Its apparent to me that we have come very far as a race, as sentient creatures, as people, as anything you wish to deem us as. I have made this assertion from maybe not-so-keen observations of my surroundings but still sound observations in their own right. We are, as a people, devoting more of our life currency day in and day out engaging in the social media revolution. I may be putting on a boot too large for my foot by calling it that but in all regards the advent of websites like face book and twitter have undeniably changed the way we interact with, well, everything. I am very much a part of this, and am subscribing to many of its different iterations as I speak, and by iterations I am referring to all of the different playgrounds of communication that are at our literal fingertips. What I am acutely interested in in this sentiment is how the social media revolution, or whatever you’d like to refer to it as, is affecting the way we communicate. A topic that I am afraid is yet again to broad for me to cover in this passage, but shall attempt to poke fun at the tip of this proverbial iceberg.
I have recently taken a liking to twitter, a website I had once thought utterly superfluous I now visit very often in a day posting updates and Hashtaging to my lives’ content. Why is it that I should now be attracted to this way of communication where in the recent past I was just satisfied with face book or eons ago it now seems myspace? There are probably numerous reasons, one of which may be my new possession of a glorious and face stealing device known as the iphone, a device that lets me stay connected to every and all forms of communication I know with the exception of the postal service. But the iphone serves as only a catalyst for the reaction it has no preference for what social media I use, it is supremely happy with serving me a buffet of options of ways to connect. So why now twitter? It may be that inane hipsterism that drives me to stay ahead of some imaginary curve we are all suspect to, and ditch things that have become muddled with the likes of everybody (I’m looking at you face book). Or yet it may lie on some deeper resonance for my inherent need to communicate on all non ordinary levels of communication. (and on a side note I by describing social media as “non ordinary” communication may be drawing a line in the sand but for arguments sake let us consider “ordinary” communication be within the realm of face to face interactions of the human senses.)
What I have devised, as a manor of conceiving this inherent resonance of communication is the now insanely popularized hash tag some live by it others eyes’ swirl like toilet bowls flushing by it, but I have become entranced by it surviving somewhere in between the swirling and the living. There lies within the placement and creation of a hashtag some form of communication unseen, or rather unspoken in language and idiom prior, at least to my knowledge. I hesitate to compare it to poetry, or prose but in some lights I can seen the family ties. There is some crystalline truth, some ephemeral utterance, a shimmer of reference to what goes into and subsequently what comes out of a hash tag. It speaks volumes to whatever is being said and connects scores of otherwise unconnected people through the use of itself. It serves as some mutant poetic touch to an otherwise bland and pointless comment that will get read by few or thousands of eyes but will resonate on and replicate whenever another feels the necessity to hash tag something similar. It not only serves to purify and make lucid what is being said as well as connect the multitude of people through random arrangements of characters but to the individual, and maybe just this individual speaking it presents itself as a medium in its own right as a way of communicating. Err that is yet still too vague, it is its ability as a medium of text based communication to ascend from the base level of just being text, the way poems become poems through verse and the way a song becomes a song when its sung to music.
I have succeeded in doing what I wished really not to do, That being to over glorify twitter and the hash tag. I am not necessarily saying that you can compare hash tags to great poems and songs but instead that they achieve some curious level above just plain textual communication into a frontier realm of communication. Other frontier realms such have been well mapped and colonized and conquered as with music and literature and art, they are tried and true and in no means unsatisfactory in their deliverance of communication, some of which verbal, but that with the hash tag and all of its other siblings in this daily bombardment of social media we are stretching our levels of communication verbal and non verbal into ‘lands’ yet uncovered. With all that being said I am still attracted to twitter and the use of hash tags, and I intend to continue to ponder why it is so, and possibly if I am lucky to refine that answer into something possibly shorter and more to the point…
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