Sunday, August 21, 2011

Utopia in 140 Characters: What Makes Twitter Seem So Authentic?

Between the tweet stream about the Queensland flood crisis and the torrent of celebrity tweets (@kanyewest, anyone?), it’s tempting to seduced by the vision of Twitter as a digital truth serum untainted by government propaganda or PR wranglers. But is Twitter really a utopia of unmediated and immediate truth?

Kanye West wants us to believe that

Why Do We Believe?

In the deluge of information about the floods, Twitter was abuzz with rumours about public transport shutting down. While this turned out to be untrue, it’s worth examining why so many people believed the information even when it came from unofficial news sources.

This photo of Brisbane’s Central Station was posted on Twitter,
fuelling rumours of a stalled transit system. [Image source: Twitpic]

When citizens tweet reports about a major event like the floods, they invoke an appearance of truth because of what Anne Helen Peterson identifies as a seeming “lack of mediation and manipulation”. The “unrehearsed quality” of tweets creates a sense of immediacy and casualness that are taken to be signifiers of truth.

Looking to Kanye to Dissect Twitter’s Cloud of Authenticity

Kanye’s tweets are so ridiculous that they must be true...right?

Citizens reportage and celebrities posting personal information are often mentioned in the same breath when talking about the most high-profile uses of Twitter. Since both uses generate a “cloud of authenticity” in similar ways, it’s useful to examine celebrity Twitter to try to understand what makes disaster Twitter seem so compellingly truthful. Whether Kanye tweets about his “fur pillows that are hard to sleep on” (as satirised by Josh Groban above) or Queensland citizens tweet (unintended) misinformation, Twitter facilitates the appearance of truth in a number of ways.

1. First person address: Celebrity and disaster tweets invoke a sense of intimacy through the inclusive “I” or “we” and validate their claims by suggesting that the experience is shared.

2. A celebrity/disaster club: The act of reading these tweets is akin to eavesdropping on private conversations, which presuppose exclusion from media manipulation.

3. Twitpics: Photos uploaded through mobile devices lend an everyday quality to the magnitude of star power or widespread disaster. Particularly, low quality images feel more authentic because they seem “deprofessionalised”1.

Fodder for Investigation

Even if Twitter claims to offer unmediated access to people and events, the appearance of truth is a still a manufactured image. Just as Graham Webster calls for a new equilibrium in the Twitter debate, Editor Zed aims to work away from the seductive tales of a utopian technological reform and actively interrogate these constructions. Our readers are technologically fluent and in tune with current affairs. Importantly, the brief of our research asks our readers to be inquisitive and skeptical about the utopian visions of social media. Only by taking the position of cyber-pragmatism will we be able to discover an internet that suits the today’s needs.


[1] Terry Flew, New Media: An Introduction (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109.

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