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.
