As I’m poking through half-forgotten draft posts languishing behind this page, I’ve had cause to reflect that a recurring theme in my research concerns the technologically mediated dimensions of space and time. This subject is broached, for instance, when someone talks about how the internet eschews borders. That is a spatial observation. On the other hand, a temporal observation of the internet is that it can be incredibly difficult to remove information from the web. In this post I make some half-baked comments on Twitter through the lens of time and space.

Way back in April, I rendered unfinished, a post that included the following excerpt from Ed Zitron’s newsletter “Where’s Your Ed At”, wherein Zitron describes the significance of Twitter. Zitron makes some observations on the spatial and temporal aspects of Twitter:

While “global consciousness” feels a little galaxy-brained, it does nail the general sense that Twitter is about “now” or “recently” more than any other social network. With Twitter, you can see (or feel like you see) everybody’s live reactions to everything. You can talk to (and read) the live reactions of everyone, from your friends to celebrities, or just see what they’re thinking about or what they’re doing at any particular moment.

Twitter’s magic comes from how raw it is – or, at least, how raw it can be. You can type and post anything on Twitter, and anyone can type and post anything in response (within the boundaries of the Terms of Service). This rawness – and the ease with which one can reply to anybody – gives users the illusion of close proximity to anybody and the sense that Twitter is some sort of grand leveller of social boundaries, allowing you to reach anyone throughout the world at any given time.

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It can be easy to overemphasize the importance of Twitter, it was by no means a global platform, and even among users, content generation wasn’t evenly distributed. Power users took up a lot of real estate.¹ This said, Zitron suggests that there was something unique about Twitter’s spatial and temporal affordances. As Zitron observes, a medium like Twitter smooths over social frictions by introducing the illusion of close proximity. Though it is an illusion, the information still travels friction-free and speedily. It is as though Twitter were a bar, and each user is free to probe what you’re reading even though you have your head buried in a pilsner and a paperback.² Twitter collapses distance. The below Wondermark webcomic by David Malki illustrates this point well. The Sealion is hard to avoid, they can magically appear anywhere they want.

This spatial sprawl of Twitter could be read as another evolutionary node in communications media. Harold Innis told some of this history in Empire and Communications (1950). Early media such as stone, clay, papyrus, parchment, and paper, all had varying levels of mobility and resilience.³ Through these examples, Innis observes that greater spatial control can be seized by a centralized source when media have greater mobility. Media that are heavier, such as stone, are biased toward time rather than space. Systems that revolve around time biased media are more decentralized and rely on strategies like religion and architecture to exert continuity of influence.⁴

Zitron suggests that Twitter was a digital media par excellence, it was “about “now” or “recently” more than any other social network”. Though electric ICT makes information incredibly light, tweets might be the lightest of all. Especially as they related to popular cultural reaction and debate, tweets had a contemporaneousness that other media lack. Every now and then, Twitter would be captivated by something in a very current breaking news way that isn’t replicated by older forms of media, even 24/7 news channels. Forget viral, when these moments happened the feed would be infected on pandemic proportions. Examples might include the Will Smith slap or the ransacking of the US Capitol building in 2021. Concomitantly, the endless scroll means that as users constantly climb to the top of information pile, older information becomes deprioritized in favour of more recent information.

Twitter (and social media generally) is, as Zitron suggests, a sort of grand leveler. It neutralizes social boundaries in a hierarchical sense. Any person with an account can shout at celebrities and government officials (and sometimes they listen). It also pierces social boundaries horizontally, and sometimes unexpectedly so. Twitter in some ways is a giant game of tag in a nebulous arena, the trick is not to be “it”, to not actually be in reach. To be good at Twitter is to know how to manufacture at least a bit of distance.

