We are made of People!

You know how they say, "he has his father's nose," or "she has her mother's blue eyes?" Think that, but instead of physical traits, think personality traits. OK, not much different. Now switch it from nuclear relatives to friends and acquaintances. Now you have an interesting story.

I'd like to say a little bit about how I believe I am made up. Throughout my childhood my family has moved a lot. Because of this, I've lived in and experienced many different environments and I've met many different types of people. Strangely enough, I've befriended all sorts of people. And I've also learned to dislike all sorts of people. However, something I noticed is that much of who I am comes from everyone else. In a way, my personality traits are a mash-up of the personality traits of everyone I've met and become acquainted with in my life. Most importantly, my parents and brother are a big part of that. Then again, this should be pretty obvious.

Many psychological studies have supported the idea of "emergentism." By "emergentism" I am, in fact, referring to the psycholinguistic theory pertaining to the onset of language in early human development. The idea is essentially that children don't necessarily come out of the womb with innate qualities that make them automatically capable of all the faculties of language. Instead, it argues that infants are linguistically deprived and as a result learn everything they know from what they perceive (including grammar, vocabulary, and even register).

Anyway, enough of my linguistic rant (because I had to), but this is the same idea with which I'm trying to make a connection to personalities. Like language is learned from whomever is around the deprived stimulus, just the same, personalities are complex mixtures of the personalities that we encounter throughout our lives. Whether there is a certain "critical period" when we stop absorbing linguistic traits or personality traits is still a huge debate and we may never know the answer.

However, this is really quite the paradox. If the language/personality of an individual is a combination of everyone else's, then you can't simply argue that humans are born with a blank slate. And if they are, not only is that truly a phenomenon in itself, but it also means that the very essence of human nature stems from literally nothing but what we experience in our natural environment. Even then, we require tools to analyze and synthesize these experiences uniquely to create our own identity. Perhaps this is what the earliest humans went through. Perhaps our understanding of the world and our complex personalities are made up of the simple knowledge, discoveries, and qualities of the earliest peoples. Perhaps I've proven human evolution philosophically.

Perhaps I was wrong that you can't simply argue that humans are born with a blank slate, but that it is possible. Perhaps it is possible that humans are born with preprogrammed personality beta-types that, when tampered with, expand into a mature and interesting person (usually).

Well, we do know one thing for sure: Chomsky was wrong. We are not robots.

This strangely reminds me of that year I dressed up as a television for Halloween.

Photo credit: http://www.halloweencostumes.com

Found by Losing

This summer has a theme.

Cliché Alert: The past few months have taught me several things about myself. They have also taught me many things about not myself. This summer has been filled with travels, getting lost, and finding myself. Actually, every time I went anywhere I somehow got lost. Though, every time I got lost I somehow quickly found my way. The only thing about this lame truth that makes it different from any other time is that I was on my own. So in a way, it was very lonely, free, and open-ended.

In fact, this entire summer has been unwritten. I like to think that if a story is written it must have a happy ending. Well, this summer wasn't a story, but it was life. It is unwritten.

I'm really sad right now. I'm sad that I've made the best of friends during my time in Pittsburgh summer. I'm sad that I have to see them leave. I'm sad that leaving Pittsburgh makes me homesick. I'm even remotely sad that I have an incredible amount of freedom. Yes, the independence makes me sad (in almost the same way that mudslides in China make me sad).

I have been lost. I have made wrong turns. I have discovered dangerous areas. I have been confused. I have continued to juggle with my emotions. I have beaten my own drum. I have lost myself in places I'd rather not be. I have lost myself.

I'm looking forward to being happy soon. I'm happy that I am moving soon. I'm happy that my new place will be filled with the generous amount of free furniture that is beginning to make my bedroom difficult to walk through. I'm happy that I have really good friends who are staying at least for a while. I'm happy that, in turn, I will be staying for a while. I'm happy that classes will be starting soon so that I can get back into a routine. I'm happy that many people who were far away won't be. I'm happy that I have a plan. Plans make me happy.

