Wasting Time on the Internet (19 page)

By swapping more traditional compositional methods
for mechanically inspired ones, the Oulipo anticipated some of the ways we'd use language in the digital age. Every time we tweet, using a 140-character constraint, we could be said to be composing an Oulipian poem. When Twitter gives us a constraint, we agree to comply with it, bending our language to suit its agenda. Few people throw up their arms and say, “I'm refusing to write in 140 characters. I will only write in 190 characters.” Instead, by adapting ourselves to its platform, we find it a perfectly adequate way to express ourselves under a tight constraint. The parameters of Twitter are far from arbitrary: the 140-character constraint emerged from SMS culture, in which the standard character limit is 160 characters, minus 20 characters for the username.

People often grumble that on the web we've lost the craftsmanship of writing. But on Twitter, I often see a great deal of craft going into the composition of tweets. The constraint alone brings craft to the fore: how can I say something with such limited real estate? And then there is the game of the compositional method itself: watching the character count dwindle, then precisely editing and revising the tweet so it will fit into its allotted space. We substitute ampersands for “ands,” delete commas, double spaces, and redundant words, use hashtags, and employ URL shorteners to craft the most compressed language possible. Many of our tweets go through this highly edited process, finally arriving at a perfect tweet, one in which a punchy statement is made with no characters left. Sometimes at the end of this process when we hit Send, we feel like we've posted a small literary jewel.

Twitter doesn't come with a how-to manual. We learn it by playing it. We tailor our writing to the game: be pithy, be clever, be polemical, and there's a chance you'll be read and retweeted; be mundane, be dull, only retweet others, and you'll most likely be on the lower end of the game. As novelist Sheila Heti put it, “You know within a matter of seconds if your tweet was successful.” Twitter is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's concept of language games, in which he tried to tease out the unwritten rules of how we use language. Wittgenstein conceived of language as a board game involving, at the minimum, two players: a sender and a receiver. Speaking a sentence, he said, is like moving a piece on a board; the other player's response is the next move. What ensues is a conversation, an elaborate demonstration of the rules, structures—and inevitably, the faults and failings—of human language. Almost like an alien discovering language for the first time—William S. Burroughs referred to language as “a virus from outer space”—Wittgenstein questioned basic linguistic tenets: how our rules were developed, acquired, accepted, their various uses, and importantly, how they can be broken. A language game, Wittgenstein informs us, is a delicate one: failure to play well will result in potentially tragic misunderstanding.

Social media sets up the game board, gives you the structure, pieces, and a stage on which to play, but outside of some underlying rules—edicts prohibiting impersonation, violence, threats, violation of copyright, etc.—it comes with no instructions. Like language itself, its norms evolve through
community engagement; trial and error shows what works (what people respond to well) and what doesn't. The rules of the game continually change with the platform, which is constantly tweaked to accommodate those ever-evolving rules, along with user feedback and investor concerns. The language itself inscribed into the interface is determinative of the platform's tenor. The word “follower” on Twitter or Instagram means something very different than Facebook's “friend.” Followers imply that there are leaders—a vertically quantifiable power dynamic—whereas the concept of friendship is more ambiguous and horizontal. On Twitter and Instagram, there's always someone with more followers than you, making them more powerful than you, as opposed to Facebook's limit of five thousand friends, an accomplishment attainable by many, therefore roughly democratic at heart.
*
While we often use Twitter followers as a metric of power, we rarely do the same with Facebook friends. Followers, a synonym for sycophants, are endlessly expansive, emphasizing the underlying cutthroat power dynamic in play.

These same power dynamics are expressed throughout some of the most popular forums in digital culture. Take the tech blog Boing Boing, for instance. They're one of the most visible blogs on the web, but they create very little original content. Rather they act as a filter for the morass of information, pulling up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing
linking to something far outweighs the thing they're linking to. The culture of citation and name-checking on the web has resulted in a cascade of “
re-
”
gestures:
re
tweeting,
re
blogging,
re
gramming, and
re
posting. Good citation determines the worth of, say, your blog or your Twitter feed, warping the once-disdained idea of name-dropping into a widespread, powerful practice.

Social media is an economy of citation rather than engagement. For instance, on a larger Twitter feed—which is connected to the site of avant-garde artifacts I've run for the past two decades—we'll tweet out something very obscure, lengthy, or difficult. Within a matter of moments, it's been retweeted dozens of times. No one had the time to actually engage with what we've tweeted, rather it's something they've heard or knew about—name-checking—and were eager to pass along to their followers. Twitter's tweet activity dashboard shows this to be true. On a tweet that had 31,861 impressions, was retweeted 151 times, and liked 245 times, there was only 66 actual engagements with the content I was linking to. And from that one tweet, the feed only garnered one new follower. This point is made in an even more direct way when I mistweet a broken link. No matter. Broken link and all, it's still retweeted ad infinitum.

While word of mouth has always been the way certain types of information have been passed along, in the digital world, strong cultural capital is accumulated being the originator of something that is widely retweeted or regrammed. As social media evolves, it gets twitchier, chart
ing micromovements in ever-subtler ways—I now see who has retweeted a tweet I have retweeted—which keeps us in the game tallying up the likes and glued to the screen.

