Debanalizing Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study

This paper enquires into how Twitter has been studied since it was launched in 2006 as an ambient friend-following and messaging utility, modelled after dispatch communications. As Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder, phrased it, Twitter also did rather well during disasters and elections, and subsequently became an event-following tool, at once shedding at least in part its image as a what-I-had-for-lunch medium. Most recently, Twitter has settled into a data set, one that is of value for Twitter, Inc. and also is archived by the Library of Congress. Each of these objects, described here as Twitter I, Twitter II, and Twitter III, have elicited particular approaches to its study, surveyed below. The paper takes each object in turn, describing the debates and scholarship around them, and provides a framework to situate past, current and future Twitter research.