Full confession: I just joined Twitter about 30 minutes ago. However, for considerably longer, I've been curious about the significance of Twitter's text-based 140-character format. Although Twitter contains some visuals such as profile pictures and links, it is primarily a print-based medium. The viewer experiences Twitter posts, or tweets, as a wall of sentences. While tweets are themselves primarily textual in nature, two recent videos offer visual interpretations that play with the relationship between image and text.
The first, by http://markfullmer.com/ ">Mark Fullmer, uses the 140-character constraint of tweets to take on the most iconic of American genres-- the road odyssey. In the video for Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey, Fullmer voices these micropoetic tweets over black and white footage of the passing scenery. The video begins with the image of a twitter feed, but most of the subsequent imagery focuses on the western landscape. Once on the road, Fullmer shows himself jotting his words onto a pad of paper as he drives. In the sense that Fullmer writes rather than texts his words on the journey, tweets become a poetic constraint rather than a new media per se.
A very different visual interpretation of tweets is the Washington Post satire of celebrity tweets called “Twits." In this series of visual/text juxtapositions, actors read celebrity tweets with all the pomp of a Masterpiece Theatre production. Emphasizing the grammatical mistakes, bizarre punctuation and tonal oddity of these tweets, the actors illustrate not only the strangeness of celebrity but also, the absurdity of our interest in them.
Together, these videos led me to think about the nature of the tweet and the kinds of restraints, opportunities and follies it engenders. As Fullmer says in Tweet Tweet, “A tweet is not a text, not haiku, not a telegraph. Stop. A tweet is.” I’d be interested to see what other kinds of visual rhetoric and poetry the tweet may inspire. Is there any way to visually capture the back-and-forth quality of tweets? Can a visualized tweet recreate the immediacy of the ever-changing updates?
A riff (or an aside) on your post about twitter and visual culture. An article in The New York Times magazine this spring pointed me to this groovy site called Twistori. If you click on a keyword, like "love," "hate," or "wish," a series of tweets that use the word appear on your screen in a recursive loop. In a way, this project of compilation does make visual poetry out of the tweet--and perhaps a visual argument about the ephemeral nature of text-messaged communication, as well as (I'm stretching here) the shared humanity underlying our collective use of these keywords.
I would argue that Twitter is more of a "hyper-print" media since it incorporates several beyond a profile and picture. Twitter works best as a) a conversation device or b) a way to point your followers to content.
Social media communication tools in general share these characteristics. So, the content of a tweet is not just the 140 characters but everything the it incorporates through links. Videos, pictures, other people, etc.
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A riff (or an aside) on your post about twitter and visual culture. An article in The New York Times magazine this spring pointed me to this groovy site called Twistori. If you click on a keyword, like "love," "hate," or "wish," a series of tweets that use the word appear on your screen in a recursive loop. In a way, this project of compilation does make visual poetry out of the tweet--and perhaps a visual argument about the ephemeral nature of text-messaged communication, as well as (I'm stretching here) the shared humanity underlying our collective use of these keywords.
Print media?
I love that first video. Thanks for sharing it.
I would argue that Twitter is more of a "hyper-print" media since it incorporates several beyond a profile and picture. Twitter works best as a) a conversation device or b) a way to point your followers to content.
Social media communication tools in general share these characteristics. So, the content of a tweet is not just the 140 characters but everything the it incorporates through links. Videos, pictures, other people, etc.
Great post though. I love where this is going!