Canada Reads by the (Twitter) Numbers

As we frame our questions about who is discussing Canadian books in online spaces, we thought it would be useful to highlight some of the numbers that shape the conversation:

Of the 8,687 Twitter users who write about Canada Reads, the vast majority tweet about the program a single time. Approximately 2,900 users post multiple times about Canada Reads: these users post, on average, three tweets. Forty-one users have written more than fifty tweets about the program; 117 users have tweeted more than twenty-five but fewer than fifty times. 

The following visualization shows the networks of connections linking together the regular participants in the Twitter conversations about Canada Reads:

While we’re still in the process of breaking this big-picture network diagram into smaller components, we have already been able to discern a few categories of users:

1. Organizational Tweets— Accounts such as CBCbooks & ChaptersIndigo primarily work as promotion vehicles that retweet heavily and link to their own content. 

2. Celebrity Accounts— Accounts from authors featured on Canada Reads, and from celebrities who have appeared on the show (TheCandyShow, Bruce Poon Tip, Jully Black), which tend to engage with one another and bolster the show’s messaging. Candy Palmater is an exception in that she regularly challenges the discourse of the show and engages with listeners.

3. The Participatory Public— Public response is varied and surprising. A significant number of listeners are positive in their response to the program and to Canadian literary culture more generally. Vanessa Pinto is representative of this community in her comments that Canada Reads “makes me proud to live in Canada and … truly reflects what diversity is all about.” 

4. Counter-discursive Public— Finally, there are the members of the public who use Twitter to challenge the discourses of nation, literacy, and citizenship that Canada Reads offers. This community of listeners provides a range of critical responses:

What we are seeing is not just a group of readers responding to the program in a polemical or challenging manner, but actually readers reinscribing of the discourse and language of Canada Reads and Canadian literature via their digital engagement with the program. In this respect, online spaces become an alternate place in which voices that are not represented by the program can be heard. In future blog posts, we will explore these communities and their engagement with the program in more detail.