Not With a Bang But a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot

This invited lecture by Melanie Walsh and Anna Preus was sponsored by the HRI Research Cluster on the Social Lives of Digitized Culture.

T.S. Eliot concluded his poem "The Hollow Men" with the iconic lines: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." This extensive history of quotation in print has translated into a rich social life for the poem online–one that provides an important case study for how fragments of historical poetry travel through contemporary social media platforms, acquiring new meanings and new contexts along the way. Through analysis of Twitter data, we have found that at least 350,000 tweets have referenced or remixed Eliot’s apocalyptic lines since the beginning of Twitter’s history. Drawing on computational methods and close reading, we seek to understand this evolution, while also reflecting on how Twitter users have, unconsciously or not, tapped into the political fatalism of the original poem as well as Eliot’s own deep-running conservatism.