extensions

techPresident reports on recent Twitter crashes:

First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.

A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.

I’ve noticed this, too. Both the slowdown, this morning, for example, when the news came that John Edwards dropped out of the race, as well as the increasing number of people I follow talking about events as they happen: Heath Ledger’s death, the SOTU (all not-so-favorable of Bush…), the Tom Cruise video.

For some reason, perhaps that it’s much “lighter” than other apps, when Twitter crashes, it’s not all that bad. It’s just an annoyance, at least for now.

But the larger point is, Twitter seems to be growing; it’s increasingly a place where people go to talk about what’s happening around them.

The work of medium theorists, such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, has helped awaken us, or, rather, reacquaint us, with our oral past. It is a past that is elusive to those steeped in literacy – Ong, in Orality and Literacy (1982), describes the difficulty trying to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (p. 31). For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through,” phrases which are commonplace and taken for granted today, are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Yet the history of oral cultures is rich and extensive, as Ong notes only a fraction of the languages spoken have a literature, and even now, “hundreds of languages in active use are never written at all: no one has worked out an effective way to write them” (p. 7). For oral cultures, speech and sound are primary – this is McLuhan’s “ear man.” In these societies, spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power.

Today, even with literacy rates relatively high within American culture, there is a still a lingering oral component within language:

But, in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings. ‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination, syllable-by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the rapid reading common to high-technology cultures. Writing can never dispense with orality. (Ong, 1982, p. 8)

Similarly, McLuhan (1962) notes for a phonetic alphabet culture, “…there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that written code carries for the reader the experience of the ‘content’ which is speech” (p. 72). This legacy of our oral past is retained, for example, in culturally significant events, as an officiant who performs a wedding ceremony, a juror who proclaims a defendant’s innocence or guilt, or a President who declares war on another country. Words today are more than simply textual representations of thought; they have preserved the sense of magic and power that was integral to the age of primary orality.

This, then, is the starting point for an examination of the orality of blogging. For the blog is not simply a print medium, not simply textual, but a medium of speech, a collection of conversations (or, in blogger terminology, “comments”) in cyberspace. The words on a blog are more than words; they have power. They represent social acts and practices, and, in this manner, blur the boundaries between the written and oral media spaces within which blogs are situated.

The orality of blogging also creates community. Unlike Putnam’s (1995) bowling metaphor, there is no “blogging alone,” as bloggers, through their conversations, create social bonds in cyberspace. In a similar vein, medium theorists studying oral cultures find that words bring people closer together. Ong (1982) notes the “interiority” of sound, as the spoken word “manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as person, the spoken word forms human being into close-knit groups” (p. 74). For McLuhan (1964), oral man lived in a “seamless web of kinship and interdependence” (p. 50). The world of orality is rooted in sounds, in language, and words that invite participation and community, illustrated here with a post by a Daily Kos blogger:

It turned out that even though I was Wicked Smart, there were others here not only just as smart and aware as I, but some even smarter and more aware than I! I had one convo that went roughly like this. Paraphrased of course…

Me: Well, I disagree!!! I have studied extensively, as an avocation, the way the human brain works.
Other Guy: I am a Neuro-Surgeon
Me: oh.

But I also found PLENTY of folks who were ready and willing to help me…to overlook my ignorance and newness and point me in the right direction to become a productive member of the community. I learned to be a little humble and to listen to those who had been here longer and knew the ropes. Eventually the community accepted me wholeheartedly and gradually I reclaimed my imperious arrogance…..but now molded and modeled to community standards. (buhdydharma, “New Users Guide To DKos”)

If we think of blogging, and perhaps social media in general, in this light, as something more than a textual medium, something closer to our oral past, this opens up many possibilities. If we think of what we do online in terms of “conversations,” then it’s easier to see the social side of these media. Just as, in the real world, what we say and do makes us who we are, what we post, and blog, and create in the virtual world is part of us. While our online interactions are “virtual,” they are real – people are using social media to bond, to explore their identity, to advocate their politics. We’ve even seen the all-too-real downside of social media, with news media reports of cyberbullying, and the sometimes-tragic results.

