We are regularly told that Twitter is not representative of the British public.
Of course, this statement of the yawningly obvious is the discussion equivalent of a cul-de-sac, and should at best be greeted with a sardonic, “Who could have possibly imagined…” But it does expose the tip of a more interesting question.
If Twitter does not (shockingly) represent a digital simulacrum of the British public, what does it represent, in the sense of its characteristics, and, to frame the question from a different perspective, how might it be represented, in the sense of what might Twitter look like if we tried to reconceptualise it as a visual medium?
For the purposes of this column, “Twitter” is defined quite narrowly.
My focus is not the overall platform or its technology. Instead, I’m interested in the grouping that I’m going to loosely describe as “this Twitter” by which I mean UK politics, economics, and social affairs, as well as various bits and pieces of related cultural chat, and the panoply of associated conversations, whose connections extend both to and from other discourse networks (for example, European (especially Irish).
(I don’t mean to imply any form of ownership or exclusivity. The population of “this Twitter” is no more nor less than the people who decide to be involved by tweeting or even just by reading. It doesn’t matter where anyone is from, who they are or how many followers they might have. Participation is the only criterion for inclusion)
And I’m not at all concerned with the socio-economic characteristics of this Twitter. You will find only opinions and views in this column of loosely connected thoughts. For facts and figures, I advise you to investigate the British Election Study and follow knowledgeable people like Professor Will Jennings (@drjennings).
I’m going to begin by trying to identify some of the characteristics of this Twitter.
Firstly, to state the staggeringly self-evident, Twitter is principally a textual (ie words) medium that is intended to be read rather than a visual (ie pictures) medium intended to be viewed or seen. Yes, yes, memes, and yes, yes, tweeting photos and GIFs, but Twitter is not Instagram. The principal form of communication is written words.
The incredible obviousness of this point does not make it unimportant. Despite practically unlimited capacity for transmission, by using this platform, we choose to express ourselves not in pictures or sounds but in snippets of words. Sometimes we string the snippets into longer compositions, threads, but the foundational unit of expression is the single tweet of no more than two hundred and eighty characters.
The written nature of the medium makes Twitter feels familiar, almost old fashioned. A tweet might remind of a text message from one friend to another or a note on a bulletin board. Threads can replicate the structure of a bullet pointed memo or the serialisation of a story. One’s timeline, depending on its curation, might resemble graffiti scrawled on toilet walls or a transcript of the fragments of conversations overheard in a crowded street or the verses of a chaotic and endlessly rambling poem.
(Even the use of the word “thread’ references a conventional tradition of expression through the language of mythology – the golden thread through the labyrinth)
Twitter is also rather influential. One way in which it is different from the population of a perfectly constructed opinion poll is the over-representation in its discourse of opinion formers of one sort or another, including journalists, politicians, academics, all manner of experts, and a wide range of professional and amateur opinionistas.
Not only are opinion formers over-represented, but the scale and nature of the medium expands the range and influence of their views and analysis far beyond the ringfenced communities of newspapers, publishers and broadcasters who were the previous gatekeepers of mass communication. Examples of non-traditional influence include the economists and trade specialists who employed Twitter very effectively to communicate their Brexit analysis, and the many thoughtful Twitter commentators who, at the beginning of the first pandemic wave, advocated a quicker lockdown.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Twitter facilitates a disproportionate amount of opinion forming. After all, Twitter is a narrative medium. And, of course, opinion forming is not the preserve of people with institutional clout and lots of followers. Everyone who participates can attempt to exercise influence simply by tweeting or replying to tweets. Unfortunately, some people will use this power to abuse and bully. Each to their own but my advice is to block quickly and without the slightest remorse.
Twitter’s facility for opinion forming is by no means an unadulterated blessing. The nature of the medium (short, universally broadcast, anyone can reply (generally)) is highly conducive to opinionisation and seems to lead even the most analytical of commentators into the old opinion game. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it’s definitely a thing. Many experts end up being a combination of analyst and pundit.
