Tweeting

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk
 

I was recently persuaded to try Twitter after observing its use at the NLab Social Networks Conference, where a live feed of everyone’s tweets appeared on the main presentation screen throughout the event.  This could be used playfully (a message appearing behind presenter Steve Clayton read: “Steve is a vista pimp”, which later sparked some twitter interaction) or more meaningfully for people both within the conference theatre and those who were unable to attend, but could follow proceedings via Twitter.  We also discussed the way Twitter could be used as a “global pub” – a way of throwing questions out into the community and receiving “trusted” responses or generating debate.  It certainly got me curious about the Twitter-buzz…

 

As I have mentioned previously, I am an avid Facebook status-updater thanks to my iPhone, so never really saw the point in using Twitter as well.  However, in the name of experimentation, I signed up and quickly discovered how easy it was to integrate Twitter with both my Facebook profile and my website, so my updates automatically appear everywhere I could possibly wish.  It was extremely easy and suddenly I started to understand why Twitter is a much better interaction tool than the Facebook status update alone.  Excellent!  Couldn’t be happier!

 

But there was one slight snag with this brilliance.  The snag was a question of grammar:  how does one construct a tweet that makes grammatical sense in all of the different contexts in which it appears?

 

I might tweet:  ”Wondering how to use grammar!”

Most mobile phones (including the iPhone) would automatically capitalise the first letter of the text message.  

As a tweet, it would be delivered to my followers in this format:

custardether: Wondering how to use grammar!

This would appear in Facebook as:

Kirsty Wondering how to use grammar!

On my website as:

Twitter Update:

• Wondering about grammar!

 

To capitalise, or not to capitalise?  And what about the ubiquitous “is” – subject of much debate within Facebook?  It is implicit in the context of Twitter, as the service is based on the premise that you are answering the question: “what are you doing?”.  But as soon as you take the answer (your tweet) out of that context, it can require an “is” to make grammatical sense.  The app integrating Twitter with Facebook has recently stopped automatically inserting “…is Twittering:” when adding a tweet to one’s Facebook status, compounding the problem.

 

In reality, this is not a big issue.  As online readers we are use to ellipsis and a general relaxation in punctuation conventions.  After all, the essential message (”what am I doing?” or “what is my current status”) is conveyed in all circumstances – just not as elegantly as one might wish.  

 

As with all grammatical questions, it comes down to style.  What we consider hard-and-fast rules-that-have-existed-forever today are merely popular stylistic conventions which will evolve in time to form new hard-and-fast rules, which people will also believe have existed forever.  It will be interesting to see how those developing the applications responsible for integrating the various status update mechanisms handle the grammatical issue create a seamless integration – or whether we as readers simply adapt to accommodate the clunkiness of the sentence structures created.

 

I think I will now go and take refuge within the pages of Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, where there is safety for my inner stickler.  I will keep tweeting though!

Plugging In: Part II

In part two of my adventure into the world of direct auditory injections, I examined the experience of listening to podcasts whilst going about my daily life.  Would moving from the world of melody to the world of words change my perception of the earphone culture?

Well, I made a number of observations about how my listening habits quickly evolved and how this relates to the types of podcast I am looking to create as part of my new media work, to find out…  

 

Observations: 

 

* Spoken word podcasts are more difficult to listen to whilst moving around, as the background noise can distract, making it difficult to concentrate and therefore follow a thread.  Music, by contrast, being both immersive and background in nature means you can disengage your concentration and then re-engage without loosing much of the meaning.   As a result, podcasts seem to be suited to travelling situations – cars, public transport etc, where interruptions are less likely.

 

* I preferred listening to podcasts on longer journeys (either 30 minute-long Radio 4 programmes or lectures, or a series of shorter pieces, such as extracts from the Today programme or Thought For The Day, which are on average between 2 and 8 minutes in length) whilst I preferred listening to music on shorter journeys.

 

* I generally had to adjust the volume on a more regular basis to hear the podcasts clearly, whereas I didn’t often feel this was necessary with music.  This resulted in a lot more fiddling with the device, which was not always practical.

 

* It was not really possible to achieve the effect of a shuffle with podcast tracks.  This is obviously more of a device issue, but I think it is fairly generic.  With music, I could press shuffle and my playlist would be fed to me with minimum decision-making from myself.  However, I had to actively select each podcast in turn, which again meant more fiddling.  (I may, of course, now find a way of doing this, in which case I will feel like a bit of a spanner!) 

