SW in Facebook

[Trevor Jenkins]

Hi Yuri,

... deaf people, especially on YouTube, talking to deaf people from all over
> Braziland find that social networks are a great tool of the deaf.


Anything that allows us to communicate with each other is great. Personally
I find YouTube frustrating (for Deaf communication) because it is one
direction only. I could put up a video but then there is no quick and easy
for you to respond. The only tool I have made use of with Deaf friends is
ooVoo back when it was free and one could have multi-way conversations.


> Unfortunately the posts, in my opinion, are "ephemeral," but the contact is
> extremely straightforward. Knowing use, is an incredible adventure!
>

I think that is true of most posts whether email, Facebook, Twitter, MSN
Messenger or any other social network medium with the content ephemeral.

Many years ago I worked in text retrieval (what today everyone thinks of as
search engines). We had a three level category scheme: ephemeral (material
that did not need to be archived), important (material that is needed for a
period of time), and archival (material that needs to be retained). An
example of ephemeral might be the "out of office" reply one receives from a
business contact. It doesn't need to be kept once one has read it. An
example of important might be the call, agenda and briefing papers for a
meeting. Once the meeting is over the call is then ephemeral. An example of
archival might be a contract. This needs to be kept.

Over time something that was "important" may become ephemeral or indeed
archival. There may come a point at which archival material becomes
ephemeral.

I no longer agree with that category scheme! As a linguist now I think
ephemeral material is vital. It shows us how a language is used. The real
grammar, the real lexical choices, the real tone and affect. One of my
interests is corpus collation for analysis of language. And examples of
ephemera are more important than are examples of edited and formal usage.
They show me the real language not the high register language of academia.

I would rather have 10 minutes of "ephemeral" signed conversation to analyse
than 10 thousand hours of formal content. And, of course, I want those 10
minutes in SignWriting so my analysis can be automated.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!
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