Thinking a lot about audience management and social media; there's a sort of flattening that happens on FB, where your private posts become the world's fodder; your high school friends bump into your college friends on a post; your new community and its politics ring off in the distance, in a community, hundreds of miles away. I don't want this platform to have addictive features, but I do think it could become a multiuser platform. The hard question is: how do you avoid Facebook's mistakes? What does a social-science informed social media platform look like? Is it worth doing at all if the tradeoff means focusing more on social dynamics than the posting experience, which was the real reason I built this thing at all?
Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate ‘imagined audiences’ on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of ‘micro-celebrity’ and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.