Weird Twitter: Capitalizing on the Capitalization of Twitter Without Proper Capitalization
Here is an academic essay I wrote on Weird Twitter in 2014 for a digital media and culture class, because I went to a liberal arts school. I also made a video essay for it, which summarizes the content of the essay if you’d rather just watch that. The video is at the end of the post (the video was also part of the essay assignment.) I wrote a lot of academic essays in college, but this will always be one of my favorites. Mostly because I wrote about jokes involving ghosts and sex jokes and somehow got away with it.
[A few minor changes such as bolding for emphasis have been made here because Medium is, uh, a different Medium.]
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Weird Twitter: Capitalizing on the Capitalization of Twitter Without Proper Capitalization
Past the layers of celebrities, professional comedians, verified accounts, sponsored tweets, and even casual Twitter users, there is a strange subculture of Twitter users often referred to as “Weird Twitter”. The name for the group is quite fitting: the members are still using Twitter as Twitter was originally intended to be used, just in a very unusual and often absurdist way. As the social network becomes increasingly about the spread of commercial information, Weird Twitter uses Twitter at its most pure, as a place where ideas can be shared, spread, promoted, bounced back, responded to: an open forum where all ideas have merit. In her book The Culture of Connectivity, Jose Van Dijck discusses the corporate side of Twitter and the moves Twitter is making towards becoming an information network rather than open forum. What Van Dijck does not consider in her past, present, or future analysis of Twitter is where Weird Twitter, perhaps Twitter purists, lies in all of this. Weird Twitter may be crazy, nonsensical, and confusing, but it is certainly Twitter as the founders of Twitter intended. Before we can discuss Weird Twitter as a sort of revolution against the commercialization of Twitter, we must first establish what makes up this world of Weird Twitter.
Weird Twitter is the name given to the online community on Twitter made up of users that use Twitter as a means to communicate unconventional, surrealist thoughts and to experiment with language, emotion, and humor.
Thematically, Weird Twitter tweets focus on surreal or absurd situations and complex human emotions, despite the short format of the tweet. An example of this is a tweet from user @aRealLiveGhost that states simply “your body is a ghost factory that takes one lifetime to produce a ghost.” (2 April 2012)
Because of its diverse and loosely defined community of users, Weird Twitter tweets vary, but there are also consensual conventions that seem to permeate most of the tweets. Certain tropes seem to be recurrent, some more immature than others: diapers, Satan, death, loneliness, philosophy, spirituality, penises. The use of such tropes is steeped in those same goals of absurd and subversive humor. Weird Twitter tweets seem to evoke familiar situations and emotions. The confusing nature of these tweets is often in line with their subject matter: Weird Twitter aims at considering the strange and absurd elements in our everyday life. They are sometimes deeply philosophical but still random, nonsensical, or inappropriate.

Furthermore, Weird Twitter seems to adapt to additions to its conventions. In an interesting longform journalism piece from Buzzfeed (a welcomed changed from the site’s typical listicles), reporters talked to various Weird Twitter members about their opinions on what Weird Twitter was all about, in an attempt to create an oral history of weird Twitter. In the article, Twitter user @mattytalks mentions that Weird Twitter is often about “just de-constructing real events in a way that plays up the most embarrassing aspects of life or to challenge what is accepted.” Many Weird Twitter tweets start with some sort of cultural script that is recognizable and then go about manipulating this script into something unexpected. User @UtilityLimb tweeted on Sept 27, 2011: “I’m not racist, but *cranes neck to see if anyone’s around. keeps craning. head unscrews entirely. out of the hole pour jewels and mysteries*”. This tweet takes the common social script of a racist person saying they aren’t racist, checking the area, and then proceeding to say something racist. But in true Weird Twitter fashion, the social trope “I’m not racist, but” continues into something strange and absurd.
