Aphorisms, Haiku’s, SMS, Twitter
“What are you doing?” This basic question of Twitter can easily be answered in the limited 140 characters a ‘tweet offers. They key characteristic of the famous microblogging site, it’s short message length, actually isn’t really new. The history of the use of short texts goes way back; an early example of it can be found…
Communication is as old as humans (or humanoids) itself, from a grunt, a shout to a simple gesture – we have always had the ability to convey messages to others around us – whether we’re correctly understood is a whole other matter. ‘Aphorisms’ (the ability to make short, powerful and easy to remember messages) “have been around for thousands of…
Since its start in 2006 people have speculated about the significance of Twitter. Twitter has often been criticized for it’s lack of content, but is also praised for the empowering possibilities it offers us. I question both these perspectives and propose to understand Twitter, not just as another tool that can be critiqued on the basis of it’s usefulness, but as a communication-tool that can be understood as a reflection of our current society.
It is no news to us that text messaging is morphing our modern culture. In 2008, the British scholar David Crystal has observed how text messages in mobile phones and IMs can influence our live technologically, sociologically, psychologically, commercially, and linguistically. In his book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, Crystal points out that texting has become pervasive in many societies, and it…
‘Blogosphere’, ‘Twittersphere’, ‘Afrosphere’. We’re gradually getting used to a new media terminology whereby we quickly refer to new communication spaces and specified fields as ‘spheres’. As the Twittersphere is still rapidly growing, we might want to look back at Habermas’ classic concept of the ‘public sphere’, which was one of the earliest common ‘spheres’ to refer to.
Twitter, the insanely popular…
Nietzsche was known for his fondness of aforisme. Using the fewest words for the finest thoughts. This distinctive style of using aphorisms intrigued me. Nietzsche uses rhetorical violence to overthrow and seduce the readers of his work. Within Web 2.0 it’s important to ‘seduce’ people into reading your content. Could Nietzsche’s aphorisms serve as a tool to attract attention?
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