Playing with Bluesky Metaphors and Imagery (Part 1: The Butterfly in the Net)
Source: Freepik
I recently joined the social media app Bluesky (@voicefrom.bsky.social). I had quit Twitter not long after Elon Musk took over, favouring to join Mastodon (@voice@hcommons.social) over Bluesky, mainly because you still needed an invite to join Bluesky then. Technically, I joined Mastodon back in 2017 but I never used it, bar one ‘toot’, as there were few people there to make it enjoyable. Following the latest mass ‘Xodus’ from the decaying remnants of the X-parrot that was Twitter, Bluesky has now seemed to have reached this critical mass of people to make the platform worthwhile. Some have suggested Bluesky now feels similar to what the early days of Twitter felt like, “when the platform enabled one to plug straight into the thought-streams of people one admired”. This similarity is hardly surprising considering Bluesky was originally a Twitter funded project started in 2019 by Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, when he was still at the company. Bluesky spun off into an independent company in late 2021. Dorsey left Bluesky in mid-2024.
I earned my PhD by writing a thesis on the language, rhetoric, and metaphors we use to talk about aspects of digital culture, such as the meme and algorithmic filtering. I also had a substantial chapter on Twitter and a case study of President-elect (the first time) Donald Trump’s use of it. Essentially, in my thesis I was prodding the imagery and metaphors used in digital culture, pushing them, and playing around with them, and then seeing if I could create others - not necessarily to replace the originals, but just to offer something different. My approach was to see if I could use animals as conceptual figures to ‘think differently’, and possibly de-anthropocentrise our thinking when it came to the metaphors and language used in digital culture. I want to do something similar here. So, let’s play around with the imagery and metaphors that Bluesky use. ‘Play’ is, of course, the operative word here. It might not always go anywhere, there may not always be an academic or critical point; I’m just going to see what happens. There are two obvious places to start: the logo and the name. I’ll start with the former as, right off the bat, I think I might have more things to say and there are more things to play with with that.
Back in 2011, when I was pursing my MA, I wrote an assignment on Twitter and decided to briefly introduce the site’s functions as poetically as I could, and so I asked the reader to imagine a tweet as the bird from the Twitter logo sitting on a branch in a tree. There are echoes of this with the logo adopted by Bluesky: the butterfly. Given this imagery and the insect’s defence mechanism, perhaps ‘mimicry’ would be a more apt term description than ‘echoes’. Anyway, adapting what I wrote back then:
Twitter Bluesky is a social media platform, or an “online content-hosting intermediary” (Gillespie, 2010, p.350), where users publish brief updates. The updates, known as ‘tweets’ ‘posts’, have a 140-character 300-character limit; however, this simplicity belies the complexity. Tarleton Gillespie notes there are four relevant “semantic territories” of the term ‘platform’ which each lean on each other to explain why the term emerged as an important descriptor for these content intermediaries: platforms in the computational, the architectural, the figurative and the political senses. But, all the semantics of the term ‘platform’ suggest a “set of connotations: a ‘raised level surface’ designed to facilitate some activity that will subsequently take place” (p.350).
In an apt analogy, consider the Twitter bird Bluesky butterfly sitting on a twig on a branch in a tree. The twig it’s sitting on — a platform. From this twig-platform, the bird butterfly can take flight. Thinking in this manner, Twitter Bluesky can therefore be thought of as a site from where users’ messages are allowed to rise into the open blue sky. As they are published, tweets posts can gain elevation and direction via features of Twitter Bluesky interactions. Tweets Posts can be directed through the use of the @mention function, and they can be ‘forwarded’ (to borrow terminology from email) and thus gain elevation by being retweeted reposted (RT). The tweets posts can also be organised through hashtags (#) which groups together tagged messages. To continue the bird butterfly analogy, consider hashtagged tweets posts as a flock of birds; a murmuration of starlings a flutter of Monarchs; a kaleidoscope of butterflies.
Thinking more about actual butterflies - what does the life of butterfly look like? What is their physiology? How do they behave in the ecosystem? Can we draw more comparisons with the social media platform?
Picking up on the mimicry aspect, as mentioned, Bluesky feels like Twitter did, not just functionally but also aesthetically - with a similar layout and colour scheme (cyan-blue and white). Of course, Bluesky is not mimicking Twitter exactly; it’s not a total replica or complete copy. The variations are important. The key difference is that Bluesky is a little more decentralised. The platform was built on the AT Protocol, which is an open source toolbox, and allows those with the technical knowhow to adapt and build on it. Bluesky suggest they want to create an environment “where developers can freely build, communities can self-govern, and users can easily switch services”. They argue “decentralization can catalyze the innovation necessary to improve the public conversation”. There are also differences in greater algorithmic choice and moderation tools.
