How Haiku May Contribute to Rapid Rise of Twitter in Japan
According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Twitter use in Japan has caused "some of the biggest traffic spikes in the microblogging service's five-year history." A new study links this rise with the country's traditional haiku poetry.
From the article:
"Twitter could be something like haiku was 400 or 500 years ago when it first emerged," according to Stanford University's Richard Dasher, an expert in Japanese linguistics.
Dasher was one of several experts who participated in a study that analyzed millions of tweets from Japan in the weeks before, during and after the disastrous March 11 Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami and nuclear crisis.
And later, on evolving usership in the wake of the tragedies:
At one point right after the quake, there were 11,000 tweets per minute. And within a week, Twitter membership in Japan rose by one-third, the report said.
"Usership evolved from a highly technical audience to a nontechnical, diverse audience, including those previously unfamiliar with Twitter," the report said. "Twitter shifted from a one-dimensional tool to a multi-dimensional platform (news network, donation solicitation, 'I'm OK' broadcast, emotional support). Twitter is blurring the lines between the public and the private, raising new generations of Japanese who are more comfortable sharing their emotions publicly and openly."
The Twitter stream formed a virtual support group even for people in different regions of the country, said Tom Bassett, Bassett & Partners' chief executive officer.
"In Japan, it was almost like this was therapy, a healing kind of tool," Bassett said.
The content of those tweets was also revealing. The number of tweets containing emotionally charged words such as fear, loneliness, sympathy, shock, joy, surprise, sadness and hate increased nearly 30 percent as the disaster unfolded. At the same time, the number of tweets with the word "hope" increased nearly 60 percent.
That kind of public outpouring of emotion is unusual for the Japanese, said Dasher, director of Stanford's U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center, which researches emerging trends in technology and business in Asia. Dasher has also taught classical Japanese.
And then the article returns to the role of haiku in Twitter use, and vice-versa:
The researchers noted similarities between the set architecture of haiku - 17 syllables total formed by three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables - and Twitter, which allows no more than 140 characters, including hashtags and usernames. Both are interactive expressions created by one author and read by many followers or listeners.
And retweets of Twitter messages can be like haiku strung together "to form linked poems as part of running haiku contests," the report said.
Dasher compared Twitter's adoption in Japan to a pre-haiku period in the 15th to 16th centuries when poetry in the country "had lost its lightness."
What evolved were poems using the 5-7-5 formula, but with someone else adding two more lines of seven syllables each. "One person would start and another would sort of finish," Dasher said. That process, like retweeting, would repeat "and sometimes go hundreds of lines," he said.
"So that brought new life into the art and led to what I would say is a disruptive innovation in the form of Japanese poetry," Dasher said. "Things were never the same after that. Twitter to me does require a certain amount of artistry to keep things under 140 characters and I think that has brought new life into social circles with short bursts of communication. It's not unlike haiku."