What is a Twitter Bot?

• Automated Twitter account
• Software application that posts content to Twitter, automatically either on a schedule or responding to specific conditions,
• Genre of Electronic Literature

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There are

potentially endless

kinds of

Twitter bots

"every figure of speech... and practically every linguistic structure... every work of literature, every writer’s body of work, every literary movement, national literature...every data stream... Social interactions, conversations, calls and responses, platform-defined  interactions (retweets, favorites, and so on) are all ready to be codified into algorithms and explored via bot."

(Leonardo Flores "I ❤︎ Bots")

Some Twitter bots you may be familiar with (and NOT like):

• Spam bots
• Noise bots (they're not always bots)
• Brand/advertising bots

Twitter's bad rep.

• Trolls
• Too short to say anything meaningful
• Deformation of language

Why shouyld we care?

Bots are a literary genre that can only exist now and due to specific media affordances

Expressive Twitter Bots

are surreal, absurd, purposeless for the sake of purposelessness...

[have] markers of...absurdism, comical juxtaposition, and an exhaustive sensibility.

(Mark Sample, "A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit")

Taxonomy of Twitter Bots

(Tully Hansen's "Taxonomy of Twitter Bots")

Expressive Twitter Bots

• Poetic,
• Visual,
• Comical,
• Satiric
• Encyclopedic,
• Protest
• etc...

Poetic

@HaikuD2 by John Burger

@pentametron by Ranjit Bhatnagar

Comical

@TwoHeadlines y Darius Kazemi

@wtf_is_lfk by Brian Rosenblum

Visual

@tiny_star_fields by katie rose

@infinitedesserts by @getdizzzy

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

 

Resistance might come from impersonating – Twitter bots unlike most other artworks co-exist with us in a public space

 

Protest

@DroptheIbot by Patrick Hogan and Jorge Rivas 

@NRA_Tally by Mark Sample

Setting aside the formal & trope or topical aspects of Twitter bots...

Is there such a thing as a Latin American Twitter bot?

Questions:

• What counts as Latin American on Twitter?

• What media frames are brought about by Twitter? (creation, publication, audience, cultural tactic)

 

Twitter media (re)frames

• Transnational Silicon Valley-based company
• 77% of non-US Twitter users
• 29 million Latin American Twitter users
• Twitter in Spanish launched in 2009
• Twitter "capitals" are often non English speaking cities

Geographic factors that might have been identitarian markers of national/regional literatures are harder to pinpoint in these cases

https://about.twitter.com/company

Media (re)frames (users)

Internet penetration in Latin America has grown

142% between 2006 and 2014

"La nueva revolución digital: de la Internet del consumo a la Internet de la producción"

Examples to think about these issues

@BabellingBorges

By Matt Schneider

“Each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters” (JLB. The Library of Babel)

Within the affordances of Twitter

• 140 characters at a time
• Every 10 minutes

@HostosBot

By Leonardo Flores

Eugenio María de Hostos (Ciudadano de América)

• Sources from digitized books kept in Biblioteca Digital Miguel de Cervantes
• Markov Chain generator
• Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook
• Circulate Hostos' works in a way that doesn't violate copyright.

@BotCarrión

By Élika Ortega

Ulises Carrión

• Hypotext "The New Art of Making Books" (1975)
• Cut up of manually extracted phrases
• Dissemination of Carrión's work relevant to Media Studies
• Play on his ideas on self-negation.

Is there such a thing as a Latin American Twitter bot?

• Origin or inspiration

• Authorship (of bots?)

• Outlook or target

More productive to think about Twitter bots from these authors' poetic, philosophical, or political points of views

Borges' Infinite Library is actually enacted in many of these bots:

 

 

They are potentially infinite/boundless,

at least in human and machine time, and

 likely in Silicon Valley company time as well

and that's both fascinating and disturbing!

Carrión's New Art of Making Books theorized relevant issues like:

• Writing not dependent on individual genius
• "Books" anchored in their specific time-space conditions
• Specific reading conditions
• "Book" structures beyond text,  where every element adds meaning
• Modes of distribution in flux
• Remix and plagiarism

(I don't know much about)

Hostos

other than his interest in education and travels all over Latin America 

 

 

Of the three bots @HostosBot is perhaps the one more locally situated. Born in Mayagüez (both the person and the bot). The bot continues to be embedded in an educational realm and has strong dissemination objectives.

 

Parting thoughts

Twitter bots are a radically contemporary literary genre

They underscore and relocate the tensions between the global and the local

In this context cultural specificities and differences are reconfigured and fractured

Questions?