Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place.

The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days.

Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it.

It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuation, full words (obvs!) and a clear narrative. Or, to put it another way, Christmas just came early for the grammar pedant in your life.

As the Punctuation Police have a fine old time, so do those with a lot to say. Quite rightly, concerns were raised about Donald Trump now having even more opportunity to tweet random nonsense in the middle of the night. Why briefly offend an entire country when you could really annoy them with even more poorly thought-through presidential insensitivity?

Of course, it’s also entirely likely that many Twits now just have twice as much space to say nothing of significance whatsoever. Telling your followers that you’ve been busy painting your skirting board white is hardly improved by informing them that you’ve been busy painting it Unicorn’s Eyelash White, but in a silk, rather than gloss, finish.

The extra length for loquaciousness and bigged-up verbosity (not to mention gargantuan garrulousness), only increases the likelihood of us all effectively shouting at ourselves in a social media mirror.

You follow people and organisation you like, right? Probably those who you admire, or share similar views with too. When you discover someone who irritates you or presents an opposing opinion to yours, you may decide to un-follow them or at least mute them.

After a while, your timeline is lovely. Ooh, I agree with that guy. That politician is bang on, yes. No dogs on my feed thanks, only cats! It becomes easy to start believing that everyone shares your beliefs and values. Because you chose them for that reason.

So, them having 2x the space to say even more that you agree with sounds grand, but in fact it’s terrible. Outside your cocooned universe, the real world can be something of a shock.

So follow people who annoy you. Disagree with them. Understand and engage with all points of view. You can even be twice as expansive in your indignation now. Just remember there is still a limit to your word cou

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 17th of November 2017. The version used on their website retained my original title, whilst the print edition became "Making even bigger tweets of ourselves", which is really rather good.

Both online and print versions had a "..." added after the truncated last word, which kind of defeated the point of that particular joke.

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