So I’m still not on Facebook, but I’ve signed up for Twitter and added the accounts of my classmates (haven’t checked to see if anyone else I know is on there yet). Coming from an English background, I’m a little perturbed by the 140 character limit. I’m not a grammar-police guy, but seeing the way that articles and pronouns are cut and verbs are shortened in order to save on space made me feel squeamish. I use text messaging on my cellphone a lot, but I normally write more than 140 characters on two or three slides to get across what I want to say. I’m sure I’ll get used to the new format of Twitter and the fact that it’s only really for brief, brief statements (or maybe terse extensions of blogs?), but for the time being I can’t help but wonder what its effect on language is going to be after a generation grows up with it.
Another thing about the Twitter sign-up – after only a few seconds of registering my account and beginning to add classmates, I had a couple of followers. I was excited at first, thinking that this whole time the internet was waiting for me to plug into the dominant social networking tools that are out there, but this wasn’t the case. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was profiled very quickly and internet-porn businesses had started marketing to me. I still have to learn how to block people or restrict access for those who want to follow my account, so for the time being I have some weird people watching for my Tweets. Amazing how pervasive the hunt for money is once something gets popular.
I don’t know how practical a tool I find it yet, but I think that’s because I’m still unfamiliar with the controls. Seeing “@so-and-so” meant nothing to me until I did a little digging, and the system that they have to follow chains of conversations is strange… I’ll probably edit this post once I’ve had more of a chance to play with the system.
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