Hans Geser, July 2011
Institute of Sociology, University of Zurich
By minimizing costs of encoding and decoding and by combining functionalities of the Internet and the Mobile phone, Twitter is disposed to play a crucial dual role within the sphere of digitial communication. On the one side, Twitter helps to expand such communication to the microscopic level of current events, thoughts and observations; on the other hand, it contributes to a better orientation in the ever growing “Cyberjungle” by propagating signals about new information sources on which users should concentrate their attention. By focusing on current processes and devlopments and by adding a “push” element based on info (bottom-up) opinion leadership, Twitter is highly complementary to conventional Social network Sites (like Facebook) which specialize more on horizontal networks and stable patterns of social relationships and social structure.
