Twitter Be Like African Drums

Big Think Video

....Margaret Atwood says:

 ...People used to perform their lives this way to themselves in their diaries, and also through letters to other people.So for me, anything that happens in social media is an extension of stuff we were already doing in some other way. 

So, it’s all human communication. 

And the form that most closely resembles the “tweet” is the telegram of old, which also was limited because you paid by the letter. And so short communications very rapidly sent. So all of these things, the postal service, et cetera, they’re all improvements, if you like, or modernizations of things that already existed earlier in some other form. 

Even African tribal drums, for instance, could send very complex messages over great distances. They were very rapid, they were very well-worked out and communications could just go like wildfire using that medium of communications. So all of this stuff is what we do now, but it’s not different in nature from what we have always done, which is communicate with one another, send messages to one another, and perform our lives. 

We’ve been doing that for a long time.

Atwood fotocred - J.Allen

more from Atwood: 1. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/

2. http://bigthink.com/ideas/24253

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