Commentary Does Twitter Think? Joss Hands There appears to be a new power at work in the political, cultural and social life of the world: the power of social media. The capacity for previously un-­‐connected citizens to locate each other through these digital networks, to find common ground, to act on shared beliefs and aims and to cultivate mutual passions is now firmly a part of our culture and politics. However, the issues that have dominated the political agenda, at least in news commentary and public discourse, have tended towards simplistic disputes over cause and effect that bracket out more expansive and fundamental questions about the nature of social media, its role in contributing to any individual’s or group’s sense of self, collective dynamics and political capacities. The capacities (or more accurately affordances) of social media are highly complex, rich and varied. They come from the mixture of social and political choices, commercial imperatives, technical development, and interventions from users, and often emerge unforeseen in the original design phase. One such unintended affordance, which has evolved through social media use, has been the ability to self-­‐organise in new ways, in configurations of leaderless groups and horizontal networks.1 What have not been so widely explored, certainly not in the public sphere, are the more fundamental changes these technologies allow for in human agency, decision-­‐making, political advocacy and actually existing democracy. Here there is a move from thinking about gauging impact to understanding how the mechanisms and processes that allow actions to take place at all, which includes exploring how social media may offer new ways to think, both individually and collectively. Political action, by its very definition, requires reflection, interaction and solidarity, which in the current technological age will inevitably include what N. Katherine Hayles refers to as ‘intermediation’ (Hayles, 2008, p. 42). That is, in her terms, a cluster of processes that enfold human and technical elements into a multi-­‐
layered set of relations in what she sees as ‘dynamic heterarchies’ (p. 44). To understand what such intermediation means for us as political beings means more than transplanting existing theories onto new media, of digitising public deliberation. 1
For more on this see my book @ is For Activism (Hands, 2011)
Rather we need to grasp the significance of what happens when being-­‐together takes on a new character, or can even be said to manifest new political subjects or a new ‘general will’. This is of course also to ask any number of further questions, amongst these: what exactly is it, or could it be, to think, decide and make judgements in this context? How can new forms of interaction and acceleration be captured and understood? What role is there for notions of self and other in this multivalent process? I can do little more than sketch some possibilities here but in doing so I hope to raise questions that offer some fruitful grounds for further examination. What I will focus on in this piece is therefore a rather generalised opening to a set of more specialised and nuanced questions that will need to be developed in future. For the sake of brevity -­‐ and given its currency in debates over social media and politics – I shall use Twitter as a particular example. In that regard I am serious when I ask whether ‘Twitter’ thinks. Of course in posing the question ‘Does Twitter Think?’ we are therefore, unavoidably, also raising the issue of consciousness; of whether we can detect some changed form of consciousness operating in our social interactions. This in turn implies multiple possibilities, there are three such variations that I will explore here, as firstly the overarching strong sense of consciousness as spirit and transcendent entity, secondly the more limited sense of the expansion and sharing of multiple reflective individual consciousnesses and thirdly the notion as implied in consciousness raising or awareness as in, for example, class consciousness. Therefore, in order to set the parameters of the discussion we need to first ask what kind consciousness could even be conceivable as a form of ‘Twitter consciousness’? What kind of consciousness? The first strong sense of consciousness brings to mind the dialectics of Hegelian phenomenology of mind. Here the ‘idea’ or mind/consciousness is conceived not as epiphenomena of lumps wet-­‐wired grey matter, but as spirit, an entity, or process, entwined with the dialectical realisation of consciousness. In some ways this conception is closer to the third notion of ‘consciousness raising’, though of course goes much further. So does Twitter then bring us closer to the Hegelian spirit, a digital path to the absolute idea? As Marxian thinker and cultural theorist Henri Lefebvre has argued, the encompassing of mind towards the absolute idea is still primarily located within actually exiting human minds, and as such it is highly questionable as to whether ‘the limited mind of an individual, of a philosopher, should be able to grasp the entire content of human experience?’ (Lefebvre, 1968, p. 48). In that sense then conceiving a transcendent Twitter consciousness would only shift the problem from one medium to another. Indeed Lefebvre argues that, ‘the content will be attained only through the joint efforts of many thinking individuals, in a progressive expansion of consciousness. Hegel's own claim encloses and limits the content and makes it unworthy of Mind’ (p. 48). In that regard, for the purposes of the debate here, I will set the Hegelian paradigm aside as too expansive, too totalising, and too wrapped up in absolutes. So the role of social media in some form of shared consciousness cannot simply replace a transcendental understanding of thought and consciousness. That also rules out ‘strong artificial intelligence’ as a variation of such transcendent thinking. Aside from its lack of actual existence it is not a realistic or meaningful part of this debate given that it would mean either another thinking entity to be accounted for in a network of actants or again a too totalising a version of consciousness. The closest and most relevant alternative existing fields of research are those interrogating firstly ‘collective’ and secondly ‘distributed’ intelligence. The discourse of collective intelligence, while this has a lot to be said for it in the attempt to solve the problem of thinking ‘together’, while recognising the multiple character of the ‘collective’ again tends towards the transcendent by inventing new forms of language that create or allow for unification. Pierre Levi, its main champion, argues that: 'The problem faced by collective intelligence is that of discovering or inventing something beyond writing, beyond language, so that the processing of information can be universally distributed and coordinated, no longer the privilege of separate organisms but naturally integrated into all human activities, our common property' (Levy, 1999, p. xxxviii), and he goes even further to say that: 'transcending the media, airborne machines will announce the voice of the many...we have a rendezvous with the over-­‐language.' (p. xxxviii). This perspective has an implicit Hegelian logic underpinning it, and suggests a somewhat totalising vision that would ultimately equal the end of politics. This kind of idea, as well as being politically problematic does not really offer much insight into the kinds of collective thinking and acting as have recently been seen across the world. There is another recent attempt to grasp the dynamics of the collective, which is more in line with the idea of a ‘distributed’ consciousness. This attempt has its roots not in Hegel but Spinoza, with his more immanent ontology of the ‘multitude’, and is taken forward by a group of Italian theorists broadly in the tradition of post-­‐Fordist or autonomist thinking. This group’s attempt to understand collectivity using the concept of multitude maintains a place for the individual within the collective, though they rethink the individual as a ‘singularity’ to avoid conceiving the subject as an atomised and exchangeable economic unit. Multitude is an aggregation of singularities using intensive modern communications to come together and act in common towards common ends, contributing their ideas and labour into a collective practice. This means the development of a new kind of entity that is able to act collectively and creatively in an almost spontaneous manner. In doing so, it becomes a new kind of political entity analogous to a brain with its neurons and synapses working in concert. Thus multitude, says Paolo Virno, is ‘a fundamental biological configuration which becomes a historically determined way of being’ and at its core is ‘the publicness of the intellect’ (Virno, 2004, p. 98). In that regard we see a gesture towards collective thinking, drawing on and developing Marx’s notion of ‘general intellect’ and making the connection between the multitude as a social body and the biology of the brain. Here we return to the second variation of thinking about consciousness, one that is rooted in the wet ware of our individual consciousnesses. The jump from the neural networks that comprise the material substrate of our brains to the social organisation of a kind of collective thought is precisely the one made by two of the best known thinkers emerging from the autonomist tradition, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their book Multitude (2004) they argue that: ‘There is no one that makes a decision in the brain, but rather a swarm, a multitude that acts in concert…the human body is itself a multitude organized on the plane of immanence ‘ (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 336). The analogy is then made between the brain and the social body as distributed systems: ‘The brain does not decide through the dictation of some center of command. Its decision is the common disposition or configuration of the entire neural network in communication with the body as a whole and its environment. A single decision is produced by a multitude in the brain and body’ (p. 338). The new forms of networked