This link has been bookmarked by 118 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Nov 2015, by Joshua Oakley.
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Andrew LeaheyI can’t pick a good pull-quote from this article about Twitter’s failings as a communication medium. Just read it.
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24 Nov 15
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The Decay of Twitter
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On Tuesday, Twitter Inc. announced another dreary set of quarterly earnings. While the company beat investor expectations, it’s still running at a loss of $132 million after taxes. Its fourth-quarter projections seem low. Worst of all, its namesake product has essentially failed to add any active American users in 2015.
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Twitter stock fell more than 10 percent after the announcement.
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In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation.
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Twitter, dead or no, is still a powerful and as yet unsurpassed platform for raising issues and calling out uncomfortable truths, as shown in its amplification of the #Ferguson protests to media visibility (in a way Facebook absolutely failed to do thanks to the aforementioned algorithmic filters). Twitter is, as my research continues to show, a path to voice.
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At the same time, Twitter is also a free soapbox for all kinds of shitty and hateful statements that minimize or reinforce marginalization, as any woman or person of colour who’s dared to speak openly about the raw deal of power relations in society will likely attest. And calls for civility will do nothing except reinforce a respectability politics of victim-blaming within networks.
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jhave2"The public knows about conversation smoosh, and that constitutes, I think, a major problem"
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Ong’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media. His work catalogued the many differences between these two cultures: that orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.” In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic. (Am I painfully simplifying a great scholar’s work here? Of course.)
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To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century.
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As Ong put it in an interview late in life: Online, “textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange.” In other words, we process chatty words online (whether on Twitter or Slack or gchat) like we process someone saying them to us in front of us.
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on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty.
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Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to.
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10 Nov 15
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Joe RossThe Decay of Twitter via Instapaper http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/
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07 Nov 15
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06 Nov 15
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its namesake product has essentially failed to add any active American users in 2015.
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“The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres where the collective ‘we’ treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims,”
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Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.”
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05 Nov 15
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04 Nov 15
Daniel J JohnsonOng’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media. His work catalogued the many differences between these two cultures: that orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.” In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic. (Am I painfully simplifying a great scholar’s work here? Of course.)
Ong advanced this analysis for modern times, as well. To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century. -
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Why is Instagram (or Vine, or Pinterest) so much more fun than Twitter?
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To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong.
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Ong was an English professor and a historian of religion at Saint Louis University. He served as president of the Modern Language Association for a year. He was Marshall McLuhan’s student. And from age 23 to his death in 2003 at 91, he was or was training to be a Jesuit priest.
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Ong’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media
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orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.”
-
In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic.
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To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century.
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we chat, we type, we text. One of the key attributes of orality is its instantaneousness: There’s no delay between utterances
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How do you describe this odd mix of registers: literate culture that has all the ephemerality of oral culture? During his life, Ong suggested a new term, secondary literacy. I’ve also seen it referred to as a hybrid literacy
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on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”
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Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to.
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It’s not quite context collapse, because what’s collapsing aren’t audiences so much as expectations. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations. It’s a consequence of the oral-literate hybrid that flourishes online. It’s conversation smoosh.
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This tension also explains, to me, why the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi, but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.
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At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.
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witter Inc. announced another
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03 Nov 15
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Ryan JohnsonOn Tuesday, Twitter Inc. announced another dreary set of quarterly earnings. While the company beat investor expectations, it’s still running at a loss of $132 million after taxes. Its fourth-quarter projections seem low. via Pocket
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Lun EsexThis is true. https://t.co/PStD48HQhO https://t.co/qjQffQkaZK
The Atlantic: The Decay of Twitter. https://t.co/nFW4atdgrG -
Gustaf JosefssonTwitter is going down. / The Decay of Twitter - The social network fundamentally changed in early 2014. And that’s causing big problems for the company.
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Wessel van Rensburgwhat's wrong with twitter: "a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations" https://t.co/TuQlgJ3JfR
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Geo ParadigmGreat to see @bonstewart ideas & thinking reflected in @TheAtlantic https://t.co/ulTb8u7MWn
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02 Nov 15
Patries van DokkumTop story: The Decay of Twitter - The Atlantic https://t.co/SmktCFRmxp, see more https://t.co/H8C8DZvCPz
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mitcholson“The Whale Beached between Scheveningen and Katwijk, with Elegant Sightseers,” by Esaias van den Velde On Tuesday, Twitter Inc. announced another dreary set of…
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clconzenThe Decay of Twitter https://t.co/H7EOD3IbPv
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During his life, Ong suggested a new term, secondary literacy. I’ve also seen it referred to as a hybrid literacy. Twitter is a archetypal example of this type. Though “conceived as a simulation of face-to-face communication,” writes one scholar, Twitter lets users read the same words at different times, which is a key aspect of literacy. Tweets are chatty, fusing word and action like orality; and also declarative, severable, preservable, and analyzable like literacy.
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In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”
-
Twitter, dead or no, is still a powerful and as yet unsurpassed platform for raising issues and calling out uncomfortable truths, as shown in its amplification of the #Ferguson protests to media visibility (in a way Facebook absolutely failed to do thanks to the aforementioned algorithmic filters). Twitter is, as my research continues to show, a path to voice.
At the same time, Twitter is also a free soapbox for all kinds of shitty and hateful statements that minimize or reinforce marginalization, as any woman or person of colour who’s dared to speak openly about the raw deal of power relations in society will likely attest. And calls for civility will do nothing except reinforce a respectability politics of victim-blaming within networks.
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abdchariesThe Decay of Twitter via Digg http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867/
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Joshua OakleyOn Tuesday, Twitter Inc. announced another dreary set of quarterly earnings. While the company beat investor expectations, it’s still running at a loss of $132 million after taxes. Its fourth-quarter projections seem low.
& culture digg most dugg society story upcoming Pocket brainiacs news newsblur opinion robinson meyer stories storytelling the atlantic
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