Since my post of October 26, 2013 entitled, PLNs, our way of ‘speaking’ the new language,
I have not only been thinking about the Internet as one of humanity’s major
languages, but I have been reading theorists AND writing a paper called, Zombie Lingo, with fellow U of A grad student Sean Jones. The thesis of the paper is that the Internet is one of humanity's large complex communication systems, called 'language' and that Twitter is a specific example of such a system. We analyze the event‐game‐learning‐experience of Twitter vs. Zombies to see if it fits the criteria of a Twitter language within the larger communication system of the Internet.
Robert K. Logan, in his paper, Making sense of the visual - is Google the seventh language?, claims that there are seven languages of
humanity, each one evolving in response to an information overload in the
language that preceded it. The languages in evolutionary order are; speech, written language, math, science, computers, Internet/ World Wide Web and Google (search engines). Stephen Downes explores and expands on many of these ideas in, The Buntine Oration: Learning Networks.
In the language of the Internet, sequence is not the single
most important consideration and full absorption of content is neither possible
nor necessary. Logan claims the language of the Internet is characterized by; two-way communication, ease of access of
information, continuous learning, alignment and integration and finally community.
In November of 2012, Jesse Stomell and Pete Rorabaugh launched
Twitter vs. Zombies, a three day, synchronous, event‐game‐learning‐experience with simple rules that evolved through
crowd-sourcing. Twitter vs. Zombies was open to anyone
with the motivation to participate and access to the Internet. What resulted
was an amazingly rich, syntactically congruent, semantically cohesive language
of communication that serves as a prime example of Logan’s 6th
language of humanity. Stomell's thoughts about the process helped us conclude that Twitter vs Zombies is a good example of the 6th human language.
My views regarding the language of the Internet are evolving daily. As our Zombie Lingo paper points out, there are many theorists who have been considering
these ideas long before us. So . . . how does all of this relate to my Personal Learning Network (PLN)? I think my PLN is my own individual linguistic, ever changing take on
Internet Lingo. The filter forward aspect of my PLN is part of the brain-augmentation necessary for understanding the newly evolved language (i.e. it helps me
filter the overwhelming amount of information so that I can “abosrb and
understand”). Additionally, the artifacts I create, curate and share within
my PLN are my way of communicating in Logan’s 6th language. Comments,
responses, links and the like constitute dialogue.
I think this is
an area that I will be exploring for a long time to come!
Wow! Thanks for posting this, I was waiting for clarification on the previous post! I'd read a post from Rhonda Jessen a while back about twitter vs zombies and was fascinated by the concept, so just had to read your Zombie Lingo paper...!
ReplyDeleteStill trying to get my head around it but I think I understand a bit more what you're getting at.
I guess the thing is that if twitter is a "language" (- and I agree - there are insufficient words in the English language to truly convey what you mean here by 'language'), it's evolving at such an enormously rapid pace that it's hard to identify it with conventional languages, which evolve relatively much much slower.
Very interesting thesis though, and look foward to your further explorations of this concept!