Paper long abstract:

I will show results from a three-year participant observation on a group of very influential German Twitter amateurs. There, I have participated in a field, where the relationship of media technology and media practices can be studied extraordinarily well.

This relationship is one of the core issues of German media theory: After a dominance of techno-determinism, media theorist Hartmut Winkler developed a cyclical model of mutual inscription of media practices and media technologies, whereas one of them still holds a primate as »cameras are produced by camera producers not by cameramen« (Winkler 2004, 136). Winkler's approach has been criticized by Jens Schröter (2014, 244) for this prioritization.

In that debate, German media theory encounters concepts of innovation and interpretative flexibility that have been developed in The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987), which has already been used by van Dijck (2012) to analyze Twitter. She states »Twitter's meaning has not stabilized yet« (ibid., 19).

I will demonstrate Twitter's efforts to remain ›unstable‹ up to the present day and discuss the role of usage practices in that context. I will ask, in how far Winkler's model might have failed to describe the relationship of media practices and media technologies on a general level but remains helpful to understand the relationship of Twitter practices and the platform Twitter, as Twitter is produced by the company Twitter and not by Twitterers.