Following Searle on Twitter Following Searle on Twitter How Words Create Digital Institutions Adam Hodgkin Th e University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Th e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Th e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by Th e University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2017. Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43821- 4 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43835- 1 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226438351.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hodgkin, Adam, author. Title: Following Searle on Twitter : how words create digital institutions / Adam Hodgkin. Description: Chicago ; London : Th e University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes  bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2016034777 | ISBN 9780226438214 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226438351 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Twitter. | Social networks. | Searle, John R. Classifi cation: LCC HM743.T95 H644 2017 | DDC 302.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034777 Th is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Preface vii 1 Philosophical Tweets 1 2 What Twitter Really Is 20 3 “Following” Makes Twitter’s Social Structure 43 4 “Almost Everything You See Today in Twitter Was Invented by Our Users” 63 5 Referential Complications 88 6 Twitter’s Content and Twitter’s Context 98 7 Twitter’s Constitution and Twitter’s Shape 114 8 Digital Institutions 125 9 Digital Language 140 10 A Natural History of Digital Institutions 158 11 Since We Make Th ese Digital Institutions . . . 173 Notes 187 Index 195 Preface Th is book had an accidental birth, which may be of some interest to a reader who might need some context before investing fi ve or seven hours of precious time in traveling through it. Th e authorial thread began in 2011, when I read a review of a philosophy monograph, then read the book under review, then started to write something—an essay or two, perhaps some material for some blogs—which gradually over a period of two years shaped into this book. Th e review that started me off was by Geoff rey Hawthorn in the London Review of Books.1 It had the nicely self- referential headline “Th is Is a Book Review,” and it was a thoughtful and broadly favorable account of John Searle’s Making the Social World: Th e Structure of Human Civilization.2 Th e self- referential head- line was a playful acknowledgment of Searle’s ambitious thesis that much so- cial action and all institutional structure are generated by speech acts, which make things happen by saying what they say, since the saying is a part of the doing or the making. Our declarative use of language makes institutions and pushes them along. I had read some of Searle’s work before, and had even studied his fi rst book, Speech Acts, in the early 1970s. I have a memory of hearing him give an energetic talk in Oxford when I was an undergraduate. In the intervening years I read one or two of his books, but I was not then a Searle fan as I am now. Something in Hawthorn’s review made me think that this could be an im- portant book and I promptly bought a copy. Nor was I disappointed. Searle’s book is not an easy read, because he has a highly ambitious argument that is based on a very wide- ranging foundation in the philosophy of action, epis- temology, ontology, and the philosophy of language. Th ere is quite a lot that you “buy into” when you take Searle on board. He covers a lot of ground in short order. Th e book is an example of a kind of systematic theory that is not viii Preface in fashion in contemporary Anglo- American analytic philosophy. He does not have a modest goal—as can be seen from his subtitle, Th e Structure of Hu- man Civilization. But who said philosophy should not be ambitious? Th e book fascinated me and caught me, and it perhaps accidentally re- directed me to the writing of this book, because I had for some time been thinking about Twitter and the way in which this new digital form of writing was related to, but disruptive of, our traditional forms of reading and writing. For most of my working life (for all my working life, once I stopped being a philosophy editor) I have been involved in digital publishing—and been convinced that we are at the beginning of something very diff erent from, but following on from, traditional print publishing, traditional print reading and writing. Th e innovative potential of digital technologies has been my métier. Reading Searle’s book suggested that it should be possible to develop a philosophical account of the way in which digital technologies are emerg- ing, since they are emerging by building new sorts of institutions. In Searle’s book, traditional institutions of nineteenth- and twentieth- century Western culture are the primary focus: “governments, families, cocktail parties, sum- mer vacations, trade unions, baseball games and passports” are his typical quarry.3 But digital institutions appear to be prime candidates for analysis via what he calls Status Function Declarations. With this thought, it occurred to me that it would be useful to employ the framework that Searle identifi es to demonstrate the way digital language works in digital institutions. Our lan- guage with its “markup” allows us to give status and function to fragments of text that work both as code for the program and as language for us. Perhaps our systems of markup are really forms of Status Function Declaration, in which elements of text are given a particular performative role that can be recognized by digital systems. I was further encouraged in this thought when I noticed that Searle had been experimenting with Twitter when he wrote the book (or perhaps while he was fi nishing it). Perhaps he had done so because he had seen that Twitter was an almost perfect laboratory for the study of speech acts and for testing some of his points about declarative action and the construction of institutions. For some months I had been playing with vari- ous metaphors that are suggested when we try to understand Twitter and its function: Twitter as a modern, digital re- creation of the network of acquain- tance maintained by business cards; Twitter as a system of open, shareable notebooks and digital commonplace books; Twitter as the conversational space for a marketplace in ideas, the agora or forum for the exchange of news and opinions in our digital culture. A powerful metaphor in its growth has been Twitter as an agora or a town square, but Twitter has borrowed meta- phors and language practices from many previous forms of language use. Preface ix Twitter seems to be a good template for studying language- made institutions, since that is pretty clearly what it is. Th e idea of writing a book using Searle and his theories to explore the Twitter institution was given a further and decisive, but again accidental, twist when in the late summer of 2012 I heard him give an invited lecture to the Modena “festival fi losofi a.” Searle gave a fi ft y- minute presentation that was an engaging summary of his book, and it was listened to attentively by an audience of over fi ve hundred. In Italy, at least, the philosophical basis of institutional structure seems to be a matter of broad intellectual interest. Th at is a short account of how Following Searle on Twitter came to be writ- ten, and the principal steps in this authorial reconstruction are steps in our traditional use of recorded language: a review, a book, a book about a book, a lecture and its reception via a translation, etc. Is there something in this pat- tern that is aptly reminiscent of the way in which through Twitter we reply to messages, we retweet the remarks and the thoughts of our peers, and we learn to reply with interest? In thinking through these topics it has seemed to me that I am very oft en treading in Searle’s footsteps as one might indeed follow his tweets. Th e use of digital language through Twitter is not, aft er all, so diff erent from the language of print as deployed in reviews, treatises, and monographs. Th ere should be no “either/or” between print and digital, nei- ther in reading nor in research. Much of the writing of the book was a matter of using newer digital tools, including web- based access to digital events and, in plenty of cases, the historical record in its primary digital form, as recorded and archived in tweets, blogs, and web pages. So there might be a fuller story to be told about the writing of this book, since in the age of Twitter and Face- book much of our reading of works that are still in print is surrounded by digital research and digital reading to the same ends. Just one more thought about books and publishing, which may have some underlying relevance to my theme: as noted, some of the sources that I have used for this book are digital resources, such as videos from YouTube, iTunes, Vimeo, etc., and blogs and press reports taken from the web, especially con- temporary reports from Twitter in its early years. Naturally Twitter too has furnished much direct material through its tweets and the web pages that explain its services and defi ne its policies. Th ese sources are not the kind that fall naturally into the bibliographic formats that traditional book publishing supports. I have also used and sometimes cite published books and articles. Many conventional publishers are trying to “normalize” digital resources to the house styles that they impose on the citations of printed books and ar- ticles in the works that they publish. I think this is a mistake, since it invari- ably means presenting the digital reference in a format that is not native to