The good folks over at the Oxford University Press, after analyzing nearly 1.5 million updates to the Cascading Commentary on Contemporary Life known as Twitter, have come up with some interesting findings:
1. Verbs are much more common in their gerund form in Twitter than in general text. “Going”, “getting” and “watching” all appear in the top 100 words or so.
2. “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, revealing just how often people use Twitter to report on whatever they are experiencing (or consuming) at the time.
3. Evidence of greater informality than general English: “ok” is much more common, and so is “f***”.
Next up, perhaps: a study that examines whether any of the OUP’s findings is correlated to the bizarre, gender-related results of the Harvard Business Review’s Twitter study.
Really? I don't think the OUP's analysis is interesting at all. Twitter is more like gabbing in person than traditional "texts," which are a kind of medium optimized for communication between relative strangers. Of course, this not to denigrate gabbing, since everyone does it. The point is that OUP is quite simply comparing apples to oranges.
#1 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Mon 8 Jun 2009 at 09:04 AM
You're right, Josh, none of this is earth-shattering--and, hey, I may be the only one who finds the OUP findings even remotely interesting. (I tend to find a lot of things interesting that others rightly don't. The plot of the film Troop Beverly Hills, for example.)
But: I do find it interesting that gerunds, in particular, are so common in Twitter text. If for no other reason than that finding's seeming validation of Twitter's narrative immediacy--and, by extension, its fluidity and its transiency. Which in turn suggests (though by no means proves) that Twitter is, as broadly used, oriented more to the currency of action than to the durability of ideas.
Though I see your point when it comes to the differences between Twitter text and traditional text, the distinction to me is less a matter of apples-and-oranges and more a kind of Fuji-and-Gala situation: I see Twitter as part of the narrative continuum, rather than a discrete conversational entity. Given that, I actually do find the tools people use to structure their Twitter updates--and the OUP's study of those tools--broadly telling and, yes, broadly interesting. If not, you know, mind-blowing.
#2 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 8 Jun 2009 at 01:13 PM
I think we agree on everything but the degree of difference between twitter text and traditional text.
And if we're going to be serious about degrees of difference--and I very think we should be serious--I vote for an apple and ... a block of wood. They're both vaguely plant matter, but one's basically alive while the other's basically inert. Personal communication between friends or acquaintances who share come context is--by my lights, anyhow--super different from the stuff that I suspect composes OUP's comparison.
Here's the short of it. Why didn't OUP ask whether we use lots of gerunds in casual spoken conversation? Also, I utter fuck a great deal more than I write it, anywhere.
#3 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Mon 8 Jun 2009 at 03:11 PM
Hmm...apples and applesauce, perhaps? (I know that sounds glib, but I'm actually being (fairly) serious: Twitter, to my mind, brings a kind of manufactured fluidity to the core--pun only half-intended--unit of traditional text.)
But to move away from plant matter...I agree, Twitter is certainly conversational and, in that, dynamic--correct me if I'm being too extreme, but it's more conversational than perhaps any other textual platform yet invented. And if (or, more likely, when) users add more discursive functionality to Twitter--the ability to forward tweets, etc.--the current platform will likely only become more discussion-oriented. (Steven Johnson's current Time cover story, say what else you will about it, articulates that idea nicely.)
And yet, to me, the textual aspects of Twitter trump the conversational. The process of textualization itself--the business of articulating a thought not through the (general) impermanence of speech, but rather through the (general) permanence of the written word--means that textual platforms, inherently, have much more in common with each other than they do with spoken words. As conversational and dynamic as Twitter is, the route its words travel on the way to becoming tweets--brain to fingers to keys to screen--is, as in other textual platforms, one of implicit deliberation. That split second--the time it takes for the private to become public--binds together text in all its forms as aesthetic entities as well as communicative: text is talk, sure, but it's also an artifact. Written words, as a group--aware (however vaguely) of their own durability--simply have more intention than spoken words. And thus more in common.
Which is why, I assume, you say 'fuck' much more often than you end up writing it down...and why, to get back to the original issue, the OUP was (to my mind) perfectly justified in narrowing its analysis to written text.
#4 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 8 Jun 2009 at 04:44 PM
I completely agree that the process of textualization--the task of committing words to characters that we can see just after we let go of them and before the rest of the world does--matters. Textualization, a fittingly technocratic word, matters a lot, and yes, tweets have more intention. To the extent that "gabbing" implies less intention--and I think it largely does--I was wrong.
But tweets also have different intention because the audience is different. We know that our tweets are open for the whole public, and persistent into the future, but we also write them mostly for a much smaller, well acquainted public, our followers, who read them in the present.
When I talk about the "conversational" context of twitter, I guess I mean to talk not only about varying levels of intention and cognition that go into carrying our ideas to the public. I also mean varying levels or kinds of context. This is what I was trying to get at by contrast with "traditional 'texts'" as "a kind of medium optimized for communication between relative strangers." We should expect a different vocabulary and grammar within a medium optimized for communication between people who know another and interact repeatedly in near-real time.
And none of this necessarily has anything to do with whether twitter is "inherently solipsistic."
#5 Posted by Josh Young, CJR on Wed 10 Jun 2009 at 03:45 PM