Long Story Short

Even after Twitter doubled its character limit from 140 to 280 characters long there are still quite a lot of thoughts and ideas in my head that I can't express with such brevity, that's part of the reason why I have this and my other blogs to vent.

Even in person though I find it frustrating when people ask you to get to the point, like their attention spans have become so short they can't focus for longer than 30 seconds.  There are a lot of things I could say which taken out of context would come across completely wrong.  The idea that every sentence you utter should be able to be isolated and still present a positive message is somewhat laughable to me.  Context is important and without it you get a message that is framed not by the person that said it in the first place but by whoever delivers it or if no framing at all is given, then it is framed by the person receiving it.  The problem with both of these is that it leaves the message open to manipulation. 

Let's take for example the question, what soft drink do you enjoy?  I could answer:  I like coke.  That's a short statement, three little words, tells you I like Coca Cola.  You get the question, you get the answer, and with the context it makes sense and the message is clear.  However, those three words "I like coke" can be interpreted many different ways.  Without the question that prefaced it and without the context of it being about soft drinks, the meaning can be manipulated.  You could claim it to mean cocaine, or even coal - although why anyone would want to twist a narrative to give that impression is beyond me, the point is it is a very simple example of how one statement out of context can be manipulated to mean something very different.

Twitter and many platforms like it encourage us to be brief, it does this to keep people moving, to keep you scrolling through your timeline not dwelling on things too much so it can present more ads, more sponsored tweets, and monetize your activity.  This too is part of the reason why platforms like Facebook are not content with ads being along the side of games but wants them placed inside the games themselves, because the more you focus on one thing the less you focus on the other and it still needs to be able to grab your attention.  There's a fine line between getting you onto their site and getting you to keep moving around their site.  This is also why social media campaigns and strategies obsess over engagement metrics to measure how much you interact with content because they feel that is a reliable way to see if you are paying attention.

I don't like being asked to dumb myself down and reduce complex issues to simple statements, the world is rarely black and white there are very few things you can make absolute statements about.  When I was a kid there was a game we would play that was in many ways the antithesis of this mentality called the Yes/No game.  The game was simple, one person would ask the other person questions that can be answered with simple yes or no answers, but the person answering wasn't allowed to say Yes or No, they had to avoid those two words, so they had to think of ways to answer that were more than one word answers.

I think with social media platforms like Twitter, there is a thought experiment to be had on contemplating what a minimum character limit would be.  Twitter at present will let you make a tweet that is only 1 character long if you want, it will accept that tweet.  The question to contemplate though is how short is too short, and how long is too long?  There was a time 140 characters was based on underlying technical limitations but that has not been an issue for many years now and there had been calls for a long time for Twitter to up the character limit.  They eventually give in and increased it, but the size was arbitrary, there is no technical reason for the limit being 280 characters, that was just a choice the developers made.