Twittering Away

by Paul Newnes , April 6, 2009

Is Twitter hastening the evolution of English. You bet. Is that a hazard for marketers who get lost in translation? Definitely. Should we all worry? Read on.

I have a first cousin who recently turned 18. As modern times dictate, I not only sent him a birthday card and present but a message through Facebook, asking how he was and how his birthday was going. His reply was: "im great thx m8 thx agen 4 the ipod."

My cousin is fully literate and typed this on his computer with access to a full Qwerty keyboard. Obviously, the shorthand he used has come from the text messaging medium. I'm sure it's crossed all our minds at some juncture that this "lol-speak" is somehow debasing the literacy of future generations.

However, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for this and we are not the first witnesses to people using different language forms for work, friends and family. Humans after all are pretty adaptable mammals.

Thus, it seems odd that such (similar) hyperbole is raised about Twitter: now not just the diction, spelling or grammar, but for heaven's sake the bite-size nature of the information feed. After all, won't this subvert our concentration spans entirely? Will we stop reading books in favor of receiving bullet points of introduction-plot-conclusion via our iPhones? In fact, aren't smartphones just making us all a lot more stupid?

Clearly, those who still need to (i.e. the workforce) won't be abandoning Webster's in favor of Newspeak, nor are we showing signs of reading fewer books. In fact, our more entrepreneurial companies are creating value around new devices for discovering and reading them.

And we are definitely not becoming more stupid, we have just chosen to be bombarded with more information than at times we can reasonably cope with. Thus, the social norm has moved beyond a required social etiquette.

Twitter falls into the last point and the cycle as I see it is like this:

_. You sign up _. You add friends _. You play around with it _. You read all the tweets coming in _. You get your cellphone bill and seriously regret having the tweets forwarded to your phone _. You get bored and cheesed-off reading all the tweets _. You stop reading the tweets _. You discover Stephen Fry's feed _. You find other feeds that are interesting over time

The key perception problem of Twitter and other social media is that it's not a raison d'être in itself. Rather it is a transport for snippets of information that I have given permission to receive. Tied to location awareness and maturation of personal preferences, Twitter could become an incredibly powerful medium for information exchange.

But seriously, does anyone really think it's going to change our language?

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5 comments about "Twittering Away ".

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Norbert Mayer-wittmann from Mayer-Wittmann Joint Ventures, April 6, 2009 at 7:08 a.m.
I think one of the greatest achievements of Martin Luther was a technological one.
He INVENTED the "written" German Language.
I doubt that one web site (twitter.com) will change language in any way (note that for me: "web site" = domain, and "website" = HTML and/or simlar content published at that site).
However, so-called "natural" language will undergo significant changes -- I predicted this maybe 5 years ago already and I wrote about it a couple years ago: http://gaggle.info/miscellaneous/articles/wisdom-of-the-language )
We already see such changes taking place (e.g., such changes led NBCU to acquire weather.com).
Twitter, however, is relatively meaningless. If they're lucky, they may be able to cash out before they're forgotten.
:) nmw
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Tim Braseth, April 6, 2009 at 7:29 a.m.

Telegrams lasted 150 years stop. They didn't perm alter the language stop. Did they? stop.

Thorsten Rhode from marqueteer, April 6, 2009 at 6:51 p.m.

@Tim: Your comment would have 'wasted' 50 characters on Twitter :-)
@Norbert: Good to see a fellow-German on here -- commenting on the Twevolution of the English language no less...

I agree with Norbert insofar as I cannot see a single web site having that much of an influence. Add SMS and similar services and I am not so sure anymore. But language has always evolved, influenced by developments in the most unlikely spheres. To a large degree, though, the abbreviation mania on Twitter is offset by the articles many tweets link to -- those articles and blogs and white papers are well-written, often technical in nature and would generally leave anyone with a limited vocabulary behind. So there is incentive to be fluent in more than one type of English. "Humans after all are pretty adaptable mammals."

twitter.com/@marqueteer

Andre Szykier from maps capital management, April 7, 2009 at 5:49 p.m.

Consider that each communication revolution had at its center a narrow focus to begin with.

Printing presses started with religious text; telegraph as a means to schedule transport; telephone to do the same with voice; radio to extend messaging across water separated geography; television adding visuals and so on. Each has morphed into numerous uses that evolved both organically from social needs and technologically from improvements.

The strongest computer influenced method was email , a logical and quicker extension of surface mail. Additions to email allowed attachments and rich content in a push model to multiple recipients. Chat evolved in parallel for reasons of parsimony and presence (the always on phenomenon). Cellular phones adopted this with SMS because it required only a small change in the device's modality and the network's transmission modes.

Twitter improves over the email and chat model in that recipients can subscribe to a sender. By limiting it to a small number of characters it inherits the parsimony of SMS and the one-to-many feature of chat.

Twitting coupled with location aware devices almost becomes a means for casual commentary, the value of which depends on the sender and the interests of the subscribers. It's like taking a walk and making comments on what you see and hear: if its interesting, someone will listen; otherwise you end up talking to yourself.

Whether Google can parse this 'noise' and create value to its customers, advertisers in particular, is questionable. I believe that Twitter will evolve, like all other examples described earlier into a method of communication with its own intrinsic values.

Probably, Twitter will morph into Chatter, with voice snippets replacing text. What a great tool for explorers connected remotely in real time to others in different places.

Andre Szykier from maps capital management, April 7, 2009 at 5:53 p.m.

Another comment on Twitting.

I think that automatic language translation from the subscriber's viewpoint is the next logical extension. Your 140 char. message in Japanese, is translated into English, German, Chinese, Tagalog depending on the recipient. Now there's a real value.

Google, are you listening? Plug your translator into Google Chat. If it gets legs, buy Twitter. You're home free...