Through discussions surrounding the historic use of the internet as a means of distributing information, and more specifically Social Media and its generation of memetic subcultures, I have chosen to select Twitter as my Media of exploration.

Social Media is a public space, that permits us to form communities and form performances of identity. Many times, these common groups and public faces are formed through humour, typically through ‘memes’ with relatable thoughts and threads, or through a shared vocabulary of words and phrases, we gravitate towards pages/people on these platforms that we see ourselves in, and whose phraseology we understand to be our own.

In the first instance, it was this vocabulary of relatability that interested me, as often it's only a matter of a few small language tweaks that will separate two tweets with the same ‘relatable content’, and will determine a ‘Hit Tweet’ from one with no engagement whatsoever. These tweaks in language, syntax, length of tweet, etc are all designed to exploit the nature of Twitter’s algorithm. The algorithm being a set of internal calculations within the Twitter App that determines what tweets are ‘seen’ by users, and determines the success of a tweet based on a multitude of factors. Through this, I was also influenced by the motivations of Trevor Paglen’s work, an artist who uses his art to expose to us the invisible systems of surveillance and influence that exist within the technology of the 21st Century, to make visible to us civilians what we are not meant to see or understand. Additionally, Artist Erica Scourti, who uses her smartphone’s predictive text feature to reveal herself to her audience through what her phone has learned about her syntax, phraseology and language.

This lead me to consider how I reveal myself, to myself, through the language of Twitter. I wanted to better understand what I gravitate towards and relate to on Twitter, specifically the language and themes of the content I consume. I do not tweet, I use Twitter primarily as a means of entertainment, and I catalogue tweets that specifically make me laugh in my ‘Liked’ tweets section on my profile, a place I return to when I need a laugh. As such, I collected the text of every tweet in my ‘Liked’ tweet section (approx. 1300), a total of 10 years of my online susceptibilities, and condensed them into a large block of continuous text (2641 words). I then put this text block into a paragraph randomiser, at which point I would (quite arduously) select fragments of phrases / sentences that I deemed to be funny / evocative / interesting according to my own sensibilities. In this way, I was trying to lean into the personal nature of this process, the words are not my own, but they feel as if they are, the phrases were not generated by me, but they were ‘curated’ by me, creating a vocabulary and phraseology that embody my sense of humour and the objects of my interest, and reveal them to myself. As a final, additional, element to this revelatory process, I chose to take these bold self-proclamations and re-platform them by placing them back into the world and public view.