Twitter: A Magnifier of Intent

There are numerous ways to look at a technology like Twitter and try, somewhat in vein, to describe just what it is and just what it might do. Some have argued that Twitter is just another application in a globally networked society (Castells 2011), others have argued that it is a tool for engaging in symmetrical participation (Shirky 2008), and others have lumped Twitter into a large group of new media technologies arguing that these technologies are, in and of themselves, new languages (McLuhan 1995). While all of these arguments hold their own level of validity, what they all have in common is the realization that in the end, Twitter like many other new media technologies, is a magnifier of intent. Intentions are essentially an aim to execute a specific course of action. And as a magnifier of intent, whatever the aim behind the action, or the state of mind that drives those actions will be taken up through technology like Twitter and multiplied tenfold. As a magnifier of intent, we can better understand the role that Twitter might play in communication and discourse production during times of social unrest.

On the whole, Twitter is just a communication tool. On its own Twitter does nothing, it is in fact benign. Twitters true impact is realized when its communication functions are combined with human action and intention. Communication is something that all humans, as social animals, tend to want to do. Twitter multiplies our intent and capacity for communication and does it on a scale of great magnitude. And to understand just how the tool magnifies human intent, we need to look at two key features of the tool: 1) the one-to-many feature of the technology and 2) tweets as writerly text.

At its fundamental level, Twitter is a one-to-many communication tool. Unlike new media tools such as Facebook, Twitter does not require a reciprocal relationship be built to engage in conversation with others (for example: Friending someone to see what they say). Twitter has less to do with personally knowing the audience and more to do with mutual interest and intent. The use of symbols, hashtags and hyperlinks facilitates the specialization of targeted communication to those who would like to participate in the conversation. Essentially, Twitter allows users to organize a staging ground for relationship and coalition building based primarily on interest and intent. In this sense, Twitter is a hybrid social group that includes real friends, friends-of-friends, and complete strangers.

By using Twitter as a communication tool, it is implied that each user is speaking directly to others who have shown vested interest in the topic. It is also understood that conversations on Twitter are monitored, and consumed by others who have not actively engaged in the discussion. It can be assumed that while you may be speaking directly about a topic, there are others that are actively consuming your thoughts. All users have followers, and those followers have their own set of followers. What this creates is a virtual chain of readers. The audience, while not visible, is far from imagined. The audience is present in virtual online spaces. More and more, its no longer the individual who speaks on their own, but an entangled and adaptive network of humans tied through machines (McLuhan 1989).

The nature of the electronic age gives a foundation through which to understand the impact that one-to-many technologies have on the collective. Marshall McLuhan challenges us to think more clearly about how we are tied together electronically. One-to-many technologies, as characteristic of the electronic age, make up a central nervous system where each individual is included in the whole of mankind and the whole of mankind is tied to each individual (McLuhan 1995). As a result of this inclusion we necessarily participate in the consequences of our every action. The electric field of simultaneity gets everybody involved with everybody else (McLuhan 1989). To break it down, McLuhan is essentially warning us that, in the electric age, we are no longer able to adopt an aloof or dissociated role in world events. One-to-many technologies like Twitter and other broad reaching, highly connected forms of social media, shape and control the scale of human association and action (McLuhan 1995).

Twitter and similar one-to-many technologies have changed the scale and pace of human affairs and this new pace is expressed in the immense speed with which the intention behind each speech act is magnified and absorbed by the larger audience – through the electronic nervous system that we all belong to. Since the electric age has a global reach in which users necessarily participate in the consequences of every action, then perhaps we have to explore the notion that the medium and its users are responsible for the dramatic shift that the object of struggle takes as it moves from the local to the national to the global. Take for example the current events surrounding the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the United States. The intent of the first few adopters of the movement was to bring awareness to economic and structural issues that had a direct impact on their lives. In a very short time (by social movement standards) the message, and intent of the movement began to spread across not only the United States but into countries all over the world.

