Twitterverse and visual capital

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

Twitter

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

[email protected]://twitter.com/agneseh

Thank you!

[email protected]://twitter.com/minaemme