Twitterive: Prologue
A listing of all of my Tweets, most of which will be mentioned in this assignment because I have so few, can be found at my Twitter page. The theme that will run throughout my Twitterive is inspired by my own dislike of Twitter, and that is discomfort in a particular place as a whole. I am part of a generation that is supposed to be entirely at home on the Internet and with technology, but society has begun advancing at such a pace that I find it difficult to believe we ever could have actually sat down, read a piece of paper, and gained the information we truly needed. Along with discomfort, there is also a degree of fear and anxiety to this evolution of the role technology plays in our lives. This narrative, then, will not so much be a story about my own personal life (though it will certainly have such elements infused throughout as examples) but more a narrative about how we as a people are developing faster than our own minds can keep up. My inspiration for this Twitterive is my own interest in the ever increasing role that technology has on our everyday activities, and the degenerative effects machines can have on us as humans.
YouTube - Personal Video Introduction
As a child born to the early 90's, I'm supposed to feel at home in front of a computer screen. I'm supposed to be able to find anything, complete any mechanized task, and innovate the way generations before me never could have dreamed. I can work a computer. I can manipulate text, and video, and pictures, and technology as a whole to serve my needs. I'm a native to the technology, but there's an ever-growing disconnect in that nativity. Rather than being a home to me, the technology that we trust is breeding me siblings that I struggle to recognize, despite my best attempts. Websites like Twitter, where the written word is made to be feared as something that necessitates sparse usage, or places that we used to get our news from in print form transforming their websites into multimedia eyesores.
As young boys and girls we grow up in pictures. Through television, movies, video games, and picture books, we are cultured and socialized and we begin to find ourselves. As we grow, we begun to appreciate the art that wasn't created with images but rather with words. We saw beauty and creativity in how people used their words to express not just a place, or a feeling, or an action, but how these things combined to show us also who the wordsmiths themselves were. We didn't have to be novelists or poets or screenwriters to appreciate what another human being could say. My parents never spared any expense when it came to teaching me words and how to use them. From the time I could comprehend what they were saying they wouldn't speak down to me. They challenged me to understand them and to use what I had learned to in turn make myself understood. Firsthand experience taught me to be articulate, intelligent, but most of all proud of what I could do with words. It didn't matter how many I used because nobody cared. Nobody counted. Nobody kept track. I was free to do whatever I wanted. Then the Internet arrived and both society and myself would find ourselves in love with something that we didn't even realize was altering what we were at our very cores. Let's go back in time a little bit.
A little startup website in 2006 attempted to do what no large platform had done since the Internet became available to the public. The creators had a simple idea of allowing people to share their thoughts, beliefs, hobbies, and anything they could capture on video with the world. This website was YouTube, and it served to reintroduce us to something we had begun to disassociate with: the human face. We of course had means of viewing the faces of anybody we cared to, through Facebook, Myspace, and Flickr, we could see the bodies of hundreds of people we didn't even know. We made their stories, we created a persona for them from what we knew, and we began to believe that it was good enough for our purposes. What we didn't have was emotion. We had lost it somewhere along the way and we started not to care if we could get it back or not. YouTube gave us a multimedia way of communication, yes, but it also gave us real people sharing their personalities and their soul; the very things that make us human.
Technology struggled for thousands of years to keep up with the demands of the people. We fought for millennia to make our voices heard in the truest form. From the oldest clay tablets we emerged to write books, from there we took photographs and we've never stopped, we innovated and made film and found the spectrums we broadcast radio on so our physical voices could be heard. But we were missing the complete package. We still didn't have an exact parallel for the thing that we really wanted to do when we first wrote in clay more than 5,000 years ago. Communicate.
So let's take a look back now at how we got here, how I got here, and let's try and figure out what it all means.
As young boys and girls we grow up in pictures. Through television, movies, video games, and picture books, we are cultured and socialized and we begin to find ourselves. As we grow, we begun to appreciate the art that wasn't created with images but rather with words. We saw beauty and creativity in how people used their words to express not just a place, or a feeling, or an action, but how these things combined to show us also who the wordsmiths themselves were. We didn't have to be novelists or poets or screenwriters to appreciate what another human being could say. My parents never spared any expense when it came to teaching me words and how to use them. From the time I could comprehend what they were saying they wouldn't speak down to me. They challenged me to understand them and to use what I had learned to in turn make myself understood. Firsthand experience taught me to be articulate, intelligent, but most of all proud of what I could do with words. It didn't matter how many I used because nobody cared. Nobody counted. Nobody kept track. I was free to do whatever I wanted. Then the Internet arrived and both society and myself would find ourselves in love with something that we didn't even realize was altering what we were at our very cores. Let's go back in time a little bit.
