The Twittering Machine

July 15, 2020
A sophisticated critique of the age of social media. The term social media, ventures Seymour, isn't quite right, "a form of shorthand propaganda," since all media are social, tools that connect individual people to the world. "To talk about technologies is to talk about societies," he continues, and the technology in question is one of the industrialization of the written word. In an argument reminiscent of O.B. Hardison's now-30-year-old book Disappearing Through the Skylight, Seymour examines the code--the writing, that is--and the messages it generates in light of that social industry, whose titans have been rightly accused of hijacking expression to manipulate various untruths--and not just the fake news of Trumpians, but the compromised messages that say less than they mean. "The only way to conform successfully on the internet," writes the author, "is to be unutterably bland and platitudinous." All of this falls under the rubric of what Seymour calls the Twittering Machine, one that generates plenty of feeble noises. Some of the author's arguments seem a little obvious, and some of the best bits are borrowed (with attribution) from critics of technology such as Jaron Lanier, who observes that the technology capitalists "don't have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world." However, Seymour dives deep to show just how that manipulation works, making us addicts of the machine--though, as he notes, the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual does not yet have a category for internet addiction--who crave the likes that a post or photo might bring. Indeed, the addition of the "like" button was practically as revolutionary as the internet itself. Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is the more useful book in this regard, though it lacks the essayistic dimension that Seymour capably employs here. Thoughtful reading for technologists and technology's discontents alike.

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