Seven Red

I spent the last weekend out in Davis, CA and environs, doing the Computers & Writing (C&W) conference thing. My colleague JP and I have been going to this conference every year for the last several, and we usually have a good time. Same this year. The new thing at the conference this year was a Twitter feed that displayed various participants tweets (is there a more obnoxious term?), many of them directly from some presentation room or other. So, you’d go into the break/registration room, and you’d supposedly get a sense of what was going on in the panels that you were not then attending. You could also go back to the feed to see what people had to tweet (ugh) about your panel. All of this, of course, ends up being presented as some kind of openness, and presumably we’re supposed to learn something from all that tweeting (yuck!). The question here, I guess, is whether we actually do.

As anyone breathing is now fully aware of, Twitter is now somehow implicated in the events going on in Iran—so much so that otherwise careful commentators have fallen into the whole “Twitter Revolution” rhetoric as if it’s some kind of obvious fact. The supposedly political use of Twitter washing over the infosphere was thus a frequent topic of discussion at the conference, with most people that I saw entering into rather unqualified celebration of whole thing. I should remind you all at this point that the conference was not made up of Iran experts, but—and I hesitate to say this—Twitter experts, or experts in the use of new writing technologies and rhetoric. But this may be the correct group to stand in as an instance of the general phenomenon, since all the twitter about the tweets from Tehran seems to be much more about Twitter than Tehran. In any case, I’d eat my hat in the public square (supposing such a place still exists) if even a small fraction of the people currently celebrating the Twitter revolution know fuck-all about Iranian politics, culture, and history.  But this returns us to the other point.

The Twitter revolution at C&W had something of the same feel, with a kind of awe at the medium itself (it’s the message, doncha know). Of course, it can never be just that, or you’d get the usual replies—and this is the supreme alibi of all these proceedings—that the technology is and always should be a useful adjunct for some pedagogical goal, however intimately that goal ends up being twirled around the technology in itself. Put another way, nobody is allowed to say that they want to deploy this or that technology in the class just for the hell of it, or even, really, as a kind of wild and largely wasteful experiment (NOTE: “wasteful” is a good thing!). Rather, we’re supposed to believe that there is some initial lack or opportunity that the hottest new tech magically addresses. That the goal might be for people to have a space for just fucking around with the technology itself is seemingly frowned upon, despite the appearance (at least in my view) that that’s what’s going on the vast majority of the time anyway. This is another instance of people taking the institutional requirement seriously, even though their own practices make a joke out of it. So you saw this kind of buzzing excitement about the fact that all the panels were being tweeted (blech), and you were supposed to get some sense of connectedness through all this.

But the tweets themselves, if you stopped for ten minutes to read them (and I did several times) were so rarely substantial responses to the content of any panel that the  various miraculous claims about the medium strike me as at least suspect. What I saw were formal comments about the presentations themselves (turn off your PowerPoint when you’re done speaking, why are people reading papers, and similar presentation related issues) and a good deal of what could only be described as consumer-styled evaluative points (“X is discussing Y: that’s awesome!;” or, on the other side, “So-and-so is discussing Z: that’s teh SUCK!”). Perhaps this is all that can be expected of 140 characters. I don’t know. The argument, of course, is that you’re supposed to get a better feel for the whole affair in the aggregate, and that looking at any one tweet (gag) or even any thousand tweets (blerg) singly is therefore a failed grasp of the communal “nervous system,” the background hum that ties you into something like sociality.

However, when I did hear positive comments about the way the feed was working, it was almost always something like this: “So-and-so was discussing X and used an acronym, but somebody in the audience didn’t understand the acronym, and tweeted ‘what’s this acronym?’ Then the person presenting saw that tweet and defined the acronym! Isn’t Twitter teh AWESOME!” And I think it’s here where you see the real desire that runs many of these celebrations: the dream of the transparent audience. We may hear a lot about the development of an exo-nervous system or the automaticity of the feedback mechanism, but the way it cashes out in practice always seems strangely subject-centered for such a set of supposedly communal concepts. It goes like this:  “If only I knew what they were really thinking!”

It’s like the insider trading of rhetoric.

But back to the Twittering Majorities. I am, of course, well aware that the correct construction would be to call them the “tweeting” (aargh) majorities, but I thought twittering captures the sense more effectively. The title refers to Baudrillard’s famous long essay In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities, in which he argues that most people have more or less checked out or exited from the great political projects of modernity—and it may be this problematic that all these social media technologies both bring to the fore and seek to redress. If rhetoric seeks the transparent audience, social media – and this is not unrelated to its economic mode – seeks to crack the black hole of the political project, to prevent exit. If we go back to our Iranian election, we get the reversal in all its aspects: the claim of Twitter is that it fills in where the “traditional news media” was silent, or, as one of my friends posted on Facebook, “CNN:Tiananmen as Twitter:Tehran.” The corporate media dropped the ball, and their silence has shown their obsolescence, a void presumably filled by Twitter, through which one can follow the goings on molecularly in a way that would be impossible with the big molar information sources. We should notice that the implicit claim here putatively rejects Baudrillard’s thesis: there is not a silent black hole of politics among the people; if anything, they’re too noisy. Really?

It would seem equally accurate to say that the big corporate media, far from being silent, constructed the events as a traditional political project in the first place. Of course, saying this runs the risk of putting you in the camp of the Iranian “establishment” (notice the language here), since they’ve been running around screaming that the whole thing is a “distortion” on the part of Western media. That they happen to be partially correct is no comfort.  The entire election was narrativized long before the protests, and few would have even questioned the results had not there been a rather extensive campaign that called any positive result for the status quo into question. Big media subsequently hooked into the Twitter narrative, further obfuscating its own initial role in shaping the story for the last several months.

On the other side, the tweets (yak), which purport to being the “voice” of a traditional political project where the big information sources were silent, do as much to cover the complete absence of a widespread political investment as they do to promote it. It’s remarkable that people trained to think about access to technology should forget that the success of the 1979 revolution lay in the way a territorializing fundamentalism hooked into and transformed class dislocation. If we think the majorities are in the streets tweeting, I’d suggest we have another thing coming. The twitter revolution, in any case, seems particularly incapable of tapping into the class resentment that fueled the rise of fundamentalism in the first place, while Mr. Ahmadinejad—who is, let’s face it, awful—never stops linking the project of the establishment with class resentment. Unless you see these events spreading out past the rather limited class dimensions they’ve assumed thus far, it would seem that the comparison to Tiananmen will be far more prescient than it hoped to be. The problem is that the protestors rely on a twittering majority, whereas the establishment need only have the majority shrug. The latter is the more likely course, but may also – and this is where you’d really get a molecular analysis – be the more political, all the tweeting aside.

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