The Immediacy of Twitter
Updated: 13 June 2016
2012-2024 2012-2024 “The Epitome of Immediacy”
Immediate
"Immediate" is often used to mean "instantaneous."
Discussing Twitter in his book New New Media, Paul Levinson focuses on this first definition. Specifically, Levinson calls the platform "The Epitome of Immediacy." He writes, "...Twitter's revolution is that it makes the sending and receiving of its brief messages nearly as instant as their conception and writing" (31).
Even more than other social-media platforms, Twitter promises communication that rivals the unmediated character of speech.
Immediate
But the root meaning of "immediate" is closer to "without media," and this second definition helps to clarify a common mistake that Twitter invites its users to make.
When speaking, we can instantly share our thoughts with anyone in earshot. Twitter offers the ability to reach millions of listeners just as easily. Because it's so easy and so quick, Twitter often feels unfiltered and "immediate" in the second sense above. But this aspect of Twitter promises more than it can deliver. Although it can approximate the speed and rhythmns of F2F communication, it lacks that mode's directness and density.
We don't really care about you.
Twitter and the illusion of intimacy
By definition, famous people incite the interest of far more people than they can possibly be interested in themselves. The human capacity to care about the intimate lives of others has some built-in limits (maybe in the dozens?). It is beyond the human capacities of Beyoncé or George Clooney to return the interest of the millions of people who care about them.
But, as the 150-year-old celebrity-gossip industry has proven, you can make a lot of money by providing people with the illusion of intimacy. During its brief lifespan, Twitter has become one of the key ways that this happens in contemporary U.S. culture.
If a user follows <famous person> on Twitter, she likely will learn details that only an intimate of that person could have known in earlier eras: what <famous person> had for breakfast, how <famous person> is feeling at this moment, etc. These details are similar to those provided by tabloid newspapers for a more than a century, but again Twitter's immediacy produces a difference, intensifying the illusion of intimacy.
Wisdom from Some Grey Bloke
Interpersonal + Mass Communication = Twitter
To clarify his claims about Twitter's uniqueness, Levinson makes a basic distinction between one-to-one (interpersonal) and one-to-many (mass) communication. Many of the problems people get into using Twitter stem from mistaking one for the other. Dharun Ravi, the teenager charged in the death of Tyler Clementi, made precisely this mistake.
Interpersonal communication happens in face-to-face encounters between two people or in small groups. Often, a small group of Twitter users will carry on conversations for months or years without attracting the attention of outsiders (even though all their posts are open to anyone, at any time).
However, problems can erupt through a process that danah boyd calls "context collapse": a Twitter conversation will suddenly blow up, attracting a mass audience to conversations that originally felt private.