1.3 Social Media and Hypertextuality: their influence on our storytelling
by admin
I regularly indulge in the use of online social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, and I frequently utilize functions that typify the virtual medium, such as hypertext. I feel certain that these online platforms have altered the way I express myself as a writer. How could they not? Over the course of my life I’ve experienced innumerable changes in the virtual domain.
As a child, in the late 90s, my family owned a computer and a handful of basic computer games, but we didn’t have internet until I was about 9 years old. We didn’t need it. Then internet became more accessible, more common, and suddenly my family was connected to the www. The internet got faster, I made a hotmail account, and I started to use msn messenger. I was aware “chat rooms” existed but they seemed rather distant and a little arcane. Hotmail, MSN, and Neopets defined my online horizons.
When I started highschool there was no such thing as Facebook, and I was the only kid I knew with a cellphone or a laptop, and this was only the case due to special circumstances involving a short-lived modelling career that necessitated such “high tech” equipment. By grade 12 everyone, including me, had Facebook and access to some sort of rudimentary cellphone with a tiny screen and T9 text messaging capabilities, while a few really lucky kids had heavy, angular Mac Books, the sort that have since become museum curio.
Though my high school days weren’t terribly long ago, in the grand scheme of things, it admittedly feels like an eon. I’m now 27 years old, I have an iPhone 6, a laptop and a tablet, two FB profiles, and accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Blogger, Gmail+, the list goes on and on. Compared to my 17 year old self, awkwardly hammering out text messages to the one or two other people I knew with Motorollas, totally unaware that there would eventually be an extensive lexicon of SMS Shorthand condensing whole sentences into tiny groupings of letters, years from ever hearing the word “selfie” let alone trying to take one, and likely convinced that Apple could never release anything more impressive than my Ipod touch, the current version of me, sitting here typing this rambling blog post for an online university course is far, far more connected to, well, everything.
I’m working from my home on Vancouver Island, but with incredible speed I can touch base with a professor or ask questions of classmates currently situated in Vancouver, miles away. In fact, I can do both those things at once. Meanwhile, I’m preparing to curate an Instragram takeover for an independent publishing house in Montreal, and I’m exchanging Facebook messages with friends in the US. Followers and friends on various different platforms are posting photos, videos, and status updates about life as it is a world away, or a click away, depending on how you look at it.
The www and social media platforms provide me with connectivity characterized by immediacy, and these are qualities reflected throughout the virtual realm, a great example being hypertext. In the same way i can use three characters in a Tweet to indicate three separate words (omg), or “share” one photo to multiple social media platforms at the same instant, hypertextuality enables one blog post to contain within it countless other online sources, all of which may be “summoned” immediately (more or less depending on the strength of one’s Internet connection). I’ve used variations on the word “immediacy” to emphasize how central speed is to these online processes: access to people, media, and information is instantaneous and I believe this emphasis on speed has greatly impacted how I write.
Though the context in which I’m writing leads to variation (am I typing a tweet or a 2500 word essay?), it’s generally accurate to state that a heightened awareness of the dimension of time pervades my consciousness as a writer. I place a premium on being brief and concise (can I say what I need to say in under x-amount of characters?). Readers are often scrolling past, surfing, skimming: getting my message across quickly is important in such a context, and it also becomes important to consider the role of other forms of media in drawing attention to my text. Graphics engage readers visually and also seem to play some sort of trick on increasingly microscopic attention spans.
Hyperlinks are another useful method of engaging or, perhaps more accurately, of entangling readers. Because they typically utilize colour coded indications hyperlinks involve the attraction of graphic variety embedded in the textual. But they also have the value of guiding the reader fluidly through a text, directing their movement through a multiplicity of virtual sources with comparative ease. Clicking a hyperlink embedded in a virtual text is much easier and much faster than the time consuming process of, for example, flipping through a physical book to locate endnotes.
Thus it seems to me that social media platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram, centered around continual access to immediate updates, impress a consciousness of time, its limitations, the need for rapid access. The value of immediacy is supported online by pervasive hypertextuality and ultimately, and environment is created which projects a (possibly false) sense of urgency. In such an environment, such urgency has certainly impacted my own approach to self expression, particularly in the virtual domain.
Works Cited:
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Action. 1916, Free Verse + Futurism, Designhistory.org, 2011.http://www.designhistory.org/Avant_Garde_pages/Futurism.html. Web.
hi anne!
i found many things interesting about your post.
firstly, i enjoyed reading your progression of how technology changed as you grew up. i also enjoyed your writing style immensely!
on the topic of immediacy – i think it is an excellent point that social media has created a currency out of current, as in happening this very moment, events. especially twitter and facebook – the power to communicate and share information instantaneously with hundreds, or even thousands, of people is really affecting the way we understand and process information ourselves. we are now placing greater value on things happening in the moment in the world around us.
this urgency is becoming a part of all our currents stories – a driveness to extract information immediately, to hear as many of our favored angles as quickly as possible. feeling a need to share information virtually as soon as something happens, with fear that the moment or opportunity may be lost if not taken immediately. or feeling the need to give our virtual opinion on the most current events, and to weigh in, in order that we might somehow feel a part of the stories we are empathizing with, or being angered by.
the threads of social media on the internet is creating something maybe we might consider “popcorn lit” – little bits of explosive written published information, produced very quickly. it has it’s benefits – it is immediate, eye-catching and satisfying. but on the flipside, it is also confusing and chaotic and very small, unreliable bits of information that cannot give us an accurate idea of the big picture on their own.
best,
stephanie
Hi Stephanie,
Thanks so much for you comment, I’m glad to hear you enjoyed reading my writing. I’m also glad that you mention what you call “popcorn lit”. I think this is a great name for the kind of speedy, mass produced text that we as users of the www are bombarded with daily. I’m very interested in this kind of writing. I agree that there are numerous downsides, particularly, in my opinion, the tendency for popcorn lit to be shallow, poorly researched and/or thought-through, and ultimately without real content. At the same time, I think it’s important that as critical readers and observers of society at large we try to recognize the value, maybe even beauty, inherent in the kind of uncensored, reflexive writing that characterizes blog posts, tweets, Facebook status updates and so forth. I’m particularly interested in how their brevity and ephemerality evince a kind of unintentional poetics.
cool observation – the poetics of brevity! it makes my mind wander to the ways in which brevity has changed language overall. so fascinating.