A common trait of Weird Twitter is the deconstruction of language. Common language techniques in Weird Twitter tweets include misuse of punctuation, simplified spelling, and incomplete thoughts. On the one hand, this is a product of the medium: tweets are limited to 140 characters and in order to fit in deep ideas, you sometimes have to make the most of your limitations. But this misuse of language also adds to the overall weirdness of Weird Twitter. There is something that seems almost inhuman about the improper spelling and grammar of the tweets. Language is not being used in the normal way and this creates tweets that are almost so nonsensical that they seem to be from a spambot rather than a real person. It is possible that Weird Twitter members do this as a protest to the increasing commercial presence on Twitter. Companies use robots to respond to tweets and sponsored tweets seem to be fundamentally detached from actual humanity. Weird Twitter creates this same inhuman quality intentionally, to ironize what happens when non humans occupy a social network intended for living beings.
As Van Dijck discusses in her book, Twitter users have their own language to describe the site, whether it be Retweet, Hashtag, or Follow. In the same sense, Weird Twitter too has its own language, one that has regenerated spontaneously as more users become familiar with terms and implement them into their own life. Certain language cues in Weird Twitter come with specific expectations. For example, when a tweet begins with “Sext:” the expectation is that what follows will not actually be a normal ‘sext’ but rather a humorous announcement of lust. Another example is when a user uses asterisks around their phrase, such as “*coughs*”, this is considered to be a symbol of action, just as parenthesis are used for stage directions in a play.
In the same Buzzfeed article mentioned earlier, user @tricialockwood says that Weird Twitter “has an enormous capacity to absorb and incorporate voices that are complementary but dissimilar. You see this when a new great tweeter comes along and suddenly people start using their tropes and vocabularies and forms! New people do not diminish it, but they add to it, they mutate it.” Weird Twitter, like many aspects of Twitter, is constantly changing and susceptible to alteration based on user experience and user feedback. Just as Van Dijck explains how the interface of Twitter has changed over the years based on what will best service users, Weird Twitter acts as almost microcosm of Twitter in this sense. It too is constantly reforming itself, while still maintaining what makes it inherently Weird Twitter, in the same way that a new Twitter layout is still the same Twitter platform users have grown to love.
Now that we’ve done some work to establish what Weird Twitter is, we must consider what Twitter is at this point in time as well. “Twitter presents itself as an echo chamber of random, chatter, the online underbelly of mass opinions where collective emotions are formed” states Van Dijck in her chapter “Twitter and the Paradox of Following and Trending”. This is the true essence of what Twitter can and should be. Van Dijick asserts, however, that while Twitter idealizes its platform in this way, the company is equally “challenged by the pressure to make its content stream profitable” (69). Because of this pressure, we are now seeing Twitter trend towards a more commercialized network, losing that original intention as a public forum.
In Van Dijck’s chapter, she mentions the nine “notable uses” for Twitter, as they are listed on Wikipedia. These functions include using twitter “as a central tool: in campaigning, legal proceedings, education, emergencies, protest and politics, public relations, reporting dissent, space exploration, and opinion polling” (73). Notably lacking from this list are the ideas that seem to be central to Weird Twitter, namely humor, language, philosophy, and creative exploration. Weird Twitter is not trying to manage a campaign, inform about a national emergency, or relate a celebrity to his fans. Instead, Weird Twitter is a group of people who are just trying to explore new concepts in humor on a new medium and perhaps make people think along the way. Where is this on Wikipedia’s list?

“Information networking” is a term Van Dijck uses to explain what may be thought of as one of Twitter’s new aim (79). The website seems to be making moves that cement Twitter’s position as a source to get news, pop culture information, and even just personal details from our friends. While Twitter is less of an information network than a site like Google, it still seems like Twitter’s future as an “information company rather than a utility” (80) is particularly potent. But similar to Wikipedia’s list of Twitter uses, where does Weird Twitter fit in to this new future?
If Twitter continues to change and adapt its business model to go a more corporate and information based route, will we see an end the creativity that is able to thrive in Twitter’s current interface? Or does Weird Twitter thrive because of this change, as a response to this change?
