Are you a twitter-brain?

excerpted from, 'Warning! This article contains more insight than all of Stephen Fry's Tweets put together.

Anyway, we are talking about ‘tweets’ for goodness sakes. How ‘interesting’ can a monosyllabic sound be? When I first came across 'Twitter' and 'Tweets', I found it all a bit condescending. I can understand it being used by news-sites when it comes to keeping us abreast with the latest, but when it comes to personal updates, I'd think it most useful for family and friends. And even then, if it is not good enough to communicate via Messenger real-time, i have to wonder after its value as a relatively permanent 'tweet' on 'twitter'.


As I was saying, in a previous observation, about the limitations imposed by the lyrical form of songs on the communication of anything more than a ‘signpost’, as opposed to providing a clearly articulated navigational chart, this would apply more so to ‘tweets’. So, I would say that the potentially exciting value of Fry’s ‘tweets’ is compromised not by a boring character, but by the limitations imposed by a form of communication that aptly takes its description from a monosyllabic ‘tweet’.

It seems that people are becoming increasingly thought-challenged enough to appreciate ideas and thoughts only when they are abbreviated to the point they require little or no thought, or which simply validates that which they value.

If modes of communication begin to increasingly take on a form that promotes increasing brevity, what happens after a while is that the need for and even propensity to think in greater depth and detail about anything is compromised. That is how, for instance, an Orwellian ‘newspeak’ is facilitated via the ‘newthought’ that is promoted by these modes of communication – though ‘modes of thoughtlessness’ would be more apt. Put together the self-absorption of ‘blogs’ together with thought-reduction ‘tweets’, and we’re set for a civilisation inundated by self-centred bird-brains.

The Guardian chose to end off a related article in support of twitter with,

"The idea that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. If people are more informed then they become more engaged and if they are more engaged then they can become more empathetic."

But not if it is transacted on a grossly thought-abbreviated plane mate.


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