Do We Tweet Differently From Our Mobile Devices? A Study of Tweet Styles on Mobile and Web-Based Platforms

• In Event: Mobile Compared to Immobile Communication

Abstract

Most social media scholarship does not specifically distinguish between content from mobile versus web in analyses of sentiment, word frequency, and other methods. This paper hypothesizes that social media content that is produced on mobile versus web platforms may be qualitatively different and uses Twitter as a case study. As we increasingly tweet from our smartphones, this could be encouraging us to ‘report’ on our immediate thoughts, feelings, physical self, and surroundings. This paper seeks to understand whether these presentations of self tend to be more egocentric, negative/positive, gendered, or communal depending on whether they were tweeted from mobile devices or web platforms. Using 6 weeks of Twitter data, we found that mobile tweets do tend to use more egocentric language then web-based tweets. We found that negative language is used more frequently by mobile users, suggesting that social media reporting of our lives may be skewed towards negative portrayals.

Authors

• Dhiraj Murthy, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Alexander Gross, U of Maine

• Sawyer Bowman, Bowdoin College

• marisa mcgarry, Bowdoin College