communication draw together the processes of the brain and the social collective, or multitude, into one assemblage. In recent years the most popular of these networks has been social media platforms such as Twitter. The key characteristic of these networks of communication being their distributed topology, that is they are many to many, all points connecting to all other points via numerous possible routes, again much like the synapses of the brain. Thus the multitude is comprised of ‘The innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed networks’ (p. 113) that produce the ‘Dynamic of singularity and commonality’ (p. 198) and a ‘social subject and a logic of social organization’ (p. 219). This social subject is intimately entwined with distributed communication and the notion of ‘emergence’ is implicitly used to explain the process by which multitude makes decisions and acts. Emergence being the mechanism wherein the combination of numerous small decisions and processes aggregate to produce effects that can be considered to express a kind of group intelligence. However there is a significant problem as far as emergence and decision making in multitude goes, that is -­‐ to put it bluntly -­‐ people are not neurons in a brain. The forms of connection between brains (as opposed to within brains) require a linguistic pragmatics, even accepting affective and virtual aspects of inter-­‐subjective communication. The propositional content of communication is overlooked in theories of multitude in favour of such ideas as emergence, or at least spontaneous self-­‐
organisation. Such an understanding is also deeply reliant on the power of affect. Affect theory has become increasingly influential through the humanities and social sciences and places the emphasis not on the pragmatics of language but on the impact of communication as an ‘intensity’ in terms of physical changes, neurological processes and unconscious behaviours. Yet any imaginable form of democracy still requires deliberation as an element in collective decision-­‐making. Without an account of deliberation, and an understanding of how social media adds to or diminishes it, any theory will be incomplete. Likewise purely deliberative theories focused on rational decision making, which does not account for the affordances and affects of social media, will be equally incomplete. The brain only becomes autonomous and able to make reflexive planned and meaningful decisions in the process of sets of feedback loops of self-­‐awareness, of which symbolic language and meaning becomes a central element at higher levels of consciousness. Affect theories entail a danger of seeing decisions as determined by a set of affects, bobbing around on a sea of unconsciousness decisions made beneath the level of awareness. The cognitive scientist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter describes ‘strange loops’ (Hofstadter, 2007) as the essential element that ratchets up our brains towards reflective consciousness. But it requires such immense biological complexity to achieve this that the connections of the Web and social media could never approximate these numbers. In that regard, we are really thinking of something more humble by way of any kind of ‘thought’. This element of reflexivity then needs to be accounted for in a fully developed understanding of distributed consciousness. In this scenario we can imagine human brains as one element of a wider media-­‐technology hybrid, wherein human intelligence and consciousness is augmented and extended through social media. Indeed as Katherine Hayles has argued, this broad idea is hardly new; memory has been enhanced by prosthesis ever since the first use of writing (Hayles, 2008). Twitter Thinking as Distributed Consciousness Distributed consciousness must then be a fundamentally intersubjective process that is embodied and culturally embedded in the pragmatics of communicative action2. As such I understand thought and consciousness not to be reproduced or transcended by Twitter but to be evolved, enhanced and extended by it. This is not to say it is only a process of rational exchange, but that this element of communicative action is nested in and recycled through a range of other emotional and affective processes. Antonio Damasio, the noted philosopher and cognitive scientist, argues that there is a tripartite development of consciousness and self that he describes as ‘the protoself and its primordial feelings; the action-­‐driven core self; and finally the autobiographical self, which incorporates social and spiritual dimensions' (Damasio, 2010, p. 10). 2
For an account of this idea refer to Jürgen Habermas’ fully developed theory of communicative action
(Habermas, 1984)