Twitter is becoming increasingly more focused on advertisement and sponsorship, as seen by the advent of Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. Furthermore, Twitter employs “sentiment analysis, mood mining, and opinion mining…subsets of predictive analytics” through algorithms that access users’ data. “The process of aggregating and disaggregating data from individual consumers may be deployed to tap into users’ buzz about brands as well as to create brand communities based on Twitter dialogue on specific topics” (82). This information can then be sold to brands, not only creating profit for Twitter but also changing the market for consumers. In short, Twitter is no longer the neutral chamber for voices it once seemed. Our tweets are being tracked, sold, analyzed. It may seem behind the scenes, but it is also slowly becoming discernable to the common consumer. One night I tweeted about how I couldn’t decide if I wanted to eat Quiznos for dinner. A few hours later, I received a notification that the verified, official Quiznos Twitter had tweeted at me, a tweet that said something to the extent of “Quiznos is always the best choice.” This simple encounter made me aware of the stakes of a commercialized Twitter. I was no longer able to make casual statements about my every day life. The pure communication utility Twitter had originally intended felt hijacked, corrupted, gone. This anxiety is where Weird Twitter comes from.
Weird Twitter, despite its nuanced silliness, seems to aim at subverting this growing corporate tone of Twitter, to return Twitter to its roots as a place where ideas can be discovered and shared. The tone of these tweets, in their somewhat anxious or manic narrative or confusing language, highlights a sort of social anxiety regarding the future of Twitter. User @mattytalks, in the Buzzfeed Oral History of Twitter, said he sees Weird Twitter “as a medium to communicate the things that [he] find[s] funny with similar people and also as a way to put release some of my misanthropy about what’s bad with the world in a safe place.” The bad in the world @mattytalks is referring to perhaps this corporatized Twitter, and Weird Twitter acts a space where people can push against that world. The philosophical weirdness, the complex emotions, the reimagining of social scripts, all of these elements speak to the anxiety Weird Twitter users feel regarding the potential end of Twitter as a pure place for expression. The ironic deconstruction of language, particular to a point of deconstructing humanness, further speaks to this anxiety. Weird Twitter is means of pushing against this current future of Twitter.

Because of their nonsensical nature, it may be easy to assume that Weird Twitter tweets are thoughtless (or as we discussed earlier, mechanical) but most tweets are actually carefully constructed, especially if we are assuming they mean to create a social commentary. Popular user @jakefogelnest mentions in the Buzzfeed Oral History of Twitter that “it’s frustrating at times to try to explain to people that don’t even understand Twitter exactly what kind of talent is out there. I don’t think it’s just meaningless blurts of subversive nonsense. I think there’s true talent there.”
Weird Twitter is not just Twitter purists screaming into the empty chamber to make an echo, but rather budding comedians, writers, and creative minds trying to use Twitter as a means to spread their ideas. They may be doing so in a way that is ironically detached and intentionally subversive, but there is clearly a lot of thought that goes into each Weird tweet.
So yes, the Weird Twitter community is not using Twitter as it is currently intended. They do not hashtag trending topics or even discuss them. Weird Twitter is not concerned with pop culture, celebrity life, brand names, or even current reality. Weird Twitter does not livetweet, does not participate in the topical news of the day. Weird Twitter does not talk with friends to meet up, does not post pictures of their children or new dog. Weird Twitter does none of what Twitter expects of you. And because of this, they do everything Twitter expects of you. They utilize the medium as a means of expression. They give each member an equal and relevant voice: anyone who wants to become part of Weird Twitter, so long as they seem to follow the conventions of the genre, can participate. They take advantage of the medium: they make use of the character limit, the irony of fabricated narrative in a platform meant for realtime, and the ability to RT and favorite similar tweets. All of this creates the unique subculture of Weird Twitter while maintaining Twitter at its most pure. Free of corporate sponsorship, trending topics, and hashtags, Weird Twitter is able to exist as Twitter’s pure form: “as an echo chamber of random, chatter, the online underbelly of mass opinions where collective emotions are formed.”
Works Cited
Dijck, Jose ̌van. “Twitter and The Paradox of Following and Trending.” The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. N. pag. Print.
Herman, John, and Katie Notopoulos. “Weird Twitter: The Oral History.” BuzzFeed. Buzzfeed, 5 Aug. 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.
Tweets accessed from Twitter.com
