Twitter

The (in)famous Twitter Logo.

Twitter is a site that allows you to post your thoughts, musings, photos, GIFs, and other immortal words of wisdom on the Internet. The catch? Your message must not exceed 240 characters.

In my view, Twitter is aggravating a major problem facing our modern society - that of being bombarded with fast-paced, rapid-fire words and images with little time to process them and slot them into our larger world view. There is no time to analyze what the President says in his latest Tweet, when a Kardashian is featured just below, and perhaps Elon Musk has something to say below that, and on and on we scroll, mindless consumers of an endless feed that would take an army to process or put into some semblance of order.

In comparison to a discussion in person, Twitter seems merely like a fugue of voices, all shouting at cross-purposes with one another. There is little room for civilized, intelligent discourse in 240 characters, and yet the leader of our nation sees fit to use Twitter to address us, the American public and citizens of the world in what is surely an ill-omened precedent.

In a world where we are reduced to immortalizing our misspellings, mishaps, and misfires, is it any wonder that the nation and the world are becoming more and more polarized? In my humble opinion, 240 characters just aren't enough to say anything of more than trivial importance. Twitter might have its virtues, but you aren't likely to catch me extolling them. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but it is also the heart of confusion and the body of misunderstanding.