In all this, I find myself. I transform wrong turns into adventures that lead to home. I experience dangerous areas so that I can grow stronger. I feel confusion so that I can try to make sense of it for myself. I practice juggling so that I won't fall. I have my own beat, but it's part of a beautiful symphony. I learn from uncomfortable experiences and people. (This doesn't always mean I apply those lessons.) I find myself. Little by little.

August is usually my month to shine. This one is especially special. Though I usually play some metaphorical game of hide-and-seek, this time, this year, it was with myself. And this time I am winning. Hopefully I will.

*crosses fingers*

It is found by losing.

Photo credit: http://www.zastavki.com/

Found by Losing: A Corollary

I'm moving to a new apartment next month (maybe one that is bigger on the inside than on the outside... one could only hope) and there is one item I am lacking - a dinner table. And I've been looking around, shopping for a table that would be right and won't break the bank, when suddenly...


I got an idea!


So this summer has been relatively boring so far (compared to the previous, ultra stressful school year) and I always find myself with very little to do and I end up wasting my time doing stupid things - like, well, nothing at all. That's pretty stupid, right? And instead of wasting my time shopping for a table I was never going to buy, I decided to make a plan - a plan to design and build my very own dinner table from scratch. (I like plans.)

Just one more thing to get lost in before discovering that the final resolution is greater than the sum of its parts.

Inside (literally) The Book

As part of the curriculum for the MLIS program at Pitt, we are required to prepare discussion of a book for orientation. The title of this book is Everything is Miscellaneous. The book itself is written in a Saganite tone except that it's not quite as thought provoking as the universe. However, some of the points it makes about information are good to think about.

Just in the first chapter, it discusses how iTunes has revolutionized the organization of music sales by making everything miscellaneous and allowing the users to decide what are the most popular/downloaded items; more explicitly, focusing more on the track rather than the album. Having read and understood this I seemed to agree with their argument that before online music stores, music sales were all about the economic benefits of the album. Without going into all of the consequences of this within the music industry (i.e. artists' recording habits, singles vs. albums) I thought about how ground-breaking this was for the information age. Now, I'm honestly not a big fan of Apple being a corporate, manipulative giant, but they seem to have grabbed a corner on the market.

Likewise, Google Books has increasingly become the top choice to find printed content of many professionals. However, this is still very much in codex format. There are still pages with a limited amount of text on them. Yes, eBooks have certainly influenced booksellers and readers alike, but what about the apparently everlasting novelty (no pun intended) of the printed book? If we make the argument that many people enjoy holding a tangible object or the smell of old or new books, we can always counter that with eReaders and scratch'n'sniff stickers or the fact that - let's be honest - the majority of readers prefer electronic media. It is easily accessible to those who are tech savvy enough to at least use a word processor.

Where am I going with this? Well, my immediate thought was an analogy between albums and books. Of course, these are very different types of content with different purposes, and information architecture should - I believe - always be aware of the type of information it is grouping together, but I've found - at least in academic settings - that there is more of a focus on the author or a specific article. This is actually somewhat like the microsizing of weblogs (Twitter) only it focuses more on a specific topic as part of a bigger picture whereas tracks of an album don't necessarily have to relate to one another. There is a bit more codependency as far as books go - especially if it's a chronicle. However, not all books are like this. And I feel that breaking down and re-synthesizing these types into new media would be beneficial for the content and more accessible to the reader/researcher. This should be considered in any digitization process.

In the future, I imagine a world where all literature and knowledge (printed or otherwise) is easily and readily accessible to everyone. For free would be nice, too.

Photo credit: http://www.bbc.co.uk

The Phono-semantic Bias: A Subjectivity in Linguistics

Yesterday, I was reading a few example abstracts on the website for the Linguistic Society of America. The reason why I was there is because I was considering submitting one for their upcoming conference in Pittsburgh. Despite all of the examples having obvious counter-arguments, there was one that made me literally chuckle. This one. At least it was good until the end - when they started talking about "glorping." It got me thinking. Why do I think this is so hilarious? Well, "glorping" sounds like a pretty funny word to me, but it wasn't that. It was the fact that the researchers were attempting to use it as a neutral, unbiased term for some action being described on a television screen. What action that is, I/we may never know. What action do you think it might be? Well, certainly it's one that can be displayed on a screen. So it's a tangible, physical, noticeable action.


