I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience

2010/07/07 by Alice Marwick, danah boyd · 4,520 citations
Social Sciences · #Advertising #Business #Commodification #Communication #Computer science #Context (archaeology) #Conversation #Digital Games and Media #Emoji #Face (sociological concept) #Gender, Feminism, and Media #History #Internet privacy #Media Studies and Communication #Media studies #Social media #Social science #Sociology #World Wide Web

paper · doi:10.1177/1461444810365313

published in New Media & Society 13(1), 114-133 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2010/07/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate ‘imagined audiences’ on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of ‘micro-celebrity’ and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.

Citations

• ‘My blog is me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology)
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Impression management: A literature review and two-component model.

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• Context collapse [wikipedia]
• Personal branding [wikipedia]

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