 

Thoughts: 

 

* Most of the podcasts I subscribed to were monophonic, which may explain my difficulty immersing when there are other real world sounds and events to distract.  My own work is polyphonic, involving layers of speech, elements of music and some effects.   Will this help to improve the immersing capacity of my work if the audience are listening on the move, compared to the types of podcast I have been testing here?  Until now, my experience of podcasts both as a listener and a creator has been to engage through a computer, so the experience of listening is very much the same as listening to the radio.  However, by nature podcasts should be engaging whilst on the move, with all the distracting features I have previously noted taken into account.  Maybe the additional layers, which until now have just been slight enhancements to my work, will actually be a more important factor as I design my work for its publication environment.

 

* Most of the podcasts available are information-based, rather than creative.  The podcasts I found that were fiction-based were generally serialisations of longer pieces – usually the equivalent of an audio book by installments, or podcasts of Radio 4’s programming.  Admittedly, I am only searching for podcasts with rss feeds in the iTunes directory, so this may not be an accurate picture of the types of content available in this format.  However, it would be interesting to explore further to see what is out there and why this trend exists.  It is also important for me as I work out where to position my work in order to reach an audience.

 

Well, this has certainly been an experience.  Since carrying out these experiments I have not actually become addicted to either form of constant entertainment.  It is a strange world in which people have such a variety of content injected into their ears whilst performing other functions.  I just like listening alone…

Plugging In

I was fortunate enough to acquire a very very nice new iPhone on Friday, and have since spent most of the week playing with its various features and being generally distracted either by the device itself or envious colleagues.  However, the option to use it as an iPod led me to conduct a previously untried experiment…

 

I often watch people, and have been particularly intrigued by the number and types of people who are plugged in to mp3/portable music devices as they go about their lives in the wider, observable world.  It has always struck me that these people must be experiencing the world in a very different way to those of us with naked eardrums: they effectively have a soundtrack to their movements, like in the films.  Unlike a lot of people I have spoken to on this issue, I have yet to be convinced that this is a bad thing – although I am perfectly sensible to the rudeness it can present under certain circumstances, and the safety risks.  So, armed with my new toy, I decided to try it out for a few days and record my observations.

 

I noticed a variety of things, some of which surprised me and others of which provoked a “Duh! Of course!” reaction.  I shall leave you to distil one from the other:

 

• I prefer to listen to music with my left ear and the world around me with my right, and was often more comfortable with only one earpiece in to this effect

 

• I automatically removed one earpiece (or both) when crossing roads, boarding buses or greeting anyone in passing – no matter how briefly (a standard greeting in this part of the country consisting of: “alright?”… “arr”)

 

• All sorts of visual stimuli seem to sync with the music.  As I type (from the 12:43 London Paddington service from Bath Spa) the clouds of white plumage from the power station funnels at Didcot blend perfectly with In The Bleak Midwinter (arranged by Bob Chilcott), whilst the cows in the fields outside Swindon earlier seemed to walk in time with Defying Gravity from the soundtrack to the musical Wicked, even during tempo changes.  I suspect this is just my brain trying to identify patterns between what I am seeing and what I am hearing, but still interesting…

 

• Outside sounds and the more internal sound of the music create a 2-layer auditory input.  Sorry, I can’t find a better way of phrasing that!  Basically, I mean that the outside sounds around me superimpose over the music (provided the volume is not set too loudly), which creates a strange joint experience of both sound worlds

 

• I am looking around expecting everyone else to hear what I am hearing.  I actually have to visualise a bubble around me to grasp the silence/absence of music around me.  It is quite strange thinking that there are sounds in my ears and head that are not also around my hands or anything else I can see.  This might be getting a bit philosophical, mind.  Actually, now I think about it, I have always had the same issue whilst sitting in a car – particularly on a motorway or busy road in a traffic jam.  I look around me and imagine the chassis of each car acting as the shell of a bubble containing a different mixture of sounds to those I am experiencing.  It seems so odd being close by, but encapsulated in different sounds.  Tangent spotted…

 

• On the more physical side, my eyes hurt a lot more than usual (as I am having to use them to do orientation that I would usually do using my ears) and my ears have a sort of fuzzy skin of ache across them.  This is after only moderate use, on a fairly low volume.

 

Of course, I have focussed on the effects of listening to music so far, so the next step is to test spoken word podcasts.  I’m not sure how easy it will be to concentrate on podcasts whilst going about life on the move, compared to listening to music, but there is one way to find out…