Twitter's Time Effects: Why Twitter Needs to Become a Time Lord Social Media

As Twitter continues to flounder as a business, many have tendered their advice for the struggling company.  On the other hand, people at Twitter have responded by introducing what appear (to some) to be "innovations" that are already shared by multiple, social media.  All this has prompted me to think about my own fascination with the platform.  Even though I've blogged here many times about Twitter's relationship to physical and social space, I find myself most often thinking about Twitter's time effects. 

Like other social media, part of the allure of Twitter is the way it allows users to manipulate space--i.e., using social media to "be there" even when you're very far away.  But time is also a resource that people manipulate through their social media.  While some social media emphasize the present (or the "expanded present"),  other platforms allow for other, sometimes subtle, temporalities.  This powerful combination of space and time effects is nowhere more evident than the current popularity of dating apps for the 18-34 set.  As a recent Pew study suggests, by allowing people to connect to each other through non-contiguous space across asynchronous time, online dating apps utilize space and time effects to maximize opportunities for meetings.  In other words, the attraction of social media is more than just a condition of "speed"; it's the combination of sychrony and asynchrony that makes social media so compelling. 

Ostensibly, Twitter (like other social media) displays content along a linear timeline, with the most recent tweets at the top of your reader.  You can think of this (as, perhaps, people less familiar with social media might) as similar to print-based content like newspapers and magazine articles.  But this isn't quite right.  On my desk, for example, is the excellent 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary, a "curated" collection of tweets from young people during the 2015 Baltimore Uprising.  As a book, it's taken all of the linear, temporal tweets and bound them up into a single, syntagmatic diorama.  As a temporal event, the book of the tweets collapses the Uprising into a single plane of discourse, and reading the book is a very different experience than live-tweeting the event.

However, this obvious difference discounts the structure of the social media platform as, ultimately, a heterogeneous chronotype.  Twitter looks like our experience of Newtonian time; to the casual observer, our experiential "now" is the "now" of Twitter.  Scrolling down the timeline takes us into a past that looks like our past.  But Twitter time operates according to very different rules than our ordinary, everyday understanding of temporality.

For one thing, there are many practices that can disrupt Twitter's apparent linearity.  First, you can re-tweet, summoning up content from earlier in the Twitter timeline and magically depositing it in the present.  Events that transpired in the past suddenly become the "now"--not as memory or echo, but as coeval with unfolding Twitter time.  The only indication of the asynchrony is the time-stamp.

Threading your tweets is another common form of time manipulation.  While most users seem to use this "self-reply" function to articulate longer, more complex thoughts, there are also numerous time effects.  For example:

The differences between 4 and 37 minutes are collapsed through the 3 tweet thread.  Moreover, the linear flow of Twitter is reversed, since the oldest tweet appears first.  The above example is certainly less dramatic than a days or weeks-long gap between tweets in a single thread, but the power of this function (or what Fast Company calls a "hack") is to collapse temporally discontinuous discourse into a coeval frame.

You can also manipulate time-lines with hashtags.  By utilizing a hashtag, a user affiliates their content with other tweets that use the same, even if those tweets are temporally distance.  The effect of a search query, then, folds time into tweet content.

Or, rather, hashtagging sets up another timelines--this one relativistically yanking events out of their original timespace and setting up a chronological alternative.

In addition, Twitter (and third-party sites) offer a variety of tools to help users manipulate time. 
There's "TweetDeck," which allows a combination of specialized timelines and scheduled tweets across multiple accounts--a kind of time dashboard where users can work within multiple threads across time zones.  And there are others as well--"tweet4.me"--that are more user-friendly apps that allow users to do the same.  While the intent of these tools is to enable users to always be "on," they really constitute a form of time travel, with the content I post now existing only in a shadowy future.  Discursively, the Twitter user can follow the same path as Robert Heinlein's protagonist in "All You Zombies" and go back in time to give birth to himself.  

