“What Hath God Wrought” – Samuel Morse’s first message, on May 24, 1844, on the newly completed telegraph wire linking Baltimore and Washington – was a mere 21 characters long. Alexander Graham Bell’s first message on the telephone to his lab assistant on March 10, 1876, “Mr Watson – come here – I want to see you,” was more liberal: 42 characters long. And 95 years later, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email, with the message “QWERTYUIOP,” from one computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to another computer sitting beside it. Tomlinson’s message: a spartan 10 characters.

In the past, technology determined the length and duration of the message. In the internet age of today, our ability to communicate is seemingly limitless. But the computer has ushered in a new era of brevity. Twitter is a digital throwback to the analog succinctness of telegrams. Yet what is the significance of this electronically diminished turn to terseness? Does it signal the dumbing down of society, the victory of short attention spans, or the rise of new virtual “me” cultures? Are we saying more with less, or just saying less? Or perhaps we are saying more about less. This position is well illustrated by “status updates,” short one- or two-line messages on the popular social networking platform Facebook. Though these short messages are often trivially banal (e.g., “mustard dripping out of my bagel sandwich”), they are elevated to “news,” which Facebook automatically distributes to your group of “friends,” selected individuals who have access to your Facebook “profile,” that is, your personalized web page on the site. Once the update percolates to your friends, they have the opportunity to comment on your update, generating a rash of discussion about dripping mustard, and so on. A photo of the offending bagel sandwich might be included as well. Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram prioritize the role of images, but brief comments remain very important to these media.

This form of curt social exchange has become the norm with messages on Twitter, the popular social media website where individuals respond to the question “What’s happening?” with a maximum of 140 characters. These messages, known as “tweets,” can be sent through the internet, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and text messages. But, unlike status updates, their strict limit of 140 characters produces at best eloquently terse responses and at worst heavily truncated speech. Tweets such as “gonna see flm tonite!” or “jimmy wil be fired l8r 2day” are reflective of the latter. The first tweet on the site, “just setting up my twttr”¹ (24 characters), by Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, on March 21, 2006, perhaps led by example. This book emphasizes that Dorsey’s message, like that of Morse, was brief and, like that of Bell, was unremarkable – setting up one’s Twitter and asking the recipient to return.

After 11 years of 140-character tweets, Twitter decided to double this to 280 characters from November 2017. Before rolling the change out to the general public, Twitter began trialing this “feature” with a select group of users (Watson 2017), though initial testing suggested that only 5 per cent of the group opted to use over 140 characters in their tweets (Newton 2017). Critics (e.g., Silver 2017) argue that this will drown out Twitter timelines, compromising the platform’s uniquely succinct form of social communication.

Our contemporary use of Twitter – in part a social, political, and economic information network – has evolved over more than a decade. So it may be some years before the impact of the 280-character expansion can be evaluated. Given that our behaviors on all social media platforms are interlinked, it may be that Twitter is answering a call for individuals to express themselves more fully, though in the context of these platforms more broadly, 280 characters is still relatively terse.

By drawing this line between the telegraph and telephone to Twitter, this book makes its central argument – that the rise of these messages does not signal the death of meaningful communication. Rather, Twitter has the potential to increase our awareness of others and to augment our spheres of knowledge, tapping us into a global network of individuals who are passionately giving us instant updates on topics and areas in which they are knowledgeable or participating in real-time. In doing so, however, the depth of our engagements with this global network of people and ideas can also, sometimes, become more superficial. For example, policymaking by elected officials on Twitter may not only be superficial due to brevity, but also potentially dangerous due to a lack of context for foreign policymakers reading these tweets. Of course, the opposite can be true too where brief, superficial tweets are positive, serving as public evidence of continued political engagement.

Many of us would be worried if Twitter replaced “traditional” media or the longer-length media of blogs, message boards, and email lists. The likelihood of this is, of course, minimal. However, Twitter is also mediating access to these types of content for many. For example, Twitter’s “Moments” feature presents a selection of trending “news” for users to be able to easily navigate. Though aspects of Twitter such as this may be reducing information diversity or dumbing down what we consume (and this potentially has real effects on politics, economics, and society), this book concludes with the suggestion that there is something profoundly remarkable in us being able to follow minute-by-minute commentary in the aftermath of an earthquake, or even the breakup of a celebrity couple. This book is distinctive in not only having Twitter as its main subject, but also its approach of theorizing the site as a collection of communities of knowledge, ad hoc groups where individual voices are aggregated into flows of dialog and information (whether it be the election of Donald Trump or the death of Prince). The first edition of this book in 2013 was instrumental in starting this conversation, and this second edition continues the important work of thinking critically about Twitter.

Ultimately, Twitter affords a unique opportunity to re-evaluate how communication and culture can be individualistic and communal simultaneously. I also describe how these changes in communication are not restricted exclusively to the West, as any mobile phone, even the most basic model, is compatible with Twitter. Tweets can be quickly and easily sent, a fact that has led to the growth of its base to 313 million monthly active users with 79 percent of accounts outside of the USA (Twitter.com 2016a). This has been useful in communicating information about disasters (e.g., the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in New Zealand) and social movements (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter). At an individual level, tweets have reported everything from someone’s cancer diagnosis to unlawful arrests. For example, in April 2008, James Karl Buck, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was arrested photographing an anti-government labor protest in Mahalla, Egypt. He quickly sent a one-word tweet from his phone, “arrested,” which caught the attention of Buck’s Twitter “followers,” those who subscribe to his tweets. His one-word tweet led to Berkeley hiring a lawyer and Buck’s eventual release. There are, of course, many distinctions to be made between the tweets sent by Buck, or those sent during the Mumbai bomb blasts, and the more unremarkable, everyday tweets. Contrast the tweet Prasad Naik sent moments after the Mumbai bomb blasts, “Firing happening at the Oberoi hotel where my sister works. Faaak!” with Biz Stone’s third tweet, “wishing I had another sammich.”² Though an intentionally striking and loaded comparison, it is just this absurdity that happens daily, hourly, and by the minute on Twitter. This combination of banal/profound, combined with the one-to-many – explicitly – public broadcasting of tweets, differentiates Twitter from Facebook and text messages.

