Picking up where the last post left off, this morning SLP and I were discussing the frustrations some people have with Twitter, and their frequent inclination to dismiss it wholesale as a result. One of the biggest complaints always seems to be that you “can’t say anything” in 140 characters. That the brevity of a tweet naturally leads to flippant, ill-considered, 2 short & hvly abbrvtd, or just plain pointless missives fired into the vast, chaotic fray of similar voices, loudly saying nothing.
As I usually do at this point (although maybe she beat me to it this time), I brought up haiku. Most haiku poems could easily fit within the 140-character confines of a tweet, but few people dismiss the haiku form as too brief to convey meaning. In fact, I was inspired to compose a haiku on the topic of Twitter itself, which I subsequently tweeted, of course:
Twitter, like haiku,
Is brief, but you can still say
Something meaningful.
Of course Twitter, like all forms of communication, has limitations. And of course some of what ends up on Twitter is pointless babble. Just because someone gives you the tools doesn’t mean you know how to use them. But to dismiss the entire platform simply because it has constraints or because you don’t like the way certain other people are using it is as silly as dismissing haiku because you can’t write a dissertation in 17 syllables.
But sometimes that’s all you need. Is this 262-word blog post really more effective at communicating the merits of Twitter than my (as SLP called it) twaiku?
Comments
2 responses to “140 characters”
Nice post. Dismissing twitter wholesale by suggesting that it isn’t meaningful, prevents us from having great discussions (maybe even debates) about what we mean by meaningful. Who gets to determine what is meaningful (both our content and the styles/methods we use to communicate it)? At what and whose expense is that determination made?
Your reference to “pointless babble” reminds me of Dannah Boyd’s critical response to the Pear analytics survey a few years back that concluded that 40% of all tweets were “pointless babble”: Twitter: “pointless babble” or peripheral awareness + social grooming? (I was thinking of providing a passage or two from her brief post, but I think the whole argument is interesting, so I will just encourage you to check out the link.)
As someone with a wordiness problem, I think you’re onto something with this post, Scott.
I’m frustrated by my inability to get to my point in less than 1000 words and think my best thoughts are often left in other people’s comments, where I don’t feel like I can drone on forever.