The glow­ing Twingly ver­sion of “social” media flar­ing in real time around the world.

By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From Feb­ru­ary 4, 2012
The first in my series of columns on the “social” media at Writer Unboxed.

‘Social’ media: What isn’t in a name

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power

Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour…

Son­net 126

The so-called “social” media, cur­rently our lovely boy of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, hold in their dart­ing pack­ets of data, surely, unimag­in­able power.

• They col­lapse dis­tance across con­ti­nents and seas we once showed on no maps. Ariel, him­self, would weep.
• They erase the time — days, weeks, months, even years — we once waited for letters.
• They spin across the planet’s sur­face to sur­vey, sift, locate, tag, fol­low, and bond us to peo­ple we’d never have met in ear­lier times. Our abil­ity to con­vene global salons of cohorts in real time is unprece­dented in human experience.
• They pump ready reser­voirs of infor­ma­tion into deserts of igno­rance and await only curios­ity to be tapped.
• They open to us pos­si­bil­i­ties of col­lu­sion and coop­er­a­tion, con­trivance and col­lab­o­ra­tion, calumny and cama­raderie, cat­a­stro­phe and compassion.

So where do we get off being so trite when we speak of these forces?

Cute­ness is revolting

When you need your polit­i­cal upris­ing led by a car­toon char­ac­ter. (From Twitter’s offi­cial logos page.)

Shall we say with straight faces that the brave Tunisians – whose dogged grace inau­gu­rated the Arab Spring — tweeted their way to free­dom? I sup­pose they’re lucky that Twit­ter co-founders Jack Dorsey and “Biz” Stone didn’t con­sign them to quack­ing in glory or chirp­ing their triumph.

And does it make you love a social networking/sharing/bookmarking ser­vice bet­ter to find it spelled Tum­blr instead of Tum­bler? Flickr instead of Flicker? Licorize, Pin­ter­est, YouTube?

Den­mark, like many non-English-based cul­tures, is see­ing a steady rise in Eng­lish names for com­pa­nies, even when lit­tle busi­ness is done in any­thing but Dan­ska. Thus, my cable ser­vice in Copen­hagen was pro­vided by YouSee, you see.

A book­ish ren­di­tion of the Hoot­Suite owl. Awwwwwww.

My own tweets are lobbed at a defense­less pop­u­la­tion from a dash­board pro­vided to me by Hoot­Suite. Lit­tle owl for a logo. Adorable, huh? One can tweet out pic­tures with Twit­Pic. Warm and fuzzy enough for you yet?

Does it say any­thing about a new ser­vice when it’s named for the com­pany launch­ing it and a math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bol? Google+ — plus what? Plus the kinder­gart­ners who must have done that graphic on its home­page? Scratchy arrows in the Google col­ors point to a red cir­cle of your peers. Buy me the Crayons, I can do bet­ter than that.

I like Google+, although my inter­est in scrapbook/display net­work­ing is sec­ondary to my fond­ness for news-ticker-ish plat­forms. And as for the name Google+? Well, this is the mas­sive com­pany that has named the Android plat­form for phones and tablets Ice Cream Sand­wich. Hope you like it, because Google is nam­ing all the Android oper­at­ing sys­tems after desserts. Cup­cake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gin­ger­bread, Honeycomb.

Isn’t that cute? Just shoot me now.

Click to read this full post at Writer Unboxed.

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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