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Estrada

1 Christopher Estrada Professor Malcolm Campbell English 1103/Section 011 9 April 2013 Tweeting With The Stars Over the past ten years technology has advanced at an astonishing rate. From the progression of the cell phone to the laptop computer, technology is noticeably different from how it was in the last decade. One of the big things that have come out of this advancement are the social networking sites that everyone seems to be a part of, especially people in the up and coming generation. It seems as though real-life social networks and friendships are being replaced with online ones as time continues to pass. As author Sandra Chami Kassis says, We are the generation of Social Media, our biggest revolution is a Tweet of 141 Characters (Goodreads). From the original days of making a MySpace to the current times of using Facebook, social networks have gone through many phases in their existence. One of the more recent ones to come to prominence is Twitter. On this site one can send out messages in 140 characters or less in what is called a tweet. These tweets can be about anything you want it to be about as long as it is below 140 characters. One can follow other people in order to see what they tweet, just like if someone follows you they can see what you tweet. Now who exactly has a Twitter? I guess the better question would be who does not have one? Actors, politicians across the world, even the Pope and the Dalai Lama have a Twitter. Some of the most followed people on Twitter are famous athletes across many different sports and sports leagues like the National Football League and Major League Baseball. Why do people
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Estrada 2 follow their favorite athletes on Twitter? Is it just because they like the athlete as a person or a figure as a whole? I believe it is because Twitter makes people feel like they know their favorite athletes better than ever because athletes accounts are more public, they are actually tweeting for themselves, and above all they are very social on Twitter. One reason people feel like they know their favorite athletes better than ever before is because their accounts and themselves are more public than they would have been in the past. According to the Twitters Privacy Policy Any registered user can send a Tweet, which is a message of 140 characters or less that is public by default and can include other content like photos, videos, and links to other websites (Twitter). This means that as soon as any person tweets something it is instantly public. On other social networking sites, this is not the case. For example, on Facebook as you set up your account, it gives you the option to make your account more or less private depending on what you want. The various options that one can choose from include the public can see your account, only friends of your friends on Facebook can see your account, or your friends are the only people that can see your account. On Twitter, your account immediately starts off public, however, you can make it private after creating it. The main difference between Twitter and Facebook is that there are less Privacy settings on the website so your Twitter is either exclusively public or exclusively private. If this is the case, then an athletes Twitter is more likely to be public so that their fans can make finding them easier so that they can follow them. The publicity of the site allows fans to easily see what the athletes think or say at any given time without actually being a member of the site. This makes fans of all types feel as though they know their favorite athlete better than ever.
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Estrada 3 In addition to the social networking sites becoming more public the celebrities themselves are more public than they were in the past. It used to be that in order for someone to find out what a celebrity was doing they needed people to follow them around. This is where the paparazzi came into play. Different magazines, newspapers, and television stations sent people to watch celebrities, including athletes, and see what they did on a day-to-day basis. It was something that fans were interested in and the only way to do this was in a physical way. Nowadays, thanks to advancement in technology, celebrities seem to be more public. If a reporter from ESPN sought an interview from an athlete they would need to get a time and place for them to sit down. With the invention and improvements of the cell phone, all reporters have to do is call an athlete to get an interview. Also coming with the advancement of cell phones is the invention of applications for things like Twitter. Now athletes do not even need a computer to tweet, they can do it straight from their cell phone. This makes the athletes seem more public because they can just tweet whenever they feel like doing so. Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore said, Privacy is dead, and social media hold the smoking gun (Cashmore). This is true as the increase in publicity from sites like Twitter leads to a decrease in the private lives of athletes and other celebrities. Another reason people feel like they know their favorite athletes better than ever before is because the athletes are tweeting, a form of online speaking, for themselves. This may seem like an obvious statement, but some researchers believe that this may not be entirely true. In an article by Michael McKnight, a well-known sports journalist, in Sports Illustrated, the concept of ghost-tweeting is discussed. Ghost-tweeting is when one is not actually tweeting for oneself. Specifically it is done for athletes who are prone to diarrhea of the fingertips in order to prevent them from tweeting something that they should not (McKnight).
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Estrada 4 If you think about it, is this restricting the athlete from expressing things that they normally would? Does this restriction take away from whom they try to portray them to be? I believe that an athlete should be able to tweet whatever they want to with absolutely no consequences, like fines, for expressing their thoughts honestly. If I were a fan I would want to ensure that the person I was following on Twitter was actually the real person that I had chosen to follow. There are many different types of people out there that are fans of different types of athletes. For example, personally the athletes that I follow on Twitter tend to be athletes that talk crap. I like to read what cocky athletes have to say about their opponent so I am more likely to follow them. However, if they are not allowed to do this because their organization has restricted them from doing so by giving them a sort of speechwriter to tweet for them, then I would be very disappointed. The good news for me is that ghost-tweeting rarely happens and when it does, it is something the athlete would have said anyways. In the same article by McKnight, he writes of a conversation he had with someone from a firm who studied an NBA client so much that the followers that the player had never suspected that someone was tweeting for him. He writes what the athlete told the person from the firm, He even told me himself, Wow, I would have said it exactly like that (McKnight). I believe that most athletes tweet for themselves anyways. If they did not I believe that they would be very transparent and you could tell who did not tweet for themselves. The fact that they do tweet makes people feel that whatever they read from the athletes contributes to that person as a whole. For example, I saw on my Twitter feed that Lebron James, a NBA player, tweeted If my son played for Rutgers or a coach like that he would have some real explaining to do and I'm still gone whoop on him afterwards! C'mon amongst the news that the Rutgers head