Finally, there are a variety of tools to freeze time altogether.  Your own archive of tweets is one example of this effect, as are third party apps like Storify, that let users create social media narratives with custom (and fungible) timelines that additionally allow you to mix multiple social media platforms, and then arrest the linearity of social media through "publishing" your story.  Here's part of one I did a few months ago on a small neighborhood in Seoul:

 With all of this time traveling, and the all of the chronological disjunctures this implies, it's not surprising that recent features ("Moments" and "Home Timelines") are also temporal features, but I can't help but think that Twitter could do much, much more.  For example, time zones can be manipulated by a user through scheduled tweets, but not by your timeline--a difficulty not only for those of us interested in Twitter traffic in, say, Korea, but also for the general health of public discourse.  Another possibility would be to develop a more Bergsonian app for Twitter.  When you read someone's tweet, re-tweet or reply, you're reading it out of their, individual Twitter-time.  What were they writing or commenting upon before and after this tweet?  Yes--you could find out (just as you could simply run searches to read tweets from other time zones), but why couldn't Twitter make these into new features?  

Twitter needs to consider it's relationship to time--to become a Time Lord, and to share their power with users taking control over their own temporalities. 
 

Right to the City in Baltimore and Design Anthropology

Note: the narrative for my Design Anthropology class for Spring 2016.

People in Baltimore demand a “right to the city,” i.e., to live in a city that allows them to develop human and community potentials without pernicious race- and class-based inequalities.  But, a year after the Baltimore Uprising, we are still confronting the city’s systematic, structural inequalities. And while there are numerous (pressing) injustices to be addressed, one of the most challenging questions we could ask people in power is simply that: where is the “right to the city” for the majority of Baltimore’s residents?

This doesn’t mean the right to buy and consume in Baltimore’s tourism spaces.  Instead, it’s about heretofore marginalized peoples “fighting for the kind of development that meets their needs and desires” (Harvey 2013: xvi).  And not just in the short term.  As Henri Lefebvre wrote in the shadow of the Paris Commune, “To the extent that the contours of the future city can be outlined, it could be defined by imagining the reversal of the current situation, by pushing to its limits the converted image of the world upside down” (Lefebvre 1967: 172).

In other words, it’s about imagining radical alternatives to the city.  To re-forge it, in Robert Park’s words, into “the heart’s desire” for the ordinary citizens of the city, rather than for a handful of the wealthy and privileged.  This is the challenge for anthropology.  Despite the growth of a public anthropology, the field still often divides into a theoretical concern with power and politics, on the one hand, and an applied anthropology that packages its portmanteau methods for sale, on the other. In public anthropology, critical interventions are oftentimes uncomfortably grafted onto traditional, descriptive research—a sometimes grudging admission that anthropology may contribute to the public weal.  But how do we forge an anthropology where political change is part of our methodical and theoretical approach from the outset, rather than the newspaper editorial that may follow the publication of an ethnographic monograph?

This is our challenge: to imagine a design anthropology that originates in “the cry and the demand” of the disenfranchised (Lefebvre 1967: 158).  Moreover, it must be premised on the practice of radical alternatives to the status quo.  It cannot be an accommodation to power in the form of bland palliatives to inequality.  Instead, design anthropology must take the “right to the city” as a call for dismantling the institutions that reproduce inequality and re-building a city where, as Harvey writes, we can claim the “freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities” (Harvey 2013: 4).
Doing this means re-imagining anthropology as well.  If we would like to “restore design to the heart of anthropology’s disciplinary practice” (Gatt and Ingold 2013: 140), then we must also dismantle the hoary dichotomies that have undermined possibilities for an anthropology defined by political practice.  Doing thus may be achievable through a design anthropology infused with a Bloch-ian hope for alternative possibilities.  And through this, we may be able to sketch the possibility for an anthropology that engages what it really means to be human, i.e., to be a person desirous of a better world.