Using English language conventions, we can extract a base word "glorp" which is undeniably the source of hilarity - at least for me. To me, "glorp" makes an interesting sound when I say it. It makes me want to think that "glorp" is some sort of onomatopoeia. It almost seems like a clumsy word. Maybe it's similar to "stumble" but flailingly. Or maybe it has something to do with speed - being slow sounding. If I heard that someone was glorping, I wouldn't assume they were moving very quickly. Or maybe it has something to do with some sort of awkward, alien-like march in which the participant makes an official "glorping" march noise on each step. It could be - and very well might be - the fact that it's not even a real word that makes it all the more entertaining and silly. Regardless, I wouldn't expect to hear this word in the context of writing a TPS report, in giving an official declaration or speech, and certainly wouldn't expect to hear it as part of a compliment. Why?


Well, in doing a bit of dictionary (including Scrabble) research, I was able to find a few words with similar sounds in them: namely the [orp] sound. I will assume all related words (i.e. torpid, torpor) and not include obsolete words.


gorp: a mixture of dried fruit and nuts, often with seeds and other high-calorie foods such as chocolate, eaten as a snack food, originally by walkers and campers. (OED)


torpid: benumbed; deprived or devoid of the power of motion or feeling; in which activity, animation, or development is suspended; dormant. (OED)


dorper: a prevalent and flourishing breed of sheep primary used for meat; some have black heads. (Wikipedia)


corpus: from Latin; a technical term referring to the "body"; used in various professional fields including law, medicine, writing, language, and the arts (Wikipedia)


dorp: a (Dutch) village; formerly more or less naturalized in sense: Village, THORP. In South Africa, a small town. (OED)


So far, we have one word that slightly matches my instincts: torpid. Nonethesless, none of them are verbs like "glorp." However, to be completely honest, I don't use "torpid" in daily conversation and had to be reminded of its existence while searching. So this word barely influenced my judgments regarding the word "glorp." Maybe it's the other half of the word that makes a difference: the [gl] sound. I will, however, refrain from listing all of the words I find as there are evidently hundreds. In fact, I will only list words which come to mind (seeing as this is obviously very subjective).


glop: obsolete; to swallow greedily (OED)


gloop: can be a wide variety of things (thanks to Urban Dictionary... goes and pukes)


glue: the sticky stuff


So now that I have a series of grotesque images floating around in my mind, I'm going to stop searching and just make my point. It seems that the actual phoneme segments in the fake word, "glorp," do NOT directly influence its assumed meaning. Instead, I hypothesize that there is a much more complex explanation to this phenomena (and I do believe there is one).


I hypothesize two separate conclusions:


(1) Intuitive Hypothesis: It is the combination of an uncommon sound of English with another sound or group of sounds which create a sort of "bigger picture" for the meaning of the fake word. By "bigger picture" I mean there is a completely fabricated definition which is influenced by the unique combination of sounds and some sort of psychological analysis.


(2) Non-intuitive Hypothesis: There is a word association using the words outside the perceiver's known vocabulary that combines many different similar words together so intricately that it is difficult, if not impossible, to decipher any or all of them. (Unlikely, but possible)


So I was wondering: Is it worth it to explore this further? Would anyone like to join me? Should I submit an abstract to the LSA for their conference in January?


I would actually be surprised if anyone read this let alone responded to it.

Are you really sorry?

Dear [insert financial institution],

Now that I've graduated from college, I have a new-found freedom to express my opinions... about a ton of shit. Lately, I've been really annoyed by people who use the word "sorry" and just don't mean it. How can someone tell if they don't mean it? It's hard to say, but I'm going to try to make sense of it in this letter.

