This work is intended to simulate important facets of the experience of linking through articles online —sometimes one will end up in a very unrelated place after a few iterations, whereas other searches take us into more detail on our original topic. The work interrogates our intuitions about the internet’s connection to distractibility, short attention spans, roving curiosity, and even the open-minded receptivity to new information. It exposes the heterogeneity in tweeting behavior, but also its homogeneity as some topics and tweets repeat themselves. The work also speaks to the rapidity of the evolution of information, by allowing viewers to witness the evolution of tweet topics over time.
Enter a search term, see the results, then watch TwitterSearchBot take over. TwitterSearchBot finds the most common terms within your search results, chooses one randomly from the top ten, then generates a new search. It continues to iterate this procedure, displaying results and generating new searches until the user interrupts (with the stop button) to enter a new word. A sidebar keeps track of the search history, so that viewers can track the extent to which the searches were related to one another.
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