Twitter: follow the money and look beyond sports

In this Twitter Research Forum essay, Brett Hutchins, a leading researcher on the increasing digitization of sports media, reflects on the use value of Twitter for sports media researchers. Hutchins notes two responses for the increase in the number of research articles examining Twitter in the sporting context: (1) acknowledgment of the pivotal role of social networking platforms in contemporary sport industries and (2) a distinct repetitiveness in some research about social media and sport. Noting the ease of data collection concerning Twitter, Hutchins argues that the novelty of Twitter is insufficient justification for analyzing a limited sample of tweets. It is suggested that future research needs to examine Twitter s status as a commercial enterprise and that commodification needs to be more centrally considered when scraping data from Twitter output. Foremost, it is argued that Twitter is best positioned as the subject but not the center of inquiry and matters only because it is a source of insight into the transformation of media and technology markets. The essay closes by encouraging sport media researchers to broaden their agenda by engaging with research on the nonsporting sociocultural contexts and impacts of new digital media.