A Farewell To 140 Characters, And The Death Of Brevity
The little chirps just got louder, and longer.
Twitter flipped the switch this week on all accounts being allowed 280 characters to use per tweet, making permanent and system-wide a change it implemented for a small percentage of accounts in a test a couple months ago.
Congratulations, you now have more characters to put out into the world with each push of a button. But what sounds like a feature is really a bug. And it will forever change both how we create on Twitter and how we consume on the platform.
Let’s start with the big picture — I get why Twitter made the change. 140 characters is arbitrary and annoying. It’s the kind of limitation that cuts off an audience, confused and frustrated by this seemingly unnecessary rule. “Join Twitter, it’s fun, but you have to limit everything you want to say to 140 letters, numbers, or symbols!” Why? “Because…it’s how it’s always been.”
But as a consumer, selfishly, I don’t care if more people use Twitter on a regular basis. I enjoy the forced brevity of it, the way it challenges you creatively. I appreciate the succinctness it brings forth. I love getting to the end of a tweet and seeing I’m 5 characters over, and having to figure out how to delete unnecessary stray letters or a word. Tighten, and squeeze until just the best stuff remains.
Twitter has been slowly easing us toward more space. Users created the tweetstorm concept, so Twitter helped facilitate it by allowing threading that connects multiple disparate thoughts and organizes them. Users created the screenshot-of-text concept, so Twitter helped facilitate it further by making images (and video and gifs) no longer count against your character limit. Users liked to have conversations with several people but were hampered by the handle character count limiting what could be said, so Twitter let handles in replies not count against your 140.
But this change is massive. Limiting tweets to 280 characters might as well be no limit at all. Imagine if the shot clock in the NBA went from 24 seconds to 48 seconds. Players would still dribble, and pass, and shoot. But the game would no longer feel the same.
Twitter isn’t even letting users exercise some self-control, with a countdown character count starting at 280. No, you don’t find out your character count until you reach 270, and by that time you’re halfway to a college essay.
Tweets used to be like little birds, chirping and pecking and flying around. Now tweets are giant fat pigeons, gorging on sidewalk scraps, flapping their wings but too bloated to make it far.
I imagine six months from now, we won’t think much of the change. We’ll all just send tweets that are 211 characters, or 174, or 125, or 52, or 268, without a whole lot of thought put into the process. But being freed from the shackles of brevity will make us worse — less sharp, less precise.
Being economical with language through forced limits was a good lesson for our increasingly unrestrained culture. A culture now of unfettered access, binge-watching, burritos wrapped in quesadillas — a culture of more, and then more of that more.
The death of brevity this week was not surprising— it was just another sign we are headed toward a chaos of excess.
