Posts
DTC 375: Language, Texts and Technology
Dr. Jason Farman
April 7, 2009
Word Count: 997
The microblogosphere is full of chirps, and Twitter is at the heart of it. The Twitterati may tout its newness and hipster edginess, but this SMS social network is only as edgy as the text messages that came before it.
Twitter, a free social-networking service, allows users to post 140-character updates based on this prompt: What are you doing? Since its debut in November 2006, Twitter has accumulated a rather large following – about 5 million, according to Jeremiah Owyang (2008). The State of the Twittersphere found that at the end of 2008, about 5 thousand to 10 thousand new accounts were being opened every day, and that approximately 70% of new Twitter users joined in 2008.
But where would Twitter be today were it not for its technological media predecessors – the telegram, e-mail, forums, blogs and even text messages? Twitter is, after all, based on the concept behind text messages – express yourself in no more than 140 characters. And could the term “microblog” – a mini web log – exist without its macro blog precursor?
Given the limitations of what you can express (HTML is stripped, character limits), it’s curious as to why microblogging has exploded in the last year. Its predecessor, blogging, saw a similar explosion early in its career as an Internet mainstay. A few blogs took off (Huffington Post, for example), but many more ended up going belly-up. Why the loss of interest? As one writer points out, blogging can be hard (McFedries, 2007).
“Unless you love to write, churning out even remotely interesting mini-essays every day of the week is a tough slog,” notes Paul McFedries. He goes on to postulate that this daily grind has led to a growth in the popularity of short-message service emulators, perhaps because having a 140-character limit is easier for some.
There also is the immediacy of the service to take into consideration. Where once the initiator of topics had to wait hours, sometimes even days, we are approaching territory falling into “zero seconds” between post and reply. This networking also builds a sense of camaraderie among the various groups of “Tweeter” and followers (Stevens, 2008).
Vance Stevens also addresses the different kinds of information made available to him through his Twitter account based on who he decides to follow: “Suppose you have cultivated a network of professional colleagues who reliably feed you URLs you might want to check out, and you've weeded out those who dwell on sagas in the laundromat. What we're talking about here is just-in-time informal learning, social networking, low affective filters, a playground for knowledge workers where you can ‘follow’ almost anyone you choose and enjoy his or her 140 character musings, often with a provocative URL to explore, from time to time, day to day, and even minute to minute. These gems of genuine interest are lodged in a matrix of emerging personalities that are themselves interesting.”
On the topic of networking, Twitter has evolved with its userbase over a short period of time. In user streams, one may notice a wide variety of “at” tags, wherein the “twitterer” directs a particular post to one or more of his or her followers. At first, this “@username” function appeared as normal text in posts. Once the Twitter leaders noticed this catching on, a script was created to link these comments to the intended recipients’ Twitter profile – both to call attention to it and to direct other viewers to this page, perhaps to get a better understanding of the conversation flowing among different tweets. Some blogs and news aggregate sites, on the other hand, still function as a “post only” service, limiting interactivity among users.
Due to the immediacy of Twitter and its ilk, these SMS services have been credited in the speed of victim rescues, from the 2008 earthquakes in China, to California wild fires, to getting a man out of an Egyptian jail for taking photos. In the latter scenario, through his cell phone device, the young man was able to alert his followers to his situation, after which they were able to secure his release (Stevens).
Could blogs and e-mail, even mass text messages, could have had the same effect in search-and-rescue missions, like those of southern China’s earthquake recoveries? It’s difficult to say, but various mainstream media outlets seem to credit Twitter with getting the world on alert about the disaster-in-progress (Cellan-Jones, 2008) (Siegler, 2008).
After all the praise is taken into consideration, Twitter seems to fall short in one significant area: bandwidth capacity. It is increasingly more frequent that users will log in, only to be greeted with an image of a whale being precariously towed through the sky in a net carried by birds and a message that says it clearly: “Twitter is over capacity.” Where quickly-popularized services like Google were able to handle the surge in popularity with additional in-house servers, Twitter appears to lack the means to address this current issue.
Could this deal a blow to Twitter’s popularity once the novelty of the service has worn off? As new as the service is, it’s hard to tell at the moment. At least one website exists already (twiddict.com) to tackle this issue head-on, but the Internet can be a fickle audience.
But maybe it is that long-lasting novelty that has kept Twitter at the forefront for as long as it has already. Perhaps instead of pontificating over the nuances of the latest communicative medium through a several-pages-long blog entry, it will remain easier to simply say, “Twitter is something special and here to stay.”
I have heard it said that the key to effective communication is brevity. And for that reason, no matter the telegrams and blogs and text messages that predicated microblogging and that which will come after, Twitter is and will remain the communicative medium of choice through the foreseeable future – or at least until my ADD-riddled internet generation moves on to the next big medium.
But really, after 140 characters, what else is left?
Works cited
Owyang, Jeremiah. (2008, November 19). Social networks site usage: Visitors, members, page views and engagements by the numbers in 2008. Retrieved March 31, 2009 from http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/19/social-networks-site-usage-visitors-members-page-views-and-engagement-by-the-numbers-in-2008
Volpe, Mike. (2008, December 22). State of the Twittersphere: Q4 2008 report. Retrieved April 2, 2009 from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4439/State-of-the-Twittersphere-Q4-2008-Report.aspx
McFedries, Paul. (2007, October). Technically speaking. IEEE Spectrum. 84.
Stevens, Vance. (2008, June). Trial by Twitter: The rise and slide of the year’s most viral microblogging platform. Retrieved March 31, 2009 from http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej45/int.html
Cellan-Jones, Rory. (2008, May 12). Twitter and the China Earthquake. Retrieved April 6, 2009 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/05/twitter_and_the_china_earthqua.html
Siegler, MG. (2008, May 12). Twitter is first on the scene for a major earthquake – but who cares about that, is it mainstream yet? Retrieved April 6, 2009 from http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/12/twitter-is-first-on-the-scene-for-a-major-earthquake-but-who-cares-about-that-is-it-mainstream-yet/
Online Journalism Blog. (2008, May 12). The Chinese earthquake and Twitter – crowdsourcing without managers. Retrieved April 6, 2009 from http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/05/12/twitter-and-the-chinese-earthquake/
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