{"id":6099,"date":"2015-05-31T09:55:55","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T15:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6099"},"modified":"2015-05-31T14:49:57","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T20:49:57","slug":"the-way-of-the-tweet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6099","title":{"rendered":"The way of the tweet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"birds\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[notes in search of an\u00a0essay]<\/p>\n

The lifecycle of the twitterer:<\/p>\n

1. Skepticism<\/p>\n

2. Enchantment<\/p>\n

3. Disenchantment<\/p>\n

4. Servitude<\/p>\n

(This may also be the lifecycle of Twitter itself.)<\/p>\n

Every\u00a0communication medium has\u00a0formal qualities and social qualities. The uniqueness of each medium lies in the tension between the formal qualities and the social qualities.<\/p>\n

The initial skepticism of the twitterer stems\u00a0from the formal\u00a0restrictiveness of the medium, which makes its\u00a0social possibilities\u00a0appear meager. Limiting messages to 140 characters would seem to prevent both rich expression and rich conversation. Hence the early rap on Twitter: who wants to hear what some narcissist\u00a0had for breakfast? (Many users and would-be users never get beyond this stage.)<\/p>\n

The enchantment begins with the realization that formal restrictiveness can be a spur to creative expression. A limit of 140\u00a0characters, it turns out, leaves plenty of room for wit. It also leaves plenty of room for conversation. The sense of enchantment grows as people come up with ingenious formal innovations that further expand the flexibility of the medium (hashtags, abbreviations, denotative punctuation marks, etc.), greatly enhancing its social qualities, without destroying the overarching formal constraint that distinguishes the service.<\/p>\n

(Side note:\u00a0When a link appears in a tweet, the link can serve as\u00a0either context or text.)<\/p>\n

Disenchantment begins with the realization that, even with all the formal innovations, Twitter remains a restrictive medium. The twitterer begins to sense that she has explored all the exciting or intriguing formal and social qualities of the medium, and now the limitations begin to grate. Tweeting begins to feel at best routine and at worst like\u00a0an exercise in recycling. A\u00a0contempt for the medium\u00a0begins to grow silently within the twitterer.<\/p>\n

(Side note: Unlike the charming\u00a0formal innovations that come from the users, the formal innovations introduced by Twitter itself, such as the rote attachment of images or\u00a0snippets to tweets, often feel forced, clumsy, manipulative. They’re disenchanting.)<\/p>\n

To the extent that the disenchanted have been socially successful with Twitter (lots of followers, lots of interlocutors, achievement of status), they will find it difficult, if not impossible, to abandon the medium. Servitude begins.<\/p>\n

(Side note: The formal restrictiveness of Twitter makes it a more interesting medium, a more enchanting medium, than, say, Facebook. Servitude\u00a0is Facebook’s business model, as its founder and early investors understood long ago.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[notes in search of an\u00a0essay] The lifecycle of the twitterer: 1. Skepticism 2. Enchantment 3. Disenchantment 4. Servitude (This may also be the lifecycle of Twitter itself.) Every\u00a0communication medium has\u00a0formal qualities and social qualities. The uniqueness of each medium lies in the tension between the formal qualities and the social qualities. The initial skepticism of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6099"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6110,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6099\/revisions\/6110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}