The appeal of short text

I’ve only recently started using Twitter. I have not been an early adopter of the short-message-to-the-cloud service. I signed up early but didn’t use it. I didn’t understand what was in it for me. Then I spoke at a conference and mentioned my Twitter name. By the time I was off the stage I had about 10 new followers and a few direct messages and replies. This was good!
Microblogging has a certain quality, a way to provide satisfaction to both the originator and the readers. It may be the ability to engage in conversation. It may that you can snoop into other people’s. It may be that it gives the small people the power to interact, maybe influence, brands and figures that seemed so removed before. But for me, the key to Twitter is the self-imposed restriction to 140 characters.
Through history, scarcity –real of self-inflicted- drives human ingenuity. Scarcity is at the core of the market economy. But is also at the core of the creative genius. We are fascinated by the small, the brief, the instant. And we love to play with language, that most human of creations, to make it fit down narrower and narrwoer alleys. How small will it go?
Cast your mind back for a second to a former era. Think of classified ads. Scarcity, generated by the size of the page, the need to fit as many ads as possible and the cost per word model has generated masterpieces of the brief. A recent BBC radio segment provided excellent examples of creative uses of the space -all sadly gone from my memory now. They showed the evolution from dry brevity to inventiveness to innuendo, humour etc. Taking advantage of, rather than fighting against, the brevity of the format.
Fast forward a few decades and SMS takes off as a consumer communication medium. A generation adopted SMS as their preferred conversation carrier. It is instant, it can be broadcast, it is personal. But the key to its success must be its brevity. In an era of unlimited storage and ever larger screens, kids flock to the limited format of SMS because it provides the boundaries against which they can exercise creativity.
I have rambled on long enough. I could go on to talk about Haiku, to conjecture about the important of paper size in the adoption of carrier pigeons. I could go on and on. But I have now discovered Twitter and joined the small is beautiful revolution. So I’ll shut up now. See @you all later on #Twitter!