Embedded Community In Imagined Communities

This paper will analyze the structure, customization, and user interactivity of Twitter to argue that it creates a new kind of imagined community, one whose magnitude is expanded and whose constituents have their individual voices and identities amplified and made more palpable. To do so, I will place Tara McPherson’s argument on the phenomenology of web surfing in Reload: Liveliness, Mobility and the Web in relation to Benedict Anderson’s view of the nation as an imagined community in Imagined Communities. McPherson identifies three sensations that users experience when on the Internet: volitional mobility, the impression of movement across the web that is tied to the immediacy of the computer’s response to the user’s actions and the user’s

I will look at how these three sensations are evoked on Twitter and how they foster a communal consciousness that is both similar and different from the one Anderson claims is created by the newspaper, in which the reader knows that she is part of a community of people, most of whom she does not personally engage with, doing the same thing at the same time.

The sensation of volitional mobility is created on Twitter through the website’s “timeline,” in which the user can read and “move” through the most recent tweets published by the accounts that she follows. This movement is literal, with the user scrolling up and down the homepage with her keyboard or trackpad, and slightly limited because of Twitter’s structure. Tweets on the timeline are all stacked on top of each other in a single column, which restricts the user to vertical movement. Despite this compression of space, the user still feels a sense of agency over her motion because she is able to

Closely related to volitional mobility, the sensation of scan-and-search is created by the sidebar of links to “trending topics,” where all tweets that contain the same “hashtag” are compiled on one page. These trending topics usually refer to important events or issues that compel the user to click on them so she won’t “[miss] the next experience or the next piece of data” (464). Trending topics thus function in a similar way to newspapers, providing information on significant events to a certain demographic. However, while newspapers only target a limited geographical community, hashtags congregate tweets from over the world and can be viewed by anyone anywhere, creating a much larger community of users that extends beyond national borders. The phenomenology of web surfing thus cultivates a communal consciousness that “[moves] back and forth through history and geography,” linking different moments in time and different locations, whereas the newspaper is restricted in both (McPherson