--- On Thu, 8/13/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
There's something
> damaging to the collective intelligence about a series of
> 140-character or less bleats.
[WS:} May be or may be not. Perhaps media like twitter attracts predominantly those who do not much more to say than a 140 character line of text, while those who have more to say gravitate toward other media, like facebook or lbo-talk.
The point is not really whether short-text-message media are good or bad (they are what they are, neither good not bad) but whether they are made into signifiers of something else that connote social status (or lack thereof) and desirability (or lack of it.)
To use a classical example cited by Roland Barthes - a picture of a black soldier saluting the French flag on the front cover of a French magazine - the picture itself signifies two different levels of meaning - the literal (i.e. person with specific characteristics in a specific situation0 and "mythological" as Barthes calls it (i.e. the French empire and its connotations, either good or bad.)
The same applies to any other "iconic" items from guns to modern technology gizmos (ipods, cell phones, and what not.) The issue being debated is not the item itself or its first-level meaning, but the value of its secon-level or mythological meaning and its political, ideological or cultural connotation. That is to say, what matters is not guns but gun culture and its connotations for different segments of the US society. Likewise - what matters is not technology of short text messages but the culture of using this technology and the cultural connotations this technology has for different social groups i.e. for some it is the epitome of "cool" and "hip" while for other it is the epitome of dumbing down and decline of "high culture."
It is my impression that those who praise the spread of this technology tend to do so for populist and anti-elite sentiments (e.g. the old popular versus high culture divide) - but this is just an impression.
Wojtek