I will perhaps come on to this later but one of the difficulties I have had in starting a blog is that I am not a diarist and I think a lot my problems with social media are personal. I have tried twitter and occasionally have bursts of enthusiasm - you can find me @matthew_seddon - but I just don't get on with it. I'm not interested enough to check frequently and I have a short concentration span, which makes reading often unrelated lines of neologisms and hash tags hard. If I did keep a diary you would probably find the entry "try harder at Twitter". But I don't, so you won't. Yet I see so much enthusiasm for this medium that I worry I must be missing something. Hopefully this series of things will show me something that I've missed.
Some of you may be aware of Stephane Hessel, the French nonagenarian formerly in the French Resistance, who wrote a cute but powerful 30 page book telling all the young folk to get angry. His slogan has been taken up in a series of protests in Spain, the Indignados have used social media to organise themselves and even spread manifestoes. My favourite living Spanish writer, Enrique Vila Matas, recently wrote a commentary piece about the use of Twitter and political movements, quoting from the late Tony Judt, he worried that the use of Twitter had dumbed down the debate.
[Linguistic] Impoverishment is here. We checked into the economy, of course, but also in the stunted language of political and twitter speech, unable in many cases to move beyond reading 30 pages a year. It is demolishing the once awesome power of words to analyze the world. And, says Judt, more than suffering from the appearance of "Newspeak", we are threatened by the growth of "non-language."*
Vila Matas is far from your literary dinosaur and has been into blogs and social media since at least 2005 (I am reading his (published) diaries... yes, I really am a fan). I hope that this course will show me ways of using social media effectively and without falling into this "newspeak" trap.
*My translation.
I love Twitter, but I didn't always... you might be interested in this presentation by Ned Potter that rebuffs some common reasons why people don't get on with it.
ReplyDeleteI slighty disagree (but only very slightly!) with Twitter-as-language-impoverishment; I find that expressing a complex idea in 140 characters actually improves my writing/analytic through the compression, rather than making them worse. I find I think more carefully about exactly what I want to say in order to compress it.
So hopefully you will be able to find a way to not fall into newspeak!
This is one of the great things about the 23 Things programme. It gives you time and space to consider all this stuff. If you don't use Things in your personal life what about at work? Should your library use them to communicate with users? Should the parent organization use them?
ReplyDeletemaybe a particular Things isn't for you, but the concept of what it can offer is, so you find a different web 2 tool for it.
Not everything on web 2 is dumbed down content though. Some blogs operate as peer review and it can be prestigious to publish on them.
That said isn't it the same for the printed book? Some are classics but cleary some are not. There is plenty of dumbed down/less intellectual print stuff out there too! Some of it can be enjoyable at a different level, depending on whethwr you're reading for factual information, intellectual stimulation or just pure relaxation. My other half knew someone who was doing his PhD and read pulp fiction westerns as a way of switching off intellectually. So info deliverd via the web can be exactly the same.
I agree with Samantha in that Twitter can make you think very carefully about what you want to say.
We'll be looking at twitter in a later week so I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks about it
Rowena 23 Things Team
Thanks for the link. I like the output of Ned Potter, I like to use him as an indicator for interesting things on the horizon.
ReplyDeleteI think Judt and Vila Matas are talking about communication and political movements, where in the past the short-form, self-published, pamphlet was the mode of communicating ideas. The example of the Spanish Indignados is actually quite interesting because there is a lot of activity and excitement surrounding the movement but it still lacks a prevailing idea.
I remember Ned Potter had a blog post a few months ago where someone had commented on a presentation of his in French. The commenter mentioned something about the Anglo Saxon habit of using aphorism in the place of thought. It's nice way of summing up some of my anxiety about using social media.
I think that ultimately it is a question of to whom we are speaking and selecting a message to fit.