The Tweet Life: Philosophical Reflections
on the Age of Ephemera
As the year came to a close, Buzzfeed.com produced a list of the
“Funniest Celebrity Tweets of 2011.5,1 The tweets themselves were unequal to
the task: some referred to events that were already receding in collective
memory, while others were notable more for who wrote them than for their
content.2 There is a whiff of “fad” about Twitter, even though it is a technology
of communication like email or, before that, the telephone. We did not expect
the telephone to be superseded—consider how much money was expended in
the construction of our telephone infrastructure—nor did we expect email to
become so quickly passe. They did not seem like fads. Even the web page, that
repository of information that has largely replaced the phonebook and the
librarian, seems dated in comparison to the social network. We live now in a
constellation of twinkling messages—tweets, texts, Facebook updates, the
“feed”—that come and go and are quickly replaced.
Let us suggest a name for these new technologies. Strictly speaking,
tweets are “ephemera.” So are Facebook status updates, blog posts, instant
messages, streaming movies, apps, downloaded songs—in short, so much of our
media, our communication, our entertainment, and our lives. In a technical
sense—in the sense in which the word is used in archives, for example—the
word “ephemera” refers to pamphlets, brochures, flyers, signs, or any of the
kinds of things which, despite containing potentially useful information, are
unlikely to be saved. Such things exhibit a shared set of attributes: they are easy
to make, easy to exchange, and easy to copy. They are anxious for attention—
they are brief, easily digestible, and urgent. There is a pejorative ring to the
word “ephemera” which is probably unwarranted. Information conveyed by
ephemera is hardly trivial in its moment—a flyer announces your favorite local
band’s next show, for instance—but it seems trivial afterwards. Ephemera are
consumed eagerly, and then they are discarded; the sense we have is that we can
always get more, or that the information is already out of date. There is a logic
to ephemera—they are appropriate to their purpose. They now so characterize
our communicative behaviors, though, that we have to wonder whether they are
appropriate to every purpose, or if we are not bending our purposes to meet the
logic of the new technologies.
Neil Postman warns that when a new technology comes into a culture
we do not, a few years later, find the same culture plus the new technology. We
find a new culture.3 It is not the case that new technologies are neutral with
respect to our expectations of ourselves and of others.4 The washing machine did
not free housewives from odious hours of clothes-washing—it changed how
clean we expected our clothes, and the clothes of others, to be. The 747 did not
make travel more comfortable for the occasional trans-Pacific traveler—it made
trans-Pacific travel a commonplace, even a sort of duty: Bali is now a place one