There are approximately 200 million tweets per day (roughly eight million per hour).
According to Econsultancy, which is doing an admirable job tracking these numbers, the rate of increase year-over-year calculates out to an amazing 250% annual growth rate.
If we are to treat tweets -- opinions, obsevrations and comments -- as valid data, humanity has never had a more detailed and in-depth record of its stream of conscience.
In an outstanding The Wall Street Journal article, Decoding Our Chatter, Robert Lee Holtz delves into a phenomenon of technology intersecting society in profound new ways.
Something odd is happening.
It seems that Twitter is pretty damn good at detecting lies. "When a rumor is true, it spreads faster," says computer analyst Barbara Poblete at the University of Chile in Santiago.
While parsing Twitter messages sent immediately after Chile's 8.8 earthquake last year, Poblete recognized that tweets were a reliable indicator of the truth with an accuracy of nearly 70%.
Whither Twitter?
Being a cynic, I have to ask: what if this, the newest, deepest pool of social conscience and discourse, was being manipulated?
It's no surprise that public discourse is being steered by people with vested interests and bottom-line driven agendas. And it gets creepy.
Enter "twitterbots," code that emulates human tweeters -- without the human part. Quoting from Holtz's article:
In surreptitious tests online earlier this year, these socialbots fooled 300 unwary Twitter users. After refining their software, the group this month launched dozens of even more sophisticated Twitterbots, hoping to build relationships with thousands of unsuspecting users.
The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The`Washington Post, Fox and CNN – even Le Monde, der Welt and my favorite, Liberation are all about “flash mobs” and the social media that's to blame. Thanks to Jeremy Thomas, a francophile of mine, "volet d'esprit," is French for "flight of the spirit," and flash mob. If the French have a word for it, you know it's real, d'accord?
When did this happen? I think I napped for 15 minutes and the next thing I knew was this breaking news. Some of the more astute in the crowd might remember an incident last week wherein BART police (aka San Francisco government) shut down cell phones in attempt to prevent this egregious misuse of public airwaves. Then, of course, there is the very unreal and potentially earth-shaking London riots.
Dig out your Clash tape cassettes, everyone. It's happening, and it's all Facebook's fault.
The cause as carefully researched as a child abuse case on Nancy Grace is Those Damn Kids With Smartphones. Civil rights and social media? Y'all know about my stand on the “S” word. But now it's not about Pepsi irking me – it's about real shit. Facebook, meet my freinds Ghandi and my nephew who types faster than Gloria Allred.
People are being arrested and laws are being passed that forbid the intent of communication. Not the message; not the use, but the intent.
So, if I were to, say, text you that “this concert is on fire!” I can now be slammed into prison for yelling the same.
According to this new doctrine, I've been muzzled. I wrote this piece a few years back about how corporations are jockeying to control public airwaves. Let's be really clear on this on a fundamental level: you and I and the little old lady down the street own the space through which radio waves pass. This isn't a fantasy, it's real. So when Verizon charges you the insane amount that they do, they're charging you for their equipment – the mechanics – not the airwaves.
To be even more specific, all social media flows through pipes and wifi and broadband just as news and chat and porn does. Do we see ABC News being blamed for riots when they report? No, we don't. But we do see governments attempting to control personal communication. China. Egypt. Syria. Libya. North Korea. If only there was a Tea Bagger connection.
'The English Is Coming!'
by Leslie Dunton-Downer
Book Review by: Leslie Savan
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Picking up a book subtitled "How One Language Is Sweeping the World," you might think you're in for a rant against Big English — how, amped up by extremely powerful telecommunications, it's snuffing out smaller languages across the globe.
Leslie Dunton-Downer nods to all that in "The English Is Coming!" But, she argues, English's sweep is simply a fact, and anyway it's not a conventional white man's English that's taking over. Rather, it's an evolutionary "distinct phase" of the language, a "Global English" with more non-native than native speakers. This "widespread lingua franca has raised legitimate concerns about the futures of nonglobal languages and cultures," she writes, "but it has also become the golden arrow in a vast community's quiver, the only language to date that's in a position to address matters of planetwide interest."
And for the most part, she makes her case. Co-author of "The Essential Shakespeare Handbook," Dunton-Downer takes us through an entertaining, even suspenseful, history of English. A prehistoric language that linguists have reconstructed called Proto Indo-European spawned a far-flung family of languages, which is now spoken from Wales to India to Russia.
English has always been an enormous sponge of a language — whether one is talking about the Old English of "Beowulf," the French-infused Middle English of Chaucer, the Early Modern English of Shakespeare or the Modern English of "Jersey Shore" — absorbing words, grammar and pronunciation from its linguistic cousins. And then, via trade, war and technology, it has sent them back out across the world.
Perhaps the most benevolent reading of Global English is that it's returning these words, all glammed up in new clothes and attitudes, to their roots. Ah, roots! Etymologies are like chocolates for me, and Dunton-Downer hands them out like she's Willie Wonka. As she tells the stories of 30 reborn-in-America international words and expressions — including "OK," "hello," "T-shirt," "stress," "fun," "bank" and "made in China" — I kept wanting to ask those around me, did you know that the word "film" comes from the prehistoric root "pel-," meaning an animal hide, or pelt? (As early Indo-European Ps became Fs in Germanic, so "pel" became "fell," and the Old English "filmen," meaning "membrane," eventually became the name for the light-sensitive emulsified "coating" on celluloid that made possible the movie industry.)
Or did you know that the word "credit" in the globally welcomed term "credit card" comes, she writes, from the ancient word combo "kerd-" (heart) and "dhe" (put), meaning something like "to set the heart," thus meaning "to place trust in"?
Little of that is original research, but Dunton-Downer puts it together with so much heart, and fun, that I only wish she'd gone further. I'd have loved to hear what she thinks about the truly global, rather controversial Big Lang theory — that all languages burst forth from a common mother tongue. And because she writes that different languages give you "magic glasses" to see different realities,
I wish she had explored Global English's reality with more than occasional observations. But then, deep cultural analysis isn't this book's purview; read it, instead, to understand how "English is poised, over the course of the next few generations, to be significantly transformed." This will happen as both native and non-native English speakers contribute whatever ingredients they've got to keep this linguistic stone soup reasonably clear. For instance, although English has shed most inflections (those maddening case and gender endings you have to decline in Spanish or German), we still need an uninflected pronoun for an "individual of unspecified gender." Otherwise, we're stuck with contortions like "If you love someone, set them free," or worse, "set him or her free."
Perhaps, Dunton-Downer writes, we'll try "himmer" (ouch), or tap into Mandarin, which uses one word for he/him, she/her and it: "ta."
Dunton-Downer invites readers to conjure their own new words — after all, all language everywhere is somebody's invention. Globlish, anyone?
Savan is the author of "Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever."
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
