Bug or Luck?

Everybody thinks that on Twitter users have a space of 140 or less characters to say what they want to share with the world. But rules are made to be broken, right? Some tweets look rather small at first sight, but when you click on them they expand. Sometimes I expand some tweets to see why I could only see half of it and one time something very strange happened. I found a tweet of 246 characters;

Be Careful What to Tweet

This week alone there were two minor scandals on Twitter that reached the media, both about someone who tweeted something that the wrong (or right, depends on what way you look at it) person read. The first was a Dutch politician who publicly discriminated Chinese people;

Basically he said ‘I easily overlook a gook, there are so many!’, since tweets of most Dutch politicians are being collected on kamertweets.nl a large audience witnessed this particular tweet. He did appologize for this, as a politician he has too. But harm had been done. Another guy just got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it;

Not too long after this Cisco channel partner advocate Tim Levad responded, ‘Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web‘, oops! The lesson today is to be careful what you tweet or write, about on any social media for that matter. Even if you delete a tweet it will still be visible on Twitter Search, at least for a while. Nothing wrong with critism on Twitter, but if you get negative about your job or a whole group of people, you never know who follows or read you in the end.

Words, Wordle and Data Visualization

Now that we’re used to tag clouds in the realm of web 2.0, it’s time to move to the next level and do more with words. It’s fun to pay less attention to actual sentences but to words only, the more a certain word is used indicates the importance in the text without seeing the whole context of the original text. There are a few website where people can create an alternative tag cloud, or a cluster of words. Wordle takes words from a text or site and transforms these into a cloud that can be transformed into different shapes and colors, check this example from my own blog;

Like Jeff Clark argues on his blog, ‘critical drawback of tag clouds is that the words are scrambled (or sometimes positioned strictly by frequency) and one cannot tell from the cloud which words were actually used together in the original text’.[1] There’s no meaning left anymore, except the interpretation of the viewer.

Jeff Clark also created the wonderful Twitter Spectrum which is an analytical project that uses keywords from Twitter and compares them. The fun part here is that I created one about thee weeks ago and coffee was one of the main keywords and today it’s gone.

Other projects I find fascinating are portraits made out of words or a TextArc of ‘Alice in Wonderland‘. A TextArc is a ‘visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning’. It’s a ‘tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing. It compliments approaches such as Statistical Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics by providing an overview, letting intuition help extract meaning from an unread text’. [2] The last example uses words from a book while Wordle and Twitter Spectrum make use of data from databases. Most content we watch on the Internet like on Twitter or Flickr and YouTube and all MySQL websites like blogs and newsgroups and discussion boards all make use of pulling data from databases and displaying this data onto the computer screen. So is text always a visualization then if text can be visualized too?

Thesis Proposal, 1st version

Important possibilities in Twitter are being reflected in the variety of platforms, websites, devices and programs that can generate messages that are being sent to Twitter itself and then simultaneously and real-time being distributed to several (other) websites, devices and programs. Why is there such a growth in external applications? This research is giving an overview of applications and the use of spam and linguistics within Twitter. The features this website offers and the uses of the RSS feeds have many possibilities and implications. What are its relations to older technologies and what are its uses, could Twitter be a remediation of older technologies or do we need new concepts?

Playing with Words

The words that came to me through twitter (thanks to @pareidoliac) could be or could not be describing Twitter. The first word is pareidolia, which basically is a psychological phenomenon and the tendency to interpret a coincidental visual stimulus as something already known to the viewer. The word comes from the Greek para (here meaning wrong) and eidolon (image).^[1] Pareidolia is also related to paraphasia, disordered speech in which words are substituted for another word. Common examples are seeing faces in cars or clouds. Pareidolia is related to the paranoiac-critical method developed by Salvador Dali in the 1930s, in which artist find new ways to view the world and objects around them. Objects have no meaning of it’s own but when viewed our unconscious perceives a phantom image, like the interpretation of subliminal messages. Our brain links things that are not linked in the first place. When objects are being perceived as real, or having a personality or even a face, how does this phenomenon relate to the machinic phylum, a concept of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Manuel de Lanza? And how does our brain handle new concepts, new technologies?

At the turn of the last century the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a series of texts where he criticized the inability of the science of his time to think the new, the truly novel. The first obstacle was, of course, a mechanical and linear view of causality and the rigid determinism that it implied. Clearly, if all the future is already given in the past, if the future is merely that modality of time where previously determined possibilities become realized, then true innovation is impossible. To avoid this mistake, he thought, we must struggle to model the future as truly open ended, truly indeterminate, and the past and present as pregnant not only with possibilities which become real, but with virtualities which become actual. Unlike the former, which defines a process in which one structure out of a set of predefined forms acquires reality, the latter defines a process in which an open problem is solved in a variety of different ways, with actual forms emerging in the process of reaching a solution.[2]

These arguments remind me of the phrase that everything has already been written or done before, nothing new can be created anymore. Although new contexts are being created. So all new technologies would have a component of remediation in them as they have been used before too.

According to de Landa the notion of a machinic phylum blurs the distinction between organic and non-organic life. This would mean a distinction between human life and technology. De Landa also mixes the term machinic phylum with Deleuzes body without organs, which I try to apply on Twitter here, when I take the assemblage of tweets as a single mass. Taking this further “(post)humanity will begin to coevolve (or at least to share its ecology) with new systems of autonomous robots and software agents.”^[3] This is what I think is happening on Twitter, when people get involved so deeply when writing down all aspects of their every day lives. “Nature in this notion is determinate by neither subjects nor objects. It is above all about nonlinear relations, open-ended connections of partially actualized bodies encompassing distinct levels of organization (biological, cultural, technological). [...] Indeed, a body never corresponds to a unity, a whole, an organism, or a system.”^[4] The distiction of online life and offline life intertwines and also the distiction between organic life and non-organic life becomes smaller as argued before. The bodies of users mix with technology through the use of the site of external applications.

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1. <http://cherylbernstein.blogspot.com/2008/11/paranoiac-critical-method.html>

2. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Zone Books, New York 1988: p. 97. Found on <http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-70071>

3. Johnston, John. A Future For Autonomous Agents: Machinic Merkwelten and Artificial Evolution <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v010/10.3johnston.html>

4. Parisi, Luciana. ‘Information Trading and Symbiotic Micropolitics.’ Social Text. 22.3 (2004): p. 25-49.

Twitter Domains and Language

Most Twitter applications and services have their own domain name which refers to Twitter and sometimes to the service they are offering their users. Most of them have a ‘.com’ and start with ‘tw’. I thought I could not stay behind, so I registered a domain this morning; twesis.info. Like other domains this name is a portmanteau or linguistic blend of the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘thesis’. The usage of the word ‘portmanteau’ in this sense first appeared in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Other existing examples I like of these blends are Twitterific (Twitter & terrific), Twidget (Twitter & widget) or Twurl (Twitter & url). Here, twitter is still a neologism although many people within new media studies know what it means and start to play with it. From twesis the words twesism could derive, or twesister but better not twesisaster.