Actually it’s not just social media dialogue or exchanges of communication. I’m looking for a term that describes the ever disparate discussions we have with each other, particularly friends and acquaintances.
I’m talking about the snippets of conversation that can take place by way of blog comments, social network messages and wall posts, instant messaging, forums, photo-sharing sites, and micro-blogging, such as Twitter.
Then there’s the same thing through voicemail, text messaging, and of course email (using multiple accounts naturally), to say nothing of the swag of other online and electronic options I’m bound to have omitted.
It’s occurred to me that fragments of numerous conversations have become scattered across many and various locations and mediums.
The Age of Conversation written by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan, which dissects the discussion of ideas, somehow springs to mind when thinking of these conversations.
We certainly live in an age of conversation, no matter how short or fragmented some of them may be, but has a phrase been coined to describe these divergent communications? Packets, fragments, bytes, snippets, grabs, excerpts, slices?
Whose up for creating a neologism?
I have noticed a trend (by myself and others) to repurpose existing words. Like the way we “tape” things on the PVR, I talk to people on the internet. I tend to say that “talk” is for relatively serious conversations, very often email, and “chat” or similar is for more informal IM or similar traffic. Speed doesn’t seem to make it a conversation, or not.