On Twitter. Lecture by Nan Z. Da

This talk asks what Twitter is, what it does, appending it to a longer literary-theoretical history. It isolates Twitter’s principle of design, available for anyone to see: that it visibilizes, publishes, and records speech acts and reactions to speech acts, all in real time and at scale. At scale, this formatting has implications for natural human language and, in turn, for modern society (as an engineered object that generates and responds to data).