Twittering Away...captioning lives.

I kind of wanted to continue on the idea of twitter as a tool to caption lives. Have you seen the information on the new twitter that is being rolled out recently. It is actually somewhat interesting, as it adds even more features of interconnectivity between users, but more importantly, they are trying to make it easier to embed visual media. According to their site...they are making it "easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube" . I said in my last post that I was conceiving of twitter as a tool to caption lives, that its limited space format presents the perfect format to caption and to recaption both ones own life, but also the lives, ideas, comments, and now...videos of others.

But what happens when the caption becomes the video, becomes the image? What happens when we replace short spurts of text with short clips of videos, and therefore the way we comment, and even conceive of responses changes. I'm sure this is in part already happening...hell, I've seen it on sites like facebook, and myspace...where someones response to a comment, idea, image, or movie, is a image or movie without text. Barthes, in Image Music Text, discusses the idea that barriers between disciplines are breaking down with the ideas of interdisciplinarity, that put into connection ideas that may not jive entirely with each other, but are being pushed to do something new anyways. He specifically talks about this in reference to the idea of a Text, which, as he points out "poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social' functions)" (157) I think the same can be said when you put different media together in ways that make conversation rather than just support each other. These texts are being made to speak not as separate functions, but as ideas working within a single kind of language (however disjointed that language might be).

If images, movies, words, all fall under that category of Text, because of their incapability to be only one thing, then they can all work in similar ways in a similar format...like a tweet. The more we try to differentiate, to work towards separation, the more conversations done in this matter becomes difficult to understand and work with. Barthes whole discussion of text is as it being discontinuous, broken apart, while still managing to create connection and create meaning. It, as he puts it, attempts to "abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading" and in this case, the difference between creating and viewing (159). Tweets are a way of captioning captions, and captioning images, and captioning oneself, and captioning everything...they break down the barriers between real life events and the texts that people create out of them; they therefore turn life into text...or maybe even Text (I'm still working out what the distinction actually is).

Ok, I think that's enough of me confusing myself for awhile...I'll probably be posting on this idea again later.