I read an interesting article in the Neiman Labs blog, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms.   It asked the question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? It clarified the reason for this question as we treated these two forms of expression quite differently. Text is seen as stable and more permanent and this has legal implications.

The article compares the two as follows: “Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final. And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual.”

The article concludes: “The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It’s its own thing, a new category. Our language, however, doesn’t yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn’t yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.”

I find it interesting that this debate occurred when text as we know it was first introduced through the Greek phonetic alphabet. Plato commented on this latest information technology breakthrough of his time. He said in The Republic that text is a better means, than the oral tradition, to convey and store information. Then he cautioned the limits of text in Phaedrus that meaning is better derived from the dialog of viewpoints.

When blogs first appeared similar discussions about the hybrid nature of social media arose. The researcher Alexander Halavais said that blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” They can give greater context and connection.

Blogs took the conversational aspects part way through their informal style and the opportunity for comments. Now Twitter moves the dialog much further through its real time ease of use. The Neiman article noted and interesting twist in this direction. It commented that, “Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet’s news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.”  Now the Web talks back at you through Twitter, more so and faster than with blogs.

The article notes that text has been “considered an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds.” But now this could be changing as it becomes more dynamic.

They note that Twitter is not very good at the archival part yet but it should improve. This is one reason that I post my favorite tweets on this blog every two weeks so I can go back to them. I also find it an interesting recap of what I found useful in the past two weeks when I set up the post. One thing that is needed is better curation tools and they mentioned, Storify. It allows you to create stories using social media.

The article concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter.