Twitter vs. Poetry

Twitter vs. Poetry

It struck me the other day, reading an article in the local paper, that we have come full circle. As with many of these things – your mind is like a percolator. You add the ingredients, pour in some time and slowly the concoction drips into your consciousness.

Language in the business world is always regarded as something that is mostly a tool, a simple, and often not so simple, way to communicate between parties with the goal of reaching agreement. I taught a class this week on social media and as I believe background is important, sketched the development of such media over the period of close to 30 years, starting with the first mobile call ever made – 1973.  This potted history then became one of the ingredients in my percolator. The way people communicate changes with the media they have at their disposal. The bards sang long songs and told endless tales as the evenings were long after the sun had set, and their was no evening news to watch, football matches on the other side of the earth to follow or other information to be taken in. And there was endless time to pass before the next dawn. Then print evolved, and stories became shorter due to the fact that they now had to fit into a certain format and match the size of the paper and eventually our communication became that of emails and text messages. And now there is Twitter.

For my class this week – I asked them to write their own bio, in 140 characters. And the result was nothing short of poetic. Beautiful little gems of well-balanced, well thought-through text, words that each carried a meaning and told of one person. And it struck me that we have gone full circle – if you choose, your tweet can be nothing short of a poem.

So, in summary – my blog could equally have read something like this:

Told a tale, wrote a poem

Filtered words & thoughts.

Meaning at its purest lives on.

Communication reduced to essence.

Less is more.

Words

2 Comments

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• Bill Evans | Jun 17, 2010 09:49 AM

  There are so many words that have such profound emotions attached to them that are lost with 140 Characters. Language is how we speak and words speak of ourselves.

• Sophia Flowers | Jun 24, 2010 06:02 AM

  Using Twitter helps one synthesize business goals, personalities and objectives, which is why I recommend trying it out as it can be helpful in other areas.

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