FCJ-190 Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives GNU social, Quitter, rstat.us, and Twister

Robert W. Gehl The University of Utah Introduction: Universalised Twitter Meets Its Alternatives Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) explores the moments when a universalised practice (for example, global capitalism) gets a grip on a local context (for example, in an Indonesian rain forest). When the slippery universal, which in some circles might be lauded as ‘frictionless’ (as in ‘frictionless capitalism’), meets local contexts, frictions occur. Friction traces the move from the desire for frictionless ideals to its awkward and messy contact with situated realities. Friction is resistance, but it is also productive and necessary for any energetic system. Taking up this idea, this paper traces the friction between Twitter and Twitter alternatives. In this sense, Twitter is situated as ‘universalised’ (Koopman, 2013: 19), which is to say that it is now an idealised form of online communication. Twitter has established a format of online communication—microblogging—that is […]