Three tech scholars have posted a working draft of their co-authored paper Who Gives a Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Data. Paul André (Carnegie Mellon and Southampton, UK), Michael S. Bernstein (MIT), and Kurt Luther (Georgia Institute of Technology) had 1,443 Twitter users rate 43,738 tweets. Users rated the tweets as "worth reading," "ok" or "not worth reading." Here's an excerpt of the findings:
Followers described 36% of the rated tweets as Worth Reading (WR), thought that 25% were Not Worth Reading (NotWR), and remained neutral about the other 39%. Given that users actively choose to follow these accounts, it is striking that so few of the tweets are actively liked. * * * The three most strongly disliked categories were Presence Maintenance, Conversation, and Me Now (the tweeter’s current status).
Commonly cited reasons for classification of a tweet as "not worth reading" were that the tweets were boring, repeated old news, cryptic or used too many hashtags or "at" symbols. There's a good write-up of the study here by Megan Garber at The Atlantic.
My own experiment with integrating Twitter into the classroom was a bit of a failure (detailed here and here), but my colleague Luis Chiesa is now tweeting up a storm with his Crim Law students about things like the #trolleyproblem. #Maybe #my #tweets #were #just...#too...#boring.
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