What I really think about the writing space that twitter affords is that innovators are desperate to get anyone involved in the social media craze. Few people use Twitter simply because it limits the user to 140 characters. In fact, many people who do not enjoy Twitter (such as myself) think the character restriction is a pain. Writing should allow for the author to freely express their thoughts, without a length restriction. New forms of social media are constantly created, and Twitter is nothing more than a popular form of social media. A positive writing space should allow for the author to freely express their thoughts and feelings, or whatever may be on their mind. Twitter demonstrates that power of technology, by controlling users. Many students have had a teacher who preaches "no filler words, no fluff," but 140 characters is less than two full sentences. The small space forces many users to form acronyms to help maximize the space. It reminds me of the beginning of texting, when a majority of users shortened every word to make the most of their texting plans. Young users began talking in a similar manner, making the educated American youth sound uninformed.
Every form of social media has its limitations, but the sole purpose of Twitter is to 'tweet.' With other sites, restricting the writing space would be less of an issue because users also upload photo's and videos, or directly communicate with other users. Twitter allows for pictures to be tweeted or tweets to be retweeted, but few people would list Twitter as the best form of all around social media communication. Twitter should reconsider the limited writing space it provides to see if the number of active users increases.
Megan thank you for your intelligent post. I agree with you that the 140 character limit is a pain but thats what makes twitter twitter. It is a microblogging site so its meant for microblogging messages. They should up the count to maybe 200 characters but still have a restriction so people arent tweeting paragraphs.
ReplyDelete