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Estrada 5 basketball coach threw basketballs at players heads and yelled homophobic slurs at them (James). The tweet portrays James as a strong fatherly figure who loves his sons very much, which would make people feel as though this is one of his traits as not only an athlete, but a person as well. When athletes tweet for themselves it allows fans to feel as if they know them better than ever before. Finally, fans feel as if they know their favorite athletes better than ever before because the athletes are very social with their fans on Twitter. Since Twitter is a social networking site, what else would they do on it, besides be social? Well as Kevin Cacabelos, creator of a Seatown Sports in Seattle, points out there are many other uses for Twitter. For example, athletes can use Twitter in order to promote themselves or products that they are associated with. Kevin Durant, a player in the NBA, has done this over the course of my research. On March 29, 2013 he tweeted Find out what drives me every day in the new @Gatorade spot with @DwyaneWade #WinFromWithin with a link attached that led to a commercial that he was in (Durant). This had nothing to do with being social with his fans and everything to do with promoting Gatorade, a product that he is endorsed and sponsored by. Another example of something that an athlete can use Twitter for is to build or rebuild up a public image. If you as an athlete have had some negative controversy surrounding your name, you could use public social networking sites to rebuild your image in a more public site. In his article, Cacabelos uses Reggie Bush, a NFL player, as an athlete that has done or attempted to do this recently. In his career, Bush has had a controversy surrounding his recruitment and whether he received improper benefits to play at the University of Southern California. He even had to vacate his Heisman trophy, the highest honor for a college football player. In order to rebuild his image he went to Twitter. Currently his Twitter bio is I can do all things through Christ who
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Estrada 6 strengthens me, which suggests he is more religious and spiritual, which is generally positive in the public eye. Most of his tweets have a positive feel to them as well, like what he tweeted on March 17, 2013, Man church was amazing today! Every time I go to church I here something that directly applies to my life and what I'm going through! (Bush). These uses of Twitter is not for the fans to be connected to him, but are more for his image to become more of a positive one. However, as research conducted by several different professionals suggest, this is really not what athletes use Twitter for overall. In the International Journal of Sport Communication, Christopher Greenwell, a professor who works at the University of Louisville and has published several scholarly articles in academic journals, describes a content analysis done on various athletes tweets. They analyzed 101 different athletes across various sports and separated twenty of their most recent tweets into six categories including diversion, information, interactivity, sharing, content, fanship, and promotional. The results came to find that the most common type of tweet done by an athlete is interactivity with thirty-four percent of the tweets. This means that athletes use Twitter most commonly as a medium for direct interpersonal communication with friends and fans (Greenwell, 481). How does this interactivity and socialness contribute to fans feeling like they know their favorite athletes better than ever before? This was a good question that I needed answered so I went back to the International Journal of Sport Communication for more help. I found in a different article by Patrick Walsh, a professor at Miami University, about why people follow athletes on Twitter, an answer to my question. He writes the more social an athlete is on Twitter the more media users may feel as if they are engaged in a normal social relationship with that athlete (Walsh, 493). This seemed odd to me at first, but then I started to think about it more. The point of Twitter is for it to be a social network, which is a network of social
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Estrada 7 interactions and personal relationships. Anyone that you are connected to in a social network is in a social relationship with you. The more social you are with a person the more likely that you will feel like you know them. The only difference between a real-life social network and Twitter is the fact that one of them is online. If your favorite athlete is more social with you on Twitter then chances are that you will feel as if you know them more than you would have without a social network like Twitter. Twitter, in recent years, has presented a medium between athletes and fans and the interactions between them. Thanks to the social networking site, fans feel like they know their favorite athletes better than ever before. This can be attributed to several reasons. For one, I believe it is because Twitter makes people feel like they know their favorite athletes better than ever because athletes accounts are more public. Another reason is that the athletes are actually tweeting for themselves. Finally, above all athletes are very social with their fans on Twitter. It is for these reasons that I believe fans follow their favorite athletes on Twitter. As technology is advanced in the near future we can only expect for social networks to do this as well. What exactly will be the next big thing, like Facebook or Twitter? Will there be a site where you can directly communicate with other people even more than you already can? The answer to these questions will become more and more apparent as time passes. What I can say is that no matter what changes come, fans will probably feel more and more connected to people that they might never meet in person like actors, politicians, and athletes. I guess all of us fanatics of a certain figure can only thank social networks for the connections that we have to these people because without them, the connections just might not exist.
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Estrada 8 Works Cited Bush, Reggie. (ReggieBush). Man church was amazing today! Every time I go to church I here something that directly applies to my life and what I'm going through!. 17 March 2013, 5:11 PM. Tweet.

