G’day ! Delighted to pass on this new issue announcement, which will be of interest to many here: From: Axel Bruns via M/C Journal <mc-journal@qut.edu.au> Sent: Tuesday, 12 May 2026 11:39 To: Axel Bruns <editor@media-culture.org.au> Subject: [MCJ] New Issue Now Available: 'twitter', edited by Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — 11 May 2026 M/C – Media and Culture is proud to present issue two in volume twenty-nine of M/C Journal http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ ‘twitter’ — Edited by Axel Bruns and Alfred Hermida It started with a bland tweet by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, simply saying, "just setting up my twttr” in March 2006. Twenty years on, the anniversary of Twitter’s launch presents an opportunity to diagnose a platform that has garnered so much scholarly, media, and public attention over the past two decades. Twitter's legacy is best understood as a history of public communication infrastructure and its failures, rather than just as a platform history. This issue treats Twitter as an analytically significant object, even as the platform itself has been rebranded as X and undergone a radical transformation. The name matters because “Twitter” captures more than a single platform under a single owner. It describes a cultural imprint, a set of communication practices, and a body of scholarly work that shaped how we understand social media itself. The tension between commemoration and critique runs through this issue. We are not simply marking a milestone. We seek to examine what remains when a platform mutates beyond recognition. What happens when the object of study changes ownership, governance, and infrastructure while retaining some contested form of continuity? This question of periodisation runs through the various contributions. Twenty Years Later: Twitter, Transformation, and Platform Legacies — Alfred Hermida and Axel Bruns The Death of Twitter and the Decline of Public Debate Online — Axel Bruns Ambient Journalism after Twitter: Algorithmic Curation and the Emergence of Synthetic Ambience — Alfred Hermida How Political Journalists Found—and Lost—a Home on Twitter — Elizabeth Dubois What the Rise and Fall of Twitter Revealed about Collective Behaviour in Natural Hazards Disaster Response — Leysia Palen Truth Markets and the Consensus Trap: Twenty Years of Twitter as Epistemic Infrastructure — Timothy Graham The Emergence of the Shallow State and the Capturing of Twitter — Marisa Duarte and Marco Bastos Building a Digital Media Platform for the European Public Sphere: Plans, Projects, Pitfalls — Christoph Neuberger From the Wild West to the Walled Garden: The Evolution of Twitter/X Data Access for Research — Fabio Giglietto and Cornelius Puschmann Can 20 Years of Twitter Be Preserved? What Is Lost, What Remains, and What Is in Between — Katrin Weller, Yining Wang, Yannik Peters, and Johannes B. Gruber Unbecoming: Twitter and a Better Sociotechnical Future — Breigha Adeyemo and Zizi Papacharissi A Twitter Obituary: Fragile Digital Publics and Their Afterlife — Tanja Bosch ________________________________ Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2026: 'immortality': article deadline 17 Apr. 2026, release date 17 June 2026 'embodiment': release date 12 Aug. 2026 'beach': article deadline 21 Aug. 2026, release date 21 Oct. 2026 'extreme': article deadline 25 Sep. 2026, release date 25 Nov. 2026 M/C Journal 29.2 is now online: <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>. All previous issues of M/C Journal on various topics are also still available. ________________________________ All contributors are available for media contacts: mc@media-culture.org.au<mailto:mc@media-culture.org.au>. ________________________________ -- M/C Journal -- http://journal.media-culture.org.au/