When I was a child, I always got in trouble with my parents; not doing the laundry, not picking up after myself, speaking out against them. Either way, I was usually punished despite me saying that I was sorry. My mother always told me that I didn't even know what the word meant. And now I realize I, indeed, had no idea what it meant when I was a kid. It's probably because I understand it a little better now. Regardless, as I learned more about this disyllabic utterance, I continued to misbehave and use it - correctly or incorrectly - even though the outcome was still the same. It might get to the point where using the word "sorry" would anger my parents even more.

Then I got it. I stopped using it.

What I learned from it was rather simple. No one really cares whether I'm sorry or not. What matters is that I did something wrong. And if I were really "sorry" I just wouldn't do it again. So using the word is only a courtesy and it's empty in meaning. It might as well not exist. Something I learned about myself as part of this lesson was that, when I stopped using "sorry," I began to do it consciously. Literally, making myself not say it with the hope of getting out of some trouble for using it. This, surprisingly, made me feel less regret. Not really along the line of spite, but rather it made me realize that I have way more control over what I do. Yes, I could have prevented it, but I didn't. And the reason for why I didn't became painfully clear to me. This is what made me reexamine the true meaning of "sorry." It's not about feeling regret. It's about realizing the control to fix it and prevent it. And yes, I suppose it's definitely OK to revel in your misbehavior. It feels good for a while and if you're being punished for it, who cares? No one is going to care. You messed up? Have a drink or two. Watch ten episodes of your favorite show. Eat a cake. Use certain people's faces as a dart board. (Low funds option: Do a little dance then run in the streets naked at 3 in the morning.) Just don't say you're bloody sorry. No one is going to care. I certainly won't.

To be sorry is to be a sad excuse for a human being. Think about it that way. So, Ms. Bank Teller, when you tell me you're sorry and that you've been there and you understand and that I'm not the only one, remember this. I don't give a damn whether I'm not the only one with my problems, maybe you've been there but I'm sure you have less at stake, you certainly don't understand because I'm smarter than you, and I really don't give a bloody rat's ass if you're sorry. Because I know you're not. When you say you're sorry, you're saying that you're a sad excuse for a human being.

Thank you and have a nice, sorry-free day.

Bitch.
For those of you who, instead, have a difficult time saying sorry, this article is not for you. Instead, if you're into Jesus, you should read this. Otherwise, I recommend to all my readers that all language should be taken with a grain of salt. I'm a linguist. Trust me.


Photo credits: http://nataliedee.com, http://gadgets.boingboing.net

Redefining the Sexuality Spectrum

Today, I'm going to write about something I don't think I've ever publicly discussed much - sexuality. It's a first for me so bear with me. Anyway, the topic is sexuality and the ways people measure it. Key word: "measure". More on that later.

So before I share the thoughts that I've had recently about rethinking the ideas of sexuality, I should probably say what already exists to measure sexuality. Well, for starters, there was the tertiary system (gay/lesbian, bi, straight). All fine and good. What about more complex gender identities? Well that was fixed when we added 'T' to 'GBLT'. At this point, we have a quarternary system where 'T' is kind of an other category. In fact, adding letters to this acronym (or whatever you want to call it) represents including more people into this quartnerary system rather than adding more dimensions. So in reality, there doesn't seem to be a clear understanding of "the rest" of the letters.

Another proposal that was introduced was the Kinsey scale. This was a simple two-dimensional scale to measure what a person is attracted to (men, women, or something in between). This was rather revolutionary because it showed that more people are "in between" than we imagined. Not all straight people have scores of 0 and not all gay/lesbian people have scores of 6. So, naturally, the "in between" people were informally declared bisexual, declaring that most of humanity was somehow bisexual. Very valid point! What's wrong with this? It still lumps a bunch of different people into a single category. Though profound, saying that almost everyone is a "version" of bisexual doesn't really help anyone - especially when we clearly don't understand what bisexual really means. (For a better discussion of bisexuality, visit this blog.) It's true. We may think that bisexuality is defined by one person who is attracted to both men and women, but even then we run into trouble. We get the questions like: "So would you marry gay or straight?" "What are you attracted to most?" "If bisexual isn't just 'gay + straight' in varying degrees, then are you pan-sexual or something?" "What are you attracted to? What aren't you attracted to?"