This idea of orality, and the connection it creates between our non-literate past and our technology-mediated present, helps explain much of why we find social media so very compelling.

This morning on the BPP, author Barry Yourgrau was in to discuss his “keitai stories,” an emerging form of fiction specifically written for mobile phones. (Keitai is the Japanese word for mobile phone, and its culture is highlighted in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs.)

Yourgrau, describing the compact and concise style of writing required to pull these stories off, noted how the simplicity of the form created an engaging experience, as, with its lack of information, the reader needs to use his or her imagination to fill out the narrative.

This lack-of-data-ness is an example of what media theorist Marshall McLuhan called “cold media“:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well-filled with data. . . . Hot media are low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. . . . The hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.

This somewhat arbitrary and long misunderstood concept is still useful when thinking about how media works, especially regarding the participatory impact of the kind of social media we use today. The sparseness of apps like Twitter, constraining users to express their thoughts in 140 characters or less, often results in tweets that are extremely witty and poetic (”tryin to prove something my intuition is telling me“). Similarly, bloggers, who interact pseudonymously, with only their words to create their common bonds, manage to, for example, have a real impact on our politics.

The bare-bones face of social media — a web browser, a cell phone screen — hardly inhibits people from using these sites to interact, and, in some ways, may actually encourage it. Without imagery, without in-person non-verbal cues, we need to engage each other, one tweet at a time.

Yourgrau, over at Huffington Post, quotes a conversation with a friend, and notes a rising concern about this short form and its impact on the literary world:

He echoed the unease expressed by Moto–but had a different take. “Editors and writers in Japan,” said Roland, “are quick to note that keitai novels are not conventional literary novels. They feature shorter sentences, slang, insider references, and fast, easily digestible soap-opera oriented plots, and their characters are usually young, romantic and disenchanted–like the very readers who are buying and downloading them.”

Keitai novels are therefore not considered ‘real novels.’ “And the fear,” said Roland, “is that technology is changing the content, leading it into ruin.”

This echoes a common fear about text messaging, how it is corrupting the English language.

What’s next? Twitter is ruining the art of the conversation?

I’m watching with interest, as well as participating in, Bryant Park Project’s fun little experiment with Twitter. Or, as they call it: the twitter-lution.

Others have written about the potential here, as old media (no offense, NPR radio people…) mixes with new. What’s most interesting to me is to see how it’s actually playing out, how both the folks at BPP and the fans are all trying to get a sense of this interesting community of real-time, 140-characters-or-less virtual beings in cyberspace. The somewhat inevitable cocktail party metaphor has been used, and as well the somewhat more intriguing “coffee at the local diner.” The latter, in fact, was the inspiration for BPPDiner, a Twitter account that scoops up any and all tweets containing the expression “bpp” — a neat way, once you’re following the account, to find other BPP fans who are talking about the show.

For those folks who still don’t get it, if the cocktail party and diner metaphors just aren’t enough, the most insightful description of Twitter I’ve come across is in Wired, in this post by Clive Thompson, who finds all this tweeting something much more experiential and sensory-driven than anything else:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

He calls this a “social sixth sense,” and I think that’s exactly right. Once you begin to use Twitter, and find a few interesting people to follow, you really do get a sense of “knowing,” at least to the extent you can know someone else you only know virtually.

This, therefore, leads us away from the web as something textual, to something more like what Erik Davis described in the late 1990s as “acoustic cyberspace.” A kind of “space” that’s much more immersive, much more experiential, at least as much “body” as it is “mind.”

And it’s this acoustic space that’s created with Twitter, as conversations happen in real-time (perhaps the cocktail party metaphor is entirely appropriate?), that makes this particular space “oral,” just as much as it is written. And this orality, in turn, brings people together, and creates exactly the kind of community that BPP’s twitter-lutionary experiment is creating within their audience.

I’ll be presenting a paper at the New School’s “Interdisciplinary Memory Studies” conference soon, and the full conference program is now up.

The paper is titled: Virtual Memory: The Blog as Technological Prosthetic.

Should be fun!