Twitter is not in a happy place right now. It may have just replaced its old star icon to "favorite" a post with a heart that now denotes a "like" but the company's own vitals needs a little bit of help right now. It lost $132 million in the most recent financial quarter, added no active users in the United States in 2015 and is barely expanding anywhere else. And it's not just the business alone that's suffering. It's the experience too.
People have been promising the death of Twitter for a few years now and complaints about how awful/polarised/hateful/misogynist/boring/partisan/unfunny it is have been par for the course since almost the very beginning. Yet something has actually changed and the company recognises it.
Just as blogging, once a wonderfully homegrown, genuinely participatory experience was overtaken by the corporate world over the course of the 2000s, Twitter too has started to turn into something else entirely. In both cases, blogging and Twitter, it was the success of the models that have forced change upon them.
New Users vs Ol' Faithful
One of Twitter's main problems is that it has always been mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, which is five times larger and still growing. This means that, even though there are hundreds of millions of people already on Twitter, the aim nevertheless remains user growth, with the idea that new users are crucial. Hence a slew of new features, from "While You Were Away" to "Moments" to the new heart button.
But in the meantime, Twitter seems to not have paid attention to problems facing original users, or simply been unable to tackle them. To a large extent, the social network once known for fostering open conversations has turned into a place for pronouncements, not conversations, with politicians and personalities using it as a publicity machine while actual discussions happen elsewhere.
A recent piece by Robinson Meyer points to a theory about why this is happening. Meyer quotes from the work of media philosopher Walter Ong, by way of Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart. Ong split social conversations into two categories: oral, and hence more immediate as well as adaptive; and literal, which is to say written down and permanent.
Oral vs Literal
Per Ong, the first wave of new technology like radio and television were oral, but built out of literal cultures. As the Internet has spread though, communication has started to look more literal: we write and text each other more than we speak to each other. But there's one big difference: "textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange".
Or to put it simply, people are writing on Twitter in the same chatty tone they might use while talking to someone right in front of them. Which leads to a problem: Things don't go away on Twitter and, as the network gets more and more popular, your posts which may have been conversational and contextual are also permanently attached to your name and accessible by anyone. So tweets are produced as if they are oral, but consumed literally (pun intended).
As Robinson puts it:
Indeed, who hasn't seen Twitter users go from having genuine conversations to simply using the medium to grandstand? How common is it to see an old tweet pulled out, without any context, as evidence of the perfidy of a Twitter user who made the mistake of venturing a comment? How many are ready to treat tweets as equivalent to a manifesto, when sometimes they're not even fully formed thoughts?
Conversation Smoosh
As Stewart puts it, "We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with bated breath to strike." Meyer calls this "conversation smoosh": mixing speech-based expectations with print-based interpretations.
This has moved what can only be called semi-private conversations to other spaces, most prominently WhatsApp groups. These are growing larger and more ubiquitous, and allow for discussions on things people might no longer feel comfortable talking about on open, public Twitter.
Indeed, back in the day, Twitter was a lot like these groups: It was public, which meant that interesting, unknown people could pop by, but it wasn't so public that news organisations (like this one) would scour it for news nor was it a place where brands tried to game it for traction or political operatives attempted to use it to score points.
Public vs Semi-Public
Twitter is no longer semi-public. It's properly public. People treat Twitter like their own little PR machines, pushing out 140-character press releases at regular hours of the day. Anything controversial goes into a private chatroom. The numbers don't suggest otherwise, with Twitter somewhere in the 22 million user range in India and WhatsApp more than double that.
And Twitter is well aware. It removed its 140-character limit from direct messages earlier this year and added group chat, an acknowledgement that many of those semi-private conversations were being taken to other networks. Those tweaks make it easier to stick with Twitter, but its problem remains the main Twitter timeline, and that still seems broken.
The only people it may really offer immediacy to are breaking-news journalists, wisecrack artists, politicians and celebrities/brands, as a publishing platform. Unless it develops a more interesting way of allowing people to interact with the main timeline, it will struggle to be a "social network" that is actually social.