Here is something that I thought up that might help with these issues. It also might do the exact opposite, but I'm willing to at least share what I have. And if someone likes it, I've helped one person.

I propose a scale for both sexuality and gender simultaneously; a scale that isn't two-dimensional and distinguishes individuals with a single letter and explores similarity among the different letters. So on the sexuality scale, one would assess which sex(es) they are physically attracted to AND would assess their own sexual identity (sex in both cases meaning anatomy). Then on the gender scale, one would [similarly] assess which gender(s) they are physically attracted to (mental-sex extroversion) AND would assess their own gender identity (mental-sex introversion). When I say "mental-sex" I mean to say the sexual personality that the person either displays to their environment (extroversion) or what they identify with (introversion). The important thing to understand about these scales is that any scale can be ignored because it is not a factor in physical attractiveness. So if someone doesn't factor in one or more parts of the gender scale, they are saying that they don't care or think about that when assessing physical attractiveness.

To better understand this scale, let's look at a few [fake] case studies:

Name: Sam Smith

Sexual identity: Male

Sex attraction: Female, Male

Gender identity: Feminine

Gender attraction: Masculine

Name: Gene Gildeschter

Sexual identity: Female

Sex attraction: Male, (Female)

Gender identity: Feminine, (Masculine)

Gender attraction: Masculine

Name: Leslie Lane

Sexual identity: Female+

Sex attraction: Female+, +Male, Male, +FM+, +Female, Male+, Female, +MF+

Gender identity: Masculine, Feminine, Third, Elvis "Leslie" Presley

Gender attraction: Masculine, Third, 2-Spirit, Feminine

If you're confused already, good. You're supposed to be. Here are some notational uses that I used which might explain a few things:

For sexuality, I only use variations of Male and Female:

Male: has male anatomy

Female: has female anatomy

Male+: mostly Male, transitioning from

Female+: mostly Female, transitioning from

+Male: mostly Male, transitioning to

+Female: mostly Female, transitioning to

+MF+: intersex, transitioning MTF

+FM+: intersex, transitioning FTM

For the gender scale I use a range of values:

Masculine: rugged, typical of the male stereotype

Feminine: curvy, typical of the female stereotype

2-Spirit: both rugged and curvy, both stereotypes

Third: neither rugged nor curvy, neither stereotype

Self-defined: emanating a certain personality (e.g. Elvis Presley)

You may have noticed that there is also a set of parentheses. This denotes any sub- or alter-identity. This can be used anywhere on the scale. I should mention that though the parenthesis can be used in the "Sexual identity" field, it wouldn't make sense to have more than one sexual identity without parenthesis. This is because, generally, people are born as one sex or the other. Even if they are born with both, there are only variations of two sexes. That's just how biology works (X and Y chromosomes). Nonetheless, biological sex is often disregarded when considering physical attraction - and especially when regarding gender identity.

It should also be noted that each field entry is ordered by preference of the individual. So, for example, Sam prefers women over men but is physically attracted to both. Meanwhile, Leslie prefers masculine identities over feminine and 2-spirited identities but is physically attracted to all of them.

There is also an arrangement of preferred field. So the individual can choose to place gender attraction in an hierarchy with sex attraction, and gender identity with sexual identity just the same. (I did not order the fields in the above [fake] cases.)

It should also be noted that this is only a scale of physical attraction and is subjectively arranged by the individual. It is not a scale of measuring what someone is personally attracted to. For example, someone might be attracted to a certain physical structure that is sexually ambiguous, or to an activity that has nothing to do with a person's sex or gender.

What's in a Tweet?

Would an @-reply by any name smell as sweet?

