Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: A modern-day Moses, standing atop Mount Sinai, has just received the Ten Commandments. Looking down, he sees the Israelites, impatient to hear the word of God. He pulls his iPhone out from the creases of his robe and starts tapping on it furiously. The Israelites, Moses knows, all follow him on Twitter, and so he tweets the whole congregation, condensing the fundamentals of Western morality to 140 characters. He then takes a photo with his phone, which he posts immediately to his Tumblr account; the people, he knows, will be blogging about this moment for ages to come.
If any of the references in the previous paragraph left you bewildered, don’t despair: This may not necessarily be a sign of your own technological illiteracy, but yet another indication that our new ways of conveying information, briefer and more immediate, are leaving a growing number of us, quite literally, at a loss for words.
For the People of the Book, this may be a very big problem.
Before we proceed any further, a brief history is in order: In the beginning was the word, and the word was good. Then came the book and the newspaper and the pamphlet, and for centuries, mankind was satisfied with communicating in print. All this, of course, changed as soon as the personal computer and the Internet gave rise to all manners of electronic personal expression. Which leads us to Jorn Barger.
Largely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of blogging, Barger, an Ohio resident and facial-hair enthusiast, started his site, Robot Wisdom, in 1989, mainly to publish essays about such disparate topics as James Joyce and artificial intelligence for a small community of likeminded geeks who could speak a host of computer languages and navigate the Net’s then-unfriendly waters.
A decade later, with the Internet becoming commonplace, Barger had his eureka moment: An ideal Web outpost, he thought, would concern itself less with creating new content and more with aggregating existing materials. There was less need, he claimed, for the sort of long and thoughtful pieces he himself was fond of writing, and more need for pithy dispatches that linked to other people’s work, often accompanied by a bit of sharp opinion or value judgment. A Web site, in other words, should resemble not a book, but a personal journal or a log. And as it lived online, it would be called a Weblog. Ever the student of playful, modernist literature, Barger switched around the term, coming up with “we blog.” A new term, blog, was created, a noun and a verb alike that described the habit of frenetically linking and commenting that more and more people were now finding irresistible. According to the blog search engine Technorati, in 2007, barely 10 years after Barger first coined the term, there were more than 112 million blogs in existence.
Much, of course, has been said about the pros and cons of blogging: Anyone can have a blog, lowering not only barriers to publication, but also standards of writing and reporting. Anyone can have a blog, thereby allowing more voices into the conversation and bolstering democracy. It’s refreshing to hear so many perspectives. It’s tedious to have to listen to so many voices. Blogs give power to the people. Blogs reduce the mysteries of life into minutiae.
Just as these debates were making their way, going from the depths of dorkdom to the sunny meadows of the mainstream media, rapidly changing technology made blogging seem nearly obsolete. We are now living in the age of microblogging.
As developments occur at a breakneck pace, there is little need to try and place things on a timeline. What you do have to know is this: At some point, probably early in 2007, writing blog posts — averaging, usually, around 300 to 500 words — began to seem like an imposition. Even blogs, after all, demanded a modicum of respect for the English language and a few minutes to form a coherent thought. What was needed now was a “quick and dirty stream of consciousness” containing only “the barest whiff of a finished published work… really just a way to quickly publish the ‘stuff’ that you run across every day on the Web.”
The aforementioned statements come from Jason Kottke, another respected elder of the blogosphere. He was writing in 2005 to describe Tumblr, a blogging platform that favored microscopic posts, often just snapshots or short video clips, over actual sentences. This revolution, commonly referred to as microblogging, was completed in 2007 with the advent of Twitter, a service that allows its users 140 characters to answer this maddeningly mundane question: What are you doing?
The service’s 5 million users spend their days providing brief status updates, often as they enjoy such a thoroughly ordinary activity as eating dinner, working out or walking around. Barack Obama was among the twitterati as he campaigned for president, as are most media personalities, a smattering of politicians and a growing swath of corporations. And unlike, say, text messaging or communicating via the popular social network Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are not platforms for interpersonal exchanges, but rather means of publishing one’s missives to the world at large, as pithily and immediately as possible.
Examining this thinning of language — these starved forms of communications that favor the quick and the inconsequential while remaining unsuited for thoughts that may take space to unfold and time to read — it is easy to succumb to a technologically deterministic depression and declare the end of intelligent civilization near. But since Jews have been forever defined — even constituted — by our relationship with the book and, as a result, with the written word at large, we must pay special attention to these winds of change. Without being unduly alarmist, one can say that the Internet may be killing off the Jewish mind.
If you’re looking for an easy point of entry into this discussion and are given to conspiracy theories, feast yourself: The very same Barger of blogging fame is also — can you guess it? — a noted antisemite who suggested that the Jewish idea of chosenness was comparable to Hitler’s ideology. Barger placed the catchphrases “Judaism worships fraud” and “Judaism is racism” atop his blog.
