Contstraints of Microblogging

2-minute read
microblogging • social media • conversation

Introduction

This discussion-starter was written by me, Brandon Nolet, in the context that microblogging might not be the best mode of communication for deep philisophical discussions.

Characters

There are many different characters in the world of microblogging. There’s the caret (^) and there’s the tilde (~)…I’m just kidding. Bad humour, sorry. No, what I mean to say is that the world of microblogging is a very noisy place. Between discussions being a very public thing and anyone being able to interject at any time, and many different types of people that you might converse with, it might be hard to formulate your opinion or viewpoint. You feel like the way you speak to each person has to be different in order for them to understand.

Nevermind those responding in bad faith; those responding as a troll.

It’s hard to have a serious conversation without those people.

Characters

Compound this with the character limit that helps guide the concept of microblogging (which is highly debated as to what the limit should be)

Realtime

You might not be able to phrase things in a fashion that the person on the other side understands exactly the meaning and intent you put into a given reply. When this happens, you might be quick to jump back into the replies and try to clarify yourself, but it might already be too late. The conversation branches into two, and then three, and four.

Then you’re mentally juggling four different conversations all while trying to keep up with the responses, all while trying to get your message across properly. You get lost in the conversations, and end up saying something that you don’t mean. Then looking back you have to qualify something that you said but didn’t mean, then the stress hits.

You’re trying to keep up with all the responses and while this happens, you’re stressed about getting your point across, and due to all this, the responses that you put out are becoming more and more flawed. It continues on and on until you finally decide to either log off or give up on the conversation.

Defeat

Not only were you dealing with the stress of the realtime factor of it all, you now have to deal, post-conversation, with the defeat of not having gotten your point across. You feel like you’re incompetent and feel like you can’t even formulate your own opinion.