In Real Life

Some questions I need to ask myself in order to structure my thesis chapter about my experience with Twitter. I have read the research of Edward Mischaud and consider the questions he asked some selected users in a questionaire. I will ask myself the same questions or similar questions;

How many users I follow do I know in real life?

At this moment I know 59 out of the 99 friends I follow today (June 4th). Four are virtual people (@buurvrouw, @TheMime, @NichtjeChelsey and @juffrouwjannie), two are cats (@stickiepoes and @timmedepim) and one is myself (@twesis). By knowing I mean I have met them in real lige at least once, like a Twitter meeting. Most of them are friends and classmates. The users I do not know are interesting or inspiring  people or organisations or they have something to do with my research subjects

Exploring Other Worlds

Sometimes I feel the more I read about Twitter (the company or the service/website), the less I know about them. Most articles I read are about the four main topics of my research though, applications, following, language and spam. Next to Twitter there are similar systems that are less closed than Twitter and interchangeable, meaning that one message transfers to another service, something like retweeting yourself somewhere else on the web. Although this could be seen as spam, when users only use Twitter or any other microblog as a mirror. Two examples of Twitter clones are The Twit Army and smallpicture.com. David Sarno argues that;

[t]he software they’re using was developed by Evan Prodromou, a developer in Montreal. Prodromou is the force behind Laconica — an open-source, Twitter-like system that anyone can install; hundreds of administrators already have, creating a dispersed, decentralized network of Twitter clones that can all talk to one another.

Prodromou compares the state of micro-messaging to the early days of consumer e-mail. In the early 1990s, the e-mail world was dominated by proprietary dial-up entities like CompuServe, MCI and Prodigy. But because those systems were competitive, they didn’t connect to one another, and you could send messages only to people inside your own service.

“I couldn’t send you e-mail and you couldn’t send me e-mail,” Prodromou explained. “We were on these separate islands. Making the change to an open standard for Internet e-mail has meant e-mail has become ubiquitous. I think that’s where we’re at now with microblogging”.[1]

Basically users want to be able to communicate from one system to another without the limits of one system that has a monopoly. Here lies the power of web 2.0, where a lot of social network sites are linked together. Besides a connection between users, web 2.0 applications like Twitter and its clones they are external aids to enhance our cognitive abilities. On the other hand I could extend the notion of Socrates, who argued two thousand years ago that books would destroy thought. What would he think of messages that flow around in cyberspace between users, or blogs. Socrates was against books as they were static, there’s no one to interrupt or ask questions, the author of the book isn’t there.[2] On Twitter however the written words are there, just like the author, who can respond when replied to.

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[1] Sarno, David. “Twitter has followers who want to lead.” LA Times. Posted on March 24^th, read on March 27^th.
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/03/theres-twitter.html>

[2] Norman, Donald A. Things That Make Us Smart. Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Boston, Addison-Wesley: 1993: 44.

Twitter Structure

Although most tweets on Twitter look completely at random (especially when you follow a lot of tweeple it sure looks that way), I wonder in what way tweets can have a narrative. Maybe not within a single tweet, but when they form a sequel they can. When @replies form a conversation which can be viewed in the search function of Twitter, or perhaps in some applications like TweetDeck. Also a story could be told in seperate tweets, but it would be difficult to read.

So are tweets just some comments in a cloud or are they connected? Are tweets part of a rhizomatic structure? How are retweets connected and what’s their purpose? I like the idea of retweeting, when an interesting tweet is repeated with a reference to the original author (basically a reply with RT, Retweet or Retweeting in front of it), like the example;

@twesis Retweet @chutry just because some tweets are “bad” doesn’t mean the medium is bad. <snip> #alternet5:37 PM Feb 21st from web

Basically I am still looking for the remediation of Twitter and would to find ways to visualize it.

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.

Could Twitter be an A.I.?

Twitter is the new enemy, superseeding Google. Twitter is a consious A.I. and it’s out there and designed to surveill us, watching us and distracting thoughts from our minds and building on them, feeding on us. Maybe Twitter desires life too and therefore creates a link to Foucaults bio-politics. “If nonorganic life forms can, like their organic counterparts, die, could one posit the notion of a technological death?”^[1] Should we be scared? We can forget about the threat of Google, forget about the Turing test, we need a new way of defining evil and future beings. Twitter surely has intelligence, what does it want? Is it a swarm of robots and by what definition? Is it an unorganized Wiki? To properly describe a new phenomenon like this we need new words. The old words from the old world do not fit anymore, I’m so through with remediation again when I try to define Twitter. What are the semiotics here? What are the sings that can help me define? It pushes the disciplinary behavior severely (the limit of 140 characters is just one of them). Is Twitter just smart or intelligent? Can I tell if some users are robots or real people and what framwork of reality should I use? Should I define the border between people and robots and artificial intelligence? Do some people trust Twitter more than other people? Is this new trust replacing the trust we used to have in other people?

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1. Akira Mizuta Lippit. ‘The Death of an Animal.’ Film Quarterly. Fall 2002, Vol. 56, No. 1, Pages 9-22.

Through with Remediation

When you’re looking at a car and seeing it just as a new version of a horse and carriage you are leaving out so many extra features. A car is more comfortable, more safe, it’s generally much faster and got more horse power. In a car there could be a radio and a TomTom. Using the term remediation (new media refers to old media) to compare the car with previous vehicles is not right or at least not complete. The same goes for a computer and a typewriter. A computer can be used for processing documents but also for adding pictures to these documents, or for multimedia purposes and e-mail, for Internet and music and much more. Also here remediation is not the right way to look at a computer.

The same goes for Twitter, which can not just be compared to a simple text message like an sms or written notes left around. This service can be transferred to blogs and RSS feeds and the hashtag makes it possible to specify these RSS feeds and thus create groups. People within corporations discover the service to communicate and other people use it for small updates for their website like newspapers or blogs. If there’s no previous medium for Twitter, how can I use the term remediation for this? Should I be through with remediation and look for another theory instead?