Twitter becoming a mirror for people to self-analyze.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Research scientists Munmun De Choudhury and Michael Massimi have published a new research effort that examines how the soon-to-be-married use Twitter and how their language on social media changes after they get engaged.
“Our hypothesis was that Twitter could be an archive which could tell us about the life milestones people experience,” Munmun De Choudhury, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told The New York Times.
De Choudhury and Massimi specifically geared their study — titled, “She said yes!” – Liminality and Engagement Announcements on Twitter — towards 923 individuals who announced their betrothals with the hashtag #engaged between May and December of 2011.
Next, they collected tweets from before and after the users were engaged. By pulling from a period of 9 months prior to and 12 months after each engagement, they consolidated over 2 million tweets.
In order to maintain a control group, the researchers also sampled tweets from 50 random Twitter users on each day of the study period, which added over 12 million tweets from over 11,000 users into the mix.
De Choudhury and Massimi found that there were distinct differences in people’s tweets from the period before being engaged and after.
After getting engaged, subjects tweeted 51 percent more first-person plural pronouns. Meanwhile, their first-person singular pronouns decreased by a significant 69 percent. The researchers believe the numbers indicate people identified more with couple-hood after becoming engaged.
The study also found engaged tweeters talked more about the present and the future as opposed to the past. People used 41 percent fewer past-tense verbs after getting engaged, while present and future tense verbs increased by 52 percent and 62 percent, respectively.
Furthermore, subjects used the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” less in their Twitter posts while making more frequent references to a fiancé or fiancée, as well as posting more comments about couple-centric activities such as cooking, watching television, and traveling together.
“People are repurposing Twitter as a mirror of how they see themselves in the real world, and that’s very interesting,” De Choudhury said. “It tells us people are taking these tools very seriously.”