Comments on: The points of Tweets

By: twitter hater

twitter hater — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:10:14 +0000

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…

By: EDITing in the Dark » Throwing around Bricks… in the dark… are there any glass houses?

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:31:35 +0000

[...] individuals, you can see a “grand narrative” emerge from the myriad of points ala pointillism. This seems to have certainly been happening with the Canadian and US elections. A question gets [...]

By: bob ashley

bob ashley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:40:57 +0000

I meant latter where I said former. Whoops.

bob

By: bob ashley

bob ashley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:40:07 +0000

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

By: Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:46:34 +0000

I love this. Thanks. Also extend this to looking at stream from twitter search and looking for patterns.

By: LaDonna Coy

LaDonna Coy — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:22:54 +0000

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.

By: Deepa

Deepa — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:16:14 +0000

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.

By: Writer2

Writer2 — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:05:35 +0000

Life, too, is like pointillism.

By: John Hathaway

John Hathaway — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:55:39 +0000

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.