Twitter as a Technology of Immediacy

Milwaukee.
The first speaker in this final session at AoIR 2009 is Taina Bucher. She argues for an understanding of Twitter as a technology of immediacy - in this case, of immediacy in time, enabling users to cease the time and take action. Our being in time is characterised by the scarcity of time in the 24h society; Twitter reacts to that by encouraging short messages and resourceful communication that give shape to concise messaging.

What does such a communication tool indicate about the society of which it is a part? It claims to be a service that enables users to share and discover what is happening anywhere in the world; this is a technology of immediacy for mediating the momentary and immediate. This can be explored in the context of the status update box: a box for writing, for filling in and creating moments.

The path to understanding contemporary media combines an analysis of software functions and of the cultural practices they support; this technology embeds and projects an awareness of present time and place - described for example as microblogging or locative media. Immediacy here becomes a useful analytical concept, highlighting notions of instantaneity, directedness, and proximity. It is manifested in numerous ways: nowness is a principal structuring device; newness and freshness are valued over context; and relevancy is measured as closeness to the present time (notably, there is a lack of archives on Twitter).

This can be examined as scripts and affordances, through which values and interests are inscribed into the materiality of the thing: software functionalities are invitations and possibilities for action, and so software gives shape to actions. What Twitter returns as a search result, for example, is measured in terms of distance to the present time. The 140 character limit also affects the content of the tweet, of course; the act of status writing demands an awareness about present time, and writing creates the moment.

At the same time, it creates the possibility of writing more frequently, as not much needs to be written to create an update. The restricted amount of tweets on the timeline on the site also highlights the focus on instantness; further, the shortness has given rise to add-on services like bit.ly to shorten URLs, and each tweet also has its own URL, of course (enabling them to be taken out of context and accessed through means other than Twitter itself). The site also used to have a function to automatically nudge users if they hadn't posted in the last 24 hours, incidentally.

This is nowness, then, but not a nowness marked by clocktime; this is a technology of kairos - the opportune time for speech - which provides the status update function as an opportunity for speech. Twitter hinges on kairological time to generate action, in other words. Twitter presents and introduces time, and this nowness is embedded as an invitation to action as well as projecting a property of the software. The site can be seen as a mode of relating to the world in the present, and it provides a space by which attentiveness to the world is encouraged and made possible. It makes immediacy the principal ordering device.

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