“Diffuse with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land” (Samuel Morse, 1938)
In January 27 of 2006, after 155 years of electrical transmission of written messages across the United States of America and the world, Western Union, the first communication empire, announced the discontinuity of the telegram messaging service and assumed the obsolescence of one of the most revolutionary technologies of the Electric Age: the telegraph. By separating communication from physical transportation, the telegraph, and the capitalist industrial society, economy and culture that embraced it, transformed human interaction in time and space. Time became standardized across extended territories and space was abolished by the instant speed of information movement.[1] The development of computer and telecommunication technologies during the second half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st, along with the cultural practices of the post-industrial network/information society, turned the telegraph obsolete.[2] Having completed the process of global standardization of time and abolition of space, the new technologies and society created a new dimension for human interactions: the online virtual space.
Twitter, a communication service that was launched in 2006, takes advantage of some of the technologies and practices that determined the obsolescence of the telegraph (e.g. computers, the World Wide Web, mobile telephony, e-mail, and instant messaging) allowing its users to send and receive text messages in real-time, create a website that displays their messages in a chronological order (micro-web-log), and build a social network. The service works over multiple devices and platforms (web browsers, client applications, mobile phones), and is available for free to any person who has access to a computer connected to the Internet or a telephone with short messaging service (SMS) capabilities. Three years after its launch, Twitter has reached global popularity with millions of users around the world and millions of messages sent per day through its system.
I have become one of the users and participants of Twitter. The more I think about the service, the more I think about the telegraph. Twitter triggers in my mind the image of millions of personal networked and mobile telegraphs being used by human beings world wide for exchanging written messages in the manner of the old time telegraphic press and wired news. Each user of Twitter has the potential of being a journalist with the utterances he/she sends through the system, and at the same time has the potential of being a telegraphic press with the messages it gets from the people he/she follows. The constraint over the length of the messages to 140 characters reminds me of the telegrams I was able to read as a child, the headlines of international news I used to skim in Colombian and Spanish newspapers, and several modern literary forms and styles I like from the 19th and 20th centuries. I believe that the old telegraph medium is one of the contents of the Internet, therefore, one of the contents of Twitter. Although it would be very interesting to develop a comparative study of Twitter and the telegraph, such project exceeds the scope of this essay and I have to postpone it for the future. Here and now, in this paper, I would try to stay focused in understanding my own process of adopting the Twitter service and incorporating it into my everyday life.
When I first heard about Twitter in 2006, I had just moved to Cambridge, Massachussetts from Bogota, Colombia. At that time, there was already a lot of buzz about the Web 2.0 and the social media applications that were being built for running on the Internet. Several people I met were very excited about developing systems that allowed collaboration, community building, and the creation of user generated content on the virtual space of the World Wide Web. The new friends that I started to cultivate in the physical world started to ask me about joining online network sites where our socialization could extend (e.g. Facebook, Myspace). I was very reluctant to join those sites at the first time. Although I was interested in developing content for the Web such as hypermedia interactive narratives, games, and websites, I did not want to socialize on a virtual space. I felt that I was already spending too much time online surfing the web, checking email, and getting information from many outlets such as blogs, e-zines, and bulletin boards.
Furthermore, I thought that by joining those social network sites, I would be giving away my time, labor, and data to the developers of those systems, people that certainly I did not know and that in some cases were media corporations. Even more important, I did not like the idea of exposing my private life online and giving away to profitable companies with obscure ethical policies the content and information I produce. [3] Despite my online social anxieties, I created my Facebook profile in 2007 and very quickly experienced the accelerated construction of an online social network where its members constantly exchange information and stay connected to each other. About one year later, in August 26 of 2008, at 15:29:11 (ET), I created my Twitter profile and send my first tweet: @vVvA: awake
Nobody directly invited me to join Twitter. I did not receive any email invitations as it happened with other social networks sites and nobody really suggested me to sign in. It was a decision I made after two years of living in the hypermediated U.S culture and society and being immersed in the scientific and futuristic environment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At that point of my life, I realized that I was connected to the Internet almost all the time I was awake. I felt citizen of the cyberspace and believed I was participating in the network and information society. Joining Twitter was part of my strategy for satisfying the social and cultural needs I was experiencing: on the one hand, online collaboration, communication, and community building; on the other hand, creation, distribution and filtering of information.