This class will explore design anthropology through its relevance to the continuing struggle of people in Baltimore to achieve justice and equality.  We begin with a critique of Baltimore’s top-down developmental model, one that has given the city temples to capital (Charles Center and the Legg-Mason Building) and hollow quotations of urban life in tightly scripted, touristic spaces structured to exclude the majority of Baltimore’s residents (Inner Harbor, Camden Yards, Canton).  From there, we consider a series of design interventions that were accomplished through various participatory structures: community gardens, bikeshare programs, community mapping, digital storytelling.  But even these, as we shall explore after the midterm, ultimately buttress the system they purport to critique—they “humanize” the developmental city without challenging the institutions and practices that invariably privilege elites.  From this realization, we move to a literature demanding something more than the mollification of Baltimore’s citizens.  These “guerilla” urbanisms point towards the efficacy of direct action in creating a just city.  Finally, we return to an insistence on utopia, not in terms of some fixed version of perfection, but as an evocation of virtualities that we may not be able to fully articulate, possibilities of a new “urban being” just over the horizon of our political consciousness.

All Aboard the Quantum Train: connecting self, space and time in Seoul’s subway

Abstract for a new paper . . .


The city consists of a collision of relativistic spaces and temporalities that overlap in tension with each other, nowhere more evident than in Seoul’s subway system, where, above ground, urban development space is warped around new stations and new lines, while below, space becomes the 2-3 minutes duration between stops.  For many theorists, this sprawling subway (the largest in the world) is an “empty” time in what Auge calls a “non-place”--a period of empty waiting.  In addition, capital has been quick to exploit these temporal and spatial interstices, with Seoul’s subway stations host to a cacophony of advertising and media.  On the other hand, the subway also contributes to new forms of connection and place-making, possibilities that have been enabled by technological developments of mobile connectivity that extrapolate on digital presence and absence in order to forge new quantum potentialities for human life and sociality.  In order to elaborate on possibilities for connectivity and temporality in Seoul’s subway, two sets of data are utilized.  The first consists of structured observations of smart-phone use in Seoul’s subways over the 2014-2015, with qualitative and quantitative analyses revealing the rhythms of sociality and connection at different times of day for texting, reading and entertainment.  The second looks to Twitter traffic around subway lines from 2014-2015, concentrating on the ways subways connect people to each other and to diverse geographies that may transect the subway, but are in no way confined to it.  What these suggest is, on the one hand, an accommodation to neoliberal imperatives to exploit “non-productive” time for imperatives of production and consumption.  On the other, it considers the subway as the creation of a quantum city where time, space and sociality exist in a state of superposition and indeterminacy.  Within these interstices of space/time lie new possibilities for challenging hegemony.  Above all else, the subway is a technology that helps to articulate what Rainie and Wellmann call the “networked self,” a shifting configuration of social relations and identities that is splayed across metropolitan space and time and enabled by a variety of technologies and mobilities.

Networked representation of the first chapter of Networked Anthropology

Courtesy of textextture.com , the first chapter to Networked Anthropology (me and Matthew Durington).

Defining anthropological community through #anthroboycott

Back on my pc--and here's my whole visualization for #AAA2015.

It's the largest set of tweets I've ever mapped from AAA: 21, 879 edges, 3543 nodes.  I ran it when I got to my office on Monday, November 23 and it covers the whole 8 day window that includes some pre- and post-tweets.  I used the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm to group the tweets--said to be particularly effective in revealing community structures in large networks.  Finally, each identified "group" is arranged in its own box, courtesy of the Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm.  Nice!  That said, it's hard to beat Marc Smith, who mapped out the network on Saturday, November 21.  He's got a neater graph than mine--it's his software, after all!  But I still wanted to work through my own data.

