Following Searle on Twitter: How Words Create Digital Institutions

Following Searle on Twitter

Following Searle on Twitter

How Words Create Digital Institutions

Adam Hodgkin

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The 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 : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016034777 | ISBN 9780226438214 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226438351 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Twitter. | Social networks. | Searle, John R.

Classification: LCCHM743.T95 H644 2017 | DDC 302.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034777

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

1  Philosophical Tweets

2  What Twitter Really Is

3  Following Makes Twitter’s Social Structure

4  Almost Everything You See Today in Twitter Was Invented by Our Users

5  Referential Complications

6  Twitter’s Content and Twitter’s Context

7  Twitter’s Constitution and Twitter’s Shape

8  Digital Institutions

9  Digital Language

10  A Natural History of Digital Institutions

11  Since We Make These Digital Institutions . . .

Notes

Index

Preface

This book had an accidental birth, which may be of some interest to a reader who might need some context before investing five or seven hours of precious time in traveling through it. The 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. The review that started me off was by Geoffrey Hawthorn in the London Review of Books.¹ It had the nicely self-referential headline This Is a Book Review, and it was a thoughtful and broadly favorable account of John Searle’s Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization.² The self-referential headline was a playful acknowledgment of Searle’s ambitious thesis that much social 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 first 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 important 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, epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of language. There is quite a lot that you buy into when you take Searle on board. He covers a lot of ground in short order. The book is an example of a kind of systematic theory that is not in fashion in contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy. He does not have a modest goal—as can be seen from his subtitle, The Structure of Human Civilization. But who said philosophy should not be ambitious?

The book fascinated me and caught me, and it perhaps accidentally redirected 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 different from, but following on from, traditional print publishing, traditional print reading and writing. The 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 emerging, 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, summer 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 identifies to demonstrate the way digital language works in digital institutions. Our language 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 finishing 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 various metaphors that are suggested when we try to understand Twitter and its function: Twitter as a modern, digital re-creation of the network of acquaintance 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 metaphors and language practices from many previous forms of language use. Twitter seems to be a good template for studying language-made institutions, since that is pretty clearly what it is.

The 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 filosofia." Searle gave a fifty-minute presentation that was an engaging summary of his book, and it was listened to attentively by an audience of over five hundred. In Italy, at least, the philosophical basis of institutional structure seems to be a matter of broad intellectual interest.

That is a short account of how Following Searle on Twitter came to be written, 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 pattern 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 often treading in Searle’s footsteps as one might indeed follow his tweets. The use of digital language through Twitter is not, after all, so different from the language of print as deployed in reviews, treatises, and monographs. There should be no either/or between print and digital, neither 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 Facebook 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 contemporary 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 define its policies. These 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 articles in the works that they publish. I think this is a mistake, since it invariably means presenting the digital reference in a format that is not native to the digital resource. Since publishers have different house styles, it introduces needless variety and inconsistencies into a field that is already confusingly various. But it is also a mistake in that we need to be looking forward toward tools and solutions that will be most useful as more of our print heritage becomes digital. So we should be searching for ways of making traditional bibliographic references, even though they appear in printed books, more reliable and more interoperable in a world of digital documents and databased texts.

The mistake of translating digital references into formats normalized for a printed house style is compounded when it makes those references less useful in their digital context, because in most cases the house style is not one that supports the immediate digital function, and I hope that today’s printed books will before too long become a useful part of tomorrow’s digital library. Above all, it is not useful to the reader of a digital document if the citation or reference does not link, since digital resources should be cited in a format in which it is easy for the reader to click on the resource, in context, if she wishes to investigate the source or travel to its location. As a solution to this problem, digital resources in this book are cited in a format that is immediately clickable, or at least accessible through cut-and-paste. The reader who reads the book in the print format or via ebook software and at the same time wishes to consult resources mentioned in the book should avail herself of a Twitter account, FollowingSearle@twitter (https://twitter.com/FollowingSearle), which displays all the references and URLs used in the book. Printed works and documents are cited via endnotes in the traditional format. No effort has been made to normalize web addresses or Twitter URLs to a bibliographic (print) standard form, but such references are formatted in such a way, principally with underlines, that it should be obvious that they are indeed clickable references. Since many of the web citations occur simply in the flow of the text, where the inclusion of a full web address would be disruptive, the link is included as an endnote. I hope that the canonical form in which books are published or republished electronically or digitally in five, ten, or fifteen years’ time will favor and support the long-established and noble tradition in which a proper book has pages, fixed lines, and a settled design that suits the work in question.

