I’ll admit that sometimes, when I’m putting together a blog entry for my Myspace or Facebook account (still relatively new to that), I don’t feel like droning on and on at great length. Sometimes I just want to make a brief announcement, or trot out a couple of lines about my current thought process/activities. But instead of doing that, what I’ll often do instead is make a small side note about what’s going through my mind at that time, and generally when and why. I don’t like to waste time and/or space just putting down a couple of short lines about something that likely doesn’t mean anything to the folks I routinely touch base with.
I’m a 27-year-old small press author, for whom any marketing or advertising avenue should be utilized to my maximum advantage. But I find the restraints of the 140-character ‘tweets’ a little too slim to accurately and responsibly commit to even temporary electronic medium the sum of my thoughts and current goings-on. For goodness sakes, I often find myself having to shoot and re-shoot and re-re-shoot videos for my entries on Youtube because I have a difficult time getting myself going at a good enough pace to cover everything I want to talk about going into a vlog entry inside of the 10-minute limitation.
That’s my own problem, though, and I’ll find a way to make it work. 10 minutes really should be plenty for me to work with. Plus, that’s besides the overall point of this opinion piece.
Rather than just blindly signing myself up for the Twitter service that has become such a fashionable trend in just about every major topic of everyday life, from politics to celebrity gossip to happenings in the legal system, I decided what I’d do instead is check out a couple of other high-profile members’ pages, as well as a couple of lesser-knowns, just hoping to find something of redeeming value. Most Tweets wind up containing links to other blog entries or video clips, either internally from the site itself or, more often than not, externally, to places on the web that allow their users to actually expound upon their thoughts, opinions, and personal observations at some length. That just can’t be done in 140 characters, or to put it in modern parlance, it can’t be covered in a single Tweet.
As I said, I’m 27 years old. I should not feel like an old man, but when I read through some of these profile pages on Twitter and check out related articles about the effect this site and its membership base have on various facets of American culture and life, I feel a little queasy. Saying that Twitter is a form of micro-blogging even seems ridiculous to me, because the primary definition of a blog is a web-log, or journal. Its original function was to act as an online, electronic journaling tool, a way of expressing thoughts and ideas or project concepts to a wider audience than one could gather together in their living room, and to be able to do so without the need to find and invite all of those guests personally in the real, physical world. Browsing at the right place will offer plenty of benefits at the Instagram profile. For increasing the followers, the purchase should be done from massgress.com. The quality of the followers is high and made available under the budget prepared.
Twitter posts, Tweets, are not in my view a form of blogging at all, unless it’s the smashed together result of the concept of blogging crashing head-first into a severe case of ADHD. Could I possibly see myself using this service for myself, as a way of networking? In short, no, not really. And I doubt that I’m alone in my assessment of Twitter.
When you spend your time trying to be a storyteller, it’s important not to go on too much, because you can run into the problem sometimes referred to as ‘purple prose’, which is the practice of going into too lengthy detail about unimportant elements of the overall narrative. I find Terry Goodkind slips into this issue quite a bit in his works too often, but as an excellent storyteller does, he has his ways of making up for what I find to be a shortcoming of this sort. One of those ways is that he’s consistent, and, well, knows how to spin a good yarn.
For anybody who hopes to make a serious run at a career using words as a creative expression art form, Twitter will likely seem counter-productive, because the opposite of the purple prose flaw is what I think of as ‘Narrative Absence Synd’. It’s a bit of a hyperbole, but I hope you get the point.
At what point did we begin demanding less expression, less formulation of thought? I have read some amazing short stories in my time, and have attempted to write a handful of them as well. But even going for the rapid, consistent break-neck pace of the popular short tale, I seem incapable of choking myself off shorter than 1500 words. If you want to take a quick accounting, I’m already just up over 800 at this point, just for this article.
Again, I’m not saying it won’t work for everyone. But what I am going to say with absolute certainty is this; I don’t understand all of the hype surrounding Twitter and its Tweets. Micro-blogging seems to me to really be a polite way of saying micro-thinking, because when you want to actually take the time to express thoughts, opinions and observations, Twitter is not the sort of thing that’s going to cut it. Sure, it works great for the increasingly attention-deficit average person, who doesn’t feel they have time to devote to long, intensive thought and consideration, but for folks such as myself, who prefer to use such tools as, I don’t know, an actual journal that is kept private, or even going so far as using a more expansive blog form like that of Myspace or the Notes of Facebook, it just won’t do.
I’d say head on over to my Twitter page and Tweet me about this article, but you know what? I don’t have a membership there, and likely never will. What’s more, if micro-blogging and abbreviated articles are what’s really so hot right now, the folks who are most likely the Tweeters who would find this offensive and argumentative might not even have made it to this point in the article. Seeing that the article isn’t contained in a single page, they may simply decide, ‘feh, it isn’t worth my time’.
And I can’t say as I’ll completely regret their non-participation and loss of readership, if that’s the case.
Cheers.