culture
how the users interpet the “other”’s visual production?
how the users reflexively think about their own visual production?integrating other
methods as indepth interviews
in different fields where they
express their visual identity
how different digital affordances and offline
environments change the way member of a culture construct their
visual identity?
“perpetual beta”:
field change during the research
affect the research process
