(“Night Vanity” by Evan Gruzis )
Life on open social media platforms flows continuously without beginning or end. There are no season finales, sequels or prequels. The streams are in a constant state of flux. They consist of users who are both helping to define it and being defined by it as they oscillate in and out of the various streams of which they are members. There is a refusal to stay in one place—a nomadic sense of being at home by not being at home (i.e., the call of The Road). That’s usually one of the first Twitter epiphanies that a new user has—the realization that hey, I can be in several places at once! In real life I might be someone stuck inside a coffin-like cubicle, but on the internet I can mix worlds with the effortless beauty of a painter mixing paint. I can exist at the intersections between Silicon Valley and next level Evolvers—I can follow DJs and politicians and poets—I can tweet something interesting and go viral like a youtube video. In real life I might be quiet and calm and outwardly accepting of all that happens but online I’m a moving, surfing force, straddling the space between subject and verb—I’m blooming a million ways at once—bursting forth in the extravagance of NOW until I’m no longer me and yr no longer u.
Keith Haring, capturer of NOW
Twitter is made up of steady streams of in-between moments—the “little” times like car trips and slow escalator rides and waiting in line that connect together the supposedly “big” life events. The connector times are the perfect time to dash off a tweet or two. This rushing river of brevities is always “in the middle”, which is to say, you can’t see the beginning or the end by looking at it-it’s like a play that you’re always logging in to media res. This is part of why it is so difficult to explain Twitter to someone who hasn’t used it. As the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri pointed out in their prophetic late 20th Century Masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus, “It’s not easy to see things in the middle.” They go on to explain:
The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. —TP 28
The uninterrupted FLOW(s) of Twitter form a “collective assemblage of enunciation” and an “assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside” (TP 26) D&G preferred the word assemblage to describe A Thousand Plateaus instead of “book” which implied a false unity of the book as an image of the world. To them bound books represented old-fashioned closed-off, linear thought. An assemblage was an enity that bridged the gap between nomadic writing and the writing of the state. D&G would have been excited about open platforms like Twitter and Tumblr—the way the individual tweets are created with the awareness of the openings between them—they are collected together on a single feed but not closed off to being joined, borrowed from or added to—they’re ready to be mashed up and to go viral, like the best blog posts. Their immediate NOWness fufills the criteria that D&G layed out for the “ideal book”:
The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. —TP 10
The creation of “open rings” is what social media is all about. Had the technology been available, I wonder if D&G would have tweeted A Thousand Plateaus instead of published it as a book? Or maybe they would have started a Tumblr blog instead—perhaps in the same spirit that I started this one—treating it like a rock n’ roll rhizome—a place in which to fit everything that doesn’t fit.
(Robert Scoble makes it about him by making it about US)
I’m using the example of The Scobleizer Twitter stream in order to better elucidate the fundamentals of how Twitter streams work. People who meet and follow each other through their mutual following of the popular tech writer, Robert Scoble, (@Scobleizer) are likely to have a set of specific things in common—an interest in emerging technology and insider Silicon Valley news as well as a desire to be among the early adaptors and cutting edge people who are a part of that world. These interests help form the brand of the Scobleizer Twitter stream, which is the subset of users who found and follow one another through their shared following of Scobleizer. The Twitter stream can be thought of as the subset of Scoble’s followers who form the main current of conversation about and in direct response to his tweets. They communicate with one another through “@” replies and retweets in a similar way that the readers of a blog have conversations and debates between themselves in the comments section. Even if the blog author isn’t directly involved in an exchange, his or her thoughts are still being amplified.
There’s a threshold, however, in which the specificity of the Twitter stream brand gets watered down and looses whatever it is that made it unique. This would happen if the people following Scobleizer have a large number of other people in common with one another that they found and followed outside of the Scoble Stream. If these other Twitter streams are also about emerging technology, then the overlap of streams forms a larger stream (AKA a fluid machine) within the larger Twitter river. But if the other shared Twitter streams are about a wide variety of subjects then the Twitter stream changes from a large group of people who found each other through their specific shared interests into a large group of people who found each other through a myriad of interests. What was once a strong current expands into a tepid bay.
Just because you attract a huge amount of followers doesn’t automatically mean your stream will be watered down—it does, however, make it more likely than if you have only a small group of followers. The reason I choose Scoble as an example is because he has made the workings of the Twitter streams work for him so that he has retained a sense of intimacy between himself and his followers. Even his online name, “Scobleizer”, seems to acknowledge his Twitter stream existence as neither noun nor verb. He is a person but what he has created with his online presence is a way of being. The “Scobleizer Twitter stream is not identical to Scoblizer’s follow list. A stream is about a multiplicity of connections in many directions. It’s the difference between broadcasting at a loud volume and creating a positive feedback loop. For instance, there are plenty of celebrities on Twitter who have huge follower counts but who follow back very few people in return and almost never engage in conversation. Oprah has a large number of Twitter followers, but a completely weak Twitter stream, as there’s little or no interaction or recognition between these followers as her followers. Part of what makes Scoble’s Twitter stream so strong is that he interacts with his followers who in turn interact with one another. He often closes the circuit by retweeting these interactions: ensuring that their interaction is branded AS members of the Scobleizer Twitter stream and not just conversation between people who happen to be followers of Scoble as well as lots of other people. By putting your thoughts, ideas and blog posts out there in such a way that encourages discussion with EVERYONE who follows you is the easiest and best way to keep your stream strong. There are plenty of Twitterers out there who have loads of followers but will only deign to reply to a chosen few. Even if this discussion is rich and interesting, the fact that there is an unspoken follower hierarchy discourages other followers not only from replying to the Big Fish twitterer, but it also precludes them from finding and getting to know one another AS followers of the Big Fish.
