Food Status Updates and Twittering
I also think that status updates and tweets about cooking, eating, recipes and meals add a richness and (imagined) physical substance to a medium that can is more abstract, word based and cerebral. You take in a post about a meal and you immediately conjure up senses: smell, taste, even touch--that are pleasing and missing from these forms of communication. Bob Berkman Associate Professor Media Studies The New School
I'm sure there are contexts where food tweets can be of substance --for example, tweets from folks traveling in other cultures or from those trying to follow a 100 mile diet. But let's be honest and just call a tweet a tweet. The form and established practice lend themselves to trivial communication. As with all forms of popular communication and culture, there are associated pleasures. The real issue here in my mind is the negative value we assign to triviality. Rhiannon (who this morning had an egg sunny side up on kamut toast and half a red grapefruit) Rhiannon Bury Assistant Professor, Women's Studies Athabasca University Canada's Open University rbury@athabascau.ca ________________________________ From: "RBerkman@aol.com" <RBerkman@aol.com> To: haythorn@illinois.edu; gcheliotis.lists@gmail.com; aoir.z3z@danah.org Cc: air-l@aoir.org Sent: Mon, November 2, 2009 9:01:28 AM Subject: [Air-L] Food Status Updates and Twittering I also think that status updates and tweets about cooking, eating, recipes and meals add a richness and (imagined) physical substance to a medium that can is more abstract, word based and cerebral. You take in a post about a meal and you immediately conjure up senses: smell, taste, even touch--that are pleasing and missing from these forms of communication. Bob Berkman Associate Professor Media Studies The New School _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Rhiannon Bury said: The form and established practice lend themselves to trivial communication. As with all forms of popular communication and culture, there are associated pleasures. The real issue here in my mind is the negative value we assign to triviality.
Is it all trivial? Seems like the vast majorith of tweets are banal and trivial, yet I am struck by the posts that are breaking news, eyewitness accounts and some posts that read like a mix of haiku and scientific paper titles. Some of this stuff is downright profound, but mixed with millions of peoples trivia, it is like trying to find a molecule of heavy water in the stream of a fire hose. I was prepared to dismiss Twitter when I first saw it. Profoundly stupid, I thought. Who can reduce their thoughts to 140 characters. Now I am beginning to see people really reducing the blather of their e-mail and blog posts and get their stuff down to its essence. Twitter may change the way we write. It may be feeding right into the culture of the instant. None of this twitter lasts. When my father courted my mother in the 1940's - they wrote letters. Ideas moved at the pace of envelopes with stamps. Yet, I can still sit down with a shoebox of love letters and read the back and forth. Paper is for the ages. My son courts his girlfriend in IM and Tweets. None of it lasts. It falls off the bottom of the screen after a few folks post their latest tweets and there is no record, no history. One wonders what historians of this era will use as primary sources... MS Word no longer supports the data files of the 1980's. As if that company could disconnect me from my own writing without asking my opinion. Try to read files from 8 inch floppy disks and you have to ask the Smithsonian for the use of their machines in glass cases. All that era is inaccessible. In 2000, I put a CD in a time capsule. Same year they opened a time capsule in Colorado from 1900. Inside were gold foil cylinders from an original Edison phonograph. Off to the Smithsonian to listen to them. I wonder if anyone in 100 years will be able to read my CD? I wonder if anyone will be able to even find the tweets of today, tomorrow. We are arriving in a culture of the instant. and in an instant - it will be gone. Alex Randall Professor of Communication University of the Virgin Islands.
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Alex Randall <alex@islands.vi> wrote:
I was prepared to dismiss Twitter when I first saw it. Profoundly stupid, I thought. Who can reduce their thoughts to 140 characters.
Cal & I use 60. Today I ate 5 dates, chrios, 8oz carrot jce. Twitter may change the way we write.
It may be feeding right into the culture of the instant. None of this twitter lasts.
Transience and brevity are unrelated. Pith endures. It falls off the bottom of the screen after a few folks post their latest
tweets and there is no record, no history.
Twitter's history is stored and aggressively mined... SJ
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:
Twitter's history is stored and aggressively mined...