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Cacabelos, Kevin. "Professional Tweeters: The Impact of Twitter on Professional Athletes." Seatown Sports. Bloguin, 02 Mar. 2011. Web. 02 Apr. 2013.

Cashmore, Pete. "Privacy Is Dead, and Social Media Hold Smoking Gun." CNN. Cable News Network, 28 Oct. 2009. Web. 26 Mar. 2013.

Durant, Kevin. (KDTrey5). Find out what drives me every day in the new @Gatorade spot with @DwyaneWade #WinFromWithin http://bit.ly/ZwGfPW. 29 March 2013, 1:16 PM. Tweet.

Greenwell, T. Christopher, et al. "Understanding Professional Athletes' Use Of Twitter: A Content Analysis Of Athlete Tweets." International Journal Of Sport Communication 3.4 (2010): 454-471. SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.

James, Lebron. (KingJames). If my son played for Rutgers or a coach like that he would have some real explaining to do and I'm still gone whoop on him afterwards! C'mon. 2 April 2013, 4:35 PM. Tweet.

Estrada 9 McKnight, Michael. "Twitter Can Be Dangerous for Professional Athletes - More Sports SI.com." Sports Illustrated. 20 Sept. 2012. Web. 12 Mar. 2013.

Pegoraro, Ann. "Look Who's Talking--Athletes On Twitter: A Case Study." International Journal Of Sport Communication 3.4 (2010): 501-514. SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.

"Quotes About Social Media." Goodreads. Goodreads, 2013. Web. 27 Mar. 2013.

Twitter. "Twitter Privacy Policy." Twitter. Twitter, 17 May 2012. Web. 27 Mar. 2013.

Walsh, Patrick, et al. "Why We Follow: An Examination Of Parasocial Interaction And Fan Motivations For Following Athlete Archetypes On Twitter." International Journal Of Sport Communication 5.4 (2012): 481-502. SPORTDiscus with Full Text. Web. 22 Feb. 2013

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