In the writing of this book, I have been greatly helped by the advice, comments, and encouragement of Marise Cremona, Catherine Hodgkin, Christopher Hodgkin, and Professors Barry Smith, Dennis Patterson, Brian McGuinness, Oliver Leaman, Philip Schlesinger, and Simon Blackburn. Barry Smith gave me particular encouragement with some very helpful and detailed comments on an early draft and with further suggestions at a later stage. In revising the typescript I have had additional help from three readers from the University of Chicago Press, from Rani Lill Anjum, Bob Stein, Jim Hanas, Daryl Rayner, Tim Bruce, and two other readers who sent me comments via SocialBook. The Chicago editor Christopher Rhodes was encouraging, perceptive, and very courteous in his dealings with me. It is a great sadness that he backed the book and pushed me to finish it but was not able to read the final draft, sending me his last encouragement shortly after having learned of his own fatal illness. Such straightforward support was most helpful. I hope that Chris would have been pleased by the outcome. Once the final version had been sent to the Press, I had the benefit of advice from Gina Wadas and Christie Henry and thoughtful editing from Pam Bruton.

I have had many detailed improvements and suggestions, editorial and substantive, from Marise Cremona and Angela Blackburn. I have learned from and laughed with the tweets of @amac, @amonck, @AngelLamuno, @arhomberg, @BarackObama, @BenedictEvans, @benjohncock, @bethaleh, @biz, @brainpicker, @ckyenge, @counternotions, @daringfireball, @dom, @DonLinn, @ev, @exacteditions, @florian, @Floridi, @gilbertharman, @GuyLongworth, @Jack, @jafurtado, @jamesattlee, @JeffJarvis, @JenHoward, @jillmwo, @JohnRSearle, @JulietaLionetti, @lemasabachthani, @lorcanD, @marcoarment, @mathewi, @michaelbhaskar, @mikecane, @MissCellany, @muirgray, @naypinya, @nuttyxander, @pablod, @philosophybites, @pressfuturist, @ranilillanjum, @Raymodraco, @ReallyVirtual, @ronmartinez, @samatlounge, @samuellevie, @SaskiaSassen, @tcarmody, @timberners_lee, @timcrane102, @timoreilly, @xpectro, and many others whom I follow on Twitter (at https://twitter.com/adamhodgkin).

But just as we are all responsible for our own tweets, so I take sole responsibility for the errors and mistakes that remain and may even have been repeated or retweeted in this work.

1

Philosophical Tweets

Philosophy and Twitter

The Services that Twitter provides are always evolving and the form and nature of the Services that Twitter provides may change from time to time without prior notice to you.¹

Today philosophy has more to tell us about Twitter than Twitter has to say about philosophy. But Twitter is growing and changing and one cannot exclude the possibility that interesting philosophy will be done with Twitter. There have been some philosophical tweets and there will be more. Nor should we make the mistake of thinking that Twitter is irredeemably trivial or only for small thoughts just because, as we all know, no utterance in Twitter can be more than 140 characters. Thoughts can be short and deep, and short sentences can express profound truths. Just because a great deal of Twitter, most of what is said in Twitter, is undeniably trivial and intentionally ephemeral, we should not assume that Twitter is trivial. Twitter has important moments.

Even if Twitter were thought to be irredeemably trivial and all tweets were taken to be of marginal and ephemeral interest, there would still be some philosophical interest in Twitter. In the first place, Twitter has shown that a new form of language use can take hold of all the world’s cultures very quickly and that a distinctive and purely electronic form of digital writing and reading can be used by hundreds of millions of ordinary people. Philosophers have reason to be interested in the way that we use language, and Twitter is now a prevalent and significantly new way of using our language and expressing our intentions and interests. It is a prime example of our digital use of language.

