This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly.
The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.
This paragraph captures the essence of it perfectly.
The medium basically encourages superficial thinking, or lack of thinking altogether. It's appropriate for rumors and informal shout-outs and chats, but not much more than that.
Social media is driving traditional channels to be worse so that those channels can be more relevant on social media.
Fundamentally there's just TOO much information for anyone person to process. Social media democratized the information spread where as before the news bore the brunt of that work.
Now everyone has more access to information but at the cost of spending all your time scrolling through it. There's too much to scroll... so we've relegated ourselves to soundbyte headlines.
The worst thing about this is we are programmed for group-think but rational behavior requires us to be more self-aware. There's a number of pop-sci books around this one I've personally read is https://www.amazon.com/Wiser-Getting-Beyond-Groupthink-Smart... in which an important point is made that we need to seek novel information instead of shared information to make better decisions.
Social Media as good as it is for discovering new information it has very much become a signal to noise problem.
I'm surprised. I managed to make that point in 120 characters. I've had several accounts, over the years, trying to get into it. I can't stand that you can't really put anything substantive in 140 characters, and I hate split tweets, to provide context, just like this, even more.
It's not about the character limit. It's more about how humans want attention and there's an infrastructure to support that desire.
Brevity is indeed beautiful, but usually only after your quip has been long considered and pared down from a much longer form of expression. The brilliant aphorists of the world didn't just crap out their sentences of brilliance--they toiled on them (Nietzsche has quite a few good maxims on this subject). Services like twitter make it easy to react and to throw your thoughts out there without engaging in any reflection first. Then it's easy to respond immediately with some follow up nonsense once someone disagrees with you.
It shows you how the medium really does impact the message to a huge extent. Imagine how different it must have been composing letters in, say, the 1700's as opposed to writing tweets. By the nature of the medium itself you were almost inevitably likely to ruminate on your subject and think about it more deeply in the time between your letter's arrival to its destination and the subsequent appearance of a response. Nowadays you have feedback in seconds, and most of the time it reflects the minuscule amount of time and consideration behind it.
That's not to say twitter is all bad--the format has its benefits too--it just certainly has affected the way and the amount of time people devote to thinking and questioning themselves. In general I think having the ability to consider things slowly and to take one's time may only grow all the more important in the future.
Remember what Marshall McLuhan said so long ago:
"The medium is the message" (emphasis added)