We'll start with a simple conceit that almost everyone can agree on: Auto-Tune is annoying, and as technological advances in the music industry go, it's probably responsible for more terrible music than the theremin and Peter Frampton's talk box combined. But in Auto-Tune's wake there have been a few glimmers of light, chief among them Auto-Tune The News, the hilariously low-fi and inventive series of videos from comedians/musicians The Gregory Brothers that dropped in April. (see the best one, called "pirates. drugs. gay marriage" below). The Gregory Brothers garnered such a huge and swift online following that Sony recently came calling and the brothers -- three brothers and one sister, to be precise -- signed a deal to help plug laptops and TVs. Which brings us to Sony's new Facebook app "Auto-Tune Your Status" -- hands down the best way to waste ten minutes online, at least for today. The results, as Mashable points out, are "predictably awful" but hell -- it's all awful with Auto-Tune, so why not? After installing, just write a status, choose one of four hopelessly robotic voices, select a beat, and let it rip.
There's no doubt that social media is changing a great many aspects of human communication -- LMFAO anyone? -- so when the leading edge of social media of-the-moment, Twitter, changed its prompt from the original "What are you doing?" to the broader "What's Happening?" the digital masses took note -- and unlike 99 percent of all tweets, this update was actually worth reading. While the two phrases are used synonymously in casual speech, the company's explanation for last week's switch makes clear that Twitter has chosen to consciously mature their brand away from its ponderous, twee origins and harness some of the more useful applications of the platform. From the Twitter blog:
"The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore -- starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?""
You read it here first: Twitter is officially serious. Now if only they'd swap that cutsie blue bird logo with an owl wearing a graduation cap or something.
... speaking of the intersection of social media and language: if there was any doubt left about just how far social media has seeped into our culture, behold the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year, "unfriend," a verb, which is defined as "To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Other contenders included "hashtag," "sexting," "funemployed," "teabagger," and "tramp stamp."
Hopefully more people can learn from this post what I have. A great contribution to the world at large.