Butterfly wings are thought to have evolved as a form of mimicry to aid defence. Famously, the eyespots wing pattern are thought to mimic the eyes of predators and therefore deter predation, while the underside of the wings are often dull brown so that, when closed, they resemble dead leaves and, thus, help aid predator avoidance. So, here we have something benign (wings) made to look dangerous (predator), and something valuable (butterfly itself) made to look benign (leaves). Does Bluesky use the colour scheme and familiar layout to make itself feel benign, gentle, and friendly? Like early-Twitter was. Famously, early-Twitter was dismissed as an unserious place, just a place where people posted banal updates about what they were doing and what they had for lunch. And the name Twitter and the term ‘tweets’ were seen as twee and evocative of unimportant noise. It was referred to as ‘ambient intimacy’ (Rogers, 2019, p.161). It was a friend-following tool; Dorsey described it as “the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket” (Ibid). But then it grew into something useful, valuable, and culturally significant. I guess the question could be, is this Bluesky being something valuable but making itself look benign. Is it a ploy in order to avoid being picked off and destroyed, and to give itself time to proliferate and grow into something more culturally valuable? Although, thinking about mimicry again, we should also always be wary of appearances and we should be vigilant for the possibility that this act of mimicry is actually something dangerous only making itself look benign.
As an amusing aside, their beautiful wing patterns (plumage? same as birds? is that the right term?) and the environment in which they are often seen (amongst flowers, grassy meadows, woodland, etc.) may colour our perception of butterflies being only associated with ‘nice’ things. But, they do have some “filthy feeding habits”. Some species of butterfly, such as the Purple Emperor, love to feed on decaying flesh. Likewise, Bluesky’s butterfly is feeding off the rotting corpse of X, picking up disaffected users to nourish itself!
At the moment, we are only beginning to see the potential of Bluesky and how it can possibly provide a useful function in the digital media ecosystem. However, arguably the thing driving it’s user base expansion is what it’s not - it’s not X! - rather than what it is and what it can do. Conventional wisdom would suggest that Bluesky requires a cultural event to demonstrate it’s power and utility. It needs to break a huge news story, help co-ordinate the organisation relief for a natural disaster, chronicle the events of a revolution, etc. (Given the state of the world right now - the line from the play Juno and the Paycock always comes to mind here: “The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis” - Bluesky will probably live-blog the outbreak of WWIII and all that blue sky will turn black). It needs to establish itself as an ‘event-following tool’ (Rogers, 2019). This was the precedent set by Twitter. As Dorsey said, Twitter ‘does well’ at events, elections, and disasters (Ibid). Indeed, it managed to shed it’s banal image by allowing itself to be defined as having an important role in crises such as the 2009 Iran election and Arab Spring.
[Edit: 04/12/2024 - Bluesky functioning as an event-following tool? There was some great (drunken) impromptu on-the-ground reporting and commentary circulating on Bluesky during the crisis in South Korea, when the president, Yoon Suk Yeol, made the shock move to unlawfully declare martial law, but was quickly thwarted by protests and a unanimous vote in the National Assembly.]
Whether Twitter’s role in these is overstated or not, the narrative of the revolutionary power of technology and of the so-called ‘Twitter revolution’ remains. And, thus, Twitter’s place in the social imaginary (Taylor, 2004) was established. It doesn’t really matter if the founding story of that cultural significance was a myth and was later somewhat debunked (e.g. Rogers, 2019). However, we could also argue that the digital media environment has moved on significantly since then. There is arguably less of a need for Bluesky to justify itself like that. People are more accepting of news breaking on social media platforms, of politicians communicating on them, etc. Social media platforms have already become entwined in the traditional media infrastrucutre. Is it a case of simply swapping the platforms out when one rises and others fall? Perhaps, doing the work of a butterfly is enough for Bluesky right now. It’s pollinating - it’s facilitating the production of new connections and the reproduction of communities - and it’s contributing to the biodiversity of platforms and communication infrastructures. Maybe ‘it’s not X’ is enough, for the moment?
Why did Bluesky choose the butterfly? In a similar manner to Twitter’s retweet function, the butterfly logo was invented by the community. The butterfly logo was officially adopted by Bluesky after users “were organically using the butterfly emoji 🦋 to indicate their Bluesky handles”. According to a Bluesky blogpost, they loved the butterfly and adopted it for a number of other reasons. The connotations and use as a metaphor were too great. First, it flies…in the sky. There are also resonances with metamorphosis. The butterfly is also a “symbol of change and transformation...[it] speaks to [their] mission of transforming social media into something new” - “like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis”. To be honest, what came to my mind first was the old saying that demonstrates the Butterfly Effect or chaos theory, which goes something like: ‘If a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, there’ll be a tornado on the other’. I imagine this is an appealing part of the imagery too: the metaphor of Bluesky posts themselves being butterflies flapping their wings and each having the potential at least to cause powerful effects in the world. The platform might love to see this Flapform Effect, if you will (h/t ChatGPT for that neologism!).
Related blog posts:
‘There’s No Such Thing As A Post.’ Playing with Names for Bluesky Posts
Playing with Bluesky Metaphors and Imagery (Part 2: Blues Skies Ahead) - coming soon
References:
Gillespie, T. 2010. The Politics of ‘Platforms’. New Media and Society. 12(3), pp.347-364
Rogers, R. 2019. Doing Digital Methods. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Taylor, C. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.