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JohnWaterworth
JohnWaterworth
Social Media, Language and Technology
Oct 14 2010, 6:22 AM EDT | Post edited: Oct 14 2010, 6:22 AM EDT
An interesting part of yesterday's discussion concerned the primacy of language, and more specifically written language, in social media. While this primacy holds for now, it has a great deal to do with current technology constraints and may not hold in future.

For most of human history we shared and explored our experiences through different types of performance - storytelling, spoken poetry, dance, music, drama, etc. But the only way to record experience was in our collective memory and we could only perform to a small local audience.

In time the development of written language and the printing press allowed writers to develop the novel and communicate experiences both to a mass contemporary audience but also to audiences far in the future. And many came to see the novel as a superior form to the more popular performing arts.

In this context the rapid rise of radio, cinema and television can be seen as a restoration of an earlier balance in favour of performance as the best way to share and explore experience.

Today's social media have allowed us to move on from read-only newspapers, reference books and political pamphlets to a more read-write culture. But the vast majority of that reading and writing is in written text. What if the read-write culture could extend to performance too?

Many young people in east asia communicate mostly through mobile phone photos - "look at me/us", "look at what I/we saw/did". YouTube has 'video conversations' with people posting responses to corporate message, which are then commented on in turn.

For now it is much easier to type and edit text (as in the dicussion topic) than it is to do the same in other media. Mainly due to the primacy of written language in our culture and education.

But I am confident that we will eventually see photos, speech, music, micro-dramas, etc. surplant written text in social media. Do you find this valuable?    
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