Setting up my Twitter account was very easy, as seems to be the case for joining most of the social network sites and using the majority of the web-based tools for content creation (web 2.0, rewritable web). For signing in, I just needed to provide an email address and to create a user ID (@vVvA). Then, I had to customize the design of the personal webpage where I would see displayed the messages that I sent through the system and the messages from other Twitter users I decide to follow. I chose to take a minimal design approach that matched the simplicity of the Twitter service. For the background of the page I used a black and white tiny icon of a cartoon balloon that could be repeated as a tile for creating a nice mosaic (an HTML function generates the tiling automatically). For the color of the text I chose a pale gray, for the links a light orange, and for the side bars a plane white. Finally, I selected a picture that would identify me in the system by being displayed at the right side of all the messages I send. That picture was an image of a yellow astronaut (a Lego figure) I had been using consistently as an avatar since the early days of Instant Messaging (IM) back in the late 1990s. Having set up the design of my profile and opted for a public display of my messages, I made my first tweet by filling a text box that appeared at the top of my Twitter page and that was headed with the question “What are you doing?”[4]. Seventy four seconds later, I tweeted for the second time:
At the beginning I approached the Twitter service from a poetical perspective. I wanted to take advantage of the limitation on the amount of characters for experimenting in the construction of short sentences rich in imagery and symbolism. Although the inspiration for those sentences was the real physical world, the environment that surrounded me in Cambridge, I tried to translate my sensorial experience to another literary domain that was fantastical, mythical and poetical. During three weeks I kept writing messages in this way, finding inspiration in both environmental impressions such as the weather, the landscape, the sounds of the streets, dreams, reflections about life, and random thoughts.
Because during the early phase of adoption I did not follow anybody, my Twitter page displayed only my messages. However, I started to be followed by friends of mine from the physical world that found me in the Twitter system. I received automated emails from @postmaster.twitter.com telling me about the new followers and providing me with links to their user profile pages. When I visited their pages I was able to read all the messages they had tweeted in a chronological order. On the right side of their page I also encountered different kinds of information about them such as name, location, website, short biography, the number of followees and followers they had, and the total number of tweets they had sent. I could also see in the right side of their pages, a mosaic of 36 tiny pictures (24 x 24 pixels each) that formed a square. Each of those images corresponded to Twitter users that they were following.
If I was curious enough, and I certainly was with some users (avatars can be very intriguing!), I could easily explore their Twitter sites and the ones from their contacts (both followers, and followees). All this information helped me to figure out the kind of networks that were being built by the users of Twitter and motivated me to start following not only the people who had started to follow me but also some of their contacts (especially the ones known by me in the physical world).[5] As I started to follow more people, more people started to follow me in a sort of reciprocal way of networking. However, since the relationships in the Twitter system can be asymmetrical, some of the users that I followed did not want to follow me back. Those users were usually newspapers, magazines, radio stations, tv channels, and famous people who had thousands of followers and were following just a few (e.g. film directors as David Lynch, politicians as Barack Obama, musicians as Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, and media theorists/practitioners as John Maeda).
My second phase of adoption of Twitter began when my network of contacts was big enough to keep my webpage filled with new and fresh information every time I visited or refreshed it.[6] At that moment, I was able to read not only my messages but also the ones from people I was following. While reading other people messages, I discovered the conventions (syntax and grammar) that the users of Twitter were developing and felt compelled to start practicing them. By experimenting with those conventions and functions such as replying (@user), retweetting (RT @user), acknowledgement of the source (via @user), sharing links by shortening urls (http://bit.ly, http://tr.im, http://ow.ly), and tagging (#keyword), I became a participant of a sort of networked and distributed conversation.[7]
Although I did not abandon sending tweets in my early poetical and personal style, the form and content of some of my messages changed during the second phase of adoption. The form became more conventional and the content more diverse. For instance, I started replying to some friends (@user), asking them both about the information they were sending and about their everyday life. I also experimented with the diffusion of other people messages when I thought they had valuable information (I used RT @user when I did not modify their original tweet, and via @user when I changed it). I also began to share links to different kinds of media content by shortening urls (eg. videos, articles, news, images, blog posts). Finally, I started to tag some of my messages with a hashtag (#) followed by a keyword that referred to a specific topic (usually something related to important news, to a specific location, to an event, to a technology).
