280 Characters of Stupid

Twitter is making us stupid.

More to the point, we’re allowing twitter to make us stupid.

I joined Twitter in 2007, when it was still considered shiny and new, and my intentions were mostly to secure the account @sohmer in the event the platform took off. And took off it did.

140 characters, bits of information, updated in real time, right to your phone, your computer, your Google Glass (that was a thing). It was a great way to digest a lot of content, or to gauge the severity of your buddy’s last poop. It was fun, it was entertaining and I never thought it would last.

Yet somehow, 10 years on, Twitter has become a source of news for a great many of us. And that? That is no Bueno.

In a perfect world, a person would see a 140-character summary of a story, click on the link and take the time to read the entire tale, all the way through.

But this isn’t a perfect world.

In this world, a person looks at the misleading, clickbaity title, assumes they know everything there is to know, and retweets that tale to the next impatient internet dweller. And so on, and so forth.

The reality is that a story, any story, is never as simple as 140 or 280 characters would make it seem. There is context, nuances that need to be read in full to understand. The world is not black and white, it’s a massive shit-spray of gray.

And for fuck’s sake, we need to take the time to read and understand before we comment, before we spread false information.

But who am I talking to?

You stopped reading this 1,195 characters ago.

-Because I Can.

Quote of the Day

“At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.”
-Gore Vidal