ALEXIS MADRIGAL

Russian Literary Theory and The Way Twitter Is Broken

First, allow me to state that I am wholly behind Tim Maly’s manifesto Unlink Your Feeds. What I love about his (playful and legitimate) admonition is that it takes the Internet seriously as a series of linked communities, each with their own historically derived traits and norms.

“There’s another, more subtle problem. This service and that service have a slightly different culture,” he writes. “There is a different grammar, a different tone, and even different acceptable subject matter. When you automatically import stuff from that service into this service, it can be jarring.”

This is essentially what most marketing types and other Internet people never understand. Community on the Internet is real and if you mess up the language of the place (Twitter), people don’t trust what you have to say, even if it would be totally appropriate elsewhere (Facebook).

So, yes, I’m with Tim. But I think Twitter might be a special case.

When Twitter first came out, it occurred to me that Twitter made a lot more sense when you already had a Facebook (or LinkedIn or MySpace) identity to carry the real weight of describing who you were to interested parties. Twitter sat atop the social networking infrastructure provided by others, even though it didn’t in the code.

And that’s always been both the beauty and downfall of Twitter. It’s incomplete without the rest of the Internet. It needs to sit atop links and Facebook, etc. It is not a closed circuit. Actually, I think it’s becoming a kind of social lubricant for the cold dark Internet, like those (I think) failed browser plug-ins that claimed/wanted to offer “social web browsing.” Little did they know that people would want social web browsing to mean running a separate application and all the other weird things that Twitter is and has become.

Twitter has no memory, though. It’s the goldfish service, forever forgetting where it was just a few moments ago. (Perhaps that accounts for the irrepresibly happy tone of Tweets. “Wow” is probably the most common descriptor for a link.)

But what if you want to have a conversation — or just a feed — that is preserved? Twitter can’t do that for you. It won’t do that for you. Under those circumstances one can be forgiven for wanting to pipe one’s Tweets elsewhere.

Perhaps this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Instead, it can and should be a social highwire act. A beautiful exercise in register mixing (or code shifting): Jay-Z speaking to the boardroom, the suburbs, and the streets *with the same song*. Let’s borrow from the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and call Tweets that makes sense on a variety of platforms “hybrid utterances”: snippets of text designed to make sense within multiple (Internet) communities, evoking their norms and not contravening their rules. Bakhtin identified the best of novelists (Dickens, Tolstoy) as displaying this very sort of merry switching between language realms. Bakhtin found this trait (heteroglossia) defining of the novel, in fact. Heteroglossia was its secret power source, the deep conflict that powers the genre of the novel as it pushes and shoves to describe self moving within society and through history. Or something like that. (I’m pretty sure that Anne Lounsberry, the master professor who introduced me to Bakhtin in my freshman year of college would be pretty happy that I remembered/was able to Google this much, so I will be, too.)

Circling back to Twitter, it has always seemed to me a novelistic enterprise, at least in the Bakhtin sense and maybe more broadly. The quotes and retweeting. The way evening tweets sound different from daytime tweets. The way strangers call me by my first name if they’ve followed me, but not if they just read my writing. The identity you construct Tweet-by-Tweet in real time out in public through text seems more authentic than the smooth implied author of a magazine piece or a Tumblr curator could ever be.

That’s why I think Twitter is a special case. As beautiful and real as I think it is, the code doesn’t reflect the depth of the social experience. They keep losing/erasing/not finding what you’re building.  You’re always a stranger with a few days worth of tweets to Twitter, even if you’ve used it for years as an important pathway for defining and refining what you’re becoming and the stories you tell yourself and how that makes you what you are. I feel solidity in my community, as if I’ve dived into a mosh pit and found dozens of hands holding me aloft, but Twitter’s technical undergirding doesn’t reflect that at all.

That’s just wrong.

Forgive me, then, for turning to other services that may offer some gesture towards permanence. Maybe we can disregard the Maly Rule for just this one unruly service at least until they make it work a little better for us true believers.