A little startup website in 2006 attempted to do what no large platform had done since the Internet became available to the public. The creators had a simple idea of allowing people to share their thoughts, beliefs, hobbies, and anything they could capture on video with the world. This website was YouTube, and it served to reintroduce us to something we had begun to disassociate with: the human face. We of course had means of viewing the faces of anybody we cared to, through Facebook, Myspace, and Flickr, we could see the bodies of hundreds of people we didn't even know. We made their stories, we created a persona for them from what we knew, and we began to believe that it was good enough for our purposes. What we didn't have was emotion. We had lost it somewhere along the way and we started not to care if we could get it back or not. YouTube gave us a multimedia way of communication, yes, but it also gave us real people sharing their personalities and their soul; the very things that make us human.
Technology struggled for thousands of years to keep up with the demands of the people. We fought for millennia to make our voices heard in the truest form. From the oldest clay tablets we emerged to write books, from there we took photographs and we've never stopped, we innovated and made film and found the spectrums we broadcast radio on so our physical voices could be heard. But we were missing the complete package. We still didn't have an exact parallel for the thing that we really wanted to do when we first wrote in clay more than 5,000 years ago. Communicate.
So let's take a look back now at how we got here, how I got here, and let's try and figure out what it all means.
Flickr - High Resolution Photos
Television - Video
Radio - Purely Audio File
Words, but not pure words. Regulated, formatted, quick, timely. But believable, influential, powerful.
Photographs - Early, Low-Resolution Photos
Newspaper - Word Puzzle
Early interactions of pictures and text. Rustic, amateurish, still very text based. Tight, overabundant, crowded.
Books - Simple Text
First exposure to writing.
Tablets - 'Drawings'
Now we take our largest step into the past. From things we can recognize like newsprint and books, we throw our story back to the beginning of writing, of non-verbal communication. Anywhere from 3000 BC onward, clay tablets were the first material method humans used to convey meaning. And those meanings could be anything.
Be it stories, records, a society's history, personal thoughts, or even a simple message, we had found a way to communicate with those far away or those yet to come. We still use these scribbles and drawings, as children today. For the same reasons.
To tell stories, to detail our histories, and to convey messages. We do it with our own collection of lines that sometimes have no meaning to anybody but ourselves. And yet we are discovering the most important of abilities. We find out how to tell people things before we can speak and how to make our voices, our desires, and our ideas heard. We do this as children and yet society has taken such freedom and deformed and mutilated it. We need words now, we need words and we need set amounts of that because anything more is useless. But I ask why. Why are pictures not valued the same as words? Why can't they be used side by side without being considered childish. If anything these multimedia tools should be utilized to help tell stories. Not tell them for us but to combine with words to tell a story that neither could by themselves.
Twitter - Series of Brief Text Tweets
The website Twitter lies at the core of what I'm trying to say with all of this. It makes the usage of brevity and concision in creating text-based meaning more important than the conveyance of meaning itself. Do I need all of the words I just used in that sentence? No, of course not, I could have summarized it in three. "I hate Twitter." But anybody can hate something, and anybody can cobble together an "I hate _____" statement. It becomes an argument that's no longer 'short and sweet' but rather one for how easily we can be robbed of our voices.
Facebook/Myspace - Multimedia with Text
Tumblr - Personal, Fully Customizable Multimedia
And now it would appear as though we've come full circle. In the year 2007, the website Tumblr was launched.
When we look at the timeline of humanity's communication from its earliest incarnation to our current technologies, we find that the story contains so many parallels to our own individual lives. While the story told herein is on a base level about humanity and society as a whole, each individual person goes through the same progression. We begin by drawing. Our pictures are rough and their communicative means are novice. We discover text and our writing evolves. We become more articulate and our ability to be heard increases. As we continue to evolve we plan out our communication and our verbal and visuals emerge as a carefully planned image. We are restricted. But at our most evolved, we are personal. We are free to communicate unhindered and we evolve ourselves as a result. We experience obstacles, we are limited, we are made to conform to a standard, but once we progress past such roadblocks, we emerge as fully developed individuals. As a fully developed culture. We are aware of ourselves and able to communicate in new and dynamic ways. At it's core this is a tale of evolution and growth. This isn't just a story about me. This isn't simply a story about you. It's an adventure, it's one we all take, it's about us.
When we look at the timeline of humanity's communication from its earliest incarnation to our current technologies, we find that the story contains so many parallels to our own individual lives. While the story told herein is on a base level about humanity and society as a whole, each individual person goes through the same progression. We begin by drawing. Our pictures are rough and their communicative means are novice. We discover text and our writing evolves. We become more articulate and our ability to be heard increases. As we continue to evolve we plan out our communication and our verbal and visuals emerge as a carefully planned image. We are restricted. But at our most evolved, we are personal. We are free to communicate unhindered and we evolve ourselves as a result. We experience obstacles, we are limited, we are made to conform to a standard, but once we progress past such roadblocks, we emerge as fully developed individuals. As a fully developed culture. We are aware of ourselves and able to communicate in new and dynamic ways. At it's core this is a tale of evolution and growth. This isn't just a story about me. This isn't simply a story about you. It's an adventure, it's one we all take, it's about us.