The rise of Conservatweeps: On becoming cyborgs-in-practice through social media(tion)

As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with social media, the time is ripe again to rethink human-technology relationship. I argue that the prevalence and prominence of social media use requires us to go beyond discreet conceptions of human and technology in order to capture the complex and dynamic constitution of our sociomaterial world—a world where nothing happens simply ‘here and now’. I propose the concept of cyborg-in-practice in order to capture the entangled production of human user and social media in the de-centered and distributed process of social mediation, i.e. actions and practices that constitute and organize the material-discursive working of social media phenomenon. I argue that a practice- based performative perspective offers us analytical traction in dealing with such a process. I illustrate this argument by drawing from an ongoing genealogical investigation into the organization through Twitter of the Tea Party Movement in the United States.