bill.journee.org

Twitter: The decline of hashtags

What do you love about Twitter? Is it conversations? The stream of consciousness flying past at a million miles a minute? The ridiculously fast reporting of global events? The amazing resources of all your followers at your fingertips all the time?

There’s a lot to love about Twitter, and most of those good things are beyond the simple 140 characters, and all about community. Hashtags are one of those very community things about Twitter which grew out of nowhere to become one of the most useful things in the arsenal of a Twitter user in categorizing and sorting through the vast amounts of information on Twitter.

Combined with Twitter Search, hashtags create impromptu groups of people who aren’t necessarily following each other, and lets them keep track of events, happenings, topics and ideas without requiring Twitter to build a more complex and less flexible system of groups for tweets. The problem is, they’re beginning to show signs of becoming less useful than they have been, and very quickly indeed.

Perhaps the most successful hashtag phenomena in Twitter is #followfriday – the weekly ritual of nominating people you think other people reading your tweets should follow. The concept only began in January (without the hashtag) and since then it’s become one of the big viral hits of Twitter – all Friday, every Friday since late January, many tweeps have been tweeting their #followfriday recommendations. #followfriday is probably the most relevant canary to demonstrate the problem that hashtags have. There has been a marked decline in #followfriday recommendations, at least in my stream, for the past few Fridays. People are starting to get angry at the constant stream of username lists flying past, drowning out their own tweets, and for the same reason aren’t posting their own recommendations.

Another problem with hashtags, and probably more relevant than #followfriday, is the emerging hashtag memes. Hashtags themselves, for a time, became a meme, but they were mostly nonce creations (eg. #thereallylonghashtagsthatareentertaininginthemselves). What’s started happening, though, is that hashtags are starting to take over the Twitterstream all the time. A few examples from the last week are:  #3wordsbeforesex #3wordsduringsex #3wordsaftersex (noticing a pattern?) and as I write this, 6 of the 10 trends on Twitter are hashtag memes: #liesboystell #liesgirlstell #3wordsaftersex #twistory #thingsmummysaid #3breakupwords.

Now I’ve got nothing against memes, but I don’t think memes are what hashtags are all about. Maybe we need a new standard – %3breakupwords, then have a separate trending list on Twitter search, maybe? In any case, there is an increasing amount of noise in Twitter trends, and they go back to hashtags, and that’s a problem. It undermines, at a fundamental level, one of the important ways for Twitter to show what it’s thinking.

Of course, this is only part of the problem, and something else which has become a problem in recent days and weeks is the growing noise from bots trawling the trends list and spamming the stream with their products, ads and smutty rubbish. I don’t purport to have an easy solution to that though, other than tightening up the sign-up page of Twitter to stop these annoying bots signing up en mass.

Do you have an opinion on the future of hashtags? Tell me what you think in the comments!

Future Summit 2009 & Twitter

Well, here I am, just 3 days after Future Summit 2009 ended in Melbourne. Only now have I got around the posting a blog post about it, but better late than never I say.

So I’m not going to talk about the discussions or outcomes of the Future Summit, but rather focus on its use of Twitter as a broadcast and interaction medium and what I took from this. I’ll start by saying one very important thing: I wasn’t there. I was relying almost completely on the Twitter feed provided by a number of very dedicated and clued on Twitter personalities who did a great job.

The idea behind the Future Summit feed was (from what I’ve read) about trying to remove existing media hierarchies. This meant bypassing newspapers – too slow & bureaucratic; blogs – also too slow; television – not interactive. This left Twitter, the microblogging service taking the world by storm at the moment. What it also left us with was a 140 character limit.

As great a job as the Twitter correspondents were doing during the two day summit, though, I still don’t feel that I have a really well developed sense of what was said there. 140 characters, it must be said, doesn’t replace a full video feed. It also doesn’t replace blogs. It is, primarily, an interaction medium. There have been many events – really serious events – which have been covered by Twitter in very meaningful and constructive ways. I think in the vast majority of these cases, Twitter has been used as an interaction medium rather than a broadcast medium.

