CNU Twitter: Leading a Life of Significance on a Public Sphere
Digital Public Spheres
Public deliberation of our ideas and opinions has historically taken place face-to-face. The right to debate outlooks, facts, and opinions is what gives structure to science, communication, and what we now call social media. While this deliberation still occurs across the dinner table and across the aisle in a political courtroom, the discussions have seamlessly shifted to take place online.
When the term public sphere was coined by Habermas, a public referred to a general forum for people to share their ideas freely (Lecture Slides, 2021). Virtually anywhere could be considered a public, as long as deliberation was freely occurring. However, limitations existed in these publics where everyone was not awarded a voice, minorities and women primarily. Today, the public sphere of social media provides a more anonymous platform for everyone to speak their mind to an unlimited audience, overcoming the limitations of previous publics. Twitter has been known to host countless debates on anything from politics to popular culture. In a study on Twitter’s efficacy in debates as a public sphere, researchers claimed:
“Twitter is perceived in the domain of political communication as a central space for the exchange of information and the debate of current topics because of four unique characteristics. First, all tweets are visible to everyone by default, except when a tweet or an account has been set to private. Second, hashtags, as a key feature of Twitter, facilitate discussions around specific topics without explicitly creating bounded groups. This feature also enables users to follow a debate anonymously without being noticed, that is, users can lurk. Third, Twitter’s retweet func- tion allows information to be diffused quickly and effortlessly. Finally, and important in the context of political communication, Twitter, in comparison to other sites like Facebook, does not require reciprocal relationships among users, allowing for the easy emergence of central nodes of information diffusion” (Yang, Quan-Haase, & Rannenberg, 2017, pp 1986).
Twitter has a strong hand to play in the social media public sphere, and many organizations including colleges have taken advantage of this.
CNU Twitter: a new public sphere
On CNU Twitter, everyone has a voice, student, parent, faculty member, and administrator.
More recently and closer to home, it has been the source of a lively debate on Christopher Newport’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Known to users as “CNU Twitter,” a digital public has emerged for CNU students, parents, and faculty to speak freely about the events on campus. Its presence as a public is supported by the open-access opportunity it provides to users. No one is excluded from sharing in the forum. There are not any gatekeepers refusing admittance to students, such as the CNU Parents Facebook page. On CNU Twitter, everyone has a voice, student, parent, faculty member, and administrator. It has been a place for these CNU affiliates to speak on campus-related issues and topics freely.
The power of the public has increased in the last year. While it is still used as a forum for light-hearted campus-related posts and cheerful discussion, in the last two years, the tone of the tweets has shifted from joyful and appreciative to disapproving and angry. Desperate cries for help from students have been heard across this public concerning the CNU administration’s handling of COVID-19 cases and information on campus. When this public operated as a location to share funny campus stories and occasional complaints, not much ever came of the tweets shared amongst the users. However, the contents of the public have flooded over to news stations and members of the Newport News community who are not affiliated with the public. This is a testament to the power CNU Twitter holds when it comes to publicity for the administration.
COVID-19 on college campuses has been a topic for debate since the beginning of the pandemic. Administrations across the nation have grappled with the decision to bring their students online and lose money in the process. Following a spring semester of online instruction, CNU pushed for in-person classes Fall 2020 and on, angering many students. Accommodations were put in place to aid immunocompromised students and streaming options for classes were available to almost all students. However, this changed in 2021 with new protocols for the spring semester. All students were required to return to campus for in-person classes, otherwise they needed to defer a semester. With activities limited and campus population at a high, cases began to rise around the third week of classes. When the cases hit 100, students hit send on tweets holding the university accountable. Outrage over letters from the administration made their way to CNU Twitter, and opinions racked up retweets.
CNU Twitter’s status as a digital public is obvious in the reaction present on how the COVID-19 cases spiked on campus. Students from every year, including alumni and parents, joined in on a collective conversation about the safety of CNU students in the midst of a pandemic.
The movement did not stop at outrage, however. The public went even further to contact the administration in several ways. One student posted a public Google Doc to collect the opinions and ideas from CNU Twitter to construct a letter to Dean Kevin Hughes, Vice President of Student Affairs. In his letter, the student wrote, “this virus has killed millions, and it is the responsibility of both the students and the administration to make sure no more people are put at risk” (C. Lowe, personal communication, 2021). 115 students, alumni, and parents signed the letter addressing possible solutions for the CNU community to consider when moving forward in the pandemic. Twitter was used as a digital public for those thoughts to come together into a collective letter to the CNU administration.
Additionally, an organized movement to comment reviews on the CNU Facebook page also emerged from the digital public. Over twenty reviews were posted to the CNU Facebook page in one night, poking at the public image that CNU is known to protect. Over the course of a week, dozens of comments were added to the review page, tanking the previous 4.7/5 rating to be dropped to 4.5. However, slowly the reviews were deleted and the CNU rating was raised to 5/5, higher than where it started. This shows the efficacy of the actions taken by this digital public. Together, members of the public identified an angle that the administration would not overlook and acted collectively to make a change.
The removal of several Facebook reviews prompted more action on CNU Twitter. As more people noticed a pattern of negative reviews getting deleted via “viral” tweets such as the one below, more reviews were posted.
This collective movement by CNU Twitter prompted local news outlets to get involved. Nearly overnight, articles on CNU’s handling of the rising COVID cases on campus were posted and shared in several digital publics associated with CNU. Authors at the DailyPress, Wavy10, and 13NewsNow wrote articles on the rising cases on campus after students tagged them to posts circulating throughout CNU Twitter and after push to reach out to these outlets from students on the platform. Journalists, working as researchers and guides, found access to these stories through CNU Twitter. Many have argued the credibility in stories found on or by using social media such as Twitter. However, researcher Ali Ahmad critically analyzed Twitter’s role in journalism, noting that if Twitter is used as a tool for journalism, rather than journalism as a tool for Twitter, the public can heavily aid journalists in almost all of their roles for the public (2010). The journalistic attention brought the events at CNU is proof that a digital public such as CNU Twitter not only has a purpose but also has the ability to bring about change, similar to many different historical publics.
Public spheres have changed shape over time. CNU Twitter is one of the most applicable examples of a digital public sphere to students and faculty related to the university. Recently, response from the CNU administration has been increased and the case numbers have decreased. However, it cannot be denied that some of the credit should be given to CNU Twitter. Its all to action against the injustices students observed on campus has a direct correlation to the increased response from the administration and the student body.