Twitter's full archive is not available for mining. I believe that there is only one organization - other than Twitter - that has access to a full feed. They've been on the receiving end of the fire hose since last November, IIRC. (I talked to one of the founders at the 140TC conference in LA in September.) I brought up the idea of an "internet archive" for tweets during a 'research conversation' two weeks ago. There was push-back from some faculty ... based on the idea that our 'conversations' have always been ephemeral. Me? I'd like to have full-feed so that we can track politicos and business rhetoric. Kathy @kegill PS I've lurked here for a little while. I teach in the master of communication digital media program at the University of Washington - as well as undergrad digital journalism. My limited research efforts at the moment are focused on Twitter's use by organizations as part of the communication mix.
This is a fascinating topic to raise with the Internet Archive... how interested they are in storing this material, facebook updates, &c. as well. Quite interested in theory, I should think. [I got to see the latest iteration of a cheap petabox recently: it now fits in a 4U case...] SJ On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Kathy Gill <kegill.uwlists@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:
Twitter's history is stored and aggressively mined...
Twitter's full archive is not available for mining.
I believe that there is only one organization - other than Twitter - that has access to a full feed. They've been on the receiving end of the fire hose since last November, IIRC. (I talked to one of the founders at the 140TC conference in LA in September.)
I brought up the idea of an "internet archive" for tweets during a 'research conversation' two weeks ago. There was push-back from some faculty ... based on the idea that our 'conversations' have always been ephemeral. Me? I'd like to have full-feed so that we can track politicos and business rhetoric.
Kathy @kegill
PS I've lurked here for a little while. I teach in the master of communication digital media program at the University of Washington - as well as undergrad digital journalism. My limited research efforts at the moment are focused on Twitter's use by organizations as part of the communication mix. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Samuel said: "Twitter's history is stored and aggressively mined..." We should never lose sight of this while we play with social networking technologies. I wonder which one of us will be the first to have breakfast food ads show up in FB or Twitter? Rhiannon
It's not an adequate solution, Alex, but this transience is why I send copies of my Tweets over to Friend Feed. Twitter search only goes back about 6 days but I can search for Tweets (my own or others) on FF that are months or a year old. I've found that feature of FF so useful it justifies my use of that network. It still is not the same as being to download and analyze a person's entire archive of Tweets. As far as I've been told by Twitter, these messages are all "in storage" but are not presently accessible. I don't think this is a high priority item for them but maybe one day we'll be able to go back to 2006 and see the conversations that were occurring among early adopters. Liz Pullen nwjerseyliz@yahoo.com ________________________________ From: Alex Randall <alex@islands.vi> To: Rhiannon Bury <rcbury@rogers.com>; RBerkman@aol.com; haythorn@illinois.edu; gcheliotis.lists@gmail.com; aoir.z3z@danah.org Cc: air-l@aoir.org Sent: Mon, November 2, 2009 4:23:33 PM Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twittering One wonders what historians of this era will use as primary sources... MS Word no longer supports the data files of the 1980's. As if that company could disconnect me from my own writing without asking my opinion. Try to read files from 8 inch floppy disks and you have to ask the Smithsonian for the use of their machines in glass cases. All that era is inaccessible. In 2000, I put a CD in a time capsule. Same year they opened a time capsule in Colorado from 1900. Inside were gold foil cylinders from an original Edison phonograph. Off to the Smithsonian to listen to them. I wonder if anyone in 100 years will be able to read my CD? I wonder if anyone will be able to even find the tweets of today, tomorrow. We are arriving in a culture of the instant. and in an instant - it will be gone. Alex Randall Professor of Communication University of the Virgin Islands. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Liz <nwjerseyliz@yahoo.com> wrote:
It's not an adequate solution, Alex, but this transience is why I send copies of my Tweets over to Friend Feed.
Mine are in a lot of places. I'd forgotten that I'm sending them to Plaxo, until I got a note from an old friend (non-digital friend) who is a recent Plaxo networker. Mine go to FriendFeed but also to a blog at wordpress ... which allows me to easily search them with Google, because my link posts are often a form of 3x5 card note-taking. (Yes, I should use delicious but Tweetdeck is easier!) Kathy
participants (6)
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Alex Randall -
Kathy Gill -
Liz -
RBerkman＠aol.com -
Rhiannon Bury -
Samuel Klein