Twitter also provides a platform for a diverse range of expression. This is not to say that Twitter is diverse in an absolute sense. It is not. But it is diverse relative to, say, a newspaper or a broadcaster. This Twitter teems with different groups and types: Politicals with their arcane knowledge of party political procedure, Clever Kids with their self-consciously galactic brains, Tradesters blinking in the unlikely limelight, Metas perched on their columns, Propagandists, dials tuned to broadcast, heroic Experts of all sorts, and lurking everywhere, trolls, a taxonomy of bad behaviour - Shitposters, Reply Guys, Sealions, the plain old Malevolents - and everyone else who just wants to get involved or watch from the sidelines as the show unfolds.
I also wanted to think about how Twitter might be represented.
If we imagine Twitter visually, how might it look? It might seem counter intuitive to think visually about such a textual medium but I think the exercise of considering the conception of information in both visual and textual formats is a useful way of gaining a better understanding of the whole. This isn’t quite the same as data visualisation but it is a similar sort of idea. If we were to translate textual information (a tweet, a thread, a book, a poem, or whatever) into images what might we draw, imagine or reference?
For obvious reasons this is a rather subjective process. In no particular order, when I try to visualise Twitter, I think of the Dutch and Flemish painter Bruegel and his sprawling landscapes of villagers and peasants engaged in a range of frenzied activity (see, for example, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent or Children’s Games).
https://www.insidebruegel.net/#p/v=udroom&lan=en&a=1017
I also think of the work of cubist artists of the early twentieth century like George Braque, who reconstructed (or redefined) images into collections of fragments whose visual and spatial arrangements attempted to capture a greater range of meanings than more traditional forms of artistic representation (see, for example, Braque’s landscape piece Ville Sur la Colline or his Still Life with a Metronome).
https://www.georgesbraque.org/georges-braque-paintings.jsp#prettyPhoto[paintings]/81/
Of course, it is impossible to think of the visual depiction of digital information without referencing cyberspace, William Gibson’s magnificent invention in his book Neuromancer. Although cyberspace is a literary creation we should note that it was conceived and described as a visual medium – the translation of data to a virtual world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
But most of all, when I think of the visual representation of Twitter, I imagine cities, the great metropolises in particular, a London or a Paris, a New York or Tokyo.
(Any use of the city as an analogy for human experience must pay a reverential hat-tip to Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, but I’m going to start somewhere rather different)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities)
In 1903 the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote a lecture called the Metropolis and Mental Life. By the early twentieth century, the metropolis had become the principal unit of European social habitation, and Simmel wanted to explore how the transition from the village to the city had impacted the ‘mental life’ of city dwellers.
Simmel argued that urban life resulted in the city’s inhabitants developing particular mental characteristics both to protect against being overwhelmed by the constant stimuli and to stand out from the crowd. He described the latter as follows:
‘…individuation…’ which, ‘…leads…to specifically metropolitan extravagances…the meaning of which is no longer to be found in the content of such activity itself but rather in its being a form of ‘being different’ – of making oneself noticeable.’
Simmel was rather critical of this ‘individuation’. I am not. But in the prevalence on Twitter of self consciously differentiating behaviour, I think Simmel might have recognised one of the key features of metropolitan life he had identified a century ago.
Of course, Twitter isn’t a city in the physical sense but it does have features that are city-like. The area of its activity is spatially confined, not by walls or green belts or administrative boundaries, but by the physical arrangement of the devices of its users.
It does not have bustling crowds wandering along its avenues and boulevards but it is most certainly populated, and its population gathers in throngs, big and small, who arrange themselves in constantly varying patterns that are reminiscent of crowds.
It does not have physically defined districts – a Marais or a Mayfair, a Harlem or a Shinjuku – but it does have social groupings of convenience, affiliation, friendship and enmity that might be seen to resemble the identities of city neighbourhoods.
It does not have buildings - houses made of brick or steel towers – but it does have a variety of constructions of words from simple “how are yous” to the grand spires and castles of political and economic discussions or the airy pavilions of cultural discourse.
It does not have buildings that last for years or a physical form whose changes might be best measured in decades but it does have constructions that age, depreciate and change shape albeit at a much faster rate. Twitter is different every day. The structure of its discourse may retain the foundational imprint of its various groupings but each morning its discussions are constructed anew in response to the swirl of events.
In the end, I think, we find a Twitter that represents a complex range of textual expression, good and bad, from a bewilderingly wide variety of groups and types. For me at least, it is best represented and imagined as a sprawling metropolis full of the hubbub and action of its virtual crowds and neighbourhoods, a digital city of words.