A media is a means of mass communication, such as television, radio or newspapers. Harold Innis, a leading scholar in communication and media theory, separated media into two categories, temporal and spatial. Time-oriented media lasts longer but reaches little, while space-oriented media reaches many but is short-lived. Twitter is a form of social media, which sends short messages that have the potential to reach a massive audience on a global scale, placing it in Harold Innis' category of spatial media. As mentioned, Twitter is a social media that allows its two hundred million users (twitter.com) to send messages or tweets of one hundred and forty characters to the world. Members “follow” other users whose tweets they want to see on their home feed. By default, tweets are visible to the public, including non-Twitter members, but users have the option to make their tweets private. Users can "retweet" another person's tweet, which will allow that tweet to be shown to all of the retweeter's followers. Twitter also uses hashtags, which are words or phrases typed after a "#" sign that direct users to other tweets with the same hashtag. The site was launched in 2006 but gained most of its popularity in 2012 when it surpassed five hundred million subscribers. users. (techcrunch.com) In September 2013, the company's data showed that its millions of users sent four hundred million tweets per day. (theguardian.com) Due to its extreme success, Twitter announced that it would file for an IPO. Seventy million shares on Twitter were priced at $26, and on the first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, they closed at $44.90. This valued the company at thirty-one billion dollars. (BBC) Twitter is...... middle of paper...... that as a culture moves toward spatially biased media, it moves away from temporally biased media, or vice versa . However, Twitter's short exposure time does not limit its potential for influence and power. A phenomenon known as "Twitter revolutions" has emerged, which Twitter uses to organize protests, most notably during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. This potential for influence has led to government blockades in some countries. Twitter is a social form of media falling into Harold's trap. Innis's category of a type of media with a spatial character, because even with its short messages it has the potential to reach a massive audience on a theoretically global scale, but with a minimal exposure period. Twitter provides an example of America and similar cultures wanting to make information available to more people more quickly, but sacrificing the durability of the information over time..