Twitter’s blended follower-broadcaster roles formed a rich social context for status assessment.

Evidence

For my informants, Twitter was the primary way in which they immersed themselves in the current concerns of the tech scene. They used it to follow real-life friends and acquaintances in the field as well as high-status tech people and celebrities. Further, because individual tweets are typically viewed within a Twitter stream comprised of other people’s tweets, the roles of follower and broadcaster blend, forming an aggregate social context. Then as today, this context is rich with social information about relationships, mores, customs, and trends, and thus provides more information than the sum of its parts. For instance, looking at how the tech scene defined acceptable Twitter use reveals the key role that Twitter followers played in determining status in the community. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 231

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier work on quiet/silence and social contexts — the aggregate stream as ambient social information parallels the soundscape concept from One Square Inch of Silence. — connects to: Social media’s design rewards visibility and self-promotion with social status. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 39; Social media metrics reduce complex relationships to visible status rankings; Social media metrics convert audience size into a comparable measure of personal status — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 245 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces the field-essential idea that followers determine status — foundational to influencer culture.

Broader Connections

• Social media metrics convert audience size into a comparable measure of personal status #corroborates (0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 245
• Social media’s technical features encode and reinforce contradictory status values #expands (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 644