Through a hashtag, darkly

Douglas Bowman, Twitter’s former creative director, begins his love letter to the service by counting the attempts people have had at defining it. These include Twitter as microblogging site, messaging platform, broadcasting tool, social network, information network, interest graph, real-time communication, the world in your pocket, and global town square.

It’s really no surprise that Twitter has been described in such varied terms. But why? What is it about the service, over Facebook and others, that allows for such rich variety of communication? How does it allow people to use it in different ways for different ends?

Twitter as imperfect virtual reality

Twitter’s currency is information, so let’s grasp information dynamics first. One expert in this field is Albert Borgmann. In Holding On to Reality he talks about the extent of technological information to represent reality. For example, consider the differences in the following:

1) the words “Bach’s Cantata no. 10”
2) the sheet music for the piece
3) the digital recording of the piece actually being played.

In each case, we get more and more information about the referent. When the resolution is sufficiently high, we’re no longer experiencing an approximation of the thing — we’re listening to the thing itself. The last of these we typically call “reality”.

Now, let’s consider realities of the virtual kind. In life, everyday ambiguities are typically resolved by engaging with reality itself; for example, you may wish to run a pilot before committing too many resources to something. By engaging with reality you create data points, which reduces the uncertainty produced by abstractions, models and theories in your head. But, the more you engage with a virtual reality, Borgmann argues, you get the opposite. You arrive at even greater ambiguity. It’s a bit like binge watching a TV show and then not being able to differentiate memories of events in the series and those in real life. What’s more, there will come a point when the ambiguity is so high that the connection between the virtual and real worlds — snaps.

But here’s the thing: the split isn’t clean. Residual couplings remain between the virtual reality and the culture from which it arose. This makes it hard to distinguish a trivialised tie to reality from no tie; the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred. The result is a semivirtual space with things in it of uncertain genealogy. The objects within are, so to speak, ‘unreal’.

In this kind of scenario, when a virtual reality becomes so packed with technological and cultural information, it would be difficult to find your bearings. Whereas before the age of computers you’d have relied on natural and cultural signs and landmarks to orient yourself, modernity’s effortless information retrieval mechanisms have suffocated the presence of things and has eroded the distance between them.

The relevance to Twitter is this. If we accept that cyberspace is a virtual reality, then Twitter, as a subregion of it, is a virtual reality as well. This is true to the extent that Twitter inherits defining architectural properties such as hyperlinks from its host while maintaining its own space, populations and culture.

But unlike the engrossing, totalising virtual realities as encountered in video games, the veil of ambiguity that envelopes Twitter is decidedly not dense; it is thin and patchy and porous. The successful diffusion of smartphones with push functionality has certainly made sure of that. Reality does not merely spill over into Twitter, and neither does Twitter spit out effects into the real world: the two domains are inseparably entwined.

Nevertheless, Twitter doesn’t escape all the pathologies that affect virtual realties. Recall that continued engagement with a virtual reality eventually incurs a kind of debt whereby the virtual reality eventually collapses into a hollow, superficial existence. We know that tweets are limited to 140 characters, making them very low resolution. Yet the messages they carry are often loaded with assumptions and can have strong effects, as is the case with any at conversation about a controversial topic. There’s an imbalance between the signal and the message.

The dynamics described above, the sheer quantity of easily available tweets and retweets, and the rhythmic engaging by people from the flood of opinion creates in aggregate:

1) commoditisation of cultural capital
2) disorientation in the cultural space

So, real world events deluge into Twitter, and events on Twitter have implications in the real world. And yet Twitter cannot re-establish a clear link back to reality in which it exists. Something is irretrievably lost.

The case of Twitter during emergency events

Every so often, something happens that brings Twitter’s dynamics to the fore. During emergency events, such as earthquakes and riots, the rapidly unfolding nature of the scenario causes anxiety and confusion. It’s in the crest of the moment that Twitter takes on a seemingly paradoxical duality: that of a rapid news service, and that of a rumour mill.

It’s evident that Twitter is very effective in collecting a large amount of information from users very quickly. There’s several factors behind this, but the salient one is also the most fundamental: the nature of the tweet itself.

To begin with, the definition of a tweet provided by Twitter’s help pages — namely, a “message posted via Twitter containing 140 characters or fewer” — isn’t particularly useful In the ontological pursuit. The text content is a key element of the entity but it is certainly not the entity. It’s important to not that the reply, retweet, etc. functions are also constitutive of the tweet. As the the text is drafted the tweet is in forming — it’s immaterial. But once sent, the skeleton is imbued with the geist of a message. The lid closes, the shell hardens. The tweet gains a kind of immutability as it is launched into the network. And from then on, the only real ways to interact with it is through those pre-defined interfaces: reply, retweet, etc. Even deleting the tweet isn’t an act of deletion as it is of sending a self-destruct command.

The geist propagates throughout the network, using the mechanics of hashtags and retweets to promote itself. Each tweet expressing the same sentiment becomes, then, a knowledge node in a large knowledge infrastructure. Such constructs share dynamics with conventional infrastructures; that is, the gravity of the installed base, positive feedback loops and path dependency. Therefore, the more tweets and retweets there are, the larger the installed base becomes. Positive feedback and reinforcement is encouraged through retweets and trending topics. Finally, when the volume reaches a critical mass, it will produce a path dependence whereby incompatible messages cannot gain enough traction to overcome the dominant geist.

Now it’s possible to explain the fact vs fiction interplay. The 140 character limit makes for a low resolution, indeed. But, what if some of the text was of a link to a news article? On the program level, the tweet retrieves and embeds a synopsis within itself. On the cognitive-cultural level, the message text isn’t meaningful without knowledge of the content of the article. Thus, the addition of the hyperlink dramatically increases the resolution of the tweet.

Text alone, however, does not have a similar gambit available to it such that it can escape the character limit. The severe reduction of complex, culturally-specific opinions to 140 characters thereby produces that imbalance between the message and the signal.

So, in practice, while news agencies are gathering information and verifying sources, the risk of rumours spreading is high. Then, as official news reports become available, the shadows recede and the credible can triumph. In one study on the phenomenon, The researchers found that emotionally charged statements (which really contribute to rumour propagation) were frequent at the beginning of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and then fell shortly when the number of messages that included an authenticating element (such as a URL to a news source) increased. This suggests that during the time it takes for reputable news outlets to react, verify their info, etc. the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred — who is to say what is true and what is not? There’s disorientation because of the equal weighting and accessibility of all tweets. Any interrogatory messages questioning the rumours are simply crowded out. A collectively filtered version of events occludes reality as a whole.

Postscript

I guess you can add ‘imperfect virtual reality’ to your list, Doug.