SW in Facebook

[Yuri Barreto]

Hello, Trevor!

I am very happy with your e-mail!

I think the same way about issues "ephemeral." Represents our day-to-day, since everything is always very dynamic!

--- Em ter, 11/10/11, Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe at GMAIL.COM> escreveu:

De: Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe at GMAIL.COM>
Assunto: Re: SW in Facebook
Para: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Data: Terça-feira, 11 de Outubro de 2011, 11:45

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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