I’m remembering something that @ninastoessinger once said about twitter. Or perhaps we both said it, simultaneously. In a twitter rally long ago, we were puzzling over why, exactly, we preferred twitter to Facebook. One important factor for both of us seemed to be optical consistency. Which makes me think of something Bruno Latour once wrote: “Most of what we impute to connections in the mind may be explained by a reshuffling of inscriptions that all have the same ‘optical consistency’.”
With the inclusion of ads and inline images, twitter seems to have moved away from that model. There was something modular and egalitarian about old twitter — one block of 140 characters after another, in real time — that I think might be interesting to look at more closely. I mean: I think that modularity might be part of what led to twitter’s overwhelming success.