Rather than selectively condemning Twitter (e.g., as a threat to democracy) or, on the other hand, praising it (e.g., a bringer of democracy), the book poses important questions to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of this new communications medium. Although I examine the practice of social media through specific Twitter-mediated events, this book’s emphasis is both explanatory and theoretical. Specifically, my prime aim is to better understand the meanings behind Twitter and similar social media through concise yet sophisticated interpretations of theories of media and communication, drawing upon a diverse array of scholars, from Marshall McLuhan to Erving Goffman and Gilles Deleuze to Martin Heidegger. Though this network of thinkers and scholars crosses several disciplines, their work sheds light on a problem of communication faced since the dawn of the modern age: unraveling the connections, to paraphrase McLuhan, between the medium and the message. The chapters present analyses of the shifts in which we communicate by exploring the role of Twitter in discourses of new media forms, communication, social formations, and digitally mediated communities. Early chapters introduce Twitter, historically contextualize it, and present theoretical frames to analyze the medium. Comparisons between historical media forms are made to highlight the fact that new media forms are not all that “new” in many of the ways in which they organize our social lives. For example, when the telephone began to get a critical mass in US households, there were similar feelings of anxiety that the “public” would erode the “private,” as anyone could call your house as you were having an intimate family dinner or in deep conversation with a visiting friend. The middle chapters include specific discussions of Twitter and its relationship to journalism, disasters, social activism, health, and celebrities/branding. The book then brings together theory and practice to make conclusions on the medium itself and its role in social communication within an “update culture,” a culture in which society has placed importance on updating friends, family, peers, colleagues, and the general public. The question of whether this pattern signifies “me-centric” rather than “society-centric” cultures is explored in the conclusion. At the start of each chapter, I single out an individual tweet to frame the forthcoming chapter.

Since writing the first edition of this book in 2011–13, the arguments I had made in terms of Twitter being a place to update the world about one’s experiences, thoughts, and reflections have now become part of mainstream understandings/engagements about the medium. Pop culture has often interrogated why Twitter has become part of our daily lives. The Comedy Central television show South Park compares leaving Twitter to suicide (T. Parker 2016) and the celebrity Alec Baldwin makes a cameo appearance as a social media addict who posts compulsively on Twitter, ultimately opting to have antenna implants in his head in order to broadcast his thoughts without even typing (T. Parker 2013). Their parody highlights serious public concerns over the seamless broadcasting of what people are thinking (what Mark Zuckerberg termed “frictionless sharing” (Payne 2014), and such practices may be crossing over into the line of what is colloquially referred to as “Too Much Information” (TMI).

This is an important aspect of public perceptions of Twitter and what role it plays in society. Some argue that the medium has blurred the private and public too much and that the private needs to be more ring-fenced. Others argue that this blurring of public and private is a net positive in the context of Twitter. For example, the medium could potentially be changing citizen activism in countries with no freedom of the press, or providing women with a public sphere to discuss intimate partner violence (IPV) (Cravens, Whiting, and Aamar 2015). Twitter has become the subject of very large social questions and the medium has been placed right in the middle of many prominent debates.

What is noteworthy is that privacy cuts both ways as some argue that they do not want to know what someone had for breakfast a particular day, but at the same time want individuals to be broadcasting live updates during disasters, activist events/social crises, celebrity breakups, and presidential elections. This is tricky terrain. The case of Lisa Bonchek Adams, a mother of three who had terminal cancer and tweeted over 176,000 times, is a good example. With many intimate tweets that explicitly conveyed to her followers her experiences with cancer, she mostly drew support, but also condemnation. On the one side, the argument was that individuals such as Adams should be encouraged to use Twitter in these ways as often patients of chronic illnesses such as terminal cancer need high levels of support and Twitter enables new ways to support these types of individuals both by other cancer patients and survivors, as well as by the public at large (Murthy and Eldredge 2016). Others, such as the journalists Emma and Bill Keller, publicly argued against her approach (Elliott 2014). This case provoked a sharp controversy about the public and the private, and what role Twitter should play in our lives. In an age where some perceive that everything is posted on social media, this case highlights how boundaries are being negotiated and redrawn all the time. And my book too had to be rewritten!

My work on this book has been shaped by generous input and encouragement from family, friends, colleagues, and scholars. I am very grateful for their involvement in the development of this book. Students in my classes over the years have been taught material from early versions of chapters, and offered engaging and highly useful feedback. I am also indebted to my students for providing me with a treasure trove of examples of interesting Twitter users and tweets. Thank you to my former research fellow, Macgill Eldredge, who imported the data sources in chapter 7 into a standardized format and produced the spike data histogram, and my graduate students – Kyser Lough for shooting the image used in figure 1.1 and Jordon Brown for proofreading assistance. The reference librarians at the British Library patiently helped me navigate archives regarding the telegraph, material which fundamentally shaped the historical context of the book. I have greatly benefited from input from my colleagues at Bowdoin College, Goldsmiths (University of London), and The University of Texas at Austin. I would also like to thank Andrea Drugan, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Mary Savigar, and the rest of the Polity team for their invaluable support in making this project a reality. Screenshots of tweets are used where possible to provide a fuller context.³