The comedian Stephen Fry was said to have given a twinterview, and a protest launched on Twitter was dubbed a Twitchfork protest (by analogy with a ‘pitchfork protest’ in which ordinary people, armed only with the tools of their trade, rise up against their rulers). As well as these specific words, though, it seems that Twitter has given people licence to prefix almost any word with ‘twit-‘ or ‘tw-‘. Hashtags (words preceded by #) are used to identify subjects in tweets, and a subject that is being tweeted about a lot is said to be trending. The huge popularity of Twitter means that most people are aware of tweets (the micro-blogs themselves) and the activity of tweeting. We have blogonistas who blog about fashion, eco-blogs and mummy blogs covering environmental and parenting issues – almost any subject is bloggable for someone. The world of blogging – also known as the blogosphere, is open to anyone, writing on any subject.
Recently in the Middle East, for instance, information leaked out of areas of conflict via moblogging (blogging on the move, often using mobile phones to transfer the blogs to the internet). Now, we can follow people who are liveblogging from events of all sorts. Then, sites like Twitter introduced the concept of microblogging (writing very short blogs). So, for instance, we had blogs (quickly shortened from the more formal ‘weblogs’).
This is all increasingly clever stuff, as is the progression from the search engine to the decision engine, which aims to use sophisticated profiling to direct us to the information we need.Īgain and again we see the invention of a word to describe a new technological phenomenon being creatively adapted to cater for all its later permutations. Geo-targeted applications such as those used in geosocial networking use information about the location of their users to provide relevant services. Games developers have given us augmented reality, a mixture of real and computer-generated images, and immersive reality which gives the impression that the gamer is actually taking part in the imaginary scene. Computers and their related fields such as gaming and social networking are, not surprisingly, among the most fertile generators of new words words which range from the technical to the merely descriptive to the innovatively humorous.
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