Louis C.K. Is Quitting Twitter: Maybe Everyone Should!

Well, at least take a break from the notorious rapid fire, minimal word (minimal thought) social media,  reactive communication device. I mean, the damned thing is almost single-mindedly designed for bullying and over the top reactions hurled out via "tweets".  Louis C.K. evidently saw how the thing was altering him - after a nutso tweet on Sarah Palin in 2010, and so was adult enough to stop. As he put it, in an interview on Sirius XM:

"It didn’t make me feel good. It made me feel bad instead. So I stopped doing it. Any time I tweeted anything I was like, ‘Ugh don’t like the way that came out.’ And then four and a half million people saw it! It was the worst things I ever said, heard and seen by the most people. It’s the worst possible scenario.”
 

C.K. thereby expressing a sentiment that a lot of celebrities (e.g. Lena Dunham, Iggy Azealea etc.) have shared as of late. And they are right to do so! Louis added:
 

“It’s too instant, I don’t think the speed helps dialogue.I think it’s why everything is kind of fucked up and polarizing, because people are going too fast, they’re trying to react too quickly.”
 

Again, he has a solid point. Any medium which allows instantaneous reaction or instant aggression, is going to be "fucked up:" and "polarizing".  (See also Marshall McLuhan's 'Understanding Media') It can't be otherwise. While it is true blog posts can also be polarizing, because inevitably many will take issue - at least they provide a time-extended forum to make coherent points and arguments to support a position. Something a 140 character tweet simply can't do. Thus, a tweet is more like an infant's scream by comparison. Succinct, loud, abrasive and in your face. No wonder then tweets have converted so many into brash, over-sized toddlers with anger issues..
 

This is one reason I never took to Twitter and never will, and I don't care if I'm only 1 of a million or even a billion or dismissed as "out of touch" . Popularity of a thing has never - for me- been cause to jump on the bandwagon of the moment. Whether that be the 'ice bucket challenge' or the latest stupid tech gimmick like that Apple watch. There isn't a damned thing that watch can do for me that I can't already do. Oh, that goes for "selfie sticks" too - since I believe the whole concept of selfies is narcissistic and foolish. (Why I was elated on learning Prince Harry chastised an Aussie girl about her wanting to take a selfie with him, advising her to "stick to normal photos,  selfies you don't need!")
 

But that's the problem today, because too many simply give in to the latest craze no matter how daft or counterproductive.  Everyone wants to be "on the cutting edge" of the latest tech advance and so don't give a thought to the volume of electronic waste left in their pathetic wake.
 

Then there is all the mental and emotional  bandwidth waste that sucks up terabytes as people spew forth on any and everything - from the size of a model's lips, to a political speech, to the new Miss America "not looking like a real American".  As Louis C.K. notes, it provides instant license for anyone to shoot from the hip - and of course, repent at leisure because the damned thing has already gone out. At least with a blog post one can go back and edit if the words don't sound right or the emotions expressed are out of proportion to the stimulus.
 

Ordinary people who tweet each day almost as a reflex, need to put their twitter feed to rest. Maybe take time to meditate instead  and center themselves, as opposed to allowing a tiny character -generating device to rule their brains... and hearts.

 

Linguistic 'Eggheads' Can Figure Out Who You Are From Your Tweets

Let me say first, I don't do 'tweets'. I have no Twitter account - though I did finally get a Facebook page I hardly ever go to- and intend to keep it that way. "Tweeting" (140 maximum characters sent at a time) is not my thing, and besides I have too many pressing projects ongoing (including revising several books, and finishing a science fiction novel) to be held hostage to tweets, reading them or responding. It's hard enough to keep up with emails!

Anyway, having said that, it appears a lot of eggheads in linguistics  have their focus on the Tweeter-ites, and according to a recent piece in TIME (Sept. 9, p. 56):

"are using the seven year old micro-blogging platform to put millions of tweets under the microscope in an instant".

According to one linguist, Ben Zimmer, at Vocabulary.com:

"It's unprecedented. The sheer amount of text you can look at at one time and the number of people you can analyze at once."

According to the linguists, tweets are a veritable goldmine into the profiles of tweeters, offering a treasure trove of data never seen before. Hidden in the tweets, or so they say, are insights into how people (at least those who tweet)  portray their identity in a few short sentences. Great! I can just see how delighted Gen. Keith Alexander of the NSA will be when he gets a hold of this data!

Maybe even more sinister, is how "campaign managers and advertisers" are taking note and fairly drooling at the prospect of "pulling signal out of the data" in order to better influence American or other brains to do the bidding of Madison Avenue or the Overclass manipulators.

Some of the finds so far from the tweet research:

- Women are more likely to use first person terms (like 'I' and 'my') and exclamation points, especially repeated ones.

- Females who tweet to  largely male audience are more likely to use features like numbers, associated with 'the boys'.

- Older tweeters tend to use emoticons with noses e.g. like :-) instead of :)  this is evidently tied to "their preference for conventional language"

- Youthful no 'nose' tweeters tend to use more swear words

- Younger tweeters are also more apt to type their words in all capitals and to use expressive lengthening, like: 'Niiiiiiiiiiice"'

- Older tweeters are more likely to include well wishing, like 'Take care', and 'Good morning'. They also tend to send longer tweets and use more prepositions.


Geography, income and race can also be discerned from tweets:

For example, the term 'suttin' (a variant of 'something') has been associated with Boston-area tweets.  Meanwhile, the acronym ikr ('I know, right?') is popular in the Detroit area.

Wealthy neighborhoods are more likely to use the word 'awesome', and emoticons often appear in tweets from areas with large Hispanic populations.

Linguists point out that while all this may seem frivolous, it provides insights into how people purposefully and unwittingly use words to signal who they are. According to one computational linguist from Georgia Tech, Tweet trends also "make it possible to guess the demographics of senders when no information is explicitly provided." This is a huge asset for any advertiser who intends to sell products on Twitter.

Other researchers at the Mitre Corporation came up with an algorithm that could determine the tweeter's sex 75% of the time, just using their tweets.

Another aspect that is being researched is the "diffusion of words"  or constructing "subway maps around the United States showing where words to tend to move." They've already found that race may matter as much as geography. A term coined in Jackson, MS, for example, may well turn up in Memphis (both places have high proportions of African-Americans) but not in Fairbanks, AK or Colorado Springs, CO.

Other researchers are mining tweets to discern how rumors and urban legends spread from person to person.

Linguists so far are delighted that "tweeters are generally oblivious to the possibility that their messages might be scrutinized" which is a "boon to researchers who want to analyze natural speech rather than edited text you find in the pages of a magazine, or in certain blogs (like Brane Space- with each post undergoing maybe 4-5 iterations of re-edits).

According to one linguist: "They don't feel like they are being observed by guys in white coats."

Hmmmm......maybe they should, as opposed to dumping ever more data into the data stream, sure to be used by advertisers and even the government (NSA) - say to match profiles into already existing databases such as Main Core - the database that can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.(See e.g http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/between-skeleton-key-and-cog-how-close.html )

Will the tweeters take note and be more cautious? Not likely!