Relevance to Writing Studies

Social media and its ever-evolving developments and applications are a vital aspect of digital literacy. Analyzing and exploring writing on such platforms is a new source for research in the field of Writing Studies. Writing on these platforms is just as valid a form of writing as an article or diary. This writing is inherently constructive and expressive as its purpose and motives of its users is to produce an image of that individual to the public/people they want to interact with online. As technology and society develops, so will writing and its applications.

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Twitter in itself has already evolved since its publishing in 2006. What began as a site with a character limit of 140 and one-image capabilities is now a multi-modal hive of information around the world. The shift from 140 characters to 280 is an important evolution on its own that greatly impacted the rhetoric and discourse on the site. In his article The Online Construction of Personal Identity through Trust and Privacy, Massimo Durante applies identity construction to social media platforms. "In contrast, in the digital reality, social networks for instance are platforms (as in the case of Facebook) that enable users to take advantages of
networked affordances in order to construct, in informational terms, not only their identities but also to participate in the co-constructions of their networked contexts of communication"(p. 594). The central focus on individuality and expression on Twitter through micro-blogging is a prevalent and important form of writing that should be analyzed so that it can be contributed to the applications of rhetoric for individuals. Edward Orehek and Lauren J. Human explored something similar in their study, Self-Expression on Social Media: Do Tweets Present Accurate and Positive Portraits of Impulsivity, Self-Esteem, and Attachment Style?, "Overall, these results contribute to research demonstrating that social media platforms can be an effective outlet for accurate and positive self-expression of personality traits, extending such findings to the widely used platform of Twitter and to previously unexplored personality traits, such as impulsivity, self-esteem, and attachment style"(p. 68). These articles reveal that the efficacy of Twitter is high, as it provides a public platform that people can use to employ rhetoric, whether intentional or not, to produce a specific reputation or image to be consumed by other users while expressing their identities and constructing their online presence over time based on their ideologies and identifications. Writing is constructive and Twitter facilitates constructive writing. Therefore, exploring and analyzing the writing on Twitter is relevant to the field of Writing Studies.