The DOI matches its Crossref record; 47 of the 47 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter
Abstract
This article presents the first steps towards a sociological understanding of emergent social media. This article uses Twitter, the most popular social media website, as its focus. Recently, the social media site has been prominently associated with social movements in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. Rather than rush to breathlessly describe its novel role in shaping contemporary social movements, this article takes a step back and considers Twitter in historical and broad sociological terms. This article is not intended to provide empirical evidence or a fully formed theoretical understanding of Twitter, but rather to provide a selected literature review and a set of directions for sociologists. The article makes connections specifically to Erving Goffman’s interactionist work, not only to make the claim that some existing sociological theory can be used to think critically about Twitter, but also to provide some initial thoughts on how such theoretical innovations can be developed.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community
(2000) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.38-2454 · Cited by 28,789
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Naegele, K. D., & Goffman, E. (1956) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2089106 · Cited by 25,991
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste*
Bourdieu, P. (2018) · Food and Culture · doi:10.4324/9781315680347-10 · Cited by 20,289
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Goffman, E. (2023) · Social Theory Re-Wired · doi:10.4324/9781003320609-59 · Cited by 17,562
Putnam, R. (2000) · doi:10.1145/358916.361990 · Cited by 17,114
Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship
boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007) · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication · doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x · Cited by 16,251
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Warner, M., Bourdieu, P., & Nice, R. (1985) · MLN · doi:10.2307/2905454 · Cited by 14,091
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007) · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication · doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x · Cited by 9,939
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
Thompson, E., Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M., Emerson, C., & Holquist, M. (1981) · World Literature Today · doi:10.2307/40136453 · Cited by 9,726
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
Wasiolek, E., Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M., & Emerson, C. (1982) · Comparative Literature · doi:10.2307/1770763 · Cited by 7,540
Cited by
Digital Wildfires: Propagation, Verification, Regulation, and Responsible Innovation
Webb, H., Burnap, P., Procter, R., Rana, O., Stahl, B. C., Williams, M., Housley, W., Edwards, A., & Jirotka, M. (2016) · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · doi:10.1145/2893478 · Cited by 64
When Politicians Talk: Assessing Online Conversational Practices of Political Parties on Twitter
Lietz, H., Wagner, C., Bleier, A., & Strohmaier, M. (2014) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14521 · Cited by 60
Twitter and Television in a Hybrid Media System: The 2013 Italian election campaign
Marchetti, R., & Ceccobelli, D. (2016) · Journalism Practice · doi:10.1080/17512786.2015.1040051 · Cited by 32
The Child Labor in Social Media: Kidfluencers, Ethics of Care, and Exploitation
Clark, D. R., & Jno-Charles, A. B. (2025) · Journal of Business Ethics · doi:10.1007/s10551-025-05953-7 · Cited by 25
“Social media has disrupted how we communicate, how we relate, and, through the rise of the influencer, how products are marketed and sold (e.g., Marshall et al., 2012; Murthy, 2012).”
Metadata
- Authors
- Murthy, D.
- Venue
- Sociology
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2012-09-24
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1059-1073
- ISSN
- 0038-0385 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-8684
- OpenAlex
- W2070597718
- Cited by
- 310
- References
- 47
- FWCI
- 41.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0038038511422553
- The paper
- Murthy, D. (2012). Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511422553
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
