An Anthropological Study on Social Media. 2010.

I’m exploring what it means to be human these days. I am here, you are there, and what’s in-between?

• Live performance, 2010 Miami
• Sculptural Collage exhibited 2011, NY & Santa Fe

For a time I used Twitter a lot. As I made connections and experienced the platform as a new kind of social space, I couldn’t help but simultaneously think of the interactions as a virtual microcosm of real-life communities–– the angling, positioning, wanting, and hoping made visible tweet by tweet, recorded and preserved in the stream. This is that experience, captured and presented here.

This project includes tweets, a sculptural collage, a script (it can be read here), a live performance (info about that here), and a video (see below, end of page).

The 2010 archive of my tweets, from the day I joined Twitter until the day I finished this project.

January 24, 2010 through December 1, 2010

Part One: Immersed

Researched the Field

• Started on Twitter, advocacy work for pediatric cancer, for the young daughter of one of my best friends.
• Reached out online to people I didn’t know in real life. Disorienting. Exhausting.
• Then: exhilarating! amazing! Instant nationwide connections made with advocates & cancer organizations!
• Finished the project, logged off Twitter.
• Needed art community. Homebound. Unable to connect with local artists.
• Logged back onto Twitter.
• Found one artist, which led to many artists.
• Twitter feed became two communities (pediatric cancer & New York art world), side by side.
• Unconnected but intertwined on my screen.
• What made community? What was important?

Experienced and Realized

• Saw sense of felt privacy in the public online crowd.
• Voyeur or eyewitness? I read through people’s public conversations.
• Saw the elevation and preservation of fleeting thoughts.
• Saw how interactions worked (and didn’t work).
• Observed: who communicated with whom, what was said.
• Who was ignored, what was ignored.
• When I was ignored, who ignored me.
• Who followed whom, who wasn’t followed.
• How people organized each other.
• How I organized others.

Observed and Analyzed

• Used Twitter feed of accounts followed as community sample.
• Unfollowed the least personal of the person accounts (I unfollowed no more than 5).
• Received angry message from anonymous person about unfollowing them.
• Read completely through every twitter stream of every person I was following (not organizations).
• Gathered sense of individuals through bursts of words.

Hypotheses Developed

• We resent the restrictions of social (interpersonal) hierarchies, but accept the benefits and perpetuate them anyway.
• We prioritize attention on our own discomfort despite evidence of our privileges.

Part Two: Documented

Crafted a Story

• Looked for personal information pieces.
• Didn’t excuse any account.
• Included 2-3 tweets from every person account.
• Printed them.
• Cut them out individually.
• Studied them.
• Thought about a universal story.
• Saw people’s needs, wants, hopes.
• Saw people experiencing each other’s words, sorting each other.
• Experienced people’s words, then I actively sorted them.

Connected Hypothesis to Story

• Decided how to tell the story.
• Decided what observations to highlight.
• Chose information to support subjective observations.
• Arranged information into piles.
• Found words/tweets/connections that proved my subjective points.
• Curated people’s words to tell the story I wanted to tell.

Set Out to Prove Hypothesis

• Categorized people’s words with made-up systems.
• Culled the ones that were irrelevant to the story as I saw it.
• Hid them, but didn’t trash them.
• Buried them by gluing them down first.
• Disappeared them under the other tweets.
• Built the story I had intended to tell in the first place.

Part Three: Replicated

The Hypothesis Came To Life

• Continued to select, sort, and arrange tweets according to the story I wanted.
• Noted people frustrated by the restrictions of social hierarchy.
• Saw people prioritizing attention on their own experiences over others’.
• Narrative developed that mirrored the data I was sorting.
• Had this as a conversation with myself.
• Wanted to have the conversation with other artists.
• Didn’t find anyone interested in this project.
• Got frustrated by the restrictions of social hierarchy that kept my work hidden.
• Prioritized attention on my own experience over others’.
• Lived my hypothesis.
• Wrote that experience into a script.