Where to begin? Let's start at the top. Right click the image to open it in a new tab or window so that you can zoom in and read along.
Jessi Klein is a comic and a comedy writer who has a twitter account that others follow. The Twitter interface encourages the reader not to 'miss any updates from Jessi Klein' by joining and 'following' what interests 'me.'
Following: Like so many geese imprinted to a passerby.
Jessi Klein, owing to her comedy writing skills, appropriates an oft stated axiom of empowered women that is, itself an empowerment message, that being, "real women have curves." First, it's an assertion of epistemic authority by including a trope of representation, i.e., the adjective 'real.' And I agree that images of women and femininity starting with childhood toys tend toward the skinny, white, and long-legged at the expense of a normal distribution of body types and skin shades. In a media-saturated society the assertion of what is 'real' is a policy-level pinch to wake us up to what is and is not representative of the world at large. We already watch a nightly newscast that creates a representative world of murder, robbery, car crashes, and four-alarm fires. News is about the outliers of everyday occurrence, not about norms, which are themselves repetitive occurrences.
In her tweet Klein has adjusted her empowerment message to read "Real manatees have curves." Why? Because, well, manatees are the rubber chicken of the sea. They're funny, cute, and beautifully elegant floating exemplars of corpulence.
Comedic potential noted, line delivered, laughs had. Well done.
So where do we go from here? A seemingly context-less post initiated by what is unknown, but the post itself invites imitators and respondents.
The first comes as a modulation of the sentence to read "real women ARE curves." And from a gestalt model of human sensory reconstruction I'd agree. Shapes are everything. Illustrators know this and advertisers know this because everyday people tacitly respond to shapes. What is in a butt, a body profile, or cleavage but simply the curvature of lines anyway? Well noted, first respondent. With its emphasis on a 'be' verb, the first response is an appeal to an ontology, that is, an appeal to 'what is.'
Our next respondent defers to another media trope: the artistic exemplar "Positively Rubenesque." This respondent repeats an idiom concerning round people by referring to an early artistic champion of this type of human body, the baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. To say that something is Rubenesque is to both comment upon the shapeliness or buxomness of a body, specifically female, and to give representative authority to Peter Paul Rubens' style of presenting this body on canvas.
Do you see where we're going here?
Twitter user Christina Barrett has a more pedestrian view but once again calls this a 'fact' the source of which has yet to be confirmed outside of the representative image of our non-consenting manatee floating before a diver's camera. Roland Barthes' commentary on the image presages this moment when he recognizes the ascendancy of the image over the word. So the picture becomes a self-evident fact of seeing as believing. The sentence that 'real manatees' are such is simply a symbolization of that which already is. Her concluding remark is that "It's all @ what you can eat," suggesting that personally and culturally imposed dietary restrictions are the real battleground with the absent signifier here, the 'real woman' and her body type. The use of the word 'all' is an attempt to sum it up, to totalize the experience of one's body and the pressures to look a certain way. It's a representative end-game move to frame the experience of being a woman as that of being under the pressure to look 'like' a woman, which is practiced at the dinner plate. The @ sign is simply a lazy appropriation not meant to trigger a computer algorithm but to substitute for its prepositional referent "at."
The next tweet fits into the genre of the troll, a gently rolling knoll of a troll that simply deconstructs the word manatee itself for its sexist potential. Twitter user Klaus Squirrelhammer runs through the clever portmanteaus relating to the use of different gender-specific nouns, finally resting with "personatee" instead of "manatee" or "womanatee" and ends with the hashtagged word "dignity." As a troll this tweet not only makes a clever word-association joke but also makes the tongue-in-cheek reference to dignity as if the user is attempting to raise awareness to a sexist use of gender-representative language to encapsulate the whole of a species. In this instance, saying "manatee" is akin to saying "mankind." As they say in the parlance of 'on-line,' "well-played," as if all internet discourse were a contemporary version of the gentlemanly banter among English blue-bloods playing croquet on an Asian tea plantation circa 1882. Time is so easily laundered in tweet streams like this to suggest that when the viewer arrives at a feed of this length these clever ideas, as presented, just occurred in the minds of the users without any undo hesitation and testing prior to the tweet that gets posted.
The next three tweets simply repeat the message, making it a mantra, and each completes it with a link to a twitter picture, a redirection to other twitter accounts and their feeds through the use of the "@" tag and in the final case a hashtag reference to a French word for a sexual encounter involving three individuals.
This is an online conversation masquerading as entertainment. It comes from a relatively well-known individual and garners comments from others of varying online renown. This kind of occurrence happens all the time, every day, the sum effect of all these is to demonstrate how often internally meaningful little worlds of significance emerge out of word play that have little meaning outside of the small cabal of twitter users engaged in each feed. If we contrast this use of twitter with the use of it during the Arab Spring in Tarhrir Square we see a bunch of relatively safe and free-feeling whites in the West tapping miniature golf balls with the muzzle end of the 'people's gun' of the revolution. That's a testament to the relative adaptability of communications technology as well as to the culture of distracted auto-entertainment asphyxiation cultivated by U.S. internet users.
But "there's an app for that," and with it comes a more important future substantiation of information technology: the web-enabled robot. Enter a discussion occurring contemporaneous to this tweet from Google chairman, Eric Schmidt. The future he sees for Google is in providing the products of automation that will replace "a lot of the repetitive behavior in our lives." He continues with the vague panegyric for his company's proposed application of robots: "Robots will become omnipresent in our lives in a good way." If the twitter feed is representative of what we already do with technologies like Google's, then the next generation of products that Google develops will be to address some of the unintended consequences of its first generation of products. Connect, search, copy, paste are an OCD cultivated by the information technologies in our hands, in our homes, and on our faces as they get tethered more closely to the ad-savvy search technologies that his company provides.
With the contemporary internet we already stand before something larger than human thinking and human culture. And the powerful search interfaces that we have at our disposal to 'navigate' this leviathan of human communication distort our interests around being before a very big thing and carving out personal spaces within it through search queries. This jungle of discourse that we hack through and rebuild webs of significance is powered by the search machete. But to square this metaphor with our actual habits online its as if we are simply a pair of disembodied eyes using this machete to both carve us up for submission and to cut from that which has been submitted for consumption.
Strange I know, but it's strange "in a good way."
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