Of poets and robots. Twitter bots as everyday literature
Élika Ortega
elikaortega.net
@elikaortega
Twitter folks?
raise your hand!
Twitter's great
Arab Spring
Occupy movements all over the world
Natural dissasters
Right?
Hate speech and verbal abuse are not uncommon
A lot of what we don't want to see online
Bots are creative uses of Twitter that benefit from the platforms affordances and enrich it
What is a Twitter Bot?
- Automated Twitter account
- A robot made of code
- Genre of Electronic Literature
"Bender Rodriguez" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bender_Rodriguez.png#/media/File:Bender_Rodriguez.png
Twitter bots function through an API
There are
potentially endless
kinds of
Twitter bots
Bots work independently or dependently
of Twitter input
(Tully Hansen's "Taxonomy of Twitter Bots")
Some Twitter bots you may be familiar with (and NOT like):
- Spam bots
- Noise bots (they're not always bots)
- Brand/advertising bots
Considering Twitter's bad reputation why should we care?
Bots are a literary genre that can only exist now and due to specific media affordances
Expressive Twitter Bots
- Poetic,
- Visual,
- Comical,
- Satiric
- Encyclopedic,
- etc...
Poetic
@HaikuD2 by John Burger
@pentametron by Ranjit Bhatnagar
Visual
@tiny_star_fields by katie rose
@infinitedesserts by @getdizzzy
Comical
@TwoHeadlines y Darius Kazemi
@wtf_is_lfk by Brian Rosenblum
Satiric
@ClearCongress by Zach Whalen
@StudiesBot by Mark Sample
Encyclopedic
@everycolorbot by @vogon
@everyword by A. Parrish
Bots usually don't make sense...
And they don't have to.
Part of the point of bots is to make sense (not just linguistic sense) out of what they generate
Remediate dynamics of cut-up and experimental art