Kolmogorov Twitter
Twitter is what happens when interactions, low-latency, amplification, and images (memes are pretty much precisely cartoons of complex ideas) are cheap, while nuance, deliberation, and complexity are expensive. It drives all the intelligence from the discussion, absent very deliberate effort.
It's also all plaza and no warrens.
Warrens are small spaces for private and intimate discussion. Plazas are large open spaces. The interplay is a key social dynamic, online or offline. Those of a certain age may recall "riot-proof architecture" in public spaces and some college campuses, most notable for structures or spaces in which through-travel is impossible --- to get from one side of a building or area to another, you must exit and re-enter from outside. I've been re-reading Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), and one point he makes is that AOL's architecture (at least at the time) permitted "chat rooms", but those were capped to a maximum of 23 participants. It's sort of another spin on Twitter's 120 (now 240) characters: an arbitrarily imposed constraint that limits the dynamics of conversation. In AOL you could use as many words as you wanted, but you could only address 22 other people at a time. (Unless you were a publisher or advertiser, of course, in which case the communication was a one-way broadcast.) Twitter limits words but not people.
And complex ideass require nuance. Kolmogorov complexity is an idea I keep returning to again and again. Another is that the sense of how behaviours change as costs of inputs or factors change relative to each other, as here with text, images, latency, amplification, attention, consideration, complexity, is at the heart of much of economics. (The far more interesting part than much of the memetic ideology-slinging that dominates public discourse, but then, that's another Kolmogorov problem, isn't it?)
Twitter's principle function is to reference some larger element. That might be advertising. It might be a linked article or text (which addresses a concept in more depth). Or it might be the emotional pathways of cutenesss, fear, anger, outrage, suspicion, humour, and the like.
But no, it's not an in-detail, small-space discussion network.
Vlog Brothers discussion of Twitter: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=5YYLMrZ3y_o
(Note: Because YouTube are now making autoplay all the harder to disable, I'm swapping in Invidious links.)
Expanded from comments to a private share. And speeling corrected from an earlier post, so shoot me.
#Twitter #Nuance #KolmogorovComplexity #VlogBrothers #WarrensAndPlazas #CodeAndOtherLaws #LawrenceLessig #Alamogordo