To RT or not to RT: Authorship and attribution on Twitter

摘要

In 2009, Twitter changed its interface to include a “retweet” function to accommodate a user-created convention for rebroadcasting text written by others. However, while the new retweet function did not allow for the range of use of the original user-created retweet. As a result, currently there exist two forms of retweeting: Twitter’s new retweet function and the older, user-generated retweet. Users deploy both of these forms to indicate different alignments to their talk. As Hill and Zepeda (1992) show in their work on vernacular narrative, users have different strategies for displaying alignment or distance with their own talk. Furthermore, authorship and responsibility for talk is a concern for Twitter users. The two styles of retweeting are one way to resolve these concerns. Based on evidence from a corpus of tweets, we argue that the two retweet styles allow users to manipulate available participation structures to indicate their relationship to the retweeted text. The new retweet is limited in function by not allowing new content added by the retweeter; the old retweet is broader in its affordances in that the retweeter can add a comment. The new retweet assumes implicit alignment, while the old retweet allows more options for alignment. Twitter changed its interface based on interaction patterns, and this change resulted in the emergence of a new pattern incorporating both the new feature and the old convention. This evolution of interaction patterns is built on complex arrangements of participant structures, and reveals a dialogic relationship between users and their technology.