Preface and Acknowledgments

“What Hath God Wrought” – Samuel Morse’s first message, on May 24, 1844, on the newly completed telegraph wire linking Baltimore and Washington – was a mere 21 characters long. Alexander Graham Bell’s first message on the telephone to his lab assistant on March 10, 1876, “Mr Watson – come here – I want to see you,” was more liberal: 42 characters long. And 95 years later, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email, with the message “QWERTYUIOP,” from one computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to another computer sitting beside it. Tomlinson’s message: a spartan 10 characters.

In the past, technology determined the length and duration of the message. In the internet age of today, our ability to communicate is seemingly limitless. But the computer has ushered in a new era of brevity. Twitter is a digital throwback to the analog succinctness of telegrams. Yet what is the significance of this electronically diminished turn to terseness? Does it signal the dumbing down of society, the victory of short attention spans, or the rise of new virtual “me” cultures? Are we saying more with less, or just saying less? Or perhaps we are saying more about less. This position is well illustrated by “status updates,” short one- or two-line messages on the popular social networking platform Facebook. Though these short messages are often trivially banal (e.g., “mustard dripping out of my bagel sandwich”), they are elevated to “news,” which Facebook automatically distributes to your group of “friends,” selected individuals who have access to your Facebook “profile,” that is, your personalized web page on the site. Once the update percolates to your friends, they have the opportunity to comment on your update, generating a rash of discussion about dripping mustard, and so on. A photo of the offending bagel sandwich might be included as well. Platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram prioritize the role of images, but brief comments remain very important to these media.

This form of curt social exchange has become the norm with messages on Twitter, the popular social media website where individuals respond to the question “What’s happening?” with a maximum of 140 characters. These messages, known as “tweets,” can be sent through the internet, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and text messages. But, unlike status updates, their strict limit of 140 characters produces at best eloquently terse responses and at worst heavily truncated speech. Tweets such as “gonna see flm tonite!” or “jimmy wil be fired l8r 2day” are reflective of the latter. The first tweet on the site, “just setting up my twttr”1 (24 characters), by Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, on March 21, 2006, perhaps led by example. This book emphasizes that Dorsey’s message, like that of Morse, was brief and, like that of Bell, was unremarkable – setting up one’s Twitter and asking the recipient to return.

After 11 years of 140-character tweets, Twitter decided to double this to 280 characters from November 2017. Before rolling the change out to the general public, Twitter began trialing this “feature” with a select group of users (Watson 2017), though initial testing suggested that only 5 per cent of the group opted to use over 140 characters in their tweets (Newton 2017). Critics (e.g., Silver 2017) argue that this will drown out Twitter timelines, compromising the platform’s uniquely succinct form of social communication.

Our contemporary use of Twitter – in part a social, political, and economic information network – has evolved over more than a decade. So it may be some years before the impact of the 280-character expansion can be evaluated. Given that our behaviors on all social media platforms are interlinked, it may be that Twitter is answering a call for individuals to express themselves more fully, though in the context of these platforms more broadly, 280 characters is still relatively terse.

By drawing this line between the telegraph and telephone to Twitter, this book makes its central argument – that the rise of these messages does not signal the death of meaningful communication. Rather, Twitter has the potential to increase our awareness of others and to augment our spheres of knowledge, tapping us into a global network of individuals who are passionately giving us instant updates on topics and areas in which they are knowledgeable or participating in real-time. In doing so, however, the depth of our engagements with this global network of people and ideas can also, sometimes, become more superficial. For example, policymaking by elected officials on Twitter may not only be superficial due to brevity, but also potentially dangerous due to a lack of context for foreign policymakers reading these tweets. Of course, the opposite can be true too where brief, superficial tweets are positive, serving as public evidence of continued political engagement.

Many of us would be worried if Twitter replaced “traditional” media or the longer-length media of blogs, message boards, and email lists. The likelihood of this is, of course, minimal. However, Twitter is also mediating access to these types of content for many. For example, Twitter’s “Moments” feature presents a selection of trending “news” for users to be able to easily navigate. Though aspects of Twitter such as this may be reducing information diversity or dumbing down what we consume (and this potentially has real effects on politics, economics, and society), this book concludes with the suggestion that there is something profoundly remarkable in us being able to follow minute-by-minute commentary in the aftermath of an earthquake, or even the breakup of a celebrity couple. This book is distinctive in not only having Twitter as its main subject, but also its approach of theorizing the site as a collection of communities of knowledge, ad hoc groups where individual voices are aggregated into flows of dialog and information (whether it be the election of Donald Trump or the death of Prince). The first edition of this book in 2013 was instrumental in starting this conversation, and this second edition continues the important work of thinking critically about Twitter.

Ultimately, Twitter affords a unique opportunity to re-evaluate how communication and culture can be individualistic and communal simultaneously. I also describe how these changes in communication are not restricted exclusively to the West, as any mobile phone, even the most basic model, is compatible with Twitter. Tweets can be quickly and easily sent, a fact that has led to the growth of its base to 313 million monthly active users with 79 percent of accounts outside of the USA (Twitter.com 2016a). This has been useful in communicating information about disasters (e.g., the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in New Zealand) and social movements (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter). At an individual level, tweets have reported everything from someone’s cancer diagnosis to unlawful arrests. For example, in April 2008, James Karl Buck, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was arrested photographing an anti-government labor protest in Mahalla, Egypt. He quickly sent a one-word tweet from his phone, “arrested,” which caught the attention of Buck’s Twitter “followers,” those who subscribe to his tweets. His one-word tweet led to Berkeley hiring a lawyer and Buck’s eventual release. There are, of course, many distinctions to be made between the tweets sent by Buck, or those sent during the Mumbai bomb blasts, and the more unremarkable, everyday tweets. Contrast the tweet Prasad Naik sent moments after the Mumbai bomb blasts, “Firing happening at the Oberoi hotel where my sister works. Faaak!” with Biz Stone’s third tweet, “wishing I had another sammich.”2 Though an intentionally striking and loaded comparison, it is just this absurdity that happens daily, hourly, and by the minute on Twitter. This combination of banal/profound, combined with the one-to-many – explicitly – public broadcasting of tweets, differentiates Twitter from Facebook and text messages.

Rather than selectively condemning Twitter (e.g., as a threat to democracy) or, on the other hand, praising it (e.g., a bringer of democracy), the book poses important questions to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of this new communications medium. Although I examine the practice of social media through specific Twitter-mediated events, this book’s emphasis is both explanatory and theoretical. Specifically, my prime aim is to better understand the meanings behind Twitter and similar social media through concise yet sophisticated interpretations of theories of media and communication, drawing upon a diverse array of scholars, from Marshall McLuhan to Erving Goffman and Gilles Deleuze to Martin Heidegger. Though this network of thinkers and scholars crosses several disciplines, their work sheds light on a problem of communication faced since the dawn of the modern age: unraveling the connections, to paraphrase McLuhan, between the medium and the message. The chapters present analyses of the shifts in which we communicate by exploring the role of Twitter in discourses of new media forms, communication, social formations, and digitally mediated communities. Early chapters introduce Twitter, historically contextualize it, and present...