The Medium & the Message

When technology touches on language, it usually makes an ungraceful impact. The inherent limitations of the implementation of any great technology idea often work against the implied benefits.

Let me give you an example. SMS is a great way to send a message to someone when you don’t want (or need) to actually talk to them. However - & this is a big problem - the implementation restricts the length of the message, so a new language has been created to use this technology. That language is a barrier to communication unless you know it. This is great amongst a small circle of frequent messagers, but not so good if you’re trying to convey complex instructions. The medium gets in the way of the message.

Speaking of short messages, Twitter (& microblogging in general) is supposed to be good for just telling people what you’re up to. You can blast out gratuitous updates to your homeys (or peeps, or posse, or whatever is a trendy way of describing people interested in what you have to say) ad infinitum - as long as you restrict the message length.

But tweets are more than just the update, they are a social sharing of knowledge because they broadcast to a wider audience. They are the opportunity to share wisdom, rather than communicate one-to-one. Because of this, the usefulness of that sharing has made us invent another language - tagging of the message. For those not into Twitter, this means that your message can ‘adopt’ a relevance to various pre-defined topics, so that people who are interested in those things know that’s what you’re talking about. They can search, they can browse, they can acquire knowledge more easily - as long as the tags make some sense, are consistent, etc.
This is a communication nicety generally lacking in English, for example. In fact, English is one of those rare languages where a double meaning is used in humour to specifically jar the listener into a different frame of reference, using puns & misdirection. If you had to tag everything you said, then the punch-line would be given away ahead of time.

SMS & microblogs also have that communication advantage of being transactional & text - you get the whole message in one block, & you can see (& understand) it all together. There is no waiting for the sentence to finish, or for the next sentence to start. You have it all in front of you, & a proficient reader will ingest the message without breaking it down into words. It’s almost like the sound bite that TV & radio so long for out of any important event - a very succinct message that captures the spirit of the event being reported, if not the truth.

For those who tend to turn to the back of the book to work out if the ending makes the whole book worth reading, a tweet can be quickly identified with the tags, no matter where they are in the message. You might miss something important, but the sender should have known to mark up their message with the tags in the first place!

As we make our communication more knowledge-aware - by using techniques like tagging, & other mark-ups that have been available since the web became a popular publication method (somewhat like this blog!), we are changing the way we use the language, & what we expect out of it. Let’s ignore for the time being the requirement for a richer character set to describe things ‘outside’ the language (like a ‘#’ for a tag, or a smiley face for a sentiment).

Our language is slowly changing with the medium - as always. Movable type made people more able to read. Phosphorescent type may make people more able to think.