For those of you who know, one of my graduation requirements is to write a senior thesis. I am performing research about the usage of Twitter with respect to it's genres and registers. Meanwhile, when choosing my dataset, I considered the components that make a tweet effective and viral. So, I am asking "what's in a tweet?" Seeing as how I constantly run into the point in a conversation where someone says, "I hate Twitter" or "Isn't that just a bunch of status updates?" I would like to present Twitter in a way that Twitter fails to do explicitly. And to do so, I need to point out that, because it is so primitive, Twitter is not defined by it's interface, but by how it is used. So, let's start with the basics.

What can [read: do] people do on Twitter?

Tweet: Well, duh. Named the Word of 2009 by the American Dialect Society, the tweet is the essence of Twitter. If I have to describe in 140 characters what a tweet is, I would say the following; "A tweet is more complex than can be assumably understood. There's no way I can describe it in 140 characters. Something about Netspeak. LOL." There are some key words that I think I should explain. Because, let's face it, 140 characters really isn't enough to describe Twitter.

1) public - At first this seems like a really uninteresting word. But if you consider that text messages are around $.10 a message, then you might start to realize the significance of free mass communication. Still sound too much like [free] spam? Though complimentary meat-in-a-can is certainly hard to pass up, there is more. Not only do followers see this message, but anyone who visits their page can also see it (assuming their profile isn't locked). That's essentially how people gain followers and eventually credibility.

2) broadcast - This is where the idea of mass communication comes in. Because tweets are public, they can essentially be broadcast to all of the Internet - more directly to all of one's followers. So what is significant about broadcasting? Content. (Think about news stations.) Whenever I have to speak to a crowd I constantly think about this one element. What I say to my followers has to be relevant, concise, and accurate in order for them to maintain interest and to influence others to follow me. Many will argue that there are tons of tweets out there that do none of these things. I totally agree. But those people either cater to a different audience or they just don't know how to use Twitter effectively. My good friend, Mattt, said it best. Chances are, if someone tweets something that you don't understand or find irrelevant, it wasn't meant for you. In the same vein, there's a reason why everyone doesn't follow everyone. That would just be silly. Followers choose who they follow based on content, genre, and register. And [effective] Twitter users constantly have their followers in mind when composing a new tweet - whether they like to admit it or not.

3) followers - I keep mentioning this word. What's up with all this following business anyway? Well I'll get to that. Be patient.

4) 140 characters - This is something I'm still trying to fully understand. But I think it has to do with the human attention span. If you ask someone whether they would rather read a best-selling novel or an amusing text message, you would probably find that most people would read the text message and go as far as glance at the cover of said book. They might read the back of the book, but even then, it's a shortened version of the full text. Humans are apparently not hard-wired to read large texts or for long periods of time - at least not in their current evolutionary stage. Also, short messages are much easier to remember and recall than a novel. There's also a unique difference between either genre-type that I like to call "idea-mass" which is essentially the quantity of thoughts in an utterance. In a book there are hundreds maybe thousands of ideas; in a tweet, maybe two or three. Though they usually all go together somehow. If they don't it's probably an ineffective tweet or won't obtain a captive audience. Either way, it's so much easier and more enjoyable to absorb one or two ideas than a cryptic bible of them.

5) links and mentions - Links are portals to worlds beyond 140 characters. And in these lands there are fewer limits, longer texts, and multimodal dimensions for those who like to actually read (or for those who don't). Mentions do just that with people. They provide an opportunity to see who you are tweeting about by giving a link to their Twitter profile and their most recent set of tweets. Not to mention (no pun intended) when using this structure, the person mentioned also gets a little nudge about the mention, depending on their client. (Clients have their own completely different story to tell.) There are also different types of "mentions." There's the reply mention that sends a public message to that user in reply to something they tweeted. There's the tweet that merely mentions the user's handle to refer to them publicly. Then there's the debatable third type which is public but not clearly a replied or directed message or a broadcast giving a shout out. The perfect example of this is the retweet. (That's a whole topic on it's own. No really, keep reading!) Then, of course, people use multiple mentions of different types within the same tweet.

