Table Of ContentFollowing 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
