Chirps and Tweets Through the Anthropological Looking Glass

Our social media activity has a lot to say about us as a society. Here’s my take on some of the things it says.

[NTUSU Tribune - Opinions Unthemed - Sep '10]

There have been over 20 billion tweets to date.

That’s approximately three times the world’s current population.

With almost 632,000 unique ‘Twitter’ users and 1.9 million tweets per day, ‘Twitter’ is a force to be reckoned with in the social media empire. The extent of twitter’s permeation has made it a viable resource to tap into the societal pulse; it can give us an idea of what we’re talking about and what we’re interested in. Trending topics are a pretty revolutionary feature in this regard because they monitor the things we’re talking about on the social media platform. It’s pretty much every anthropologist’s dream and has piqued my curiosity (which is why you’re reading this article).

Until about four months ago, trending topics on twitter displayed the themes most talked about in real-time tweets. Justin Beiber was always trending. So the algorithm was modified to capture topics that experienced the greatest spike in tweets posted at the time, thus displacing Justin Beiber from his twitter trend throne. People like me who have no interest in Justin Beiber heaved a huge sigh of relief. The side-effect was that the change made twitter quite adept at capturing “breaking news”. Trending topics have now become the “live” pulse of human society in a very real sense.

The unforgiving, perfect memory of the internet has enabled researchers and interested others to collect data on what the societal collective does on the internet. In that sense, twitter is not revolutionary. ‘Youtube’ views have often been used to analyse societal characteristics. Based on the popularity of videos such as “Charlie bit my finger – again!” and the Miss South Carolina slip-up in Miss Teen USA 2007, plenty of uncomplimentary conclusions result about the nature and interests of “the masses”. It appears that we like to watch singing cats, feisty babies, A LOT of Justin Beiber and Lady Gaga music videos and Miss South Carolina make a fool of herself publicly. Twitter trending topics, however, reveal a different picture. A picture that gives one hope that society is not as one-dimensional and inane!

 Over the past two years the top 50 twitter trends look like this-

Image - tweetstats.com

Besides the obvious conclusion that we like discussing Justin Beiber a lot more than Lady Gaga, whatever ‘Youtube’ video views say, there are a lot of other interesting things to note.

• 1.    It confirms the suspicion that we are a music-obsessed society. “#nowplaying” trended for three months out of twenty four. Apparently Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head with the iPod and iTunes. And of course, the word replacing ‘common’ in the English dictionary – ‘iPhone’.
• 2.    .We are not apathetic towards politics. Just as long as it relates to the United States in one way or another.
• 3.   . Festivals are important to us. Tweeting as a fixture to celebrate festivals will henceforth be regarded as a tradition, to be handed down from one generation to the next.
• 4.    Movies are more captivating than sports. Movies based on books are more discussion-worthy than movies not based on books.
• 5.   After watching “Inception”, we’re yet to figure out whether we’re dreaming or not. We also have no real idea what happened to Dom Cobb. The search for answers still continues as does the trending of Inception.

On a more serious note, this top 50 list shows us that we’re *involved* as a society. Global epidemics, conflicts and politics are all things we are interested in and talk about. We’re not just a bunch of airheads who like watching cats play with iPads and babies act like, well, babies. Phew.