Twitter's linguistic roots lie deep in modernism. James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
, perhaps the most unreadable book ever written has, uncannily, set the stage for hashtags. Joyce's book, published in 1939, was written as a linguistic dreamscape (it was labeled by one critic as “dreamspeak”), one that sought to bring the language of dreams and sleep to the page. To write the
Wake
, Joyce crammed notebooks with random thoughts and snippets of language he heard spoken on the street, on the radio, or read in newspapers, which became so dense and thick that even Joyce himself, with his notoriously bad eyesight, couldn't decipher them. Instead, he began transcribing exactly what he saw in its messy state to a typewritten page. He then further mangled the language by splitting up some words and recombining others, forming complex compound words, not dissimilar to the way the German language works. So you get compound neologisms like supershillelagh, happygogusty, soundhearing, smellsniffing, and neverheedthemhorseluggarsandlistletomine. They're all readable; you just have to be patient and read them closely, carefully deciphering each word. Because hashtags and URLs allow no spaces, compound words became necessary. Some examples of long, Joycean domains are:

            
http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldand thensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/

            
http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghi jklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/

            
http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwlll lantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/
(named after a Welsh village)

            
http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/
(the first sixty-five numbers of pi)

Throughout
Finnegans Wake
, Joyce punctuated the text with ten one-hundred-letter words that he called thunderclaps, which are comprised of words in various languages etymologically, visually, and aurally that relate to the theme of thunder. He uses these words to break up the book into several chapters, referring to various periods of cultural history, from the fall of Adam and Eve:

    
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerron ntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenen thurnuk

. . . to Thor, the Norse god of thunder . . .

    
Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirluk kilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

. . . which has 101 letters, and is thus able to fit in a 140-character tweet with thirty-nine characters left to spare.

The first Twitter hashtag, published by the former Goo
gle designer Chris Messina in 2007, was #barcamp, referring to a technology conference called BarCamp. Notice, though, how Messina dropped the capital letters, making it less readable and more perplexing; by stripping out the capitals, he landed himself squarely in Joycean territory. Today, Twitter and Instagram are flooded with words that could be straight out of the
Wake
: #photooftheday, #follow4follow, #iphone only, #dylanobrienfanpage, or #themazerunnermovie.

Aping the speed of technology, linguistic compression was at the heart of modernism. In 1906, the anarchist art critic Félix Fénéon published anonymously composed three-line novellas as filler in the Paris daily newspaper
Le Matin
. They were intended as sidebars or distractions to the bigger stories of the day, compressed as digestible sound bites of the day's news:

            
Responding to a call at night, M. Sirvent, café owner of Caissargues, Gard, opened his window; a rifle shot destroyed his face.

            
On the stake where they tied him up, four amateur policemen beat with sticks the young thief Dutoit, of Malakoff, whom they caught.

            
As her train was slowing down, Mme. Parlucy, of Nanterre opened up and leaned out. A passing express cracked both her skull and the door.

Fénéon's
faits divers
were much more than newspaper filler. Delicately meshing form with function, they were tiny poems in the guise of compressed Zolaesque potboilers, meant to quietly explode on the newspaper page where they were snuggled among more “important” stories. Intended to fly under the radar, they were subversive and, like well-honed tweets, gorgeously crafted. It's no wonder that a century later they'd be recognized as poetry. Predictably, Fénéon's “novellas” today have their own Twitter feed.

Perhaps inspired by gestures like Fénéon's, a group of Italian futurists in 1915 claimed: “It's stupid to write one hundred pages where one would do.” It was advice that Ernest Hemingway would heed when he composed the shortest novel ever, consisting of six words—a mere thirty-three characters (spaces and punctuation included)—which he penned in the 1920s:

    
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Allegedly written on a lark as a bet among a group of drunken writers in a New York restaurant as to who could write a six-word novel, Papa scribbled his quickly down on a cocktail napkin and won. While it displays all of Hemingway's characteristic wit and brilliance, research has shown the story to be apocryphal. These words had been kicking around in various forms in newspapers and advertisements before Hemingway snagged them. In 1906, an ad read: “For sale, baby carriage; never been used. Apply
at this office.” And in 1912, another ad, perhaps inspired by the first, said: “Baby's hand made trousseau and baby's bed for sale. Never been used.” Like a game of telephone, variations on this theme continued throughout the early twentieth century. Clearly, Hem—a newspaperman—dug into his vast mental knowledge of the field and, on the spot, reframed preworn ad copy, claiming it as an original—and brilliant—novel. Hemingway's gesture is a reminder that all language is preexisting and that smart recontextualization can often make used words new. On the web—an environment where language is cut and pastable—claiming originality is a tricky game. If you can think of it, it already exists on the Internet, which is why people often come up with the identical concept at the same time, a phenomenon known as multiple discovery. As the mathematician Farkas Bolyai noted: “When the time is ripe, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”

In 2014, the visual artist Cory Arcangel published a book about procrastination called
Working On My Novel
, which was repurposed from his Twitter feed, which only retweeted tweets that contained the phrase “working on my novel.” He then culled the best of them into a paperbound book. Each page contains one tweet:

            
Currently working on my novel

            
and listen to really nice music.

            
Yeah I'm a writer deal with it.

            
Sierra Brown—1:25
AM
—1 Dec 12

            
I'm working on my novel again,

            
and it feels good, you guys. I love

            
my mind.

            
Stephen Mangol—11:44
PM
—23 Sep 12

As Arcangel explains, “Part of the fun was that if you're twittering about how you're working on your novel, you're probably not working on your novel! I love these situations.” What were they doing instead of writing? Wasting time on the Internet—which is exactly what Arcangel was doing when he wrote this book, though artists routinely waste time as part of their creative process, thereby cleverly and self-reflexively conflating procrastination with production.