Who tweets about sports law?
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EDITORIAL
Who tweets about sports law? Johan Lindholm1 Published online: 17 October 2019 © T.M.C. Asser Instituut 2019
1 Introduction Social media is ubiquitous.1 It is difficult to fathom that there was no Facebook fifteen years ago and that social media’s spread to seemingly every aspect of society has essentially happened in the last decade. This includes professional life as, for example, evidenced by LinkedIn’s more than 650 million users. Not even the academic debate, which traditionally prides itself with being deliberate, nuanced, and comparatively slow, has escaped social media. While scholars vary regarding to what extent they use and engage with social media, studies have shown that researchers generally find social media stressful, risky, of poor quality, and at odds with conducting high-quality research.2 There is nevertheless evidence that more and more scholarly communication takes place on social media,3 including on research-dedicated platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu.4 The overwhelming majority of users’ interaction with social media can be sorted into one of two categories: producing and consuming content. This also holds true for professional use of social media, including in the context of academia. Researchers produce social media content that includes describing their research findings, spreading scientific news, and more generally sharing their thoughts, ideas, and reactions. Social media can be used to attract more attention to papers5 and in this sense functions as a “networked loudspeaker,”6 a tool with more and less positive uses.7 Scholars also act as professional social media consumers using social media to stay up to date with the latest development in their fields. However, because social media is social interaction and easily and reliably collectable, researchers have for some time also used social media as a tool for studying social interaction.8 This short contribution is a humble example of this. Over time, the use of social media in a professional capacity has spread to the field of sports law where actors * Johan Lindholm [email protected] 1
Department of Law, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
interested in and working with sports law produce and consume content and (hopefully) communicate with each other. One very popular platform for this is Twitter,9 and one can in this regard speak of a “sports law Twittersphere.”10 There is little doubt that social media’s impact on the world is real and extensive.11 Much like Twitter as a whole constitutes “a globally distributed public conversation” that influences which phenomena are discussed and how they are understood,12 the sports law Twittersphere influences the global sports law discussion and affects what the participants focus on and how they think about it. This editorial seeks to explore who are the actors that shape the sports law Twittersphere. In order to answer this question, I have collected and studied 2,127 tweets about sports law: All original tweets13 posted over a period of 71 days14 that co
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