Serendipity, or Twitter and the Narrative of Rhetoric

warning, love via neoliminal on Flickr

The Internet accelerates serendipity. So says my good friend and colleague Diana Kimball. The more I write and think about the Internet, the more I believe her idea to be true.

Twitter has exploded in the past year, and come along way since its introduction in 2006, its incipient user base of post-2007 SXSW, and its world-wide popularity come late 2008 (after Twitter was picked up by the mainstream media). But allthough Wikipedia pegs Twitter as “a social networking and micro-blogging service,” in reality it’s a mode and new form of communication.

Twitter basically allows a user to post a message in 140 characters or less (to accommodate for the length of modern SMS text messaging formats, which limits a one-page message to 160 characters). When a message is tweeted, it appears next to the user’s Twitter handle.

If the TEDtalk video embedded above, one of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams, says that he and his team expected out of Twitter only as much as has been explained. However, because of the people using the service, and hence the human need for communication in general, Twitter evolved much more. Eventually, the @ sign became a standard element to Twitter, allowing users to direct messages at certain people and for those messages to appear on the intended user’s Twitter stream. The @username trend eventually became integrated into Twitter as a hyperlink system, allowing random users to click on the @username to discover a new persona altogether. In addition to the @username linked in the message, underneath the tweet appears a message that says “in reply to (username),” which links to a separate page containing the replied-to message. Eventually, too, users introduced the #hashtag trend to Twitter, contextualizing messages that included the short (or sometimes long) tag in a foreign conversation that could only be understood with a #hashtag aggreator. Williams seems to remark that conversations beyond dialogues between two people were not inherent to the nature of Twitter, even though in time they appeared.

Before continuing, I will explain what I mean by “narrative of rhetoric.” In conversation we use rhetoric, to persuade or impress the addressee. The nature of conversations, or arguments, debates, etc. flows in a temporal fashion, with sentences building on previous statements to reach a conclusion. Point 1 moves to Point Two which results in Point 3. An ordinary narrative of rhetoric, then, is forward. A five-paragraph essay, for example, begins with an introduction, makes three points to illustrate the introduction’s thesis, and then ends with a conclusion that wraps up the points and reiterates the thesis. The narrative moves forward, like a bedtime story for children.

With Twitter, the narrative of rhetoric is not forward; instead, it is backward. Because of the nature of the Internet — in that we view media online after it has been produced, unlike a conversation, when the media is produced in real time — the narrative flows (and must flow) in reverse.

This is how it works:
1) User views a comment on Twitter that is “in reply to (username).”
2) Clicking on “in reply to,” Twitter brings the user to the previous message, which also contains a “in reply to (username)” tag.
3) The user clicks on “in reply to,” to be brought to another page with the message in sequence before the previous one.
4) And on, and on, and on…

Basically, on Twitter, argument and conversation flows backwards. It’s as if we were to read an essay backwards, which doesn’t make sense, but brings an entirely new and unperceived perspective to the table. We read the last statement instead of the first, and we gain the opportunity to see not where an idea or daydream or poem is going but from whence it came. We are able to ask, “Why would somebody say that?,” and yet instead of fabricating an answer to this musing we are provided the context of the comment. Welcome to history, in reverse.

A similar motion of rhetoric exists, but while the first movement relies on the @user tag, the second relies on the #hashtag. In the imaginary space creating through aggregation services like Twitter Search that compile all the messages relating to one #hashtag, a conversation is let to exist. However, if you are a friend of someone using a #hashtag, the message seems random and arbitrary and without context. As with the @username tag, the #hashtag provides the discovery of a conversation in media res. A user’s Twitter stream could become full of a stream of contextless messages, all having been intended for (imaginary space) conversations.

The difference between the #hashtag narrative of rhetoric and the @username narrative is that the story continues to be told. With the @username tag, if the conversation between two users is continued, the onlooker cannot continue viewing it, unless he finds a future message in the chain and traces its context back to the original conversation. However, with the #hashtag, context is continually accessible, with a mere refresh of the #hashtag aggregation page.

The implications of the reverse or in media res forms of rhetorical narrative on Twitter are interesting to observe. For example, the intended use of the RT tag (or “retweet” tag, which is utilized when a user wants to repeat or reiterate a comment made by another individual) can be hacked. The RT tag does not supply context for a comment, but does draw attention to a message. Adding RT to another user’s tweet means that somebody found that message worthy of recognition. RT symbolizes value. However, we can imagine a scenario when a user fabricates the comment of an individual and then retweets it. Because the RT tag is contextless, the user quoted does not need to have submitted the comment. For instance, I could retweet a fake comment made by my friend that says he hates chocolate ice cream, after having just consumed some at a local shop and texted his opinion to Twitter. The users following my account but not my friends see no context for the fake comment, only assuming that my friend did indeed send the message (because his tweets don’t show up in their Twitter stream). Perhaps fellow chocolate-ice-cream lovers would look down upon my friend after seeing my fake retweet — a negative implication. The hacking of RT can benefit a situation as well, such as retweeting a shout-out about a great blog post that my friend just published. Although viewers would be confused upon not finding the post, their visits would increase traffic on his website.

This look at hackability of comments has already been tackled by the American law system, through libel and slander. But when it is positive, it can have profound effects. A recent case in point was an observation at a hack-a-thon I participated in about a month ago at Harvard. In twenty-four hours, a group of my friends created a service called YawnLog, where users can track their sleep debt (or surplus). Jason Scott, a good friends of many of the YawnLog team, tweeted via @Sockington about our service, and our user base jumped a couple hundred in the span of about an hour.

This situation provides a novel attitude toward the concept of Internet celebrity. The hackability of rhetorical narrative on Twitter provides opportunity both for Internet fame and fame for others through the Internet famous. All of this relies, of course, on serendipity. Serendipity means the occurrence of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. Even before the introduction of the Google search bar to web browsers, the Internet has been about serendipity, about finding new and interesting things online. The novelty of the Internet has awoken a new culture, which has pervaded computer screens, handhelds, and even streets of the real world. And serendipity appears to have propelled ordinary people into stardom online, pushing identities into the realm of the Internet celebrity. Twitter, of course, is one more service, based in everyday communication, that accelerates the chance that we’ll come across something intriguing on the Web. The random potential of the Twitter stream pours a lot of useless information into our laptops and cell phones and web browsers, but it is amazing still how every once in a while a few words will inspire us to click on a link or follow an individual without expectations.