Why it’s still embarrassing to say ‘tweet’: an ethnosemantic look at online communication

Ethnosemantics: the study of the meaning of words to categorize or classify the world. The variety of words within one category highlight a culture’s priorities. Vocabularies are elaborated to reflect the value a culture places on a category.

Online conversation is becoming our primary means of communication with many members of our social group—coworkers, friends, and families.

The modern act of communication is writing (or more accurately, typing). Our language has evolved to include descriptive verbs for different channels of online writing.

The need for such nuanced vocabulary indicates both:

1. the cultural importance of online communication
   • socially and professionally, (which are almost one and the same, thanks to the necessity of consistent online persona presentation), facility with language becomes a badge of success
2. a deft meta-handling of the constraints of the medium itself
   • text-based exchanges lack body language, volume, tone, speed, and other emotional cues, so must be carefully described with verbs and annotated with emoticons and formatting.

Here are examples of verbs that mean ‘to write online’, and the subtleties indicated by each:

To blog
Example: “I got up early this morning and blogged over hot coffee”.
Destinction: Longform writing expressing opinion. Indicates a degree of commitment to communicating a point of view or expertise. De rigueur for professionals seeking to become consultants or score book deals. Overtones of earnestness (best case scenario) or self aggrandizement (less good case scenario).

To tweet
Example: “I couldn’t resist tweeting about my husband’s award nomination“.
Destinction: Microblog, or “very small blog”. Short, pithy, carefully crafted, well edited due to format constraints. A lingering suggestion of airheadedness, attributable to frivolous-sounding name and simplistic branding. As a result, sometimes shocking when used to discuss serious matters, despite excellence as a format for breaking news.

To Facebook
Example: “Let’s do lunch next week. I’ll Facebook you”.
Destinction: No strings-attached private messaging. Handy, but subject to inexplicable and random privacy screwups. Casual. Indicative of privileged “real friend” status.

To IM
Example: “IM me the link to that video so I can see what’s so damn funny”.
Destinction: Pleasantry-free, brief and thus not annoying. Appreciated for their low interruption factor. For quick questions, link and file exchange. Perfect for professional communication and people who are afraid of Skype. Unwanted side effect: spontaneous work-related questions 24/7.

To Email
Example: “I’ll email you the files and let you figure it out”.
Destinction: The granddaddy of online communication and source of great psychic pain due to quantity. For people of advanced age and business communication. Comes with a dreaded sense of  responsibility to read and respond, likely due to lack of formal policies on length and directness. Appreciated if it appears in bullet points. Means you’re getting assigned a task that’s got too much backstory to just talk about. Mercifully asynchronous.
Subverb: To Forward. In business, buck passing. Coming from Grandma, likely to contain adorable animals.
Subverb: To Reply All. Usually a mistake. Usually excruciatingly embarrassing.

To Text
Example: “Text me”.
Destinction: Personal communication, not unlikely to contain nudity. Signifies priority friends you’d actually give your number to. Short by technical necessity and amount of effort required to type with thumbs. Gave rise to abbreviated language.

Of note is the slight air of embarrassment associated with telling anyone out loud that you’ll communicate with them in one of the above fashions. Face-to-face conversation is the most respectful method of interaction, because time and attention are now our most carefully guarded commodities. We associate online communication with narcissism because it suggests we have priorities, and you are not #1.

All digital communication also lends itself to pretending you never got it, while that would be more difficult (but not impossible) in a RL conversation.

Ending up in conversation: what should you do if your organization can’t really use social media?

For the record, I like Speak Up Wpg’s use of social media. The opportunity it presents to speak to policymakers makes me feel like I come from a very with-it city. Their case study provides a jumping off point for talking about transparency. Go Peg.

Speak Up Winnipeg, a social media-driven public consultation city planning initiative here in the Peg, has just released its first report along with participation numbers. The blog/vlog-driven site boasts 535 registered users with over 1,600 posted comments. For a city of three quarters of a million, 535 users sounds low, but the quantity of comments of this vocal few speaks of passionate participation. The subject matter—the future of our city—is one of those contentious cans of worms that can make for great, if heated, public discourse, seemingly perfect for the social media milieu. More on that later.

On the participation side of things, I was dismayed initially that the the site required registration to comment, and indeed found login laziness to be an insurmountable barrier when I later lost my password. I’d recommend opening up comments; metrics could still be obtained from IP addresses. I realize misbehaviour rises in direct proportion with anonymity, but all conversational roadblocks should be removed if Speak Up is to “grow the number of people involved” as Mayor Sam Katz requests.
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Let the users do the talking…if you dare!