When media favor space, language can shift from regional vernacular to a national standard. James Carey observed this kind of national flattening in “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph” (1983)⁵ writing that “[t]he effect of the telegraph is a simple one: It evens out markets in space. The telegraph puts everyone in the same place for purposes of trade; it makes geography irrelevant”.⁶ Carey makes this observation not only to point out the diminished opportunities for arbitrage of commodity prices between regions but also that “the telegraph…shifts speculation from space to time, from arbitrage to futures…In a certain sense the telegraph invented the future as a new zone of uncertainty and a new region of practical action”.⁷

One might argue that because of its radical nowness, Twitter also invented the present as a new region of practical action.⁸ One might also consider how the capture of this time zone has been quickly eroding the commercial viability of other time merchants. Claire Malone writes in the New Yorker that “in just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork’s staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it “the big one”); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well.” The creeping loss of local news in favor of broader, national programming⁹ is similar to the trend observed by Carey: that the telegraph reduced the variance in pricing between regional markets.

In Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (1999), Neil Postman suggests six questions that Enlightenment thinkers might ask of current technologies, one of them being “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?”¹⁰ We might want to pay attention to how social media technology has changed what the word “news” means, and how it influences the loss of local reporting and the tenor of local conversations. In light of the foregoing observations, it does seem interesting that Meta (né Facebook) is trying to shepherd its products into a non-news era.¹¹ I’m not sure this will work, can the now-news be successfully spun out from social media?

This centralization and nationalization is not a permanent state of affairs however. Just as, for instance, “a monopoly of knowledge based on parchment invited competition from a new medium such as paper which emphasized the significance of space as reflected in the growth of nationalist monarchies”,¹² so too might a proliferation of social media create a rise of new vernaculars and de-emphasize space.¹³ Such a shift might not be so far-fetched. Ryan Broderick tells Malone that “[e]very media company gutting their special interest brands will either watch helplessly or scramble to catch up in like 18 months…Everything we know about Gen Z media consumption points to it being more niche.” It will be interesting to see whether this demand is met. How is another question. Could we see different affordances in social media technology (a new evolutionary node) or perhaps users get increased interoperability options (a new legal approach) that reduce barriers to entry and encourage competition.

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1. “[A] minority of extremely active tweeters produced the overwhelming majority of all tweets made by U.S. adults between June 12 and Sept. 12, 2021. During this period, the top 25% of users by tweet volume produced 97% of all tweets (which includes original tweets as well as retweets, replies and quote tweets).” “Comparing highly active and less active tweeters” ↩︎
2. Sometimes you tweet the bar, and sometimes the bar tweets you. ↩︎
3. These are examples of writing media. We might add air as an “early” medium of oral communication. ↩︎
4. Innis describes that “[m]edia that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. Harold Innis, William J. Buxton (ed), Empire and Communications (University of Toronto Press, 2022) at 7. ↩︎
5. 8 Prospects 303-325 ↩︎
6. Carey at 315. ↩︎
7. Carey at 316. ↩︎
8. The failed promises of its “democratizing” and “participatory” essence notwithstanding. ↩︎
9. See e.g. “Bell Media planning cuts to CTV, BNN Bloomberg following BCE layoffs, sale of 45 radio stations” ↩︎
10. Neil Postman, “Building a Bridge to the 18th Century” (First Vintage Books, 2000) ↩︎
11. “Meta turns its back on politics again, angering some news creators” ↩︎
12. Innis at 137. ↩︎
13. For such proliferation to happen, however the strength of platform network effects will have to be relaxed. It has been suggested that news brands that benefit from network effects for their homepages might weather the coming extinction event for newsrooms. Malone quotes a media consultant in her piece saying “[p]laces like Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Mail, CNN, the Washington Post, and Fox News. But Web sites that aren’t as frequently typed into browsers need to “contemplate drastic measures, possibly halving their brand portfolios.” These websites have a strong spatial element to them as homepages though static, can be accessed from anywhere. They also illustrate a temporal aspect as brand loyalty introduces a sort of ecclesiastic durability to their business. ↩︎