While all of these elements are primarily embodied they are also inextricably intersubjective, that is they rely on other people to have any meaning. The brain, in that regard, is always already a social brain. One of the key elements that allows us to think is our capacity to think together, and this is made possible by a number of shortcuts that mean when we think together we don’t have to go through the detailed drawn out process of thrashing out every decision. This is done in the laying down of what Antonio Demasio refers to as the ‘somatic markers’ that underpin the kind self-­‐reflexive decision-­‐making characterised in deliberation and allow for shortcuts in situations of intense speed and brevity of communication. In that regard processes of repetition and mimesis are keys, but these processes still retain embedded validity claims that tie together interlocutors in loops of understanding and recognition. There is a constant movement between the three levels. Here one can find the analogy between the notion of consciousness and thought emerging from brains and with distributed intersubjective consciousness. If consciousness emerges from ‘strange loops’, as Douglas Hofstadter also suggests, different brains are perfectly capable of becoming enmeshed with shared perceptions, thought patterns and identities. Twitter’s short form micro-­‐blogging is able to offer very succinct but never the less fully formed propositions, as well as observations, imperatives, fragments of ideas, stream of consciousness reporting and so forth. My speculative hypothesis is thus that iteration, re-­‐tweeting and clustering -­‐ with the use of hash tags and other modes of on the fly classification -­‐ alongside small deployments of variation, that are picked up and re-­‐
circulated over a period of time, lay down layers of sediment, of validity claims, and emotional triggers that are built up and shared by networks of interlocutors. These clusters of ideas, layered with emotional triggers, become embedded as background assumptions, or somatic markers, in the brains of the interlocutors. When these are tapped into in active communication online they can account for appearance of a significant element of emergent like behaviour, which can then allow for higher levels of communicative looping to take place. In short, we can get inside each others heads, our voices and inner voices can loop into each other’s in such a way that we move more closely towards a ‘thinking’ multitude. In that way we think ‘through’ each other, much in the way that Lefebvre talks about ‘the joint efforts of many thinking individuals, in a progressive expansion of consciousness’ (Lefebvre, 1968, p. 48). This means that mobilisation can occur quickly and with relative ease, because the shared thinking in Twitter is built around dyadic and subsequently hyperdyadic spread; that being the spreading effects through a network from social and friendship networks and beyond to the wider network. Twitter’s capacity for such spread, combined with iteration and variation as feedback, means a drawing together of a group dynamic, built on already existing triggers and sympathies and emotional as well as rational ties. Twitter then presents a powerful prosthesis; its scale-­‐free topology, its operation at great speed, its collective indexing and its wide dissemination of ideas, produces a qualitative shift of capacity. Thus I suggest this capacity can augment the ‘strange loops’ of consciousness and indeed provides new capacities in so doing. Twitter is not ‘like a brain’, it does not ‘think’ in that sense; rather it is a space to think in and enables us to think with each other. The speed of interaction means that the time of communications moves closer to something akin to what Manuel Castells refers to as ‘timeless time’ (Castells, 1997). That is a form of temporality that is not necessarily sequential or linear but fragmented and transversal, different time zones become integrated, different special configurations in moments of congruence. These are profoundly embodied processes, happening in real places and to real bodies. Our fingers on the keyboards of our devices, the buzzing of our phones as messages are registered and rebroadcast, and also vitally the integration with space, the layering of the experiences of sharing spaces as collectives has been startling with the ‘Arab Spring’, the Occupy, anti-­‐austerity and student movements. This reminds us that only in the production of space can resistance to power really become manifested. Twitter is hosted in brains, bodies and spaces that feed back into each other and create a capacity for ‘fuzzy’ collective thinking – but also importantly processed through emotion as a shortcut that allows the intensity and speed to produce a new affordance. This can manifest itself as something akin to a meta-­‐level ‘mood’; indeed it is not unreasonable to say that Twitter is ‘angry’ or ‘sad’. Networked Politics Manuel Castells has recently argued that it is precisely these emotions: anger, rage and fear, which push words into action, or indeed restrain it. (Castells, Communication Power , 2009). There is a clear parallel here with the political theorist John Holloway’s notion of the ‘scream’; that being the instinctive gut reaction against injustice in which we recognise not only the injustice but also solidarity within that injustice (Holloway, 2005). But beyond this raw reactivity, wherein a group self-­‐awareness emerges, another claim