I’m completely bought into the twitter phenomena, I’ve written about it here before a few times. And given that the service has grown to over 6M accounts in just 3 short years, there are a lot of people who seem to agree with me.
But today I read the 1st thing that gave me pause. It was a post from the very smart blog Naked Capitalism. The gist of which was that anything worth writing, should probably take more than 140 characters to do so.
“You can't say anything complicated or nuanced in 140 characters. I am sure readers will provide some cute counterexamples, but try explaining Plato's cave in those confines. Can't be done. You might allude to it, but you could not present it to someone who didn't know about it already. And Twitter encourages people to accept a medium that severely constrains communication, and calls a defect a virtue.”
Now I don’t know if I buy everything the author says here, but I do think that the points she raises merit discussion, and not just in regards to twitter, but to all online communication. One of the greatest virtues of online is brevity and an 2nd is timeliness. Facebook status posts, instant messaging, blog comments. We have come to accept and rely on all of these things as being inherently good, and part of their value proposition is how quickly we can banter back and forth, how they so closely resemble a conversation. But is that good? As other forms of longer form communication seem to wither against the competition provided by the web, are we losing the value that comes with patience and reflection. When the news only came once a day, or a week, did we read closer and expect more? When letters took weeks to get to their recipient, did we chose our words more carefully? I don’t know if these things are the case, or necessarily a bad thing, but I think they are good questions.
While I agree with your overal point, I disagree that we read it closer when it is less frequent. For example, you couple put Shakespeare in front of me and it might take me 10 hours to read, and that's an uninterrupted 10 hours, but the outcome is the same for me....not interested. I think it all stems from what you are interested in. If you put a good article about something that peaks my interest then I will give it the full attention. The difference is I might have to sift through 10 articles of complete shit to find that one that actually has merit worth reflecting on. For example an article I read about Kevin Rose in Inc. Magazine over 3 months ago is still on my mind and runs through my head daily.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I glad that you think of Kevin Rose daily. He's dreamy. And I understand what you are saying. My point isn't that just because it's long, or infrequent it's good. My point is that any given piece of writing might be more valuable for having been fermented for a while. You value the Rose article beacuse it interests you and you gained something from it. Would you have gained as much if INC just blasted out a twitter about rose? What if they twittered each pieced of the article, one after the other, in 140 character increments? What if INC just ran a blog post, 1/2 the length. What if the INC editor took a leave of absence and wrote a book on Rose, Digg and Web 2.0?
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying length is some magic bullet that makes everything better, my point is only that as we move to more and more concise formats on communication, are we losing something in the process?
I actually love his orange tennis shoes in the article, that's my sole interest no pun intended. I get what you are saying. Is it that that due to these concise communication techniques that have been taking off IE twitter, SMS TXT (60 char) we have lost the one skill we have over the apes? Stringing sentences beautifully together in the form of literature/poems/songs? I think we have, and I am thankful for that because my writing is piss poor! Completely off topic but in the same universe why haven't the duration of a "hit" song decreased with our writing? We still have 5-6minute songs that are popular. Don't you think by now we would see a take off of minute long songs? So we could get our fill of 60 songs every hour. Immediate gratification who wants to wait for a minute long intro or 15 minute long guitar intro (Iron Butterfly - In a Gadda Da Vida) when you can have the sweet vocals right away.
ReplyDeleteWith songs, isn't the model for pop songs usually 1 min. chorus, 1 min verse, 1 min chorus, 1 min verse. And very heavy emphasis on the chorus at that? So in a sense we are in a 1 min a world song, they are just strung together in a artistic and value-add manner?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Klear, I think it's important to realize the type of information you desire differs from source to source. I personally use twitter for anecdotes (+ or - an associated article) to share something that I have found interesting in the various websites I visit daily and meaningless banter between friends. On the other hand I look to magazines/newspapers for articles about how f'd up Ardie Lang's life is and the mystery behind Buddy Holly's death (both great articles in the latest Rolling Stone). I digress, I do enjoy the streaming news feature twitter provides, particularly the @NewsHour, because as a student who spends 80% of my downtime in a text book I don't have the time to sit and shuffle through advertisements and classifieds in a daily newspaper. So my point being that as our society has become more obsessed with immediate gratification and seamless access to everything on the go, I believe things like twitter have given people a chance to be more informed while getting more done in a day. On the topic of our communication skills going into the toilet, pretty sure that was Televisions fault.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right Foster, and you make some really good points. Maybe they key, like you illustrate is balance and using the right tool for the right reasons.
ReplyDeleteI'll tell you one thing, grammar is lost in quick-striking, internet communication. Glancing over the comments thus far, I think all but one has some sort of grammatical/typographical error, presumably stemming from haste. What got Shakespeare off (I originally had typed of here, but caught the error while proofreading) the hook though was that he just made up words, so he could spell them however he wanted. Sometimes he even spelled words, or his last name, differently from page to page. I still believe as long as there exists a delete function on your keyboard (or Blackberry) then one can utilize the ability to modify and rework their thoughts. Believe me, I've sat and thought for 5 minutes on how I wanted to word a Twitter update.
ReplyDelete