Technodiscursive Analysis of Twitterbot Poetry

Abstract Literature in the Twitterverse emerges through two cyber-species: the tweeter and the Twitterbot. Both are fighting for relevance in digital creative writing to win the reader’s attention. They tweet, read, and write to each other remotely, and they correct each other as an algorithmic sharpening symbiosis. This essay will analyse the symmetrical linguistics of Twitterbot poetry that incorporates critical code studies of its source code as a subset of technodiscursive analysis to decipher the meanings of the tweet-poems produced by Leonardo Flores’ @Protestitas. This text contextualises itself in a genre of generative electronic literature with multiple interdisciplinary approaches. Our study focuses on this Twitterbot poetry and its relation to socio-technological communication. We also seek to capture the intention of the Twitterary robopoet @Protestitas through a technodiscursive analysis that consists of what we call “Four-Dimensional Analysis (henceforth 4DAs)” of the Twitterbot poetry. How does Twitterbot produce its output as executed codes? How do we read the language of the tweet-poem? Our study seeks to demystify these phenomena in this article. The analysis deciphers Twitterbot poetry in the manner of the rebus, deconstructing the four semantic elements of the ten excerpts of @Protestitas with its source code. We have compared the source codes with the output on the screen. Therein, we discovered that both of them project the same literary spark.