In the second place, Twitter deserves more philosophical and sociological attention because it is an example of a new kind of institution, a digital institution that is being constructed by its users interacting with the software and databases designed by inventive entrepreneurs and mission-driven digital activists. There are many other new institutions that share with Twitter the fact that they are almost entirely digital (Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Uber being obvious examples). These new and in many cases enormous institutions have grown so fast and furiously because they are essentially digital. They could not have grown at light speed if they had required regulatory approval or more than click-through consent. They launch with beta versions and the beta version may be more than good enough. They innovate by experimenting, tapping user feedback, and making public mistakes, quickly corrected. They eschew plant and lease before they buy. They prefer to outsource and they insist on scaling. They build audience before they build value, and they build value before they charge for profit. They do not require five-year spreadsheets, planning permissions, or tariff agreements; and their mode of operation works mostly beneath the radar of established laws and state control. They evade or jump over borders. They go global by being first to market and by dominating a space. They engender new forms of commerce and tend to avoid conventional forms of investment and management. They breed new forms of relationship and friendship. They track their users and build identities. These institutions appear to us to be free, but in many cases they are selling the attention and the recorded preferences of their users, so they may be more systematic, more invasive, and less free than they appear at first sight. They subvert privacy and harvest customer data.

Twitter, the corporation, does, of course, own some server farms and has multiyear leases on midsized office buildings in California and elsewhere, but it is a shining example of the way in which a digital institution can be constructed in the twenty-first century and become an elaborate social structure simply through the use of language, a language whose shape and pattern the Twitter software system subtly manages and controls. Twitter has made nothing physical, it has paid little in sales taxes, there is no manufacturing plant, it has no stocks or warehouses, and if it disappeared tomorrow, it would leave nothing but an amazingly large amount of recorded language, billions of short texts, as its contribution to world history. And those texts would not be very visible, and even less audible. Twitter has exploded through the use of remarkably little plant or physical structure; almost everything that matters about Twitter reduces to the ways in which its users and its programmers use the language that Twitter channels and enables. As we shall see, Twitter’s social structure and its changing institutional shape can be understood and effectively explained once we see how Twitter is built and evolves through the language of its users.

Philosophers are interested in the ways in which we use language, and as we shall see, some contemporary philosophical notions, in places quite technical and abstract, shed a direct explanatory light on the ways in which Twitter works, and especially on the ways in which Twitter has become a new form of communicative engagement. For it is readily apparent to any serious user of Twitter that it is a system of communication and language use that is unusually innovative and unlike what has gone before and, at the same time, curiously imitative of earlier, nondigital language systems. For this reason, Twitter is a good domain in which to explore and test some philosophical theories of language.

The principal thesis of this book is that the speech act theories of J. L. Austin and John Searle offer us ways of understanding Twitter. Speech act theory helps to explain the way in which Twitter membership arises: we execute some very specific linguistic acts when we join Twitter. Speech act theory also helps to explain the ways in which members of Twitter are related to each other, especially through the institutional-digital act of following. And finally, Twitter messages are all, each and every one of them, individual speech acts, and the institution of Twitter is constructed from Status Function Declarations (also known as tweets) that brick by brick are making before our eyes a new kind of digital institution, deep in content, individuality, system, and scale. Some basic insights from contemporary philosophy can help us to get a better grip on what Twitter is becoming. The practical application of these contemporary philosophical theories to Twitter is intriguing and surprising, but the applicability of these theories may also lead us to reflections on the philosophical theories.

John Searle and J. L. Austin

When I say before the registrar or altar, &c., I do, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it.

