What I’m gonna touch upon the most here is the question of how we choose the tools that we might need to find or decode a cultural artifact.

I’m not sure who’s idea it is (Wettergreen’s or McLuhan’s) that to study a Cultural Artifact it must be separated from space and time, when in fact, to suss out an object’s cultural relevancy it is exactly the opposite. And more to the point, the meaning ascribed to one object can change over time in the same social group (The Bible’s a good example here) or change completely from time to time (Stonehenge might come to mind where we have a very different meaning of those rocks than their creator’s did). All of this is to say that the meaning behind any object is highly relative and if one’s trying to find a “original meaning” or “essential meaning” the analysis must usually be invested with as much understanding of the particular space and context as possible.

Now, all of this becomes even more complex when one is talking about a social phenomenon — something with its own dynamics that exists across several time periods and involves hundreds of thousands of people. Something of this complexity it would seem to me, is hard to fit into 4 nice boxes of McLuhan’s Tetrad. And rather that try to see what twitter does, or does not do to a given culture, essentially a “What” or “How” question (What are the cultural effects of twitter? How has it changed society?), we should look at the question of “Why is there Twitter?” My issue with the “how” and “what” questions is that they already presuppose that twitter is new, or radical, or different, which in fact may not be true, or at least not true for a certain segment of the population.

I think starting from the position of “what can twitter show us about ourselves” might lead to some interesting conclusions and might show that fundamentally it is not all that different from other means of mass communication, it is essentially broadcasting at a small scale. But broadcasting has been around for a long time, smoke signals might be seen in this light to have been early forms of tweeting. Anybody with an Amateur Radio licence could “tweet” in Morse code to whoever around the globe was tuned into a specific frequency…So what is in fact the difference? Is it the text? Is it the openness, the low-playing field?

I actually have a different idea that I think would have been quite shocking to McLuhan. More than simply too complex for his tetrad, I think twitter is more of a product than producer of our media. There is a distinct body of research that confirms elevated levels of dopamine in our brains, specifically the amygdala, when we humans engage in cognitive activities related to communication. The gist of the research is that we like, we REALLY like to talk. And this should be no surprise. But chemically, we love to communicate, and for the most part we’re addicted to it. Twitter feeds right in to this chemical equation. So the bad news for those who begrudge other tweeters is that its out of your control, this is chemical addiction you’re up against. The good news for faithful tweeters is that Twitter is almost certainly not the end of the line for micro-broadcasting. After-all we’re the “speaking ape.” It’s what we do best, and 140 characters just seems too short…

I also agree with the first half of your last point, the “…layers of reflexivity and irony seem to be a kind of ‘innovation’ in the media world,” but disagree with the second half. I do believe the technology is innovative because it gives real-time reports on the state of the world as delivered by people. This is the same reason that in the middle of the decade you used to read the NYTimes and then go to Google News to see what was socially most important in the news. Twitter and trending analysis represents the real-time equivalent of many of yous reading Google News in the “popular” category.

Matt, I’m glad to see you’re getting into social analysis here. I’m not sure if McLuhan’s scheme totally works, but it’s certainly interesting.

One cultural element I find interesting about Twitter is the very irony of its name. “Twit” is a “silly, annoying person.” And I can’t imagine this self-deprecating reference escapes anyone on the network. It seems like Twitter users are much more aware of their McLuhan-ian frame than most media consumers–including being well aware of the drawbacks of Twitter and the critiques leveled at Twitter users. All those layers of reflexivity and irony seem to be a kind of “innovation” in the media world, because the technology itself doesn’t seem like an innovation.

I hadn’t read Clive’s piece before you mentioned it. Here is the link to it for anyone else who would like to read it:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_thompson_obscurity/

These seem to be relatively new problems that we’re dealing with, microfame, social network exhaustion. I wonder whether these same situations existed when we had only phones and letters to communicate. In Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody he mentions that Charles Lindbergh would not let anyone else write his fan letters and of course, he never got to all of them.

Maybe this is where ghost writing becomes more important? Can you imagine paying someone to maintain your twitter account for you? Conversing with your friends to maintain relationships? Scary.

Thanks for the comment.

With regard to #1, Thompson cautions, “Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote.”

With regard to #2, generally users are re-broadcasting “traditional media” not generating original content, right?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by organprinter: Twitter as a Cultural Artifact http://bit.ly/d6RS4j...

I do tend to agree with what you are proposing in terms of Twitter as an active member of media culture (since the word “artifact” sounds a bit “archaeological” in connotation). Having sat in on a few blogger panels at various music conferences in the past few years, adherents to “old media” are foisting upon Twitter the same claims they hurled at bloggers. The claims run the gamut from: there are no editors; there’s no one there with a professional degree dictating content; there’s no one to provide objective analysis about any given event, and (last but not least) there’s often no way to generate income for web content.

Both McLuhan and Postman would have dismissed the claims of Twitter/blog contrarians as contradictory and counter-intuitive. In a post-Enlightenment, post-modern Information Age, people really could care less about objectivity/subjectivity (just check out your average poll on Fox News). We all have our trusted “traditional” media sources, all of which have their own, readily apparent internal biases. With Twitter (and blogs), we have the chance to read an unending stream of content that we can individually choose to follow. We can choose our own “tribes” in which to participate, complete with our own tribal leaders, medicine men/women, sages, rabbis, dreamers, leaders, thinkers, and doers.

Twitter as a “cultural artifact” is designed to be one of robust communication. In fact, it’s current tagline is “What’s Happening?” which, to me, is designed to encourage users to talk about what’s going on in their worlds – AS IT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING. To me, this makes Twitter, no matter what the haters might say, one of the most invaluable media resources of the 21st century.