Dia 12 de Maio, às 17 horas, na Sala de Aulas 1 do ICS, decorre a sessão "Information Circulation Using Twitter: Aggregation, Broadcasting and Relaying" por Mélanie Millette ( LabCMO - Université du Québec à Montreal ), integrada no ciclo de conferências "Comunicação, Cultura e Novos Media", e no âmbito do projecto financiado pela FCT - PTDC/CCI-COM/100765/2008: Mutação dos Media: transformações na comunicação pública e científica.
Esta conferência, coordenada por José Luís Garcia (ICS-UL), é organizada por Patrícia Dias da Silva (ICS-UL)

Resumo: The elements of this paper are rooted in a research project conducted by the LabCMO on various forms of online contributions. One strand of the project focuses on contributive web practices which produce new trajectories for information.

This paper aims to illustrate how online contributors use microblogging as a coordination tool to create, locate and disseminate information. Through an examination of the literature on Twitter, we illustrate how the platform supports new modes of information circulation based on short messages of 140 characters length, called “tweets”. We identify three innovative practices which appear intimately related to the form and constraints of the Twitter platform: broadcasting, relaying and aggregating.

As users develop a nomenclature to address each other and to refer to specific topics in the main conversation stream, they draw substantially on its referencing possibilities to support aggregation practices, using filters and tagging strategies. Because it maintains a main thread of conversation, Twitter encourages heterogeneity and breaks homogeneity among networks. The non-reciprocal relationship between users also supports this phenomenon. The mobile phone SMS base and multiple third party applications developed to improve its usage place Twitter as a tool that allows near synchronous communication. These characteristics position Twitter community as an alternative primary information source, on site, as seen during the Iranian election and the Haiti earthquake crisis.