Twitter versus the bean seeds: the pressures of keeping across everything

A blog post I read this morning about the importance of editors keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in publishing (What Do Editors Need To Know Now? via White Ink Limited) got me thinking again about how good I am at keeping my finger on the professional pulse – not just of publishing trends, but also of all the ideas relevant to what I do in ELT, EAP, corpora, lexicography and just language trends generally. It seems that since the explosion of social media, there’s so much potentially relevant stuff being flagged up and available out there to check out, I could easily spend more time on ‘professional development’ than I do on actually getting on with work! Facebook and Twitter both seem to daily throw up links to interesting blog posts and online articles, then there’re Twitter chats (like #EAPchat) and Facebook threads. There are webinars and videos of talks to watch, either live or recorded, and of course, I also hear about more ‘real-life’ events worth attending too. A lot of it’s really useful, and often inspiring, stuff, but it just eats time!

And even then, when I meet up with colleagues, I still find myself embarrassingly ill-informed in comparison – whether that’s academic research that my EAP colleagues bandy around or the latest edtech that my techier pals slip nonchalantly into conversation (notice I’m at least picking up some of the jargon though!). Of course, I like to reassure myself that I’m not actually less informed, it’s just that we all tend to focus on different things. Although having a finger in lots of pies, I do sometimes feel like I just skim lots of things and don’t really spend enough time on any of them.

It seems amazing now that I spent the first 10 years or so of my freelancing career relying on not much more than a yearly visit to the IATEFL conference and the odd article in the IATEFL magazine to keep up-to-date with what was going on beyond what I was immediately working on. It makes me wonder ...

• were we all just less-informed and narrower in outlook back then?
• does having all this extra information make us better at what we do?
• is a lot of what’s out there just an unnecessary waste of time? (I do find that I read a lot that goes over the same old ground and it’s only occasionally that I pick out a genuinely useful, informative nugget)
• and if so, what’s the best way to filter out all the ‘noise’ and focus on the genuinely useful stuff?

On that last point, I do feel a bit of an undercurrent, especially on Twitter, of having to be seen to keep up with the right stuff and also of taking a supportive interest in what people you ‘know’ (in the loosest, social media sense of the word) are doing, even when it’s only on the periphery of your own interests. It’s a pressure I try to resist, but definitely one that’s difficult to ignore completely.

I guess everyone has to find their own balance and way of getting what they want from social media and the "information age" generally, and we all go through phases of being more or less connected, and more or less concerned about the pressure to be across everything all the time. Personally, with the coming of spring (at long last!), I think I’m going to be prioritizing time spent in my garden over time in front of my computer over the next few months … and I’m going to try really hard not to feel guilty or out-of-touch as a result!

Daily updates on the progress of my beans!

#notalanguageluddite

Today I used my first hashtag not on Twitter. It's a trend I've been watching and mulling over for a while, and today, it just felt right. After a walk across the park earlier, I posted the following as my Facebook status:

Just watched a squirrel in the park eating a Jaffa cake ... naturally he twirled it around in his paws nibbling the edges first, leaving the orangey bit in the middle to last! #thingsthatmakemesmile

It may not seem that earthshattering to you, and the content of the post is fairly irrelevant, but it was quite a big linguistic step for someone who thinks about language for a living!

I'm generally fairly pragmatic about language usage. It seems to me that if something works for both parties in a communication, then that's fine. It's only when it doesn't work for one side, usually the reader/listener, that it becomes a problem, such as overly informal language in a job application. I’m also pretty relaxed about new coinages. English has always been full of synonyms, so just because there’s an existing way of saying something, doesn't mean we don't "need" a new one; it’ll inevitably fill a slightly new niche (in terms of register or connotation or whatever). I do get bugged by all the fuss made about new coinages - they are not the be all and end all of language and linguistic research! But I guess that's the same in any field, it's always the sexy, quirky stuff that grabs the headlines rather than the mundane or complicated developments, which are possibly more important, but don't make such good copy.

