Analyzing Social Media Discourse: Twitter

Analyzing Social media discourse: Twitter
Eduardo Cortés Sánchez

Rationale
The purpose of this project is to analyze how social media is presented within online interaction among individuals;the patterns of meaning that are created in a popular social network, such as Twitter, allow users to share personal experiences in order to create a real time paradigm.
Differentapproaches are involved into this linguistic perspective, concepts such as speech communities, discourse communities and communities of practice are used to explore linguistic patterns of socialmedia structure.
In the case of Twitter, linguistics analyzes how networks of interpersonal relationships are formed and maintained between virtual interactions; those interactions present somecharacteristics that are interesting in the linguistic field because it represents an evolution of the communication process.






Analyzing Social media discourse: Twitter
Nowadays social mediarepresents an innovative interaction that facilitates users to create and develop online relationships with friends or in the case of Twitter, known as followers. Since 2006, Twitter allow users to postmessages of 140 characters or less to general internet or even to a set of a particular users (followers) that subscribe to the user’s channel. These micro post are known as Tweets and are presentedto the user in a chronological order, the access, sent or received are mainly via web, mobile or SMS.
According to Zappavigna, (2012) Tweets contain metadata for managing interaction with others,for instance, @ indicating address (or reference), # for labeling topics and some emoticons and hashtags that are the basic elements of the Twitter system. Also we could see creative use of punctuationto address other users (@user), tag common topics (#wordsthatihate) and republishing other tweets with RT. Twitter hashtags are those that involve a symbol (#) marking the topic of the tweet, for...