Twitter Sketch

Yes, I am a geek and I love Mythbusters and this video got me excited for the upcoming new season. What really got my attention in this video is Adam Savage discussing his interactions with fans on Twitter and how a few ideas for the show was spawned by Twitter. Adam talks about how he doesn't really frequent the official Mythbusters message boards mainly because of the overall negative atmosphere there. While he doesn't deny that disagreements pop up on Twitter, he mentions that the dialogue on Twitter tends to be more civil. While people might moan that Twitter is making people dumber for limiting thoughts to only 140 characters, this constraint can also foster a different kind of cognitive challenge that seems to have other social implications.

One of the beauties of literature is the poem. Not the sappy, clichéd permutations of "Roses are red . . .", but real literature (Think Frost, Milton, Coleridge). The challenge is to pack a meaningful idea in an incredibly compact form. Classically, literature has its own versions of limits--the haiku, sonnet and ode. In a way, these are no different from the 140 character limit on Twitter. The cognitive obstacle is to pack in what you want to communicate in this short space. Yes, text acronyms and abbreviations can give you more room to play with, but the challenge remains the same. In a bizarre way, Twitter is our contemporary version of poetry, if only for the cognitive work involved in both forms. (Perhaps you shouldn't think about that for too long--I know I don't want to!) Again, there is still a lot of garbage on Twitter. Just because you can pack in your thought in a short space doesn't mean that that thought had any real importance to communicate. Deciding what to communicate in the first place is the majority of the battle.

The unintended side-effect is how this limited space doesn't allow for people to turn their opinions into long, drawn out diatribes. If you really want to carry out an argument on Twitter, you have to choose carefully what you want to say to have most impact. There is simply no room to ramble. Perhaps this is what contributes to Adam's perspective that Twitter leads to more civil debates. With most things in life, it comes down to balance. Of course anyone can post anything on Twitter and engage what they want to write with any amount of animosity or with the kindest of spirits.

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It happened today, October 2nd . . .

1950-Peanuts first published
1959-Twilight Zone premiered on CBS

Happy Birthday to . . .

Richard III-1452
Mohandas Gandhi-1869
Groucho Marx-1890