Twitter is a website that offers social networking and microblogging to its users. This enables it’s users to send and read messages called “tweets,” as most of you already know. Twitter is a new media and one of its interesting features is you don’t have to be a publisher to have your words published. You may post your opinion and it can be viewed by others. You can communicate with friends, co-workers, celebrities, and in some cases other users you may not know but share the same interests or opposing views. Users can group posts together by topic or type by the use of “hashtags”. A “hashtag” is words or phrases prefixed with a "#" sign. Other users may also use this “hashtag,” and then all the messages will be grouped together and other users may have access to viewing this particular group or category of messages. Similarly, the "@" sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To repost a message from another Twitter user, and share it with one's own followers, the “retweet” function is symbolized by "RT" in the message. In a sense Twitter has formed its own language, it has formed its own unique way of communication, just the way we had too 100,000 years ago. Twitter is the evolution of our first communication basis which was speech. In class I found the opposable thumb theory rather interesting. Because of our opposable thumbs we were able to hold things in our hands instead of our mouths; therefore, freeing our mouths for speech and communication. Speech and language was the 1st digital medium. We were able to break things up into discrete things. This changed our relationship to the world. In Sapir Whorf hypothesis he states that different languages are associated with different ways of viewing the world. Twitter is forming that language. In a way, the abbreviations and tags that we use with twitter is just another form of language. When you become fluent in another language you are taking that language in and your outlook on the world changes according to the culture of the language. Twitter is its own culture and although it is considered a new media it is very much developed from our oldest medium of all, our speech.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
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Like we discussed in class yesterday, I do not believe that speech is the first form of communication. The earliest forms of communication, of course, were non-verbal. Through gestures, motions, expressions and sound, early homo sapiens communicated basic needs and feelings. We can observe animals' behavior to get some understanding of pre-verbal human communication.
ReplyDeleteSpeech and language was the 1st digital medium. Of course before we had language we communicated through hand signals and such, but before speech and language we had no digital medium. The evolution of our language can be seen in our forms of social media, such as facebook, twitter, and myspace, that we use today. These social networks have formed their own language just like we had to with speech. Without our advancements with language and speech we would not have evolved the way we have and be able to communicate on the internet.
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