By Christine Lavosky
For this piece I copied images from Alexa Chung’s book of inspiring images, It, with marker and then paired them with very brief phrases, sometimes as short as one word. I did this to imitate the compressed style language is being forced to comply to in our fast-paced modern culture.
The social media outlet which most adequately exemplifies this phenomena is Twitter with it’s short limit of characters in which the writer is allowed in which to encapsulate their idea. The people on this page represent a wide range of the use of social media sites. There is the teenage girl who constantly quotes song lyrics as her Facebook statuses and photo captions. There is the emotional college girl who uses Twitter to say things to her ex-boyfriend that she knows she shouldn’t say (she also knows he doesn’t have a Twitter). Besides these types of posts are always so vague that even if the person they were written about say them they could only wonder whether they were directed towards them. There are the fake accounts for popular movie characters.
The cat and the eye represent the playful but anonyminity-allowing account on Twitter. They’re not for real people and their readers are meant to know this. They represent some idea or just general silliness rather than a singular person’s thoughts and opinions. Of this breed there is the well-known Wolf-puppy and So Sad Today. These “twitter famous” users have become experts in the new 140 character or less forum. They have honed the “art” of compressing humor, passion, tragedy, love into a minuscule text block of language. And if done successfully, these short burst of writing can be amusing, funny, profound even. But following Margot Tennenbaum’s downcast expression into the distance once must wonder if these short, “cheap” bursts of information are demeaning the longer, more researched, more substantial form. If they are crunching our brains into shriveled raisons that can’t focus enough to read something more than 140 characters. If they are eating our soul.
Christine Lavosky is a Writing, Literature and Publishing Sophomore from Northern New Jersey. In addition to being a writer for Isis she is the editor-in-chief of a visual art and literature magazine currently in its infancy, The Emerson Eye. In her free moments she loves knitting somewhat lopsided hats and frolicking through The Garden!
For this piece I copied images from Alexa Chung’s book of inspiring images, It, with marker and then paired them with very brief phrases, sometimes as short as one word. I did this to imitate the compressed style language is being forced to comply to in our fast-paced modern culture.
The social media outlet which most adequately exemplifies this phenomena is Twitter with it’s short limit of characters in which the writer is allowed in which to encapsulate their idea. The people on this page represent a wide range of the use of social media sites. There is the teenage girl who constantly quotes song lyrics as her Facebook statuses and photo captions. There is the emotional college girl who uses Twitter to say things to her ex-boyfriend that she knows she shouldn’t say (she also knows he doesn’t have a Twitter). Besides these types of posts are always so vague that even if the person they were written about say them they could only wonder whether they were directed towards them. There are the fake accounts for popular movie characters.
The cat and the eye represent the playful but anonyminity-allowing account on Twitter. They’re not for real people and their readers are meant to know this. They represent some idea or just general silliness rather than a singular person’s thoughts and opinions. Of this breed there is the well-known Wolf-puppy and So Sad Today. These “twitter famous” users have become experts in the new 140 character or less forum. They have honed the “art” of compressing humor, passion, tragedy, love into a minuscule text block of language. And if done successfully, these short burst of writing can be amusing, funny, profound even. But following Margot Tennenbaum’s downcast expression into the distance once must wonder if these short, “cheap” bursts of information are demeaning the longer, more researched, more substantial form. If they are crunching our brains into shriveled raisons that can’t focus enough to read something more than 140 characters. If they are eating our soul.
Christine Lavosky is a Writing, Literature and Publishing Sophomore from Northern New Jersey. In addition to being a writer for Isis she is the editor-in-chief of a visual art and literature magazine currently in its infancy, The Emerson Eye. In her free moments she loves knitting somewhat lopsided hats and frolicking through The Garden!