Interpretation on Twitter

Twitter is a relatively novel medium. At first glance, it appears to be a bunch of people just yammering into the void, contextless. At a second glance, it seems that every tweet gets interpreted in just about every context: the ultimate in Derridean repeatability, with the author held responsible for all the contextualized interpretations. When we stop at this second glance, we tend to get bothered: "I can't account for all the contexts with so few characters!"

So, we need to take a third look. This time, we notice that speakers clump into various groups. Much as in real life, many people will follow the same people, some will be in multiple groups, and often we follow people because the people we already follow are interacting with them. This gives a kind of social context, but an open one. When I post a tweet, then, it is in a context of an ongoing stream of other tweets I am aware of. Others who follow enough of the same people may be able to guess this context. This is how subtweets are able to work.

Some twitter users are followed because they are major figures in an environment. These users operate in a special sort of context where many contexts are relevant to successfully communicating with all--or at least many of--those who will read what they say.

In every case, a tweet cannot contain all the qualifiers we might like. This sometimes gives rise to massive tweet threads. In most cases, however, the result is that we rely on context cues to provide the necessary qualifications. Thus, the typical tweet is an implicit generic claim: we can imagine it prefixed with "Generally speaking..." or something similar. Furthermore, the context of who the user is on twitter plays a role: the "brand" is part of the context. There are some users who tweet so consistently in a non-serious manner, that one learns to read them as sarcastic until proven serious. Typically, one wouldn't do this, but because of the context of who posted the tweet, one should.

So, there are, at least, three elements to the context of a tweet:
1. The expected readers, cued by who follows whom.
2. The limits of the medium, which push us to say only what we take to be most important.
3. The speaker's established habits of communication.

Now, if there is a tweet and I am inclined to disagree with it, this may be due to any number of things. Charitably, I may be reading it ignorant of some element of the context. On the other hand, if I do know the context, there is still the possibility that I disagree with what the tweet has wound up meaning and not (or, not necessarily) with what the writer intended. I might agree with what the tweet says, but not what it implies. I might disagree with how it says what it says while agreeing with what it says.

Because tweets are limited in size, what gets left out and what gets said is relevant. We may object to the claim that "generally p" because we think that not-p is more typically the case. We may object to the suppression of a qualifier because, in the context the tweet is being tweeted into--that is, based on who follows the user--the qualifier is extremely under-appreciated and relevant. Notably, another user might be able to get away with suppressing the qualifier because they are known for the qualifier or because they are speaking to a different group.

There is a second dynamic of communication that gets brought out by Twitter and which is important to recognize in order to understand disagreement on the platform. Words do things. This is not just the trivial claim that words communicate, nor the slightly more novel claim that we can use performatives, phrases which do things like name ships, wed couples, pass laws, etc. Rather, words can also frame agency. Words make bids for power, demean other positions, cast the argumentative options as limited or expanded in just these ways.

Now, many of the issues of the day are fought on the battleground of interpreting what sorts of threats are relevant, what qualifiers are getting under-appreciated, and so on. So, our disagreements on Twitter are sometimes not about whether a statement is true, or even would be true appropriately qualified, but whether it is appropriate, whether it intervenes in the conversation helpfully. And sometimes we don't realize that is where our disagreements are. We object to someone making a claim, and often use words of disagreement to do so because that language is most easily available.

Return to the major figure who has many different sorts following them. Such a figure is typically followed because they have influence in certain circles, so those circles are the often the primary context of communication. What makes things difficult here is that those circles may, themselves, be fractured. Indeed, it is likely that the user will be expected to use their influence for certain ends. It would be strange if they were not, given that they are being followed because they have influence. Such a user needs to be responsible with their influence.

Here is one way an influential Twitter user might act: they might coast on their prestige, merely regurgitating what they have said elsewhere without regard to differences in the medium. The qualifiers present in the original work gets cut for space, and the resultant genericity gets blamed on the medium. These generic adages then get picked up by listeners as interventions in the stream of tweets both the listener and--the listener appropriately assumes--the influencer are both aware of. The evangelical pastor says something, and hearers--rightly!--assume he speaks about current evangelical affairs. This will be true whether or not it is clear that it is "merely" a quote from his book. The selection tells us something about the author's priorities now. If the current bit of evangelical news is one where a particular nuance is at issue, then passing over that nuance is appropriately taken as evidence for the denial of that nuance, or at least of the relevance or importance of the nuance to the affair in question.

It is worth noting that this is a divergence from how Twitter started out. Twitter began as somewhere we posted weird little messages: witticisms and random status reports. It began, that is, roughly how the first glance at it makes it seem. But between following and retweeting, it is that no more. Retweeting--and, even more, quote-tweeting--enables joint attention by a group on a single tweet or thread. Following enables social groups. These produce context for the ongoing conversations on Twitter. People who learned how to tweet in the early years of Twitter need to adapt to the ways the platform has produced, over time, these emergent phenomena which have transformed Twitter communication.

I don't intend to give directions for how to tweet. The above should be enough to see what pitfalls we need to be aware of and some of the ways we certainly should not tweet. In essence: Twitter is its own medium, and we must respect that. It is worth noting, however, that if we are getting push back where we do not expect it, the death of the author means that we have evidence thereby that we have failed to communicate, not that others have failed to understand.

In generally, I think many of us intuit much of the above, but it is helpful to make it explicit so that when someone defends themself by appealing to the character limits of Twitter we have something to respond with, namely: that is not an excuse, but part of the context in which we all send tweets. You can defend leaving out the nuance or apologize for it, but your choice to leave out a nuance (a nuance that some think highly relevant) is a communicative decision in a context.