But the real danger, of course, lies elsewhere, not with the millions of kooks who use the new technology to spread their odious opinions — Jews, after all, use the very same technology to spread their own messages — but, perhaps, in the technology itself.
For centuries, we have been the high priests of commentary, writing books that comment on books that comment on other books. The Talmud, famously, is the masterwork of this practice, containing both text and interpretation, and presaging, in its unique structure, the coming of hypertext — as Jonathan Rosen famously argued in his 2000 book “The Talmud and the Internet.” But for all our devotion to commentary, we were always strongly committed to one sacred source: the object of all our investigations and interpretations, the divine word we sought to understand.
And the new culture of microblogging, for all its enthusiasm for commentary, lacks precisely this source: The twitterers and tumblrs are not debating with each other the merits of one urtext, several key documents or even substantive issues in the raw; rather, they are commenting on commentaries. They’re like Talmudists who have never read the Torah, as they are given purely to speculation and whim.
The real Talmudists, then, not just the literal ones, but also those of us who apply the same pilpul — or method of intricately examining every iota of meaning in a given text — in academia or in journalism, in court or from the legislator’s bench, must be warned. As the move to microblogging plagues everyone, plunging society in its entirety toward a collective mindset of subjective drivel communicated in short and syntactically stricken sentences, Jews may do well to step up in defense and preserve not only the ailing medium with which we are associated, the book, but also the sort of thinking this medium shapes, analytical and expansive and exhaustive. And as all around us the world’s atwit with Twitter, let us remember that it is only great things — the word of God, say, or, at the very least, a masterful novel — and not the piffle of everyday life that truly merits comment.
Any old rabbi can tell you that. So can Barger. After all, he came up with the crisply titled “Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth” — namely, the more interesting your life becomes, the less you post on your blog. Amen to that.
Liel Leibovitz is the author, most recently, of “Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). He has a doctorate in video games. Seriously.
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Leibovitz makes some fair points about the triviality of micro-blogging, while missing its ability also to help people get important information quickly from people all over the globe. Being The People of the Book does not preclude us from being the people of the byte (or mini-byte).
I disagree with almost every aspect of this article. He omits the most important part of the history, which is the emergence of the cell phone as something that everyone has. It is this mobile phone technology which set the limit at 140 characters. It is the ability to share information over the World Wide Web, sending and receiving, with only a phone which is at the heart of this revolution.
This ability to stay connected with just a phone serves as a defense against government abuse of power. This technology is incredibly helpful in natural disasters.
The connection to anti-Semitism is ridiculous and irrelevant to the topic. I've written a full critique of this article at: http://everydayandeverynight.com/leibovitz-wrong-about-twitter
Throughout Jewish history, we have devised creative and innovative means to communicate with one another, to preserve our religion, heritage and identity, and to evolve new strategies to keep it alive, relevant and vibrant. We lit fires on mountaintops to transmit the declaration of a new month, and went so far as to write down an oral tradition in order to keep ourselves connected over time and distance. Microblogging is hardly radical. While many use it frivolously, many are using it in valuable ways, far beyond "speculation and whim". This is an opportunity to spread knowledge and insight, and to foster deeper connection. A few examples:
@ToolsForShuls (Rabbi Hayim Herring, who commented above): Excellent articles on rabbis, training for the rabbinate and continuing education for rabbis http://www.shma.com/
@JewishTweets: Today's Action: When doing your spring cleaning, donate unwanted clothes and items to a local homeless shelter.
@DarimOnline: "Social Networking and Congregations" survey data from Rabbi Aaron Spiegel at the Indy Center for Congregations: http://tinyurl.com/cg7heq
@AdathIsrael: Join us for Birkat Ha-Chamah (Blessing of the Sun) service (outdoors) at approx. 8am on Wed April 8. Your next chance will be in 2037!
Liel closes by stating "the more interesting your life becomes, the less you post on your blog." In the new social media paradigm and mindset, it's just the opposite. The more interesting your life becomes, the more you want to share the information, energy and connection with others. Like the printing press through society into chaos for a few hundred years, so too will social media. The recent downfall of newspapers is one sign of this. The technology has real potential, and it will take time and discipline to use it well. The social media driven "gift economy"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy) is real. Jewish community will be foolish to not participate and take advantage.
It's funny that Jews are known as People of the Book when we really should be called the People of the Scroll. Some 1,800 years ago, the techological innovation known as 'codex' or 'book' was begining to win fans over in the ancient world - it was cheaper, smaller, and easier to reproduce than scrolls. The Jews, clinging, as we still do today, to the sacred word in scroll form - objected to the new format. But the newly emerging Christians loved it. And used it. And spread the good word to souls worldwide and, well, the rest is history. I appreicated Leibovitz' crisp style and important information in this article - but, like the prominenet folks already commented - I want to caution us against being too hung up on formats of the past as the 'right' way to share the sacred. If Hillel was living today, o master of the Jew Zen quote, wouldn't he be blasting 'if not now, when' on twitter?