Retweet: This has a history. It all started with the simple RT syntax which usually precedes the user's handle with their original message (though their handle sometimes goes at the end depending on the client). Some people retweet this way with their own short commentary at the beginning. This commentary could be anything from an addendum to a straight reply to the original author. Either way, the comment is public and often adding commentary makes a retweet more interesting and/or unique. Then, in November of 2009, the new retweet was set loose. Now all you have to do is click a button and the tweet would be "echoed," preserving the original author's message in it's entirety and their icon. Personally, I think this new feature has a much different connotation than the older version. In a way, it is less selective because the user is unable to alter or add anything. But on the other hand, the old retweet still exists. One might re-coin the old retweet as a "quote" or a "reference" or even a "call-out." With this new retweet, the retweeter is further removed from the message and misuse and spamming become potentially more common. Nonetheless, there are several different purposes of the retweet: quoting, referencing, calling someone out, or echoing what someone tweeted; there are almost certainly others.

Direct Message: If you recognize [and ever used] "DM" then you're probably with me in saying that direct messages are pretty specialized. For one, they're private. So it has to be either unworthy of or too personal for a public audience. They are also limited to a conversation between only two users. And to use this feature most users utilize special client mechanisms or the website itself.

Follow: This is pretty straight forward. Users can follow what other users tweet. This might be because they are interested in what they have to say or in what they represent. Either way something about them brings the user to click the "follow" button. It's probably important to note that following is not equivalent to friending. Friending implies that you both know each other (this is cyberspace so that's the only requirement for cyber friendship). But for following, the target user may not even know you exist or that you are following them. Follow is to Twitter as subscribe is to the blogosphere. And it's not uncommon for users to have personal "unfollow" sessions where they sit down and determine who is still worth reading and who is now considered spam. (I should know. I just lost three followers the other day.) Ironically, I find it more socially acceptable to unfollow someone than to unfriend them on Facebook. This might be evidence to suggest that Twitter is less of a social network and more of a reader's network or an amateur publisher's network.

In the context of following, there's something I like to call "Twitter affluence" which is reflected, most explicitly, by the ratio of followers to following; The higher the ratio, the more viral the user appears to be. It can also be explicitly reflected by the amount of retweets that person obtains. This idea of affluence is also greatly dependent on a balance between personality and product. Is the Twitter user more interested about telling their followers about their life by the minute? Or are they trying to sell their personality and experiences as a literary product? If you haven't guessed already, one of the main arguments in my thesis is that there is a distinction between public communication and personal broadcast; the former being quasi-standard communication (and often illocution), the latter being the unique adaptation of interesting thoughts in relation to the user's environment and experiences which is also relevant to their audience.

So maybe Twitter really isn't just 140 character updates of someone's mundane activities. Maybe there's a little more than that inside the tweet.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerpig

Lexiconhance

Lately, it has been easy for me to understand words. And to that, I owe a few regards to my Speech class in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon. Say nothing about it being a mere acting class. It's much more than that. It's a class on understanding how to communicate an idea - maybe not your own, but an idea nonetheless. In a way, it is a picnic stop on the path to self understanding. (For more about that [self understanding] see my previous post - or, better yet, just simply assume we know nothing about anything about ourselves.) And at this meadow meal, there is a theme song underscoring that has absolute meaning for the moment and none for the next; so, in a way, the music knows us better than we do - especially when it means the most.

What is it in a lyric that makes our hearts sing? There are a bunch of letters on a page, or sounds in the air. But, there's more; the way the singer uses the words with their voices to communicate some phenomenal bit of pragmatism and sentient thought. In a moment, a single word can tell the story of human history or of love. And then the Earth purges it all and starts from nothing again, repeating the bittersweet cycle of this vicious art until finally there is nothing left to purge and meaning is lost. But really, it's not lost; it's just dormant, waiting for the end.

Words are like songs in themselves; symphonies for the classically inclined. They have phases and movements and stories and peaks and valleys and empty oceans and seas of thought. But, like every song or symphony, if you listen to it over and over again, it becomes (or seems to become) shorter and then simpler and then less meaningful and eventually - when all the instruments sink into the stage - just sound. Or at least that's how I see it at this particular moment.

Photo credit: http://www.segisramirez.com/