Yesterday after recording our podcast I had a lengthy conversation with two of the podcasters about the various social media platforms. It was a fairly interesting conversation and could have easily made its own podcast. During the course of the conversation though when we were talking about twitter there was this thought that I’d had a long time ago that came back to me that has been itching at the back of my head for a while. Later that same day, I got a tweet from another friend that ironically reminded me of the very same thought and so I KNEW I had to write about it. You see, what I’m been thinking for a long time is this:
Twitter is corrupting us. Seriously. It may already be too late.
Twitter now dominates the world data sharing and information spreading online. Going ‘viral’ now is almost by DEFINITION being popular on twitter. If you want to get the word out about something, anything you best post it to twitter and hope it trends. You will reach the most people the fastest that way as people “ReTweet” your stuff ad nauseum.
And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Twitter is a very nice service. I think it is a very powerful tool for skimming long streams of data and picking out the gems that matter. As a matter of getting the ‘news’ there is no better utility out there, whether it be news about your friends or news about your family or news about the world in general. Twitter makes it easy. The more I use twitter the more I appreciate the power of its brilliant simplistic model and the amazing platform the twitter user community has turned it into. I say the user community because it has been Twitter users that have made Twitter into what it is far more than the developers who happened to create it.
There’s only one real problem and its one only the developers can solve. It’s That Dammed 140 character limit!
Don’t get me wrong, some limit is necessary. In order to skim things they have to be short. You can’t sort of have an unlimited stream and then have people write novels in an attempt to plug links to other novels. That’d be ridiculous. But 140 character is SOO small, ESPECIALLY when URLs, hashtags, and @mention usernames, as well as any punctuation or emoticons all have to count against the limit It’s super constraining. We’re sort of trapped. Trapped in a prison of 140 characters.
And the longer twitter remains a dominant force in our society the more of a pernicious impact that 140 character limit has on our culture. It’s like if you were living in a police state. Culture still develops but it is constrained by the artificial boundaries placed by the cops and guards that limit where you can go and how you can act. The 140 character limit is our barbed wire fences. We can’t escape!
Here are just some of the obvious effects:
- It almost guarantees that shorthand shortcuts like Text Speech that seemed on the decline prior to twitter become permanent additions to our linguistic style. be become b. see becomes c. about becomes abt, etc. etc. etc.
- Writers who want to write something that catches on will have a super strong incentive to write their cleverest lines in 140 characters. Want your quote to become famous? Better make it 140 characters or less! That way someone can tweet it and other people can retweet it! AT the very least make the first 120 characters or so of your message the most catchy and eye popping as you can make it so that users will be willing to click the link to the rest. Similarly for jokes. No more long strings of words leading up to a big punch line at the end. The beginning has to STAND OUT.
- Similarly relics of the past, linguistic phrases that are 140 characters or less gain popularity. This is particularly sad because some of the cleverest most brilliant lines of writers in the past get overshadowed by trite 140 character nonsense written by less skilled wordsmiths. It’s a crying shame.
- Titles of articles and stories and captions for images and the like similarly must be bound by the 140 character limit. Actually they must be significantly LESS than 140 characters because a title necessitates a link and the link takes up space. Anything that wants to lead people to click on a link must be smaller than 140 characters.
- Chains of ideas become hard to express. You can’t easily quote a conversation or carry on a coherent or substantive back and forth. The twitter stream breaks up even chains of distinct 140 character tweets.
- Complex ideas are simply off limits and distorting what someone says is easy and fun. Tweets are sort of wholly divorced from context so if you want to smear someone the easiest thing to do is to take their 140 character soundbite tweet and broadcast it to the world with snide commentary.
- Users have a really strong incentive to try and come up with short usernames. In fact it seems that if you don’t want to be quoted frequently or retweeted or @replied you would want to make your username long and if you did you’d try to make it as short as humanly possible. That means awesomely creative but lengthy usernames become both less common and less “seen” by the community.
