IN DEFENSE OF SHORTHAND
Perhaps it’s my own tech obsession that puts me in the defensive when I hear my friends talk about the “death of language” online, or bemoan the collective short attention span of bloggers/twitterers/Facebookers.
“140 words? That’s it??”
Something about the brevity of online communication surprises and bothers these friends of mine, who complain about the changing way people are talking to each other. It must have been similar to hearing complaints about typists in the 1960′s, and the death of handwriting, a glorification of the medium, a way of communicating a mor meaningful connection with another person. But language isn’t seeing any type of death here. Language changes all the time, reflecting small trends in casual conversation becoming social norm; consider the rise of local dialects, the integration of anagrams and abbreviations in our daily speech.
This current growth specifically addresses our collective online shorthand; symbols, capital letters and common phrases replace fuller sentence structure and longer phrases, brevity enforced by letter and word count. Does the rise of Twitter’s 140 character faux-haikus mean that we’re communicating less, developing less meaningful connections? No. It means we are actually saying something different, or more specifically, we’re saying things differently.
To put it simply, we’re writing less, but sending more content to each other than ever. According to the Baltimore Sun, there were 100 million clicks of TinyURLs in June of 2009, the shortened link creator popularized by Twitter users. This means that 100 million articles, songs, videos and images were shared by people who only have 140 words to say something to their online world. Language makes way for direct content in these short blasts of what speaks to web users. The speed of information is right under our noses, dressed in “LOLs,” “G2Gs” and Keyboard Cat videos — these are silly examples, but they show a new type of social currency rooted in our online conversations, in our status updates and Myspace bulletins, that of knowing something.
It’s knowing and seeing that become our social currency, a way of showing shared experience online and establishing communities on web platforms and message boards. Knowing the same links, the same songs — not too far off from how normal circles of music fans or moviegoers are built, but now at a speed that rapidly introduces things that “you need to know.” The speed of word-of-mouth is ever increasing and continually more direct, and the way our social media works reflects this speed — we want to see more, read more, listen more. Our communities are built on piles of YouTube videos, news articles and most importantly (at least to this article,) music.
We gain that currency from seeing the same links, sharing the experience of finding the same short bursts of entertainment on the increasingly limitless internet. It’s this pursuit where our language becomes media — free, 100% accessible media. The irony here is that music is more important than ever in connecting with other people, but it’s expected to be immediately sharable and completely free. Music here isn’t taken for granted as a sharable, pirated product, as often depicted. Instead, music is ingrained into relationships and conversations like written speech, and like speech, it is expected to be readily available as if in the air, to pluck and use in the next message to a friend.
This is the conundrum of modern social networking. Music is the glue that brings together online — over 255 million users on Facebook and 14 million monthly hits on Twitter — and yet the value it provides cannot be cashed in,because the fact that it’s free makes it the center of our online world. When critics calculate the current value of music, there are so many graphs of song downloads and album sales, but many miss the notion that music’s value comes from the communities they inspire online, and the way that music becomes part of the language of links that we use every day. It can be said that as music’s value has diminished by the expectation of free streaming media and embeddable MP3s, its meaning is absolutely larger than ever.
Perhaps the central role of music — specifically free, sharable music — in online culture is both the curse and the promise for musicians in the 21st century. Your music can be the substance of thousands of clicks and responses, but at the price of having to remain priceless.
