What is the minimum amount of information you need to get an idea across in social media? This is the gist of the discussion I had recently in reaction to how systems like Twitter are accelerating the fading of English grammar and spelling (and likewise in other languages as well). Our debate was not really about policing grammar, but rather how we have changed the way we convey information and context to others for personal and business purposes. It was an exploration into the ways we have made it more efficient to convey this context and, in the end, is helping us individually exchange more information in less time. The need for speed of e-communications has led to some of this abbreviation in language, as well as the rise of other metadata and media types within the text of our conversations.
With social environments we have mostly lost one important component of business communications: that of seeing and understanding body language, expressions and other non-verbal cues from face to face encounters and meetings. These are very important to humans to understand what is not being said; they often give us a whole lot more in information than what is actually said. This is the realm of psychology that many learn from experience if not from actual instruction. Can you imagine high value business negotiations not being done in person? It is possible but still fairly uncommon.
However, now we are starting to see new types of non-verbal communication coming into place. This change emerged long before Twitter’s 140 character limit to ‘sentence’ length. As many have said, the language trend that first started with email and later text messaging has been to use more abbreviations, and even symbols (emoticons or smiley faces) to convey ideas, emotions or context. Some of this is considered jargon or slang– new words that are created for a specific field–even if the format (e.g., a smiley) has changed from the use of alphabetic characters alone.
My point is that social media and the growth of the Internet have accelerated how we convey context and how we converse. The Internet has certainly helped it spread further and faster than ever before, but now there structure of what is considered content or context has also evolved with technology.
A simple example is the URL. Instead of trying to describe what I saw somewhere, I simply add a URL to the message which allows someone else to follow my thought on the subject to the details of the subject itself. To aid this, we evolved the URL shortener making it possible send the URL in even shorter messages. Most people who use these shorteners do not write them out by hand; rather they copy and paste the shortened URL, or the tool they use automatically shortens the URL for them. In other words, even the way we input has been accelerated, saving us time.
Another element of conveying context is the non-verbal and non-textual information that can be encoded into our message, in particular images. Essentially, now we can embed an image into the message, saving us time and effort to describe it. The input mechanisms have also evolved with it: cameras on smartphones and tablets, or screenshot tools. A picture is a thousand words, but now it is also a fewer less words in the message we send out.
Location information is another common meta-data component of the new language. Rather than write out directions or an address, we give geo-location information either as a data point or a URL that is interpreted by the interface (e.g. GPS location data that is then mapped to an actual map).
While textual in nature, the concept of the tags, hashtags and similar metadata is another element of conveying context. In the simplest form, it is just a word without the need to follow any strict taxonomy or definition. More than that, in public social networks, we do not try to disambiguate hashtags when they are used in two entirely different contexts; we simply read the message and try to make sense of it.
For example, the Twitter hashtag #e20 has been used to identify “Enterprise 2.0” topics as well as for the long-running BBC soap opera EastEnders. Both are valid uses but with remarkably different messages and conversations. Thus, there is a contextual disambiguation that we have to process mentally; a sacrifice we make in the light of trying to accelerate the rate of conversation.
Social sites can now also link names of users to their identity or profile. With Twitter it requires an ‘@’ sign before their Twitter ID; with other systems, the system tries to detect their first and last name as they have entered into the system. The site links to name if it can locate or disambiguate who you are referring to and if you have them in your network. All sites also inform the person you are referring to, of your post. This gives other readers immediate context to whom you are referring and allows them to look up more details about the person if so interested.
In summary, some common elements of this new grammar – Linguists, please feel free to argue this point – are the addition of several types of contextual information: links, location, images, video, tags, and identified names. What we now need to understand and practice is how to put this effectively together. If the old grammatical style has gone out the window, then perhaps we need a new style guide. I therefore leave you with this question:
What do you think are the basic tenets of such a style guide? Does it have to be specific to each social environment like Twitter, Facebook, or Google+?