Background

Twitter is a social media platform that is classified as "micro-blogging" because it originally provided users with 140 characters per tweet. Since its creation in 2006 (MacArthur, 2017), Twitter has since expanded its capabilities from just tweets to videos, photo sets of up to four images, GIFs, live-streaming videos, and the character limit was recently increased to 280. Motivations to sign up for Twitter vary among individuals, creating multiple subcultures of Twitter users comprised of diverse demographics. However, no matter what an individual's intentions are for using Twitter, all users share the commonality of expressive and constructive writing through their Tweets.

Although Twitter users may not be expressively writing on purpose, constructive and expressive writing is inherent in all forms of composition. In "Writing Is Linked to Identity", Kevin Roozen's contribution to Naming What We Know (2016), Roozen introduces the idea that, "Through writing, writers come to develop and perform identities in relation to the interests, beliefs, and values of the communities they engage with, understanding the possibilities for selfhood available in those communities" (p. 51). This is an exact reflection of Twitter's foundation and main components: people expressing their individual ideologies and creating conversations and interactions based on the relationship between such thoughts and communities. Some people use Twitter strictly for self-expression and to voice their thoughts and opinions to contribute to a specific conversation, or just for individual recreation. These users can utilize the multi-modal aspect of Twitter to curate their online persona, in order to create an aesthetic that is reflective of their individualism and how they want to be portrayed by others. In this aspect, these individuals are intentionally and directly writing for self-construction with the medium of a public platform. Even without the intention of conveying a purposeful online reputation, individual tweets are expressive and constructive because they are inherently and directly influenced by the ideologies and identities of the user. People that lack a strict motivation for using Twitter still have underlying expressive rhetoric because Twitter serves as a platform for publicizing an individual's stream of consciousness. Regardless of an individual's reason for using Twitter or what the majority of their content is, it is constructive through the online history provided by that individual's tweets that comprise their digital footprint and allow for a manifested virtual history of that person's thoughts and content over time.

Because of Twitter's more condensed structure through its limited amount of characters and multi-modality, the writing can be argued to be more constructive than other forms because it is so constrained. Users have to fit their thoughts and musings into four or less pictures or a video of up to two minutes and twenty seconds with a maximum of 280 characters to accompany the excess content, if there is any. The rhetoric in tweets is much more prevalent and powerful because of the nature of the medium it is being presented through. Twitter's restrictive properties influence the writing and composition produced on the site to be more constructive than typical writing through blogs or other sources that lack production limitations.

The sections of this website will explore multiple aspects and sects of Twitter that impact and/or produce self-constructive and expressive writing for the purpose of researching modern applications of how writing is self-constructive in the modern age and why it is relevant in writing studies.