Search

Twitter acts as an information gateway as it provides a place where professionals network and share their knowledge. Twitter has increasingly influenced the way people use and share information. However, limited research demonstrates IT professionals' information experience on Twitter impacts the way they use it for professional purposes. The study aimed to understand how such information experiences impact on the way IT professionals use Twitter for professional purposes. Eleven IT professionals were recruited for this study to understand the participants' information experience through their own individual perspective, with the data analysed using constructive grounded theory. This study revealed that IT professionals' information experience plays a vital role in creating professional networking and knowledge sharing in online spaces. These lived experiences influence the way IT professionals use Twitter for professional purposes. Thus, the findings of this study contribute to theoretical perspectives in the understanding of information experience perspectives within Twitter, along with a foundational understanding of the ways in which microblogging is used for professional purposes. The findings can help organisations understand and provide for this emerging channel of professional information sharing for its staff and stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media, specifically a microblogging service such as Twitter, constitute a public space that has changed how we interact with, exchange, and respond to information in a civil society. They also have the potential to give public voice to minority narratives that are under-represented in the mainstream media, just as grassroots graffiti in public spaces have done over human history. Using a specific case study around an issue in the Australian national discourse around Australia Day, this study contributes new insights towards an understanding of how alternate narratives are expressed and erased in cyberspace, just as graffiti are erased from public view by the authorities. Widely promoted by official sources as a day of festivity and celebration, the Australia Day Your Way initiative actively promotes the use of the hashtag #AustraliaDay to metatag tweets for capture to an annual time capsule stored by the National Museum of Australia. For Australia’s indigenous minority though, Australia Day is symbolic of an entirely different narrative, expressed online through the hashtags #InvasionDay and #SurvivalDay. We studied all three hashtags and their intersections on Twitter and also compared this data to what was showcased in the official time capsule. We found that although the alternative voices existed on Twitter, they were excluded from the official time capsule. This has implications both for archives and for future historians studying contemporary events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information grounds are social settings where information, people, and place come together to create information flow within a physical environment (Karen E. Pettigrew, 1998). Information grounds also facilitate the opportunistic discovery of information within social settings created temporarily by people gathered for some purpose other than seeking information, but the social environment stimulates spontaneous information sharing (K. E. Pettigrew, 1999), such as in hair salons, doctor's waiting rooms and other public places. Professional and scholarly use of social media is a rapidly emerging area of research. In this regard, qualitative analysis of data gathered from Twitter is a relatively unexplored area of Library and Information Science (LIS) research. This paper details the results of a qualitative study of Twitter using digital ethnography, in order to investigate the use of Twitter by IT professionals in forming communities of practice. This study is relevant to Library and Information Science (LIS) research as LIS professionals are part of the IT community of practice. This study used information grounds theory (K. E. Fisher, 2005) to explore Twitter as an online information ground. The research used online observation - conceptualised here as online ethnography or digital ethnography - and interviews to collect data. The online observations helped the researcher to understand the norms and culture of the participants along with patterns of behaviour. Interviews were used to understand the information grounds of the virtual environment through the participants' individual perspectives and their information experiences. A total of eleven participants were interviewed after a total of 734 tweets from these same participants were downloaded and analysed. Both interview and Twitter data were analysed using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). The findings highlight a variety of information sharing types, the role of information sharing in professional contexts, and the influences of Twitter on communication and social engagement, including a counterintuitive finding that professionals use Twitter not so much to seek or share information as much as to seek out a network of like-minded people. The significance of this study is in providing a fundamental understanding of the ways in which social media is used for professional reasons. It also proposes a systematic, qualitative data collection and data analysis approach to future research around Twitter and social media in general. This contribution not only helps LIS researchers, but can also help information professionals in the use of social media for professional purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]