Cultural Musings #2

April 30, 2009

Twitter as Distillation of Validation of Cultural Membership Groups

Here’s some musings on Twitter that I dug out of a canned post of mine. I should probably flesh it out into something more, but it gets the main message across;

“Twitter, is the fertile soil to plant, grow, share and trade cultural norms – the medium in which is used to emit and transfer. In fact Twitter is more than just the medium, it’s the ideal medium. The social networking element keeps tweeters in touch on a minute-by-minute basis while not binding them to any real time conversation. The tight word count moderates each sentence making it low fluff and straight to the love. The response system flaunts replies to people within the same network. This whole set up is ideal for users to flirt and trade ambiguous nudge, nudge, wink, wink commentaries among each other, and then transmit their dialogue to onlookers. It’s a contained system, built around the utterance, a distilled cultural transmitter. As said to death in the cultural studies field, language = culture. Therefore Twitter’s composition is a fantastic, quantifiable way to observe memberships groups defining their cultural identity. It’s in Twitter that I draw much of my reasoning as it’s a transparent model to view this culture.

When I cruise through other people’s Twitter pages and observe the small talk, I’m often baffled at what’s actually going on. People declaring their membership roles or attempting to grow their seed, by throwing strings of replies to others. It’s a society alright. A society where people are constantly stating their roles and relationships. To “fit in” people have to acknowledge the presence of a membership group, whether they’re in it or not. And with only 140 characters to play with, you need to be discrete about this, which is where the love letters, and ultimately masturbation come into play. In Twitter, if you want to be part of the elusive membership group you have to wank it all up on an open stage, and therein lies my frustration, as the audience member of that stage.”

“The Foreign Game”

For my next column, I’m considering tackling the problems with creating a “foreign game”. That is in the same sense as a foreign movie. The inherent issue is basically that games require an interface outside of the avatar’s own world. Such things as menus, on-screen hub etc. These features take one out of the immersion of the game world. Now, how does one get around these issues when creating a a game with a foreign language as the only language.

Too Kind to be Cruel

Basically because of the whole face system, it sometimes seems that Chinese people are too polite to be critical as they lose face when transmitting something negative to someone else.

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