In many ways, the graph is typical of associations.  Marc Smith et al (2014) might call this an example of a "tight crowd": "highly interconnected people with few isolated participants."  And yet, there are some definite clusters here, suggestive of what they call a "community cluster": "Some popular topics may develop multiple smaller groups, which often form around a few hubs each with its own audience, influencers, and sources of information."  Let's look at the individual clusters themselves.  Each has been identified with its own color.

Here are some of the larger "groups":

1. Dark Blue: Boycott resolution.
2. Light blue: Panels discussion.
3. Forest green: Tweets from the AAA, their re-tweets and their discussion.
4. Light green: Discussion around medical anthropology, associated panels and events.
5. Orange: The anthropology of education, associated panels and events.

On the basis of this, I would argue that the AAA conference is stuck somewhere between the "tight crowd" (typical of organizations) and the "community cluster"; in other words, the AAA conference combines homogeneous groups of people mostly concerned with their particular topics and communities with larger interests that span different clusters.

Next, I ranked the Twitter accounts by betweenness centrality, which measures the importance of a node (or vertex) based on the number of times it falls "between" two nodes on the shortest path between them.  "Importance," here, then, is different than just simply popularity; instead, betweenness centrality measures some of the importance of a node to the flow of information.

1. americananthro

2. anthroboycott

3. palestinetoday

4. benabyad

5. omanreagan

6. pacbi

7. cultanth

8. cmcgranahan

9. jasonantrosio

10. socmedanthro

Nodes with high betweenness centrality may act as "brokers" or "gateways" for flows of information and influence between different clusters.  It's worth noting that associations and group Twitter accounts (americananthro, cultanth, socmedanthro) are represented as well as the Twitter accounts of particular active individuals (omanreagan, cmcgranahan, jasonantrosio, etc.).  

But I want to concentrate on a few: anthroboycott, palestinetoday and benabyad.  These Twitter accounts have high betweenness centrality, and they serve to connect these different clusters that would, otherwise, lack even their comparatively modest connectivity.  

This is readily evident in this graph, where I filtered to include only tweets that contained the hashtag #anthroboycott.

Here are some of the top tweets (measured by the in-degree centrality of their associated node).  Much of the traffic concerned a few themes: 1) the historic vote, and the clear majority of the pro-boycotters.  2) solidarity with various pro-Palestinian groups.  3) discussions of the procedures during the boycott vote.

1. VICTORY at #aaa2015: @americananthro Clears the Way for Final Vote on #AnthroBoycott https://t.co/GSWdohHWeQ

2. RESOLUTION 2 PASSES! #Anthroboycott #BDS #AAA2015

3. Over 1500 people at #AAA2015 for the #Anthroboycott! https://t.co/by3QWTqAsp

4. RT @OmanReagan: Everyone who stays to vote on Resolution #2 can have a free drink @WennerGrenOrg party after! #Anthroboycott #AAA2015

5. #AAA2015: Congratulations to the organisers of the #Anthroboycott! https://t.co/vra6uc0BG4 https://t.co/eXAVKkI7Pe

6. I reported on2014 #Gaza war, when #Israel bombed universities. Tel Aviv U released statement gvg support for army #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015

7. E. Williams and J. Pierre discussing #anthroboycott @aba_aaa members to attend @AmericanAnthro #aaa2015 #abapanels https://t.co/SiaiQEfoQW

8. Now: motion to DIVEST from Israel. #BDS #Anthroboycott #AAA2015 https://t.co/hg1xUeXRFI

We could conclude many things from these graphs, but I want to suggest that these say something about anthropology and anthropologists in the American Anthropological Association.  Divided into subfields and sections and, generally, communicating with others in their specializations, anthropologists at the annual meeting may have little in common with others who also identify as anthropologists.  Most of our tweets are variations on live-tweeting that summarize themes we've picked out of papers and panels--in other words, tweets that are tightly coupled to our own, narrow interests and specialities.  And yet, certain issues (and their lively discussion) serve to cross these different clusters.