What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or for short a performative.²

John Searle is one of America’s most distinguished and influential philosophers. He has taught for fifty years at the University of California at Berkeley. For all that time he has been developing a theory of speech acts, an approach to the philosophy of language through which our uses of language are viewed as ways of doing. Californian by adoption, Searle’s philosophical roots are in Oxford in the 1950s, where he was a student of the then leading figure in the Oxford school, J. L. Austin. Austin pioneered the linguistic approach to philosophy, sometimes called ordinary language philosophy, and outlined a theory of speech acts, which subsequently became Searle’s territory. In the twenty years following Austin’s premature death in 1960, Searle was very active in fleshing out an Austin-type approach to the philosophy of language that became influential with linguists and psychologists and also had considerable impact on Continental philosophers (especially the French) who were not otherwise in sympathy with analytic, Anglo-Saxon philosophy as pursued by Austin, Searle, and others. In the second half of his career, Searle has paid much more attention to the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action, and, in the last decade, a philosophy of society and culture that gives prominence to the way in which language is used to form and shape institutions. If one looks at Searle’s philosophical trajectory, it is clear that he has covered a lot of ground. Starting from an apparently narrow theory on the borderlands between philosophy and linguistics, he has moved rapidly over many other philosophical topics and fields in working toward a grand view of the role of language in thought, action, society, and culture. Searle has not at all abandoned his core starting point in the theory of speech acts; for his philosophical journey toward a big theory about what institutions are is really an elaboration of the original insight that our use of language is profoundly social. Much of this is grounded in the Austinian theory of speech acts.

Austin was a brilliant man with a very English sense of humor and a philosophical approach highly typical of Oxford at that time. The title of his first book, Sense and Sensibilia, makes a joking allusion to his near namesake Jane Austen, and he was Austen-like in enjoying detail, precision, qualification, mockery, indirection, and subtlety. His second book, How to Do Things with Words, captures in its brilliant title the essence of his theoretical position: language for Austin was a way to do things, of course, with words.

We can quickly get our arms round the speech act idea if we oversimplify. The oversimplification is that the speech act approach to the philosophy of language was reacting to an earlier consensus that humans use language the way scientists use scientific theories or explorers use maps. Before the idea of speech acts caught on, philosophers of language were interested only in a picture, or a model, of language, thought, and meaning in which the human use of language was primarily about making statements, establishing propositions, proving theories, exploring meanings, and establishing truth. This was as though language was really all about describing or picturing the world in much the same way as Google Maps describes the world, mapping even the smallest geographical feature, topographical detail, satellite view, and street scene, from an infinitely variable scale of resolution. Many philosophical theories of language in the twentieth century took it as obvious that the big issues in the philosophy of language were problems about the way in which we can use language to describe the world, to name objects or refer to them, to express truths and to verify or prove them. According to this cartographic or pictographic model of the way language relates to the world, there is an underlying reality that language describes, on which we superimpose multiple layers of language that allow us to view and navigate the spatiotemporal universe through an enormously comprehensive and extensible set of representations of the underlying reality. Anglo-Saxon philosophers in the mid-twentieth century seemed to be completely preoccupied with language as a way of stocktaking or auditing innumerable truths or facts either about the world or constructed from our experience. It is as if the function of human language were to build a set of theories or to weave a descriptive carpet by means of which meaning, truth, and objective reality would correspond and interact. Austin, in his precise, conventional, painstaking, but disruptive way, punctured this picture. Language is not like this, and Austin’s book is full of subtle points on the ways in which our language use enacts various ends and may run into various mishaps and infelicities. Austin was very interested in the ways that language might not work well for us because it does not work as it is expected or intended to do. Yet it can also work very well for us, since we are always doing things with words, and our use of language—to promise, threaten, abuse, assign, judge, define, mollify, warn, prove, reclaim, pretend, etc.—shows us that language can change the world as much as it can be used to describe the world. Austin was well versed in the mainstream interests in language as a descriptive and truth-oriented system; before he wrote his own books, he produced a translation of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic,³ which is one of the earliest and deepest texts in analytic linguistic philosophy. But he was considerably more interested in the way in which we use language to do things. Austin did not at all reject the traditional thrust of the philosophy of language, nor has Searle, but they have both chosen to focus on the questions of how we do, in practice, use language to make things happen.⁴

Philosophers also have their own speech acts. They have their characteristic linguistic tics and foibles. Most philosophers are very adept with language and with their conversational presence. They do things with words philosophically by lecturing, by questioning and answering, by writing papers for specialist academic periodicals, by reading and refereeing the papers of others, by marking exams and examining