Tweephemera vs. Supertexts

What use Twitter?

Bloggers are busily discussing the value of Twitter:

• Dave Winer sees Twitter as a breakthrough in journalism, but appears quite concerned about the corruption of Twitter's capacity to reflect an objective measure of influence.
• Dave Pollard posts a thoughtful explanation of Twitter for uninitiated, and offers a critique higlighting the chaff that comprises the bulk of tweets. He predicts that, while addictive, Twitter is a fad.
• Noam Cohen offers six observations about Twitter that stem from its apparent utility in mass protest.

Tweets vs Supertexts

In the book The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership, University President Steven B. Sample discusses the value of the supertext relative to ephemeral daily news. Sample defines a supertext as any text that is still read 400 years after its first publication. He points to supertexts are being important because:

1. Any text that commands attentional resources hundreds of years after its first publication is culturally influential.
2. Supertexts have influenced the language, enabling savvy leaders to resonate with their audiences through culturally-appropriate signaling.
3. In times of rapid change, supertexts allow leaders to tap into what is universal.

By this measure, one would expect tweets to be ephemeral rubbish: to be ignored by anyone wanting to build long-term leadership skills.

A new view on Twitter

Is Twitter producing the world's first real-time conversational corpora?

Perhaps the individual messages are out-of-context, as Dave Pollard alleges. Perhaps the messages are ephemeral, as one might expect Steven B. Sample to concur.

But might the real value in Twitter lie in our ability to database the tweets and examine them using corpus techniques? Maybe it is the participation in large-scale semantic patterning that will shift the humble ephemeral tweet (tweephemera) toward the value of the lofty supertext.

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