Like, retweet, and the growing hyper-simplification of online methods of expression

In the course of our day-to-day lives, it can be easy to forget that, a mere couple of decades ago, most of us could not use computers to talk to people. Widespread internet access has since revolutionized communication and entertainment with astounding speed for an ever-expanding slice of the world’s population. Reactions to this kind of radical novelty generally fall into either of two camps: those who fear (or, occasionally, hope) that enveloping ourselves in new media environments will cause dramatic, unforeseen changes in our minds and lives; and those who picture us less as helpless recipients and more as autonomous users of a set of changing tools that we could pick up or put down as we please. As with most such polarized debates, there is truth to both ways of looking at it. The effects our social media have on us, and the ways we choose to use them, make up a feedback loop in which each influences the other. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube reshape our lives and minds, not by enslaving or coercing, but largely just by giving us what we want — and, in turn, shaping what we want.

The practice of “retweeting” — copying another person’s tweet, with attribution, prefaced by “RT” — arose organically out of the nascent Twitter community. By late 2009, this bit of etiquette had become so ubiquitous that it was formalized as a built-in function of the site, allowing users to retweet with a single mouse click, and also see how many times a given tweet had been repeated. Now, observe here an intriguing commenting behaviour, on a wholly different website, in which the users paste in a previous comment and put a number beside it to indicate how many times it’s been repeated. (more…)

Tags: communication, facebook, Like, Retweet, social media, Twitter, YouTube
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