That might not be a huge problem for a product used by more than 300 million people. But if it continues to evolve this way, it just won't be the Twitter that we've come to know and love.
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People have been promising the death of Twitter for a few years now and complaints about how awful/polarised/hateful/misogynist/boring/partisan/unfunny it is have been par for the course since almost the very beginning. Yet something has actually changed and the company recognises it.
Just as blogging, once a wonderfully homegrown, genuinely participatory experience was overtaken by the corporate world over the course of the 2000s, Twitter too has started to turn into something else entirely. In both cases, blogging and Twitter, it was the success of the models that have forced change upon them.
New Users vs Ol' Faithful
One of Twitter's main problems is that it has always been mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, which is five times larger and still growing. This means that, even though there are hundreds of millions of people already on Twitter, the aim nevertheless remains user growth, with the idea that new users are crucial. Hence a slew of new features, from "While You Were Away" to "Moments" to the new heart button.
But in the meantime, Twitter seems to not have paid attention to problems facing original users, or simply been unable to tackle them. To a large extent, the social network once known for fostering open conversations has turned into a place for pronouncements, not conversations, with politicians and personalities using it as a publicity machine while actual discussions happen elsewhere.
A recent piece by Robinson Meyer points to a theory about why this is happening. Meyer quotes from the work of media philosopher Walter Ong, by way of Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart. Ong split social conversations into two categories: oral, and hence more immediate as well as adaptive; and literal, which is to say written down and permanent.
Oral vs Literal
Per Ong, the first wave of new technology like radio and television were oral, but built out of literal cultures. As the Internet has spread though, communication has started to look more literal: we write and text each other more than we speak to each other. But there's one big difference: "textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange".
Or to put it simply, people are writing on Twitter in the same chatty tone they might use while talking to someone right in front of them. Which leads to a problem: Things don't go away on Twitter and, as the network gets more and more popular, your posts which may have been conversational and contextual are also permanently attached to your name and accessible by anyone. So tweets are produced as if they are oral, but consumed literally (pun intended).
As Robinson puts it:
"On Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets 'are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers'.”
Indeed, who hasn't seen Twitter users go from having genuine conversations to simply using the medium to grandstand? How common is it to see an old tweet pulled out, without any context, as evidence of the perfidy of a Twitter user who made the mistake of venturing a comment? How many are ready to treat tweets as equivalent to a manifesto, when sometimes they're not even fully formed thoughts?
Conversation Smoosh
As Stewart puts it, "We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with bated breath to strike." Meyer calls this "conversation smoosh": mixing speech-based expectations with print-based interpretations.
This has moved what can only be called semi-private conversations to other spaces, most prominently WhatsApp groups. These are growing larger and more ubiquitous, and allow for discussions on things people might no longer feel comfortable talking about on open, public Twitter.
Indeed, back in the day, Twitter was a lot like these groups: It was public, which meant that interesting, unknown people could pop by, but it wasn't so public that news organisations (like this one) would scour it for news nor was it a place where brands tried to game it for traction or political operatives attempted to use it to score points.
Public vs Semi-Public
Twitter is no longer semi-public. It's properly public. People treat Twitter like their own little PR machines, pushing out 140-character press releases at regular hours of the day. Anything controversial goes into a private chatroom. The numbers don't suggest otherwise, with Twitter somewhere in the 22 million user range in India and WhatsApp more than double that.
And Twitter is well aware. It removed its 140-character limit from direct messages earlier this year and added group chat, an acknowledgement that many of those semi-private conversations were being taken to other networks. Those tweaks make it easier to stick with Twitter, but its problem remains the main Twitter timeline, and that still seems broken.
The only people it may really offer immediacy to are breaking-news journalists, wisecrack artists, politicians and celebrities/brands, as a publishing platform. Unless it develops a more interesting way of allowing people to interact with the main timeline, it will struggle to be a "social network" that is actually social.
That might not be a huge problem for a product used by more than 300 million people. But if it continues to evolve this way, it just won't be the Twitter that we've come to know and love.
