John Durham Peters “The Marvelous Clouds”

“Writing’s incendiary quality is one reason why so-called social media will never be like face-to-face speech” (Peters 278). 

One passage from John Durham Peter’s The Marvelous Clouds that stood out to me is when he writes, “Writing’s incendiary quality is one reason why so-called social media will never be like face-to-face speech” (Peters 278). Peters explains that writing has the ability to preserve words and meanings in a way that spoken conversation does not. Because written communication can remain visible and be shared with others long after it was created, it can have consequences that the original writer may not have expected.

I think Peters means that there is a major difference between communicating with someone in person and communicating through a written medium such as social media. When we speak to someone face-to-face, the conversation happens in a specific moment. We can immediately see the other person’s reaction, hear their tone of voice, and clarify what we mean if they misunderstand us. Written communication does not have those same characteristics.

A social media post can be saved, screenshot, reposted, or taken out of its original context. This gives written communication a kind of permanence and power that a spoken conversation may not have. I agree with Peters’ point, especially when thinking about social media today. Social media makes writing much more powerful because a person can communicate with up to millions of people at once. Something that someone writes in a few seconds can potentially remain online for years. This is very different from saying something casually to a friend. Even if a person deletes a post, someone else may have already taken a screenshot or shared it.

At the same time, I think social media shows that writing is not necessarily less personal than face-to-face communication. People often use social media to express emotions and opinions that they might have difficulty expressing in person. Writing gives people time to think about what they want to say before communicating it, which can be very helpful. 

Overall, I agree with Peters that social media cannot fully replicate face-to-face communication. Social media allows us to communicate quickly and across large distances, but it also gives written communication a lasting and public quality.