33 characters

Joey Carlson
MSMU Class of 2025

(9/2022) As of 2018, the average tweet was 33 characters long. The primary problem with the 30-character message is that it is very difficult to say anything worth saying in 30 characters. For reference, the first sentence of this article is 53 characters in total.

Communication can be long or short, so long as one’s audience understands what they are meant to. The question becomes, "Who is the audience for in most tweets"? It is different every time, but very seldom is a tweet intended to convince someone with whom one disagrees. Short messages are best suited for practical use, but on a platform that is meant to connect us to everyone else in authentic discourse, there is nothing more hindering than short messages.

If the goal of Twitter is communication, then Twitter is pretty lousy at its job. There is a pattern to every convincing argument, each requiring more than 33 characters, where premises lead to conclusions. Each sentence serves a purpose, not only relaying information but stringing it all together so that one conclusion leads logically to the next. This is how one communicates to a world that cannot read his or her mind. We’ve grown accustomed to reading each other's minds, because in order for one to send a tweet with 33 characters and relay any kind of information at all, we rely on social conventions to fill in the gaps for the audience. Slogans, glittering generalizations, signaling, innuendo; these are how we understand each other. There is no room for nuance. Rather, one person says something that signals to one group of people that he or she agrees with them, and the other group understands that they are unwelcome. Those caught in the middle are battered with judgments from whichever side is louder, and there is not a single means of garnering a deeper understanding for anyone else. Every now and then someone can say something meaningful within a character limit, but without context, and with the previously mentioned pattern of thinking, it is very hard to get converts. After all, it is pretty likely that the person reading your message only wants to convert you too. When we are regularly filling in the gaps of how we ought to think of someone based on their 33 characters, it becomes difficult to stop judging.

It is pretty easy to tell that Twitter sows division and is not very good at its job of "fostering open discourse." The habit of perpetually trying to most effectively signal to one’s followers that he is virtuous, rather than simply trying to reveal the truth, makes us gradually forget how to think. The written page is a mirror for your mind. As when you alter your picture in a mirror you alter your true appearance, how we write will change how we think. In this way, writing is not simply intended for an audience, but rather for self-maintenance and growth.

Writing one’s thoughts down makes them a lot clearer, or can expose the holes in reasoning which are allowed to persist when they are simply rattling around in our heads. If you are ever left with a moral dilemma, a question of prudence, or a difficult experience you seek to cope with, write down your thought process. Immorality can only persist with the aid of our own selfish rationalizations, and if the keyboard warriors really wanted virtuous change, they would enact it in the only place they could be certain that they can affect—namely, themselves.

One of the most effective methods in discerning questions of prudence is imagining that one is speaking with someone else who happens to have the exact issue he has. Writing down one’s reasoning for both sides of the choice will help to keep one’s emotions in check, which would more easily mobilize against reason otherwise. When we undergo trauma, one of the first steps we take is to disassociate ourselves from it. While this is helpful and sometimes necessary in the moment, you end up with a part of yourself left in that memory and the rest of you moving on without him. Begin to slowly cease disassociating yourself from the traumatic memory. No one can live with two minds. Writing down the event, how it feels, and what you were thinking will work to reunify the part of your soul which was harmed.

These are some of the things which writing is actually useful for: clarifying your thoughts, and effectively communicating to others. You can say something well in an essay that you cannot say impromptu. Twitter often jumbles our thoughts and is a poor means of communicating. This, in one way or another, applies to most social media.

As with many parts of life, I am sure there is a way to use Twitter and not have these negative effects. We must, however, acknowledge that social media is designed to chemically suck you in and give you a hit of dopamine, the hormone responsible for making you feel like you’ve accomplished something, for every swipe. In many ways, therefore, it is more like alcohol than writing anything constructive. Just like how your liver can handle a drink an hour, you can handle social media in moderation. Very quickly, however, does this turn into abuse for a generation with an addictive personality. Every sip (or gulp) is slowly rewiring how you think so that you are on the lookout for anything indicative of something you should disapprove of. It eventually teaches you to think, and therefore speak, like you're saying something on a social media post. In fact, for those who try and remain functioning in the real world after routine social media abuse, we essentially end up dissociating ourselves from the experience because such is at enmity with constructive discourse. The only way to function on social media is to let truth and the real world form our posts, and to, for the most part, not let social media form our worldview.

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