The Rhetoric of Twitter

The Twitter logo. www.twitter.com

I was thinking of writing about social media as a whole, but I thought that focusing on Twitter alone would be more interesting. The idea of Twitter is that users can send short messages about whatever they may be doing at any time. Any message, or tweet, is fine to be posted-as long as it is less than 140 characters.

The required brevity of tweets requires users to be concise about what they want their followers to read about them. Longer tweets require two messages, and no one likes a two-message (or longer) tweet. It's sloppy and shows the inability to shorten your own thoughts for the sake of your followers.

Now, most people do not care about what most other people are doing at any given time in the day. The main reason Twitter succeeded at all is because people were (and still are) very much interested in what certain people, usually celebrities or political figures, are doing/thinking at any time. This ability was unprecedented and allowed people to connect to their favorite celebrities in a way that still astounds me.

Twitter has had incredible world-wide impacts as well. The most dramatic example of this is the role social media, and especially Twitter, played in the Arab Spring, when many countries in the Middle East coordinated their strives towards freedom through Twitter. In a more day-to-day example, Twitter is almost like a news source. Whenever I hear about something I feel is unbelievable, the death of a celebrity for example, I immediately turn to Twitter to see if it is true. When news of something particularly influential breaks, people flock to Twitter to speak their minds on the issue. In fact, I get more of my news from the Trending Topics on Twitter (the collection of the most tweeted-about words/phrases) than anything else.

Social media as a whole has lead to such change in the world, and I feel that Twitter will exponentially increase this impact and help people as whole will become more socially aware.