Following the followers : sport researchers' labour lost in the Twittersphere?

This Twitter Research Forum essay by Communication & Sport Associate Editor David Rowe explores the common assumption that Twitter has insinuated itself into all the communicative crevices of contemporary everyday life, including those set in the sporting context. Invoking Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it is noted that the interpretive ground for communicative innovations such as Twitter (and its import broadly and in sport in the particular) are often staked out by bipolar--conservative and innovative and dystopian and utopian--projections. Rowe notes that the fragility and unpredictability of the capitalist marketplace should not be forgotten in assessing the euphoria about and real effects of Twitter in sport and elsewhere. The essay concludes by ntoing that, in approaching Twitter, it is imperative that sport researchers understand that powerful forces are at work although their precise timing, place, and extent may be (as yet) unknown.