Social media posts as picture postcards, just faster

Summer reading of the best kind--I got a postcard from my grandson in the mail from Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo. How awesome is that? Personal hand-printed mail that traveled across geographic space over ticking hours and minutes and days to land in my physical mailbox. Woo-hoo! Sting rays and bats and tigers, oh my!

I'm struggling with my lunch break reading of Gretchen McCulloch's consideration of social media linguistics, Because Internet.  I'm intrigued by our turbo-changing informal writing culture. My problem is keeping track of McCulloch's cohorts of internet and social media adopters: Old Internet People, Full Internet People, Semi Internet People, Post Internet People and Pre Internet People. Really, they just need catchier names. The important idea is that we are in an era of unprecedented informal written communication  activity. People who would never have picked up a pen or typed out a memo are communicating by text, tweet, and post. They are creating new ways to add intonation, layers of meaning, emphasis, breath pauses, and speech-mimicking spellings.

McCulloch compares Beatle George Harrison's postcards with brief messages and doodles mailed in the '70s with use of emoticons and emojis today. Brief informal written communication isn't new, but the number of people participating is vastly different. Doodles and tiny faces are just attempts to indicate mood in a tiny box for a message.

Across cohorts and generations we still have some gaps of interpretation and understanding. My "NEW fiction" may just indicate a special library shelving location, while my coworker takes it as a shouted criticism of her shelving efforts.

We may need to identify and acknowledge those internal critics, editors, and even mentors perched on our shoulders with red pens and twinkly star stickers. Who is grading us for spelling, punctuation, legibility, and turning in our work on time? How do we feel about what goes into our Permanent Record? On my shoulders sit toga-clad judges who happen to be my great-aunt Emma and Miss Helen Madsen from seventh grade English class.

I am often guilty of being too flip, too blunt, too esoteric in speech and writing. Social media is a complex Venn diagram of audiences -- those we have in mind when we post, those with access to the post now, those viewing the post in the unknown future, those lacking the Rosetta stone to unlock the meaning.

What about the sensory experience of texting or posting? I don't get the joy of twirling the display rack of color postcards  (5 for $1.00) in the corner of the souvenir shop. Across the generations I DO get the XOXOX hugs and kisses I received from my grandmothers via the U.S. mail.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder