If this is about pensions, why are students the most active talking about it? (Tag cloud of #n30 bios)
Tag cloud of #n30 Tweeters' bios
I was interested to see an analysis of those who are tweeting about #n30 at the moment. This is taken from the last 3000 tweets and analyses those Tweeters’ biographies.
3 Comments on “If this is about pensions, why are students the most active talking about it? (Tag cloud of #n30 bios)”
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I’m a student, I’m a teacher, I use Twitter and I posted about today’s strikes within the past three hours. Admittedly I didn’t use the N30 hashtag, so it doesn’t really count.
I don’t think this information tells us anything other than maybe students may be more likely to be using Twitter at this time of day than other people. Maybe more students than teachers have Twitter accounts that they comment on regularly? Or maybe students are commenting about how they have been affected by the strikes?
Twitter does not provide an accurate cross section of society, and you can’t really glean much information like this accurately from it. By the same token you could say that only people from London seem to be talking about it, or that there is some sort of correlation between music and pensions.
I suppose I should have said ‘most active on Twitter’ – I thought it was implied by the fact it was a Twitter #cloud – I don’t think this is a representative cross-section of society, but I still think it is relevant.
As both a student and teacher, I imagine you are in the minority, and of course I haven’t checked out the accounts of all those students to see if they are student teachers, that’s purely a guess.
Even looking at users on Twitter – which on protest days usually increase quite dramatically – I think it is telling that those tweeting the most are students. For whatever reason that may be, I think it speaks for the importance of the issue the stats available.
I’ll grab another chart later to see if it changes throughout the day.
As Emma points out, many public sector works are also students as I am. So that could account for it.
The use of hashtags is hit and miss at times. I often forget to add the hashtag at the end of a Tweet, much to the annoyance of some people. I would not simply use the N30 hashtag as a means
It may also be something the spread of Twitter users amongst age ranges and professions/staff groups. I work in a team of roughly 30 clinicians (nurses, medics). Out of those, there are only three of us who use Twitter. And today, half of them are on strike and will not be tweeting about it. Admittedly, most of them are on Facebook!