What is this? From this close in, it seems as meaningless as a bunch of Tweets on Twitter.
You have to back away to understand this canvas painted by Georges Seurat in 1889. Seurat was a pointillist. He believed in the power of dots of primary color to create secondary colors in the viewer’s imagination. You’ve undoubtedly seen posters of Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte:
It took Seurat two years to paint the dots of pure color in that one. You can see the original at the Art Institute of Chicago; I’ve made the pilgrimage. But now I’m stalling for time because I wanted the context of the dots from the top to appear below the fold.
Twitter is like pointillism. Up close it can be meaningless. Back away and a pattern emerges. Your subconscious shapes an image of the person from the Tweets. The whole is a phase change from the sum of the parts.
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This is becoming a popular analogy for Twitter and I think it’s quite accurate, although Twitter also spreads the dots out over time: it’s like watching a pointillist painting as it’s being painted. It’s a big reason why it is hard for people to understand the value of Twitter until they’ve experienced it for a while. I think you need to actively participate for a week or so to have enough dots to see the picture.
Life, too, is like pointillism.
As an artist and a twitterer, I can really appreciate this perspective. Thank you for a lovely post! and thanks to @jeanlucr for bringing it to my notice.
This is an excellent analogy and visual for thinking about and describing Twitter – thank you Jay. It strikes me that with some of the offshoot applications like http://search.twitter.com/ you can even gaze at a particular portion of the “twitter painting” so to speak, a subset of the larger conversation and yet still at a enough distance to see patterns emerge.
I love this. Thanks. Also extend this to looking at stream from twitter search and looking for patterns.
This is a useful metaphor. Thanks for describing it more fully. I’d suggest that while the pointilist cumulative power enables an intelligible image to appear, it is motivated. The fact that we have a diverse set of metaphors to describe Twitter, I think, lends credence to a comparison with the Rorschach Test (inkblot), which is unmotivated. Where the former falls down, of course, is that the inkblot is an amorphous or homogenized picture, lacking the communicative power of the dot mob.
Maybe a pointilist rorschach?
bob
I meant latter where I said former. Whoops.
bob
I’m an artist and student of visual arts and was drawn here in search of Seurat images. This is an interesting analogy about the overarching significance of twittering. It made briefly consider signing up…