Twitter is the
big thing currently,
and while I like word games as much as the next writer, and the challenge of
saying something coherent in 140 characters might ordinarily intrigue me -- I
can’t get into this one.
What
it does is, it puts me in mind of the time when messages – urgent ones, anyway
– were sent via Western Union. Because Western Union charged you by the word,
you left out anything that wasn’t vital to understanding the message; you
adopted a “telegraphic” style.
Where
the comparison ends, however; is at the word “urgent.” I’d think that having mastered
the Twitter format you’d want to go on to something practical for continuing
communication. The idea of continuing to communicate by “tweet” doesn’t seem to
me to make sense.
The redeeming
feature,
since brevity is the soul of twit, is that the people who do it are forced to make
it short – probably against their real inclination in many cases. That spares
you a longer version of a short unimportant or boring message.
I
see now there is discussion about retweets (or “RTs,” to the initiated) and
whether sending one constitutes endorsement of it. This is still being sorted
out between various people and journalistic institutions with conflicting views.
If an outsider
may be allowed an
opinion -- the more reasonable of those
views would seem to be to forward the message with a disclaimer if it’s not an endorsement. This might apply in
situations where someone has managed to assemble 140 characters into something so
outrageous that you feel you have to tell other people about it, but you don’t
want anyone to think you sympathize with the idea expressed.
That
would be easy enough in a normal communication environment, but can you add an
exculpatory message within the confines of this system? Could you say “exculpatory”
if you wanted to? Why give up most of your vocabulary of more than one syllable
if you mean to communicate?
