Twitter as Disruptive Innovation in Sport Communication

This Twitter Research Forum essay by Ann Pegoraro, one of the leading sport management and marketing scholars on social media, focuses on the need to study Twitter as a disruptive innovation in sport communication. Making a case that Twitter has disrupted the one-to-many, single-medium framework of sport consumption traditionally offered by television to the many-to-many possibilities of Internet-enabled sport participatory consumption, Pegoraro poses that Twitter's disruptiveness is distinctive in that it was up to the users to define how this platform would be used. Noting varied response to research on Twitter and sport, it is argued that the research process and the building of theory is necessarily not a neat and tidy direct line process. In observing that much research on Twitter and sport to date has ported many of the categories of research agendas and key theories that have driven earlier research on media and sport, the essay concludes that the research process that has been started portends hope for future comprehensive theoretical analysis.