The one-to-many nature of Twitter was one way in which Occupy Wall Street participants were able to tap into the central nervous system created by the electronic age, taking advantage of the public magnification that comes with the system. As each message spread, it was picked up and adapted by other groups who felt that they could not longer take on a dissociated role in the events that were not just local, but quickly becoming global in their scale. As each person spoke through Twitter, the eyes and ears of the collective heard and began to take up the intent of those speech acts and magnify them to the largest possible audience as a call for action.

The other key feature of Twitter that makes it such a powerful tool for magnifying intent is that tweets are in and of themselves writerly texts. At a limit of 140 characters, each Tweet, or better yet each Twitter based speech act, creates gaps in the narrative that allows for others to fill in with their own presuppositions (Bruner 1986). As a result of the mediums writerly nature it is perhaps best to view the text, and resulting narrative as one produced by a subjective reality. And within this subjective mode users are able to bring their own realities into the narrative and are able to begin “trafficking in human possibilities rather than settled certainties.” (Bruner 1986, 26)

As each statement, each expression of thought, and each call to action are disseminated via Twitter it coalesces with that of others, building upon the tiny pieces of information coming from all directions (Kleinberg 2011). At each step of the process, new narratives are created that build on the intent of those that it consumes. In due time, the intentions behind these communications build into a hive-mind phenomenon that integrates the altruistic impulses and intentions of thousands of individuals (Christakis 2011). Essentially, Twitter magnifies the intentions of the individual by combining the voice of the individual with hundreds if not millions of other voices – until the crowd itself speaks as one heterogeneous identity.

Recognizing that Twitter, and the Tweets produced are writerly in nature, we are left to ask: what does this mean for magnifying intent in situations of unrest. For answers to this we look to the events in Tunisia from December 2010 to February 2011. As events unfolded, actors in the social movement began to use the speech acts on Twitter to employ a civil meta-language that related practical problems to the symbolic center of society and its utopian premises (Alexander 2006). Using the writerly nature of tweets, a narrative was developed and refined over time in which the characterization of the protestor evolved into that of a romantic hero struggling against the oppressive antagonist – the government. Furthermore, as the hive-mind phenomena began to pick up speed, these same characterizations were magnified in a way that shaped the discourse of the conflict, making a clear delineation of the protagonist in terms of the sacred and the antagonist in terms of the profane – a classic understanding of how collective action is understood as a struggle for position (Alexander 2006). Overtime, the voice of the crowd was established from the adoption and convergence of a million previously distinct voices into one, unified expression of thought and intention.

While we’re able to see what aspects of Twitter make it a magnifier of intent, it may be best to sum it up as so: Twitter is a magnifier of intent in that its impact on the whole is multiplicative, not additive (Toyama 2010). Twitter does not on it’s own add anything unique to any particular situation; it simply multiplies the impact of the intentions behind its use. Similar to computers, guns, factories and democracy, Twitter is a powerful tool, but the force that determines how it is used, is ultimately a human force, a human decisions making process (Toyama 2010). As we rush to scale the impacts of Twitter on global affairs, we often forget the most obvious of points: the effect of Twitter to create or affect change is by all accounts contingent on the motivations and abilities of its users. The aspects (one-to-many, writerly) of Twitter that make it so effective for positive social change are the same aspects that make it destructive if used with malice intent. As with any technology, the magnifying properties of Twitter can and will go both ways, it is up to the users to take control of the end result.

Works Cited:

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bruner, Jerome S. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Castells, Manuel. 2011. Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society. In Social Theory Roots and Branches, ed. Peter Kivisto, 588-598. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Christakis, Nicholas. 2011. There Is No New Self. In Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?: The net’s impact on our minds and future, ed. John Brockman, 202-204. 1st ed. New York: Harper Perennial.

Kleinberg, Jon. 2011. The Human Texture of Information. In Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?: The net’s impact on our minds and future, ed. John Brockman, 83-85. 1st ed. New York: Harper Perennial.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1989. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1995. Essential McLuhan. 1st ed. New York, NY: BasicBooks.

Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

Toyama, Kentaro. 2010. “Can Technology End Poverty?” Boston Review, December. http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/toyama.php.