highimpactsex

blogger and game dev

no more social media. i make text games that are poorly rated in game jams and talk about cool niche stuff.


lutz
@lutz

it's not original to remark upon. but one of the most interesting things about the fall of twitter and the rush to readymade replacements is how they really do just recapture the form of the thing, in some inevitably marred way, but this ends up mainly highlighting how much of the twitter experience was less about the website and more a kind of culture and feeling its history produced. twitter was twittr and it was launched as a normie micro-journaling website where you said shit like "got a big meeting today!" and posted pictures of your lunch. you did it with those newfangled phones with cameras and internet on them and could ONLY use 140 characters. but what happened was this: suddenly you and a thousand strangers could text message each other. communities consolidated. voices became distinct. you could talk about watching TV live with everyone watching the same show. twittr became Twitter because people found something else to do with it. twitter became Twitter due to a combination of celebs drawn in by the novelty and a bunch of people using the platform against its stated purpose and posting deranged shit (sometimes these were also, surprisingly but crucially, the celebs). twitter became what it was because its developers added things we think of as basic functionalities, like faves and retweets, based on behaviors users had an interest in performing for each other, had invented the language for, independent of them. for a while twitter felt nice because it always carried the sense you were using the thing in a way it wasn't quite meant to be. and now there's all these apps where the pitch is "hey use this like Twitter"


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in reply to @lutz's post:

Twitter was a chat room where I could voice things like "I just talked so loudly about the entirety of the Jaws franchise to my wife the neighbors heard" to effectively no one or maybe, if the stars aligned just right, Oprah

I'm still working through how at one point in my life that was the thing I wanted most, to be seen by Oprah or Channing Tatum or at the very least Chris Hardwick, and now that's a thing I'd throw pepsi on a server to prevent. The things I like, though, are when basically normal people who create things and say things I really appreciate talk to me, by which I mean, this right now.

twitter was twittr and it was launched as a normie micro-journaling website where you said shit like "got a big meeting today!" and posted pictures of your lunch. you did it with those newfangled phones with cameras and internet on them and could ONLY use 140 characters.

For me, this quote highlights how difficult it is to lay over this the all-too-tempting "Twitter as tech company imposing itself at a profit from without" reading. Don't get me wrong; that's absolutely what happened. But text messages in general were still such a novelty in 2006 that no culture emerged around them the way one had emerged for the Internet as a whole. Indeed, you could argue that how text messaging was understood at the time - defined by immediate use value at a person-to-person scale - left very little room for any larger culture to develop outside tech companies like Twitter and Apple actively creating it themselves. This was to the latter's benefit: it both allowed them a greater degree of control over their creations while making their introduction seem more organic, less like the extension of privatizing whatever new frontiers they could invent or get their hands on that this process actually was.

suddenly you and a thousand strangers could text message each other. communities consolidated

Honestly, nothing sums up the experience of Arab Spring more than this. What would have been a more isolated event (like Occupy Wall Street, which was harder to get info about purely online without risking going to crackpot websites), was plastered all over my timeline, as I watched friends from those regions give small quick updates on their safety, small bits of news, linking to videos, and giving instructions or help on how to get around firewall blocks or explaining what was happening at given events in real time.