Twitter and the Principles of Illusion

It is worth noting the two guiding principles of illusion are "suppressing context" and "preventing reflective analysis" (according to Tufte, in Visual Explanations). The first applies also to the ubiquitous photographic image, nearly all of which appear without context. A situation that apparently few people find troubling. A good example of the phenomena is the iconic image from the Vietnam war of the Viet Cong operative being summarily executed by a village officer. The photographer who took the picture often wished he hadn't because of the damage the image did when used out of context (as was the usual case). Several iconic images from the Vietnam war were frequently presented without context. It was left up to the viewer to interpret and may very well be people at the time did not want to know the context, enabling them to press the image into service of their political aspirations or personal, psychological needs. Visual media is inherently weak at providing context.

The emergence of email, web discussion forums, short messages, video sharing, all network native forms of communication create an environment hostile to reflective analysis. What is needed to alleviate this trend is a movement akin to the "slow foods" movement, perhaps a "slow media" movement, asking people to slow down, consider context and think reflectively within a network information ecosystem. The content of a Twitter stream can be informative, but it can also be trivial, and despite its benefits, it does not encourage reflective analysis. I personally find a tweets (Twitter messages) are frequently a touchstone for an innovative thought, connecting me to something I did not know and probably would not have had someone not passed on an interesting web link or thought out loud. But it would still be nice to pull wisdom from the ether by capturing tweets in some reflective and expandable form.

Although not yet a visual medium, these concise messaging and blogging systems are most attractive to television journalists. A quick turn Twitter before the commercial graces many newscasts. These context free nuggets are ideally suited to a medium described as a "wasteland" and it troubles me that networked content has been so eagerly adopted by television news shows. It points out the need for reflection and context in networked short message content.


I have explored this theme before (see Twitter Wiki, "quick-slow" bliki articles previously). The question is how to accommodate the fragmentary, context free units of networked content and encourage expressions of context and reflection to balance them. It is a daunting task because people often do not see a need for context or reflection and are often unwilling to bother with the story behind a photograph or take time to expand on a short message.

We need to accommodate the uses for which short messages are legitimate and when they are beneficial (such as the conciseness they encourage...concise writing requires reflective analysis before posting, you must know your subject well to pare it down to its essentials and wordiness often just adds confusion...we must be prepared for abuse of longer text forms connected to short text forms). But also we must make it possible for reflection to take place. The "quick-slow" approach to networked content systems encompasses this. We can then turn the two principles to our advantage, by encouraging their opposites context and reflection.