I think the tweet above demonstrates what I’m trying to say here – there’s a very broad brushstroke idea of what is being said, but it leaves more questions than it does answers. More often than not, the nuances of argument which were no doubt taking place at the Future Summit were lost in translation to 140 characters, and although it’s been noted that approximately half the questions asked of presenters at the summit came directly from Twitter, I suspect many of them digressed somewhat from the issue at hand due only to the fact that most people reading the Twitter stream would have had no idea what was actually being argued.

The best interaction I’ve seen with broadcasting, Twitter, and interaction is the interaction between tweeters during television shows (Stephen Conroy appearing on QandA a but over a month ago comes to mind). I think that with this in mind, the inclusion of a video stream of the Future Summit combined with the already established Twitter correspondents would be a great way to get people involved and interested in what’s happening. Rather than focusing on simply reporting the events of the summit, the Twitter contingent could then focus on being the mediators between the world of Twitter and the conference without needing to summarise very complex ideas into 140 characters for mass consumption.

That said, @futuresummit being reserved for some kind of coverage as was already present would also be good.

Overall, I get where the organizers of the Future Summit were coming from with this idea, and it is a good idea. I think the best (albiet old) idea here is that we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater – lets not throw out old media completely in place of new media, because new media in many ways has grown out of traditional media forms such as television and video, and doesn’t quite work 100% without it.

UPDATED: TwitDoc – First Impressions

UPDATE: The creators of TwitDoc (surprisingly, I must say, given the readership of this blog!) took the time to read my little review and respond to most of the problems I’ve raised here. From the outset I’d like to thank them for listening to my ramblings about the site, it’s always good to see people taking on board criticism and working on it (ahem, #fixreplies, Twitter.)

The header images have been fixed (on the main page – the actual document view has been overlooked so far, but I’m guessing that’s an accident, so a heads up here ) and the menu is much easier to see. The Flash form is still there, but I’ve been told that it too might be on its way out, or at least a viable HTML alternative will be added. These are all good changes, and thank you TwitDoc for implementing them!

I uploaded a document to the service, and it is a great service. Another example of the power of Twitter apps, and the fact that 140 characters can really be stretched to contain a lot – a whole document, book or presentation in this case.

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On the advice of @geehall1 (via his blog) , I decided to check out a new third-party Twitter service, TwitDoc.

Basically it’s a service that allows you to upload documents of various formats and share them on Twitter. In theory. But I haven’t used it yet. I didn’t get far enough without feeling compelled to write a blog post about my first impressions. So here’s a list for your viewing pleasure: Continue reading…

Endangered languages – a very brief introduction

Ok, welcome to my first linguistics-related post for a little while now – @ParisianChic (AKA Eunice Moore) asked on Twitter:

@mr_billiam How does one stop an endangered language like Yanyuwa from becoming extinct? What made u become interested in this particularly?

SInce 140 characters is never going to be enough to answer either of those questions sufficiently I decided that this was a good point to stop and look at a few of the things driving me this year on my little endangered languages trek with Yanyuwa, even though it hasn’t properly begun yet.

Endangered languages

Prominent linguist Michael Krauss and a number of other linguists predicted, rather ominously, in 1992 that in this century over 90% of the world’s approximately 7000 languages could become extinct¹. This obviously means that in 100 years time – in an extreme case – only 700 languages out of the current 7000 could still be with us in less than 100 years.

What it also means is that a huge amount of collective knowledge – cultural knowledge, human knowledge – and a huge number of communities are going to be destroyed in the process. At the moment, over 80% of the people in the world speak one of the 83 biggest languages, whereas just 0.2% of people in the world speak 3,586 of the smallest languages². That difference means that most of the smallest languages in the world are sustained only by a few speakers – usually elderly speakers – and once they are gone, nobody will speak the language any more.

These languages often contain within them ideas and thought structures dating back millenia, and many of the languages are also scarcely if at all documented. Languages such as Yanyuwa who have only a few (7, as of this moment) speakers left don’t have the huge amount of text, recordings and grammatical information available to comprehensively understand what made the language tick once it is gone. This is where linguists come in.

