Co-Motion—Twitter Enters the Public Domain

Abstract

Political communication is being dramatically altered by the new or social media. The new media has discovered this communication. The politicians have discovered this communication. The paper is an argument about what the public domain becomes as the new media becomes pervasive in society. The evidence used to buttress the argument is taken from 800 collections of streams of Twitter messages. Twitter is particularly useful as evidence because it is by default public. Hence, it is in the public domain. And it is readily available for researchers. The conclusion is that we have moved from broadcast-audience to co-motion, and that is a dramatic transformation of the public domain.