A Micro-Ethnographic of Twitter Usage
by Marcos Figueira

About fifty years ago, Andy Warhol anticipated that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. The willingness for fame is intrinsically related to vanity itself.

In the realm of the digital age, the barriers today for vanity (self) publishing, thanks to the advance of digital technologies, notably the internet, are incredibly low. Blogs, personal web pages and the social networking spaces (MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Twitter etcetera), could be viewed as an enormous vanity arena, overflowing with amateur publishers, self-appointed authors and the most diverse self-centered personalities.

The premisse or hypothesis this article will explore is that the main motivation users find to engage in Social Networking activities is fundamented on vanity. For that matter, the method chosen is based on the Structured/Systematic Observation of 100 (one hundred) randomly selected Twitter personal users.

The Research Method

In order for a Post to be considered vanity-related it should be associated to the author´s feelings, thoughts, personal opinions or related to the “cult of the personality”.

The Results/Conclusion

Noteworthy

The results indicate that a significant portion of Twitter members use their page/space to spread the word about their own selves. Even though the Research was conducted in a limited time-frame and considered a relatively small sample, it seems that a pattern has clearly emerged.

It would be interesting to extend this study and compare the results with the Brazilian users in particular. The premisse is that the percentage of users that “post for vanity” would still be more significant due to the fact that international users are more profficient in the use of Twitter for advertisement and business purposes than the Brazilian counterparts.

It is noteworthy though, that electronic authorship comes with the possibility of social mobility. What starts as a vanity operation can, with time, become legitimized and respected through complex social processes that we are only begining to be able to track. Social Networking publishing is simply a convenient starter mechanism, not a last resort for the self-centered or excluded user.