Are these issues, then, defining moments for anthropologists in the AAA?   If we go back to earlier AAA conferences where anthropologists were asked to take a political or ethical stand on issues (e.g., last year's #BlackLivesMatter), we can see similar patterns, with the protest against police violence spanning multiple groups.  Here's a graph from Marc Smith (again!) from last year:

From the Nodexl Graph Gallery

Would it be too much to suggest that these ethical and political orientations are what brings anthropologists together?  That it's not just a "public anthropology" (in the abstract), but a concrete politics?  It's certainly something for the AAA to contemplate--these critical moments of public anthropology are performed amidst the American Anthropological Annual Meeting, but they are not orchestrated by the AAA.  Indeed, they seem to proliferate despite (or because?) of the efforts of the AAA to quell the emergence of this kind of public anthropology in the association.  Indeed, despite predictions that the politicization of the Association will "break apart" the AAA (something I heard several times from different people in Denver), the exact opposite seems to happen.

#anthroboycott in medias res

I'm on my Macbook at the AAA conference, so NodeXL isn't happening for me, so I'm using socioviz instead.  It's a java-enabled, web-based Twitter network visualization--but it's quick and dirty (especially in its free form).  Here's the #anthroboycott traffic over the last few minutes, with close-ups of the main components.

So--there's a great deal of Twitter traffic now (it's not SXSW, but not bad!).  Socioviz will only pick off the latest 100 tweets.  Even so, we can see effort to bring people into the assembly . . .

And here are the top tweets by degree centrality

1) Doors to the #AAA2015 business meeting open at 530PM! CCC Mile High Ballrooms 2 +3. Vote NO on 1, YES on 2 #Anthroboycott

2) 2.5 hours until #Anthroboycott vote. Mile high Ballroom 2&3. #AAA2015 https://t.co/FARzNSLZ0Q

3) RT @PalestineToday: Mick Taussig: The issue seems not so much why support; but how could you not? #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015 #BDS https://t.co?

4) RT @anthroboycott: To ensure that your voice is heard and vote counted, come early and tell your friends! #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015 https://?

5) RT @PalestineToday: 31 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers since the beginning of October #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015

6) RT @AMReese07: E. Williams and J. Pierre discussing #anthroboycott @aba_aaa members to attend @AmericanAnthro #aaa2015 #abapanels https://t?

Those Who Can't Tweet, Analyze: early Twitter traffic at #AAA2015

I won't be rolling into AAA until tomorrow, but I wanted to check the conference traffic before I left.

At this point in the game, there's not much going on--one large component (in blue) where people (and institutions) are publicizing their papers and booths.  So far, there's not much commentary on papers and presentations.

Let's look at the top tweets by in-degree centrality.

1. RT @AmericanAnthro: Headed to #AAA2015? Make sure you download the mobile app through iTunes (https://t.co/80rZY5CR6O) or Google Play (http…

2. Conference Chic, or, How to Dress Like an Anthropologist https://t.co/GFWOIA1dFd What are YOU packing for #AAA2015?

3. Blizzard warnings in effect for Denver tomorrow. Take note #AAA2015 attendees, bring warm clothes!

4. If you're in Denver this week for #AAA2015, please stand with us in solidarity. Spread the word., https://t.co/kHmoxjIXVM

5. Two...more...days...#AAA2015 https://t.co/62eb20zOhX

6. NEW: The Anti-Boycott Resolution: Entrenching the Status Quo, Denying Justice #aaa2015 https://t.co/C8dFXvWFxz https://t.co/XthvibLvqb

7. Savage Minds at #AAA2015 https://t.co/vC2VREjdaS

8. Looking for short thought pieces on #medanth panels at #AAA2015 for 2nd Opinion, the SMA newsletter! @somatosphere @culanth 

An interesting addition to the usual tweets from AAA, Wenner-Gren, etc., are tweets on the boycott resolution--it's encouraging that they've been re-tweeted multiple times!