Twittering Away – “LOL Speak”
Paul Newnes
Partner
Last Exit, New York City
I have a first cousin who recently turned 18. As modern times dictate, I not only sent him a birthday card and present but sent him 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 QWERY 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?
May 11, 2009