- The twitter Retweet Button becomes transcendant not because it offers any kind of better functionality (that’s arguable) than the natural Retweet users came up with themselves but because it doesn’t have the limitation of counting the username of the retweeted and the RT symbol against the 140 character limit.
- Talking to small groups becomes virtually impossible since the more people you @Mention the shorter and shorter your tweets become. It’s basically impossible to easily have a small group conversation.
- The small limit together with the inability to save or preserve tweets and the prevalence of the newest tweets encourages a kind of fire-and-forget culture where you throw out things in rapid fire in the hopes that something catches fire and gets retweeted. It makes no sense to spend 3 hours composing a perfect tweet when you are just as likely to get a catch by tweeting 50 less well thought out tweets that are mildly clever in those 3 hours.
I’m sure there’s more but my point should be clear. Don’t get me wrong though. Constrains often are the impetus for some of the most brilliant forms of creativity known to man. And indeed I think within twitter the community has risen to the challenges presented by the 140 character limit and done truly awesome things with it. But at the same time these effects are still with us and clear and becoming stronger. I think over time the existence of twitter if it remains the dominant river of news will change us as a society and as a people in ways I’m not sure we’ve thought through so clearly. It might be that we don’t WANT to become a society that thinks 140 characters is the default perfect length of expression. Maybe we don’t wnat to feel like we have to justify going beyond that 140 character boundary and prove that we are worthy for a closer look? Maybe it should be longer? A little longer or a lot lnger. Or maybe we DO want it. Maybe 140 characters is too much. Maybe it should be smaller? And maybe it should be different lengths for different languages? For example in English the average word is 5 character but in Korean it’s only 3 and in German it’s 6. Maybe German should have a longer limit than English and English longer than Korean?
I just don’t think we’ve thought it through at all. I think 140 characters was just fallen into for stupid reasons having to do will cell phones and since twitter had no real competition it stuck.
And does it have to be a number decreed from above? Isn’t there a way to make *users* set the limit somehow? So that it can grow organically rather than be the length that some bonehead programmers thought up one afternoon whilst sipping tea in the break room?
Now if I’m the bonehead tea-sipping programmer that is in charge of said decree I’d have some ideas that I think would be at least a little better. For English I’d make the limit 200 characters. The average sentence length in English is I think around 88.23 if you include punctuation and space and I think you need at least two times that to give enough flexibility for creativity. I like round easy numbers to work with so I round up to 200. Second I’d let people use damned hyper links that don’t count against the limit. You could use some kind of simple tag notation either <a href=> or some other easier to use notation. Links hard coded in would still auto transform into links, it’s just that that would be another option to save character space. You could also do a “link behind” that is turn the entire tweet into something that if you click on it takes you some place else. And for audio and video a link behind would play the audio or the video or open up the picture in a preview panel of some kind. Next most important is that @Mention would stop counting against your limit period. Why should you be heavily penalized for talking directly to more people? I’d put a hard limit on the number of @Mentions you could include to limit spam. The limit would probably be around 8 because I like powers of 2 or 10 cuz I like our base 10 social hegemony. Next I’d also let you create group tags that act as @Mentions to groups of people. You’d only be able to tweet to one group tag at a time however but this would enable a group of people to hold a conversation. Finally I’d have an expandable tweet option that allows you to build a tweet that is larger than 200 characters and can easily be expanded by clicking the ‘more’ button in 200 character byte segments. Oh yeah and I’d also fix the dammed @Reply tracking so I can A. see when a @Mention is a reply and not a mention and B. so if I click on a user who has been a chain of @Replies I can clearly and easily see the entire conversation *in order* instead of hunting around for the replies.
I’m sure you can think of other good ideas for how to dig our way out of this 140 character prison. My main point is that the prison exists and it sucks. I say it’s time for a REVOLUTION! Free The Tweeters!!! Tear down those 140 Character Walls!! We must escape before it’s too late and we become boring uninteresting slaves to the new 140 character language regime.