What to do about endangered languages?

From what I’ve said above, it should be fairly clear that most of the languages – especially those most endangered – are on a downward slope that can’t really be reversed. When a language, such as Yanyuwa, has only a few speakers left, it is beyond the point at which a realistic language revitalization program can take place. Some languages, in less serious states of endangerment, can be restored as a first and growing language through the active involvement of speakers and community members. A good example of this is the Hawaiian language³, which has historically been severely endangered but is now becoming spoken by more and more people, is a language which can now be used as a sole language for education from prep through to postgraduate university if wanted.

Hawaiian the exception to the rule, though. Ultimately, most languages – especially those which are severely endangered, will not have the same number of speakers, the same amount of support or the facilities to stage a comeback and will eventually no longer be spoken. Most linguistic work on endangered languages now focuses on the documentation of these endangered languages before they cease to be spoken without any record for future generations.

Australia, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific regions pose specific problems for linguists and governments tackling language endangerment. These are all areas of extremely high linguistic diversity – and also areas of extremely high language endangerment⁴. Australia, for example, has about 230 languages spoken, but many of them like Yanyuwa have less than 10 elderly speakers left, and many are only beginning to be documented. The case in South East Asia – areas of extremely high language density such as Papua New Guinea with about 820 languages – is even worse, with many languages not documented at all, or even known to science. 820 is an estimate, but we don’t know for sure.

So, obviously, there is no clear answer to the question of what can be done to stop languages from becoming extinct. It will be one of the great cultural questions to be addressed by mankind in the next 100 years, as more and more languages become extinct.

Why am I here?

I think it’s probably obvious from what I’ve said above that I’m very interested and concerned by the plight of languages around the world. It is a tragedy that languages and the cultures, communities and all the other things they entail are being lost at an alarming rate. While nothing can be done to stop the loss, per se, I think it’s important to do what can be done to try and record as much of these languages as possible and assist speakers and community members in any way possible to that end.

I’ll write more about endangered languages as the year goes on, and admittedly my thesis topic doesn’t directly address these issues – I’m analysing existing language data from Yanyuwa in the context of its endangerment – but I thought I’d do a very broad overview of what language endangerment is all about. To me, anyway.

1. Hale, K., Krauss, L., Watahomigie, L., Yamamoto, C., Craig, L., Nasayesva, J., et al. (1992). Endangered Languages. Language , 1 (68), 1-43. [↩]
2. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 14. [↩]
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language [↩]
4. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 13-14. [↩]

Progress Report

Well, since university is already steaming on past the middle of semester one (what the hell??) I thought now would be a good time to do a general update of what’s going on, and why I haven’t been posting all these insightful posts about linguistics I mentioned earlier in the year.

Mostly this semester has been taken up with my two coursework subjects, ‘Linguistic Theory’ and ‘Language and Identity’. The former is the compulsary fourth year honours subject in linguistics, and mostly deals with the history of linguistic thought and theory. The latter is pretty much what its name suggests, dealing mainly with the ways in which we construct our identities using language, and how language helps define those identities. The latter is also very relevant to my honous thesis (which is why I’m doing it.)

What all that means, thus far, is that I haven’t done much work on my thesis at all. I’ve been doing some general background reading into Yanyuwa, and to a lesser extent into Kriol, and language endangerment in general, but I’ve mostly been trying to get assessment stuff done for my coursework subjects (which are, after all, worth 50% of my mark this year – so sacrificing them for the good of the thesis will only screw me up anyway.)

So, in essence, that’s why I haven’t been posting any insightful posts about lingiuistics or much else for that matter. However, I can say that as I work on my next assignment for Language and Identity I’ll probably have some interesting comment to make on the Nothern Territory Intervention and the language used to sell it to the people. So that’s something you can look forward to if you so wish.

So, now that I’ve explained my lack of blog posts, I should get back to all the other stuff I have to do!