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The tweet-filled void
May 04, 2007
James Governor has posted two love notes to Twitter over the last couple of days. In the latest, he argues that Twitter's 140-character limit promotes brevity. He says that the suggestion that you can't be "either deep or meaningful" in 140 characters or fewer is nonsense - it's "evidence of the verbosity of our culture."
I think he's right that there are far too many words in circulation today, and I also think he's right that meaning and even profundity can come in tweet-sized packages. But I think he's wrong to suggest that Twitter is the friend of brevity. For that to be true, we'd have to assume that the messages streaming through Twitter are briefer than they would have been otherwise - that they've been pared down to their essence, like telegraphs. I don't think that's what's happening. I don't think that most tweets are substitutes for longer messages. Rather, they're additional verbiage layered atop all the existing verbiage. Twitter adds to the great landfill of words; it doesn't subtract from it.
Twitter, in other words, is the real "evidence of the verbosity of our culture." But it's more than that. It speaks to what seems to be a growing fear of silence, of being alone with one's thoughts. It's as if there's some great emptiness that we have to keep throwing words into. To hold one's tongue is to risk - what, exactly?
Comments
While the search engine is king? Non-existence, probably.
"tale told by an idiot" and all that yadda yadda still applies.
Posted by: Al chang ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at May 4, 2007 06:02 PM
To hold one's tongue is to risk having to deal with . . . . . . . . . . . .what Nicholas? Alan.
Posted by: alan at May 4, 2007 06:34 PM
Also,
i tink dat u use 2 mny wrds
Posted by: Michael Chui at May 5, 2007 01:38 AM
It's not the number of words or characters that matters IMO. It's the ever-rising bullshit-per-word ratio of our culture that's worrying! Unless that's what you mean by verbosity... as in unnecessary verbosity.
Posted by: andrew at May 5, 2007 07:42 AM
yes, perfect for our teenagers who SMS each other, then follow by phone to make sure the messasge was delivered, then email to confirm both the text and voice message were delivered. I say it is a telco conspiracy to increase messaging traffic -)
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani at May 5, 2007 10:24 AM
Posted by: Tom Panelas at May 7, 2007 02:42 PM
"I think he's right that there are far too many words in circulation today"
Really? Very Newspeak of you.
Posted by: Jim Stogdill at May 11, 2007 09:01 AM
That's not what I was trying to say by "too many words." As our output of words has exploded, our vocabulary seems to have narrowed. Maybe the two phenomena are connected, and are both Orwellian.
Posted by: Nick Carr at May 11, 2007 10:02 AM
Ah, understood; and agreed.
Posted by: Jim Stogdill at May 12, 2007 12:32 PM
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