I entered a third phase of adoption when my number of followers and followees went beyond one hundred. The majority of those new contacts were people that I never met in person. Although I know that I found them in the links and retweets from my followees, I was not sure how several of my new followers got to know about me. I would like to think that we shared similar interests. Whatever is the case, as my Twitter network grew up asymmetrically (I started to follow more people than the one that followed me) I became more immerse in a conversational environment that fed me with information about a selected group of friends and strangers that satisfied my immediate social and cultural needs of awareness. My gratification was such that I stopped visiting the websites of newspapers and magazines for getting information about what was happening in the world. As I was receiving tweets from the newspapers, magazines and news organizations I used to consult, I did not feel encouraged to go to their website to find information. Each tweet was like a news headline that was directly sent to me in real-time.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of my third phase of adoption was that I could experience the construction, in real-time, of breaking news. The diverse social and informational network I had created in Twitter let me feel surrounded by a real-time conversational environment that even if it was dispersed and multi-thematic, sometimes focused around certain events that were happening, “right now,” in the physical world. Due to their immediacy and freshness, such news could not be processed and reported by the other media as fast as by the users of Twitter from their portable computers and mobile phones. The attacks of Mumbai, the accident of a plane in the Hudson River, the street protests after the Iranian elections, Michael Jackson’s death, and the debate of the Referendum in the Colombian Congress were events I experienced with this mode of awareness.
After having used the Twitter technology for almost seventeen months, I felt like my media consumption habits have been radically modified and became more dependent on a sort of real-time awareness of both the real physical world and the cyberspace. Twitter allowed me to experience a sort of lively networked public sphere where the debate is constantly updated it, a real-time conversational environment that is changing all the time, a stream of now. Of course, there is a down side for this sort of experience and it is the lost of depth in the conversation and in the debate. 140 characters definitely do not help for thorough reflections and analysis, neither super fast thinking and typing. However, the combination of all the tweets from diverse users creates a mosaic, a cloud, an impressionist landscape of utterances that has certain depth. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of voices that meet in this conversation and networked public sphere generates a complexity that cannot be achieved in the deep thinking of one single person.
All
in all, as a user and participant of Twitter, I have been able to satisfy my
social and cultural needs. Being connected to a lively stream of information, a
stream of now, and participating of it, makes me feel as a citizen of the
network and information society and a speaker of the ongoing public conversation.
[1] As James Carey has pointed out, the adoption of the telegraph by the US capitalist society made geography irrelevant for trading purposes and facilitated the standardization of time zones for controlling and coordinating human activity across the country. Marshal Mcluhan has also noted, that the instant speed of information movement of the telegraph, also characteristic of the Electric Age, abolished the spatial dimension and put human beings in a state of village living.
[2] According to Daniel Bell, the new communication infrastructure of the information society is a combination of telecommunications and teleprocessing. Bell uses the term “compunications,” coined by Athony Oettinger, for emphasizing the complexities of integrated computer communications.
[3] My anxieties about digital socialization can be explained by the fact that I grew up socializing in a completely different way in Bogota, Colombia. Being a child in the 1980s and an adolescent in the 1990s without access to a computer connected to the World Wide Web definitely leads to a different kind of interactions. Meeting friends and building a social network required physical contact, face-to-face and landline-telephone conversations, in-person game play (even video games from Atari, Nintendo, Super NES, and computers were played with the physical presence of friends), letters and postcards correspondence, and analogue media exchange (cassette tapes, vinyl records and books).
[4] Nowadays the question that floats on the top of the text box is “What’s happening?”
[5] Twitter allow its users to create a hybrid network of weak and strong ties. On the one hand, they can connect reciprocally with friends they know in the physical world and can interact with them exchanging messages (strong ties, social bonding). On the other hand, they can also connect with people they have never met in the physical world and limit their interaction to just receiving their messages (weak ties, social bridging).
[6] I was following approximately 30 active users and 20 people were following me when I considered my network big enough to keep my Twitter webpage dynamic.
[7] The conventions of Twitter have been developed by the practices of the users of the system and, later, adopted and standardized (with buttons) by the providers of the service. That fact reflects how information technologies and system are, as Manuel Castells has pointed out, more than simple tools to be applied but also processes to be developed.
*This essay was written for a doctoral seminar on communication and media theory, during my first semester at UT-Austin, Fall 2009.
References
Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York: Basic Books.
Bell, D. (1979).The Social Framework of the Information Society. Dertoozos, M. L., Moses, J. (eds.), The Computer Age: A 20 Year View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 500-549.
danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan (2010).“Tweet Tweet Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.”Proceedings of HICSS-42, Persistent Conversation Track. Kauai, HI: IEEE Computer Society. January 5-8, 2010.[pdf]
Carey, J. (1983). Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph. Prospects,8, 303-325. doi:10.1017/S036123330000379
Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Castells, M. (1999). The information age: Economy, society and culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
