The issue of M/C Journal on Twitter I co-edited with Axel Bruns, is out now. The issue looks back at 20 years of Twitter as a site of media, cultural, and journalistic transformation. The platform has long occupied a central place in debates about digital journalism, not simply as a distribution channel but as an infrastructure that shapes how news is produced, circulated, and interpreted.
Co-editing the issue was, in effect, an exercise in framing that complexity. The collection brings together work that approaches Twitter less as a discrete object of study and more as part of a broader hybrid media system. I was always specifically interested in how institutional journalism intersected with networked publics on a platform where authority was continuously negotiated rather than assumed.
Axel and I are grateful to the contributors to the issue, whose work reflects both the diversity and the depth of current scholarship on Twitter and digital media. Bringing together these perspectives made it possible to approach the platform from multiple angles and to build a more comprehensive account of its role within the contemporary media system
I contributed two pieces to the issue. The first is the introduction written with Axel, which sets out the conceptual orientation for the collection. It situates Twitter within longer trajectories of media change, assessing how it has changed drastically from its original form and what lies ahead.
The second article revisits the idea of ambient journalism, extending my earlier work on how social media creates an always-on awareness system for news. In this piece, I introduce the concept of synthetic ambience to account for the increasing impact of AI-generated content that mimics the look and rhythms of human journalism. I argue that synthetic ambience suggests an epistemological turn, signalling a move from social ambience, rooted in networked publics, to algorithmic ambience, driven by platform curation.
The issue is out now and available as open access.