I mostly agree with Liel - which is something, given that I run http://www.jewlicious.com - a somewhat well trafficked Jewish blog. All technological advances in communication have had a democratizing influence on the dissemination of information. As we see the barriers of entry become lower and lower we have to expect standards to fall as well. But that didn't seem to hurt us when we went from Torah Sheh Beh Al Peh to scrolls, and then from scrolls to printed books and then from printed books to everything digitized and being able to access the Shas or any siddur from your iPhone.
But wait, I did say I agree with Liel right? Why? Because I am witnessing the best minds of my generation wasting their writing talents on shorter less analytical content. Blog posts that are too long and don't have photos or dramatic titles aren't as popular. And now with twitter everything is reduced to 140 character chunks. It's getting harder and harder to write intelligently when communicating with your mass audience because no one has time for intelligent commentary and the available mediums don't encourage it. The signal to noise ratio is huge and as consumers of information we are inundated with noise.
I still read books. I still buy newspapers. Thank goodness for Shabbat where I can't use digital anything! But yeah, our standards are falling. I share Liel's concerns and despite Lisa Colton's optimistic analysis, I despair at the loss of future Philip Roths and Isaac Bashevis Singers to twitter and an audience that demands easily digestible, unchallenging, bite-sized morsels of content.
In response to David: first, Amen to dropping the digital life on Shabbat!
Regarding you concern about audiences who are accostum to taking in information in small morsels: don't forget this is also an era that has us delivered us 9-year-old kids reading 750 pages of J.K. Rowling and causing parents to resort to, "Sally, if you don't stop reading that book and come to dinner right now I'll have to take that book away for three days!"
There is an avalanche of high-quality children's literature being written right now. [My two favorite children's authors are Kate DeCamillo (Because of Winn Dixie) and Cornelia Funke (Inkheart series).] In a world that people criticize for being toxically addicted to multi-tasking, one of the biggest techno crazes out there is Amazon's Kindle. The ONLY thing you can do with that gadget is read a book.
What is up for grabs right now is how legacy business modules related to artistic endeavors will change and how that will affect the artists themselves and consumers. There will be losers. But I don't see art or people's interest in art diminishing in all.
Think of tweeting like the text of a road sign on the highway. It provides very relevant information helping you get to where you want to go. And its short. It's different because anyone, thank goodness, doesn't have access to putting up a road sign. One of the powerful things about the evolving semantic web and technologies like Twitter, is that filtering and finding is key to them all. The technologies all help users find the sources that are the most relevant and most interesting to them. Users who engage with these selection tools and actively improve their skills in using them will be more successful at creating personalized data-flows that are truly relevant to what they care about.
In the last two weeks I've been experimenting with tweeting on Torah. I've encouraged others to do so and to mark the tweets with "#Torah." I know that for me personally it has helped to slow me down during the week and connect with Torah on a more regular basis. I make no claim for their impact on others. These tweets are agregated automatically via Twitter at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+%23torah. And I've also created an experimental site where, using Twitter's open technology, I import the tweets to my own site but then edit out ones that don't contain any content. You can see that at: http://torahtweets.org. My geek persona is at rabbi personas are split on Twitter, my geek is at http://twitter.com/sgluskin and my Torah tweeting rabbi persona is at: http://twitter.com/rabbishai. I wrote an article on my blog called, Six Reasons to Write Torah Commentary on Twitter.
Rabbi Gluskin, I'm sure your comment was insightful and all that but you lost me midway through the 2nd paragraph. Can you repost an executive summary using 140 characters or less?
:)
Dude. Harry Potter aside, book publishing is in its death throes. Many factors have contributed to this and to the dearth of truly great, Nobel Prize winning Jewish authors. Blogs and Twitter are definitely part of the problem. It's ridiculous that a dummy like me has received 2 lucrative book publishing offers because of my blog while really great writers don't even get the time of day from most literary agents.
As for Torah tweets, good on ya for bringing Torah to the masses but I'll take a good Chavrutah session over 1000 Torah tweets any day. It behooves Jewish organizations and activists to use these new media tools cautiously and intelligently and yes, to provide real world interaction opportunities with their respective constituencies. All that requires hard work, relevant and well crafted content,a good dose of imagination and less Web two-point-Oh! blah blah blah from the army of newly minted Social Media experts that seem to be at every Jewish conference...
I've actually read that book sales continue to increase(albeit through Kindle and other "Internet e-books."
So no worries! Twitter, Facebook, etc., will never entirely replace coherent sentences. They can, however, coexist.
Also, as good as the Word is, it's tough being a Jew if you're illiterate. The majority is not, but it's tough being Jewish if you weren't one of the people included below.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was good. Then came the book and the newspaper and the pamphlet, and for centuries, mankind was satisfied with communicating in print"
In fact, if Moses did take a picture with his iPhone, and he uploaded an audiobook, and twittered, at least everyone would be completely included
:)