Is Tweeting for Action Enough?
Participatory and interventionist practices are often a response to economic crisis and duress. Young architects look for new ways of action, expanding their actions beyond disciplinary boundaries, and funding often takes on alternative, more complex routes. This new field of operation complicates the task of communication, itself in flux due to the proliferation of paper and digital publishing platforms, exhibitions, blogs, and social networks. What are the different roles of these platforms, and how can they potentially interrelate in order to generate critical thinking and create new platforms for debate? How can we maximize their advantages to create a narrative for these practices without simplifying or trivializing their operations?
platforms like twitter are great for pointing you towards things, gathering strands and conversations through hashtagging, and connecting large networks of people. ultimately the critical content, the analysis, the longer reflections happen elsewhere–but you get to it through a tweet, or a post. there’s something wonderfully minimal about having to condense your critique to a sentence, and inflecting someone’s reading by framing it through the right wording.
additionally–“tweeting for action” suggests that the act of communication itself is an endorsement and a form of activism. sometimes, but the task of the critic–if this is what we’re talking about here–is to distance herself from the object enough to be able to study its contradictions, and to navigate the tension between critical analysis and activism.
In my opinion, one of the most interesting subject of this kind of tools, like twitter, blogging and other social networks is also the feeling of “pertinence”. When you feel that you are part of a community, then engaging in action is easier… then, the action of passing from the digital world to the physical one, becomes part of the same philosophy.
The use of digital forums to discuss and generate ideas is really powerful, but we need to understand that the digital and the physical are not different worlds. They are just layers of the same community in which we live in.