Gill's motivation to research Twitter is derived from attempt to understand how technology impact society. While  looking at the presentation Twitter in the Classroom she commented that many have Twitter but don't use them. Why? too much noise or they don't care what others do during the day.

This presentation is her introduction to twitter to students: http://wiredpen.com/2009/02/24/intro-to-twitter/

Her insigts from using heavily and teaching Twitter:

1. Twitter is a conversation space not a publication.

2. Disinformation and information can move so rapidly on Twitter, without any easy way to correct it. More problematic the messages ephemeral nature. Since archiving twits is still in its infancy, many of the twits are inaccessible if it is more than two weeks. The case of Iran is interesting - specially the disinformation that came out of Iran and was fed to a large audience according to a specific world view.

3. Twit is not a twit is not a twit - a twit about breakfast is not a twit about a conference or a news item.

4. Twitter has the potential to be a democratizing technology. See her project "The Book" for example. The case of the wineries is a great example to how stakeholders were involved in the discussions.

Politicians: Twitter is a conversation space not a publication

Some of her insights about the elections: in 2008 we came to see politicians who started to use twitter. But there was almost no candidate in 2008 who used twitter as a conversation media, twitted by the politicians. One that she can thing of is Senator Edwards. Once Obama got the nomination, people noticed that twitter exist. But Gill warns that one shouldn't use it like obama. The Obama Twitter was one-side channel with no interaction. His Twitter was all about "he" and "he". Same thing happened with Clinton and McCane. the problem is that John McCanes' twits are all gone now. They deleted all of them. Gill's lesson from that is that therefore we should try to archive it all because the traditional gatekeepers are gone.

I think that when it comes to public figures, we should definitely find mechanisms to be able to archive them. Politicians have to know that when they twit they are not 'off record'. The challenge is what happens ethically when you archive also conversations about people who are not public figures? How can we develop ethical mechanisms to allow eternal transparency and accountability and at the same time maintain privacy of individuals?

Virality of Networks

One of the hottest topics currently under investigation is in the area of virality and campaigns, or the role of the Internet in political campaigns. Here are several articles from a conference titled "You Tube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" -

Bob Boynton Going Viral

Kevin Wallsten "'Yes We Can': How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon

LaChrystal Ricke A New Opportunity for Democratic Engagement: The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates

Hillary Savoie YouTube, Community, and Me: The New Media Balance Between Self and Community

You can find the full list of articles and posters here: http://youtubeandthe2008election.jitp2.net/frontpage

An ultra-Orthodox in a cybercafe

Cultured Technology is an article that presents a theoretical framework to understand the relationship between religious fundamentalist communities and the Internet, through addressing four dimensions of tensions and challenges: hierarchy, patriarchy, discipline, and seclusion. Together with Prof. Gad Barzilai, we develop the concept of cultured technology, and analyzed the ways communities reshape technology and make it as part of their culture, while on the other hand allowing this technology to make certain changes in their customary way of life and in their unwritten laws. We also exemplified our theoretical framework through an empirical examination of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. Our empirical study was based on an original dataset of 686,192 users and 60,346 virtual communities, while also relying on extensive literature review and secondary data. The results show the complexity of interactions between religious fundamentalism and Internet, and invite further discussions of cultured technology as a means to adapt Internet and to be adapted into it in various communities that incline to challenge technological innovations.

Click here for the full text paper in English.

Click here for the full text paper in Hebrew.