Twitter, a Biography, by Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, explores the evolution of Twitter from its inception as an SMS-based platform to its current status as a major source of news and political discourse. The book examines how user-driven innovations shaped the platform's development, focusing on key features like the @reply, hashtag, and retweet. It also delves into the tensions between user-generated content and corporate strategies, highlighting the challenges of content moderation and the evolving business models of social media platforms. The authors provide a comprehensive analysis of Twitter's impact on communication, social movements, and political activism, offering valuable insights into the complexities of online communities and the ever-changing landscape of digital media. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and impact of social media.
In 'Hatching Twitter,' Nick Bilton chronicles the tumultuous birth and rise of Twitter, focusing on the quartet of founders: Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. The book delves into the personal conflicts, betrayals, and high-stakes power struggles that marked the company's early growth. Drawing on extensive research, including hundreds of sources and internal documents, Bilton provides a gripping narrative that reveals the complexities of technology startups, venture capital, and Silicon Valley culture. The story underscores the importance of resilience, adaptability, and collaboration in bringing a groundbreaking idea to life.
As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities.
Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.
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