8 - ‘Things That Should Be Short’: Perec, Sei Shōnagon, Twitter and the Uses of Banality

Summary

‘The trouble with Twitter: Far from delivering a “wisdom of crowds”, social networking sites have created only a deafening banality.’ So reads the title to a 2009 article in The Guardian. This has become a familiar lament in relation to various forms of social media but is one that is particularly pronounced with respect to Twitter. What seems to be at stake in these critiques is not just that banality proliferates through Twitter, but that this banality is without function or value. As Cornelius Puschman et al. note, due to its focus on ‘mundane communication’, in its early days Twitter was ‘widely lambasted as a cesspool of vanity and triviality by incredulous journalists (including technology journalists)’. Platform developers have since responded: better to hide the banal through algorithms that prefer the intensity of trending topics, and reward certain kinds of expression with visibility. But how can we revalue that element of banality, the intimate access to everyday life-worlds that characterises social media more generally, even if platforms like Twitter have turned toward spectacle, celebrity and breaking news in its place?

This chapter brings together three somewhat disjunctive approaches to banality to rethink the everyday as an object of social research. We consider accounts of Twitter as a ‘machinery that produces banality’ and the criticisms this attracts, through the lens of Georges Perec and his enduring interest in the musings of the late tenth-century Japanese courtesan Sei Shōnagon and her The Pillow Book with its famously intimate observations of her day-to-day life. While Perec never realised his desire to produce a contemporary version of this book, he did identify in Shōnagon's work two specific elements that became crucial in his own writing and his ‘new anthropology’: (1) an attentiveness to the inner workings of the everyday (the ‘infra-ordinary’, as he came to call it); and (2) an appreciation of the uses and value of list-making. ‘Sei Shōnagon does not sort; she lists and begins again’, he writes, with the list both containing and prising open the ineffable form of everyday intimacy (think shopping or laundry lists, inventories of drink and food consumed and so on).