of Castells becomes relevant, that: ‘By becoming known to the conscious self, feelings are able to manage social behaviour, and ultimately influence decision-­‐making by linking feelings from the past and present in order to anticipate the future by activating the neural networks that associate feelings and events’ (Castells, Communication Power , 2009, p. 141). The feedback loops and interaction via Twitter certainly offers capabilities to shift between these registers on a wider social scale than would have been previously possible. This is neither completely rational nor affective in the full sense, as I would say it is both, layered through cognitive processes, somatic markers and intermediated across the network. Reactions against injustice, claims for recognition are combinations of ideas and emotions, are often transmitted though affective connections triggering the somatic markers built up through more long-­‐term relationships and deliberations. Thinking and feeling brains and bodies intensively connected and communicating reverse the established lines of communication from centre to periphery, they allow for the organisation of multitude. As I have argued, this is a process of deliberation and affect layered trough intermediation. This, at the very least, produces powerful large-­‐scale responses that makes it increasingly difficult for the established political class to govern as they would like, that is with a free hand. This is what Noam Chomsky would call – for this political class, with heavy dose of irony -­‐ a crisis of democracy. However, there is an attendant danger that a small number of voices can become dominant and can begin to direct the multitude as a Hobbesian sovereign. This is one of the side effects of a scale-­‐free network, the clustering of connections around popular hubs that increasingly tend towards centralisation and broadcast models. Unlike formal democratic systems there are no checks-­‐and-­‐balances, no filtering processes or deliberative norms to offset this danger. This strikes me as the major political challenge of such media; to balance the grassroots self-­‐organisation with the need for formal or quasi-­‐formal modes of filtering, deliberation and representation. We also need to be keep in mind that Twitter is not a common, it is a commercially owned and privately operated software platform, as are the majority of such popular social media platforms. Problems of archiving, searching and utilising its full potential have been made clear, for example with the withdrawal of Google real time search. This service allowed a keyword search of the Twitter archive but was withdrawn because of copyright infringements, in so doing effectively inflicting long-­‐term memory loss on any Twitter ‘consciousness’. With the elements of archive and memory in particular consciousness can also be conceived in the sense of class-­‐consciousness – something like a shared concept, idea or identification amongst a specifically bounded group in opposition to a prevailing power structure, in a political context we often hear of ‘consciousness raising’ as an aim. The further political question that emerges from this debate is whether new affordances for shared thinking and consciousness can or will be translated into large-­‐scale class or group consciousness, in new allegiances, new collectives and new kinds of social movement? That is not to claim more than is warranted in the way of a new collective ‘self’ as such, but a principle of sufficiency for collective decision making in real time that is readily actionable in collective desires and goals. We have seen evidence of this around the world in Iran, Egypt, the USA, UK and numerous other countries going through paroxysms of one sort of another. Whether new capacities afforded by networked communications will flourish, or whether constituted power will succeed in squashing them, remains one of the key political questions of our time. Bibliography Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, M. (1997). The Rise of the Network Society . Oxford: Blackwell. Damasio, A. (2010). Self Comes To Mind, Constructing the Conscious Brain. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of Communicative Action . Cambridge: Polity Press. Hands, J. (2011). @ is For Activism: Dissent, Resistence and Rebellion in a Digital Culture. London: Pluto Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude. New York: Penguin. Hayles, N. K. (2008). Electronic Literature. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Hofstadter, D. (2007). I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books. Holloway, J. (2005). Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press. Lefebvre, H. (1968). Dialectical Materialsm. London: Cape Editions. Levy, P. (1999). Collective Intelligence . New York: Basic Books. Lukacs, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness . London: Merlin Press. Negri, A., & Guattari, F. (2010). New Lines of Aliance, New Spaces of Liberty. New York: Autonomedia. Virno, P. (2004). The Grammar of the Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e) .