As someone captivated by semiotics, the contemplation of what is happening to the @ symbol as a result of Twitter is fascinating to me.

For centuries a mark that designated the relationship between quantity and price — 24 pomegranates @ $.12ea — the symbol was appropriated (reportedly from monks in the Middle Ages seeking greater pen-stroke efficiency for “at”) by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 for the purpose of sending individual messages from one computer to another.  Like many of the Internet founders, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor, and selected the symbol from a keyboard display. For anyone using Internet standards thereafter, it was simply a matter of designating name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer.

Employed in this fashion, individual users are associated with a particular location. Even if that location is essentially virtual, there is nevertheless a tether to a particular domain — communication is exchanged between people residing “@” a specific virtual place. Indeed written messages are sent, as they have been for thousands of years, to an address where a person is presumed to be. Now, however, we are starting to see what may someday amount to a paradigm shift.

The use of the @ symbol in front of a name instead of an address — @rpgranger, my own Twitter designation — suddenly removes the address altogether. It doesn’t matter where I am. I no longer have any direct association with a location, virtual or otherwise. I am the destination. Even if the technical aspects of this shift are not as profound (it only requires being inside a closed system, or networked with other closed systems), the symbolic and metaphorical change is unmistakable. It represents an evolution into a world where not only physical but even virtual location is irrelevant, and where domain (and, potentially, brand) association can be marginalized or even eliminated altogether.

The further empowering of the individual in digital media presents both exciting opportunities and unusual new challenges for marketers. On the one hand, sales efforts — especially on the b2b side — can become more direct and personal, leveraging values that have long been identified as critical to complex transactions. On the other hand, the ubiquity of the brand can be easily lost without the corporate associations and controls that have been in place since the advent of mass media.

More than at any other time in history, @ is evolving to mean that which is directed toward an individual rather than toward an address. What may be most intriguing about this progression from a metaphorical standpoint — and a possible balm to brand managers — is not what this new permutation contains but what it’s missing. Where once the there used to be a name in front of the @ symbol, there is now a new and alluring emphasis on the message that goes in blank space in front of it. And we all know what advertisers do with blank spaces.