Language and Analysis: Twitter Timeline Example

The genre of this text is a Twitter timeline, screen printed from a specific Twitter user, which has a mixture of registers which are mostly informal and colloquial. Its audience is personalised as the person that sees this timeline has chosen to follow each of the accounts listed, however each Twitter account individually is open for any other twitter user to see, unless the account has selected to be private. From the timeline, we can guess the person following these accounts is perhaps an indie music fan, who enjoys going to festivals or could have even been to or is going to Smog Festival. As well as this, they may be a Leeds FC fan, or even just a football fan in general. The mode of the text is written, however it does include elements of spoken language because some tweets have been written in a very colloquial register, and are supposed to be read how someone would say them in a conversation. For example, @L33D5 has written "can this b tru??? please make this true". The purpose of this text is to inform as well as entertain its audience. The relationship between the senders and receiver in this text varies quite a lot. We can assume from reading the text that the receiver and the user @Christophe are friends because the account looks very personal and more suited to an individual. Whereas other accounts the receiver is following, for example @LUFC4EVA look much more like fan accounts that they would probably not know personally, and is only following to keep updated on football news and match results etc. We can also assume from the text that the user is interested in politics and may be in particular a communist group called 'Red'. We can make this assumption as the user follows the account @redrobborobsdarich who talks about "Tory cuts" and involes the communist group red in their username and icon.

The timeline throughout uses phonetic language such as "b" and "tru" which are all forms of non-standard grammar, and CMC abbreviations. These show how Twitter has been designed to look like old text messaging, which like Twitter, had a 140 character limit to its posts. Therefore, users have to abbreviate words to make sure everything they want to say will fit in one tweet, like they would have in a text message to save money. This is also why many of the users the receiver follows use punctuation differently as to how they would on other websites such as news forums. Many of the accounts, for example @rredrobborobsdarich lack grammar and punctuation like colons or commas perhaps that the user could have put on the end of their tweet, so it would look more formal. However, because the website is very colloquial and fun users may also use punctuation excessively to show empahsis on what they have said or to catch peoples attention. @L33D5 writes "Bates is resigning!!" using two exclamation marks which could possibly be to make the statment stand out and catch Leeds fans attention, as it is something they would probably want too know.

Twitter uses the help of its 'Retweet' feature to help advertise and also entertain its audience and users. We can see on this users timeline that the account @WalthamForestAntiCuts has retweeted another account (@Redrobborobsdarich) onto its timeline to shows its followers the tweet that the account has posted. This user could have done this to encourage other users to follow RedRobbo's account as they might find his tweets useful or entertaining to them, or to help persaude them to sign a petition. Twitter also includes a feature known as 'hashtagging' which allows any user to turn a sentence, phrase or word of their choice into a 'trend'. By writing a word with a '#' symbol infront, the word becomes hyperlinked and by clicking the hashtag any user can then see what people have tweeted using the same hashtag. Examples of this are when @Radioindie uses the hashtag "#nowplaying". This could show users what song Radio Indie is playing and persuade them to listen too it as well. Hashtahs can also be used to entertain and inform the audience and the user like when @LUFC4EVA tweets "#Batesout".