Twitter: a Member of the Big Brother Family?

My first experience with Twitter was a kind of déjà-vu. I had seen something like this before, a few years ago. It was, I think, at a music festival. There was a big screen with a telephone number. You could send a text message to that number and a few seconds later it appeared on the screen. I noticed that people were not just sending messages to the screen, but they were communicating too. They sent messages to each other. It was a microblogging system with a big audience and because of the character limitation of the text messages, the comparison with Twitter as just a digital social network is made quickly.

On the other hand, there’s a big difference between the festival screen and Twitter: your computer. Birds tweet and for us, it’s just a sound. For the bird it’s not only the sound, but it’s a (one-)way of communication. The bird in your garden is broadcasting to all the birds in the neighbourhood. He (females don’t sing usually) sends messages to other birds. When you Twitter, you are a bird broadcasting messages. Here I don’t mean the messages you are typing for other Twitters, but I’m talking ‘data’. When I send a message, for example ‘frying an egg on the back of my overheated car’, the message ‘frying an egg on the back of my overheated car’ is just the tweet, the sound of the bird you other birds hear.

Checking the Privacy Policy of Twitter you’ll read:
‘When you visit the Site, our servers automatically record information that your browser sends whenever you visit a website (“Log Data” ). This Log Data may include information such as your IP address, browser type or the domain from which you are visiting, the web-pages you visit, the search terms you use, and any advertisements on which you click’.

Although this may deter you joining Twitter, things get worse. Your Tweets are worldwide visible as well. On several websites you can collect information about Twitter uses. For example, Twitter Stream Graphs shows you the latest Tweets that contain any word you fill in. The graphic shows you how many times the word is used. Below the graphic you can see who (or which Twitter) has used the word in which Tweet. Another search mechanism is TwitArcs. Jeff Clark, the creator:

‘It (TwitArcs) takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term. You can click on the left side to load the tweets for a new user, on the right side to load the tweets for a specific term, and in the middle to visit the actual tweet.’

So, even for anyone who doesn’t have a Twitter account and therefore doesn’t have to reveal he is following you, you are leaving trails by using Twitter that can be interesting for many purposes.

In 1990, Gilles Deleuze explained that our society is changing into a society of control. Today’s capitalism has changed:

‘(But) In the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed.’

Data is the new ‘stock’. By using applications as Twitter, you are providing stock, for free. Different kinds of control institution can use your data for different kind of purposes. Companies (that, according to Deleuze, have a ‘soul’) can use your data for marketing. Governmental controllers can trace you. Look at this Twitter instruction and promotion clip and you’ll notice that it’s sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. Why does the U.S. Airforce want you to Twitter?

You can discuss whether Twitter is just another member of the Big Brother family or just a social network application. But Deleuze already described the society has changed from an enclosed to an open one. In this open society people are leaving trails that are usable both for marketing and governmental discipline.