I've been hearing about Twitter for a while now and decided to look into it. Now, I'm looking away. Is this the future of writing? A professor of mine in Literature seems to think so, which sent me hyperventilating. It was tough enough trying to compress a well-crafted story into 750 words or less, and now I'm looking at 140 characters as a potential benchmark? It drove me insane for a good, well, 140 characters.
Giving twitter another look, it's actually handy if you're into the kind who needs to be in touch all the time. It's actually the mass broadcast version of SMS messaging, which isn't new. My question really is: do we really want to be that public? It seems like tweeting removes the need to filter anything. Instead, we place anything into the internet, what we're eating, how our pants feel, why we're eating at Mc Donald's, etc. Do we really have that much content to write? Do we have that much content in us worth reading? The pressure to update with Twitter seems to lead people to place whatever's in their head at the moment. Also, because Twitter can't give you context in any clear way, everything's abbreviated. Again, that saves time, at the expense of quality or substance.
Twitter as an application is cool, it's a handy way of keeping in touch, sure. But is it going to be the future of writing? Only if we turn into 3 year olds, with that kind of attention span. Or we turn into people who are just so bored and desperate for connection that we read mundanities from anyone, just so there is that feeling of connection. It's fun, I guess, if you have a few spare seconds anywhere, to tell everyone what's happening with your life in the past 5 seconds. But you can't reflect in 140 characters, nor can you express yourself well.
I can't agree that Twitter-sized packets will become the future of writing. Maybe it'll stay, and soon I'll be twittering away in some blog somewhere. But I won't really be writing, I'll be twitting.
I'm still for writing as a deliberate, planned, carefully crafted process. If you notice, this isn't 140 characters long. That is, if you're still here...
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