Thinking through Twitter

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Joss Hands, whose interest is in collective action in social media. How do we think, decide and act collectively in the age of social media as such, and how does this take place on Twitter in particular? Are social media expanding our capacity for a new kind of device consciousness?

A simple way of putting this is ‘does Twitter think?’ – the framing of the problem is rooted in the concept of the multitude as a social body, linked through communication technology; how does this social body come to collective decisions, not through top-down decision-making chains, but as a swarm that acts in concert like neurons in the brain? The suggestion is that it is the entire network which acts here, producing a dynamic of singularity and commonality.

But there are problems with this perspective: the problem of intersubjective communication, in the first place. People in the network aren’t neurons in the brain; the metaphor is overstated, therefore. The problem is one of language, meaning, and communicative action; it is also one of the democracy of the multitude, overlaid with the vision of an invisible hand returning – strangely, the image of the multitude replicates the economist image of the market, though this is precisely anathema to it. Alternatively, there is a tyranny of the swarm here, where individual agency and consciousness is eradicated by the swarm.

What kind of collective consciousness can we talk about, then? Not an absolute consciousness, certainly; not a thinking human silicone-assemblage, or a distributed intelligence in the network; not a collective intelligence which relies on new forms of communication that move beyond individualism – but rather, a thinking as a pragmatic, intersubjective, embodied and affective practice. There is spontaneity, mimesis, cooperation, articulation; communicative action and intensity – this enables a certain loopiness (in a good way), brain sharing, and cybernetics.

Combined with the affordances of certain types of social media, those feedback processes lock us together and enable us to start thinking through each other. Twitter provides speed as a qualitative difference; it allows a qualitative shift of capacity in communication and thinking, aided further through hashtags and other somatic markers that allow users to cluster together quickly and ad hoc.

This also enables new understandings of space, and a shared cognitive mapping; this can be augmented with the power-law distributions of social media – which also entails the danger of new hierarchies, exhibiting the dilemma of the commons.