The Evolution of the Written Word

Hello internet,

I have used a pretentious title, I know, but I wanted something to distract from the fact that this is a post about Facebook and Twitter that I am going to inform people I have written via the selfsame Facebook and Twitter. This post is about a couple of ideas I have about some changes in the way we communicate in this age of increased importance for the written word, particularly in a few particular forms.

The three forms of communication I am primarily talking about are Facebook status updates, Twitter posts, and mobile phone text messages. Though the lattermost came first chronologically the first two are the more important in this discussion because of the larger usual audience of the message, but the same sorts of things apply to text messages as I am describing for the other two media.

My observation is that between the very small number of character we use in these media, and the distancing effect of having no recognisable handwriting to connect the writing to the writer in the reader's mind (not to mention he distancing effect of using the written word instead of speaking face to face), there is very limited potential to present oneself as a complete person to the receivers of the message. By this I mean we find it much harder than usual to express who we are to one another.

In the post-60s age of individualism expressed as a desire to live authentically and to find your true self, and a load of the rest of the rhetoric which has developed in the last 50 or so years and has been used to great effect by advertisers (boo!) and the various liberation movements (yay!) the felt need to truly express yourself is a powerful force inside us. So we really do care quite a lot that in some of the dominant new ways we have of communicating with each other it can be hard to put ourselves across as we'd like to.

It is entirely coincidence that I am posting this just as Amy Winehouse is in the news for dying, I was planning on writing this piece anyway. It does provide a good example for my next point though. The internet has been awash with platitudes at the early death of the troubled celebrity.

I think that people overcompensate for the difficulty of injecting their personality into modern written media by trying to ram huge amounts of it into the messages they publish. People publish the kinds of sentences one might usually only expect to hear between personal friends. This is an attempt to more strongly establish their personhood. We all feel the risk of coming across as automotons (or automata?) online. I am sure many people have typed out a Facebook update, only to look at it hard and delete it again. I myself have on several occasions released a message and then promptly deleted it again. Why are we so self conscious about how we come across online?

I have not really considered the impact on peoples conversation habits of the ability to unsay things by deleting them, but I am sure this also does some peculiar things. My main point is that people try to inject far more wit, emotion, sarcasm, anger, or whatever personality trait they are trying to exhibit, into those 140 characters than would ever seem natural in a sentence of that length usually. I believe this is even having some effects on our wider culture.

I realise that some of the properties I am describing are also present in letters and emails. These may be important precedents, and the distancing effects I have described also apply to varying degrees with these forms of communication. From my narrow knowledge of film and novel clichés letters have quite often been rather romantic or otherwise emotional (though this may be as much because it is easier to approach difficult questions when one is not confronted with the full horror of engaging with emotional matters face to face with another human being) and emails may have fulfilled something of a similar role. Neither, I believe, have had quite the same effect though.

We make our personalities more hyperbolic so we can squeeze enough of them onto the back of a digital postal stamp. The most interesting thing about this, however, may be that we do it all in public. The combination of these two factors are what I believe might actually be agents of social change. I don't think it is worth disputing that technology can change society, one need look no further than the supremacy of television over many of our lives for much of the past century to appreciate that. I think that Twitter and Facebook are making us represent ourselves as more extreme people than we normally would, and are making us express ourselves in public in ways that would normally be exclusively between close friends. Now I don't know if these changes are being reflected in meatspace as well, and frankly it would not surprise me, but the social change is there whether confined to cyberspace or not. I think that the driving force for this change is an insatiable need to reinforce and exclaim our individuality in a digital age where it can sometimes be hard to feel like the unique people we are.

Caleb