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.
