Sarah Palin did what? The Importance of Redundancy

G. R. Boynton, University of Iowa

Abstract

It was but a drop in a roiling stream of 50 million messages a day. Three hundred and sixty seven times the word went out: "Sarah Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care: http://bit.ly/cRRdAU". From time to time the basic messages was either adapted slightly or augmented with commentary by the tweeter, but the basic message was always the same. While living in Alaska Sarah Palin had regularly crossed into Canada for healthcare.

Why more than once? The same question could be asked about all communication utilizing Twitter. The Twitter stream is full of repetition. A power blackout in Chile after days of earthquakes is reported hundreds of times. Google threatening to pull out of China appears thousands of times. Redundancy reigns, but to what effect?