Abstract
Reflecting on the research presented in this volume, this chapter considers the nature and quality of political communication on Twitter and what this reveals about the platform’s potential to serve as a public sphere. The chapter elaborates on the importance of extending current understandings of political communication to include the trivial and everyday conversations people often have, the role Twitter plays in forming communities and giving voice to marginalized groups, the nature of resistance on Twitter, as well as the quality of interactions between users. Concluding that Twitter usage is more about connections than engagement, the chapter argues that viewing Twitter as a public sphere does not reflect the reality of behaviors on Twitter, which can best be described as a wild public network instead.
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Bouvier, G., Rosenbaum, J.E. (2020). Afterword: Twitter and the Democratization of Politics. In: Bouvier, G., Rosenbaum, J.E. (eds) Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_13
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