In terms of my own language and communication, I'm not an early adopter, I'll sit and wait and observe until I've got a feel for something and figured out whether and how it’s relevant to me. It took me a while to decide how I wanted to use social media like Facebook and Twitter, but now both, to a greater or lesser extent, have settled into being part of my communicative landscape. Facebook has certainly changed the way I use language. The need to convey an idea in a concise, punchy way in a status update lends itself to looser grammar and punctuation, and I'll happily scatter smilies and random punctuation marks !?!*! (Although, to be fair, I think I've always used punctuation that way in informal letters.) I do agonize over whether to let those habits creep into other areas, like emails. It feels somehow lazy to use a shorthand when you’ve got the space to express yourself more fully, but that’s probably just a personal hang-up … communication should be easy and relaxed and natural, shouldn’t it?

I’m not sure whether the topic-heading hashtag is going to catch on as part of my communicative repertoire, but today it just seemed to capture an idea perfectly, so I suspect it may stay. Think I’m probably too old to pull off the spoken hashtag though … wouldn’t that be old-skool mutton dressed up as linguistic lamb ;)

Can you say ...?

I generally tend to keep out off the whole language change: good or bad debate. Over the years, I've got a bit bored of explaining to people the whole concept of being a descriptive rather than a prescriptive linguist. So I tend to avoid questions about "correct" usage and discussions about falling standards. And probably like most lexicographers, I feel a little bit irked that most people think we spend our whole time looking for new words, because what else would there be to do? This week though, a couple of language change issues have caught my attention.

Facebook grammar: Anyone who uses Facebook will have come across the issue of whether to write their status updates in the first or third person. Because your name comes up at the beginning of the line, you tend to carry on the sentence, which means using a third person verb, so: Julie Moore is looking forward to the weekend. But then because it's clearly you, the first person, writing, it would then feel odd to start using third person pronouns, so you tend to switch and end up with this funny mixture: Julie Moore is looking forward to seeing my parents at the weekend. Different people approach the issue in different ways, some going for the funny grammatical mix, others just ignoring the name at the beginning and starting a new sentence. Could be a PhD research topic in there - I'm sure someone, somewhere is already looking into it!

Facebook threw a spanner in the works this week though when they slightly changed the way the text appears on screen, so that now (on your home page at least, but not when you look at your profile!) your name now appears at the top, more like a heading, and your status update starts on a new line. To me this now lends itself to the whole sentence approach and so more conventional grammar. I wasn't sure what I thought about the change and when I posted a comment to that effect, wasn't entirely surprised to get a response from a friend saying they are actually quite liked the third/first person mix! We'll have to see how it develops, especially as 'comments' (replies to status updates) are still in the old format. "New" grammar for a new medium?

Insurgence: The other new usage also came to light via a friend's Facebook post - thanks to Michelle for this one. She pointed out that she'd come across several examples recently in the media of the word insurgence being used to talk about a sudden increase in something. So one from the Tate Gallery Facebook page referred to "the insurgence of digital photography" and another on the radio, "an insurgence of autumn winds". My first reaction was that they can't possibly be right because an insurgence is a revolt or rebellion. But then when I thought about it a bit more, we do talk about a resurgence of something, to refer to something increasing again after a period of quiet or unpopularity. I guess if you take off the re-, you could talk about a surge or an upsurge in something, but somehow they don't fit quite as well. I did a few corpus searches and indeed, this new usage does seem to be out there, I came across:

we saw a huge insurgence of "cool" gamers
There has been an insurgence of books which answer
What is going on with this sudden insurgence of Norwegian music ?
as a possible solution to the insurgence of drug-resistant bacteriaThe last of these comes from an academic journal! So perhaps, after all, an insurgence of something does make sense? Is it filling a gap? I'll be keeping an eye out for it.