Social Media and Global Development Rituals: a content analysis of blogs and tweets on the 2010 Summit

Social media content generated by web logs (‘blogs’) and Twitter messages (‘tweets’) constitute new types of data that can help us better understand the reproduction of global rituals in the context of international development policies and practice. Investigating the United Nations High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), a three-day event held at UN Headquarters in New York in 2010, as a case study, we examine a sample of 108 blog entries discussing the meeting, as well as 3007 related tweets. We find that topics receiving the densest coverage mirrored existing priorities as defined by the mdgs. Although most blog entries created content which, in contrast to tweets, went beyond spreading mere factual or referential information on the event and even included some critical commentary, sustained debates did not emerge. Our findings suggest that social media content accompanying the Summit reproduced global development rituals and thus failed to catalyse alternative priorities for and approaches to international development.