Instead of aiming for a high number of followers, I would argue that a Twitterer’s IDEAS reach a greater number of people if they instead focus on cultivating a smaller, yet more engaged group of followers. You should cap off your followers at a number that still enables you to interact with them. Despite his huge following, Scoble is an example of someone who has made the fluiditiy of his stream work for him. He’s kept it “about him” precisely by not always making it about him.
Twitter Telepathy happens when a person is thinking about something that happened or is about to happen, checks Twitter, and finds that someone they follow tweeted about the exact same something. This coincidence, in turn, is linked to another, altogether separate occurrence to which it shares a similar psychic state in the mind (or minds) of the person (or persons) that it effects. Once you get past the “that’s impossible” and “I don’t believe in magic” knee-jerk reactions that many so-called scientific minded people have in the face of events to which there are no readily apparent explanations, it becomes apparent that Twitter is ready-made to be a vehicle for new type of non-causal communication. The essential timeless asynchronicity (of Twitter as a whole (not as the individual streams that make it up, as I write about here) and rapid-fire pace of the application combine in a functionality that mimics ESP from the outset (a fact that is cited by Twitter on its homepage).
Twitter Telepathy can happen in two different ways: either a person someone follows tweeted about the same thing at the same time that they were experiencing it, or else they tweeted about it at a different time but the person didn’t see the tweet until the moment just before or after their experience. The more specific the coincidence, the more likely it’s Twitter Telepathy and not just the usual chatter about current events, or Barack Obama, or any number of trending topics ranging from software application releases to political scandals to the latest episode of Dancing with the Stars. In addition, it’s always time to eat or drink or make coffee somewhere in the world, so the fact that someone tweets about eating a sandwich at the same time that you take the first bite of yours is not so mindblowing. If, however, you both bit into your respective sandwiches and crunched down on something hard and possibly tooth cracking—then the connection becomes more specific and the weirdness factor expands. If once you’re done inspecting your teeth and are about to tweet about the coincidence you refresh your feed and happen to notice that an altogether different person that you follow has just tweeted about a dream they just hadin which all their teeth fell out, then you know you’re really on a roll.
The more specific and non-everyday that the “something” is, the less it feels like merely a coincidence, and more like a communication delivered via an invisible but very REAL and functioning messaging system, like the rivers of data running largely unnoticed beneath city streets and between building walls.
In order to truly attain the WOW factor necessary for there to be Twitter telepathy, it helps if the connection between the synching pair contains another, previously hidden element that is brought to light during the connection over the coincidence. For instance one is inspired to visit the other’s blog and finds a post or a picture that forms another coincidence—that the two went to the same school, or are both exactly half-way through Infinite Jest. These types of discoveries are only possible with curious half-strangers that a person doesn’t know in “real” life. Twitter is not merely about duplicating an existing stream of friends online, but creating new ones—the emphasis being on the plural—numerous Twitter streams which a person cultivates to meet the needs of the multiplicity of selves that exists inside each of us as individuals.
fluid machines
A Twitter user stream is a kind of fluid machine (reminiscent of the T-1000 cyborg in Terminator 2) that is comprised of the followers of the largest account in a group of users who are also followers of one another. It’s not the number of followers that makes a Twitter stream strong; rather, the strength of a given stream depends a majority of its members having discovered each other through their shared following of this person AND for those members to have had few if any other people that they followed in common prior to when they started following the Big Fish Twitter account.
The users who make up the fluid Twitter stream machines are what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “desiring machines”: smaller machines (users) that function as circuit breakers in the larger circuit of the various Twitter streams that they are connected to. In addition, these smaller machines produce their own flow of desire—which will sometimes run in a direction counter to the overall flow:
“There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale.”
According to D&G, the main goal of a desiring machine is to appropriate that which is outside of itself. This is the movement that creates the essential dynamic that keeps Twitter flowing. A Twitter user tries to gain more followers who are receptive and responsive to their tweets. The goal is to get them to become followers, but also to retweet and hopefully even reblog what they write about. Every amplification extends the amount of Twitter domain that a user “covers”—each mention adds to the percentage of the Twitterverse that a desiring machine can claim.
The emergence of non stop data streams such as Twitter streams alongside the non stop data streams of our thoughts is leading to an overlap in which the give and take of exchanging thoughts happens so quickly that it is almost impossible to tell where an idea starts. The question of an origin is made moot.
We’ve left old thermodynamic-based paradigms behind and have transitioned into a reality understood in terms of quantum physics: we’ve learned that particles react in ways both predictable and chaotic—creating a science of the unscientific—a fractal physics that maps invisible energy exchanges. While it seems like magic, the increased occurrences of online telepathy are a matter of people integrating the same data using the same post-modern assimilation processes at the same time. Online telepathy is similar in its workings to the way men and women have often had the same idea in different places at the same time—such as the invention/discovery of physics by Newton and Leibniz—something the psychoanalyst Carl Jung pointed out in his study of UFO sightings:
Things can be seen by many people independently of one another, or even simultaneously, which are not physically real. Also, the association-processes of many people often have a parallelism in time and space, with the result that different people, simultaneously and independently of one another, can produce the same new ideas, as has happened numerous times in history. (13 Jung UFO)
