Information affordances: Studying the information processing activities of the core Occupy actors on Twitter

Emergent social movements benefit from technologies that support the information activities that core actors perform to achieve the goals of the movement. Starting with an information-centric perspective, we use the theoretical lens of information processing, to examine the roles of Twitter affordances during the Occupy movement in solving information problems. Our data is a corpus of tweets from the core actors of the movement, as identified by our extended 1/9/90 rule. Using inferential statistics and network visualization, we show how different Twitter affordances act as mechanisms to resolve information problems in many different ways. Our network visualization shows the ecology of the interactions amongst the core actors, and between the core actors and the public. Our work contributes to the discussion around recent social movements on Twitter and advances the theory of information processing.