Twittering Arts. An Apocalyptic Vision.

Twittering Arts. An Apocalyptic Vision.

Food for Thought by Joan Hus

In August, I began snooping around Twitter to get an idea of what was happening in the world of art. Using the appropriate hash tags, I browsed through an endless series of Twitter posts. Bits of information in different languages, invariably stored in the 140 characters, #hashtags and shortened.urls format appeared and disappeared on the screen of my computer. With a click on the resource locators, I accessed the pages that the busy bee members of Twitter community shared on the Internet. For hours and days on end, I sat clicking, reading, watching, listening. There seemed no limit to the flow of written and spoken words, pictures, videos and sounds. The whole world seemed within my reach. A false impression, since I cannot read Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Urdu, Greek, Russian, Hindi and Chinese, not to mention the twenty or so other languages that I do not know, in which Twitter is available. However, as I readily discovered that tweets about art were either in English, or gave access to sites available in English, my lack of linguistic knowledge did not hamper my pursuit.

At the end of a long and tiring exploration, I took a rest. Lying on the sofa, a box of top Cuban cigars and a glass of excellent port within reach, I thought back to my experience. There were a couple of things that I had found surprising. One of the things that had stricken me as rather odd was the use of Twitter for the promotion of various and sundry ‘Arts’ events. Typically, the tweets were posted by some x, authorized to tweet on a well-defined topic on behalf of some y, the organizer of the event, or of some z, the Board.

Lying on my back, I wondered whether the tweets that were meant to advertise some ‘Arts’ event were not futile by sheer weight of numbers. Could be, but that was not the right question. The question was, why did all those x’s, y’s and z’s use Twitter as some kind of promotional machine for ‘Arts’ events? Because this was the most efficient way to draw the attention? I doubted. To change people’s mind? I didn’t think Twitter was the appropriate medium for that. To persuade people to do something like going to some place to see something, choosing a winner of a competition, visiting a website, buying a ticket for a show? None of these suggestions did answer my question. I did not want to understand the purposes of the x’s, y’s or z’s. I wanted to understand the surprising fact that the arts community used twitter for marketing reasons. I decided that I would not touch the port before I had found a reasonable answer.

And you know what? It worked. Out of my yearning mind came the answer that the x’s, y’s and z’s of the arts community did what they did because they wanted to do what every other x’s, y’s or z’s of the arts community did.

Satisfied with that answer I enjoyed a glass of port. Thanks to Twitter, everyone behaved like everyone else. Everybody was equal. Every tweet was processed in the same way. Each tweet about art was like a grain of sand. Together these grains formed a mass, a heap, a sand dune. Going deeper into the analogy, I suddenly understood what the consequences of this state of affairs might be. The changes of position of the grains of sand forming the dune were not coordinated. Yet, these changes not only had an impact on the overall shape and the position of the hill, but also on its very existence. I nearly choked in a sip of port. On my mental horizon loomed the apocalyptic vision of the future of the arts: an arid, featureless area covered with grains of sameness, from which the creative mind only escaped by believing in life after death.