Saturday, July 25, 2009

Twitter and the bastardization of language




I'm having conflicting considerations about Twitter. I dusted my personal Twitter off because of the Social Media - Integrated Marketing Class that I'm taking. I also reclaimed the orphaned Twitter account for my work TicketWeb.

I find the use of Twitter for business purposes and marketing something like a product or event most useful. But there's a dialect, a language - a lingo that Twitterers or whatever they are called, that directly parallels to our short-attention-span society. At the same time, I believe that the hyphenation, abbreviation, and bastardization of language is the prophecy that George Orwell dreamed about in "1984." In the novel, the government or "Big Brother" instituted "Newspeak" or "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year".

Many elements of Twitter convey a tone of casual fun. But I think there's an intangible and sinister undercurrent that is readily absorbed and assimilated by it's users. Is Twitter "Newspeak" the new form of cute?


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