IVP - Strangely Dim - The Meaning of a Tweet

The Meaning of a Tweet

Many thanks to Dave for his kind introduction. Many thanks to Dave, Lisa and Christa for giving me a little platform here at Strangely Dim. And many, many thanks to you, dear reader, for giving me a chance when you don't know me from Eve.

As the web editor at IVP, I spend a good deal of my time writing copy that packs a lot of meaning about books or authors in short spaces. But the shortest of these short-form communiqués has to be the tweet.

Recently one of our authors (don't even try to guess, I'm not going to give any hints who it was) said that he didn't believe anything that had any real meaning could be said on Twitter. What determines the meaning of a tweet? Is it the content? Is it the format? And is this kind of broadcasting of short thoughts really so revolutionary in the history of the world?

In his book, Flickering Pixels, Shane Hipps defines media as "anything that stretches, extends, or amplifies some human capacity." If we accept Hipps' definition as at least somewhat accurate, then it seems that media forms are not simply passive tools but active reservoirs; we pour into them the meaning from our lives for the sake of passing it on.

Viewed this way, I see tweets as little micro-compressed extensions of our lives. Just like lives, tweets are

• Fleeting. There are so many of them, a single tweet flows down your screen sometimes before you've even had time to read it. So too are lives, passing before our eyes more quickly than we can grasp and competing with so many others for prominence, each one pregnant with meaning and potential.
• Speaking. Each tweet speaks to the world, whether or not it expects to get a response. So too the details of our lives speak to the world about us--and yes, even what we ate for breakfast can communicate something. Why else would people carve words into a tree or spray paint a message on a highway overpass or tatoo symbols on their bodies? These kinds of shout-outs to the world may feel meaningless in one sense, but their meaning lies in the very human outpouring of a desire to speak into the world, to have a voice, to declare something, and ultimately to be heard and understood.
• Fickle. Tweets, like people, can be beautiful, funny, mean, lewd, misleading, spiritual, profound or mundane. They are conduits for all the things that lie in the human heart, which is perhaps one reason why I find these little missives so fascinating.
• Constrained. In a tweet there are only 140 characters available to work with. We can't cram every word ever written in. We have to make choices to communicate most clearly, deciding what we want to say at the expense of what we can't say. The same is true with life. Most people have around eighty years to work with. Like a tweet, we are constrained by the boundaries of what is and what is not, what we choose and what we don't choose.

Working within constraints is one of the things I love about writing. I can't use every word in the universe; there's really only one that is best for each idea I want to convey. And part of the fun is figuring out which words to use and which not to.

This idea certainly isn't new. How about the book of Proverbs? "When words are many, sin is not absent, / but he who holds his tongue is wise" (10:19). At seventy-eight characters, including spaces and punctuation, eminently tweetable. What about memorable speeches? We don't remember the whole speech. But the short quotes are bite-sized, so they stick. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country" (seventy-nine characters). Long? No. Meaningful? Yes. Or how about song lyrics? "I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven't found what I'm looking for"--128 characters. Tweet it, baby.

This highly lauded poem by William Carlos Williams could be tweeted with 51 characters to spare:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Or this Japanese Haiku:

Simple. Beautiful. Tweet-worthy.

Of course, the short form isn't appropriate for everything. The Odyssey doesn't work very well in tiny chunks (though someone somewhere is certainly trying to tweet through it as I type). Verses from the Bible can be taken out of context and twisted beyond recognition fairly easily. Twitter, like any other media form, needs to be used with discernment, a quality many users will, unfortunately, lack.

It's that potential for misuse that may turn you off to Twitter. Or maybe it's because you think it's impersonal, or you think most of the people using it are idiots and you don't care what they have to say, or you don't like computers, or you think Twitter contributes to the general deterioration of Western society and our ability to comprehend and engage in longer forms of communication, or any number of other perfectly acceptable reasons. But please, let's cross "I don't like Twitter because it doesn't mean anything" off our lists, okay?

Posted by Rebecca Larson at August 25, 2009 8:46 PM | TrackBack