Twitterature telling stories with the threads and resources of Twitter

Abstract

Innovation in social network contents is increasing every day through the contributions and creativity of users. This paper presents the study of the narrative possibilities offered by Twitter through its thread creation tool. To this aim, we analysed more than 1,300 publications, grouped into 16 threads created between 2017 and 2020 and with over 7 million generated interactions. A mixed methodology is used based on content analysis, monitoring of Twitter publications and semi-structured interviews. The results show that there are several types of threads on this social network and that each of them has its own characteristics and voice, as well as certain stylistic resources. The findings indicate that Twitter has a high potential both to create improvised narratives and to construct planned stories and narratives, which often rely on an elaborate pre-production and audiovisual production process. The threads of this social network allow for the interactivity of the reading users and their active participation in the construction of stories.