For all the structuring effects of the Twitter functional features, the Twitter experience is generally perceived as a private one as only the individual user can see their Twitter feed, as they have structured it, on their particular screen configuration (Gillen and Merchant 2013). This aspect of the individualisation and heterogeneity of public and open textual communication adds to the complexities of interpreting, analysing and making sense of Twitter. Gillen and Merchant’s (2013) discussion of the capacity of Twitter users to organise the flow of discourses they are presented seems to ignore both the algorithmic impositions of, for example, Trending terms in that interface as well as the effects of the content of individual Tweets being perceived as a coherent informational flow or a chaotic mess of impressions (or both). The Twitter user experience is not an isolated or individualised one but is, rather, an entanglement of heterogeneous intentions, business logics, coded protocols, algorithmic outputs, collective norms and individual perceptions.
It is this entanglement between the human and material that opens, closes and patterns or orders the particular uses of Twitter. Twitter is constantly and actively made and remade in the intra-actions of user behaviours, hardware, coding, algorithms and visual design, rather than Twitter being a neutral utility or passive instrument.