Subject: Language changes.
And it also changes who we are.
For a colorful demonstration of that thought, listen to actor Viggo Mortensen, who grew up in Argentina until he was eleven, and last year played a Russian gangster. A few months ago he explained to NPR's Terry Gross how he prepared for his killer role by toying with language. He recounts that in moving from Spanish to English, on returning to his native language, people remarked that it was as if he became another person. It's a great story. And it succinctly describes how a person's relationship with inflection and tactile connection to speech gives them their public persona and presence, whether creepy or kind. Our language, the access to the right words, constrains and guides how we navigate life.
Well, language also encompasses the physicality of gestures as well as the verbalization of words, and technology is giving us new forms of both, namely in clicking, texting, and other human to machine expression. This last week, for instance, Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy found herself the subject of public ridicule at a forum where she was supposed to interview Facebook founder Mark Zuckenberg.
Peterson has a style of interviewing one audience member describes as "flirtaciously awful." Apparently, rather than ask questions, she tends to breezily converse. Actually, that can work quite well with the right interviewee, but it's deadly with someone who, like Zuckenberg, tends to be tight-lipped, indeed highly defensive, in public Q&A situations.
Worse, she had a tech-savvy audience who was totally put-off by the few questions she did ask, basically about the 23-year old's reported market value. They wanted more substantial queries about deeper usage issues around Facebook. Having access to cell phones and Twitter, the personal mass communication application (online to cell phone group text messaging), they started a spontaneous (and global) public dissing of the interviewer, mixing boos with text messages to each other and the web.
In those moments, Twitter changed the entire nature of what was otherwise just an interview gone astray. In essence, it was becoming a language force... a form of speech, to impact the room. The world. What's way more interesting than the ensuing cat-calls is the way that this technology is reinforcing the existing dynamic of "always on communication." It's amplifying the twitch, the need for one's word or click to have a visual result.
In the last few months there have been a spate of articles about teens and texting, where they both talk and text simultaneously. There have also been articles about teens in Japan and the United States, both not as interested as previous generations in driving. Rather than grabbing the wheel, they want their cell phones to keep in touch. Part of that instinct is highly physical, part of it is language tied to a machine, and part of that is tied to wanting to see larger results.
It's not just with teens. Apple's iphone ushered in a form of gestures known as pinching, ways of telling the device how to operate. They want to patent these gestures before other device manufacturers borrow them. But it may be a losing (and foolish) proposition. Just like web "search" probably hooks into deep human instincts (to do, as geographers say, "scan space"), there's something about "pinching" that is highly compelling. It's both expressing what we want and who we are, but it's also attempting to shape the world. Bringing it back to Twitter, see how an irritated Sarah Lacy attempted to use the technology to express her own thoughts but also shape blowback, as shown here.
Twittering is not the only application that's made a splash when it comes to language and crowd expression. At the same SXSW Conference where the Lacy/Zuckenberg forum made such waves, another panel found the audience sharing their sense of boredom in real time via a web site called Meebo in the conference-associated Meebo Rooms. Onstage the folks running the show found themselves under facing more than shuffling feet and yawns. According to this Wired blog post:
During the "Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?" panel, saucy chatters led by a user going by the nom de chat avenger staged a virtual protest Saturday from the comfort of their seats that is recorded in perpetuity in the event's Meebo chat log.
"Shit, we've got 1/10 of the room on here," avenger wrote about halfway through the event. "We ARE the panel."
Then, things got a little freakier. Avenger queried the room: "Do we trust each other. enough to all take off our clothes at the same time and and start dancing?"
It seems the stripping was limited -- with only one piece of clothing coming off ("I just took off a sock," wrote thFOOL) -- but reconstructing the event from the chat log, a dozen or so chatters apparently did some synchronized hand-raising, coughing at the words "social media" and engaging in other chat-room coordinated chicanery.
The 45-page chat transcript led saraheye to write at the end of the panel: "i think i dont need the panels anymore, i will just peep the meebo of the panel."
These new forms of language, which tie to our increased expectation of, search for, amplified results (whether through a crowd, a techology, or some visual cue) are impacting culture and therefore economies. We're seeing that most immediately in the panic around the housing bubble and credit crunch. Stock market busts aren't new. America experienced it's first after the big investments into the railroads didn't quite pan out. What's new is something author Robert D. Kaplan has said about war. Access to 24/7 news coverage inflates the importance of local battles into major events. We're always on the look out for, as local news stations know, bleeding stories. Dramas. It's not that the credit crises isn't big. It's huge. Unfortunately, getting there took millions of small steps which didn't get our focus at the time. And getting out of it demands nuanced, less dramatic steps (like saving our money, as a nation, as communities, and as individuals) where our language... our instincts or draw toward certain language just doesn't help. The language of visible, visceral, sometimes tactile result.
That said, these same tools are awfully good at galvanizing momentum. Whether you're an activist, a politician, or a business, understanding how to use this evolving just-in-time language, and its attendant technologies, is going to be more and more important. More later.
Jonathan Field
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