Social Policy in Ontario

Brandon Ambrosino is a freelance writer in Delaware, who has written for The New York Times, Boston Globe, BBC and The Economist.

Twitter announced Tuesday its new experiment with tweet length, which doubles character count from 140 to 280.

“Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet,” is a universal pain, reads the official blog post by Aliza Rosen and Ikuhiro Ihara. The company wants to give you more characters to express yourself, they say.

Of course, the company admits, the point of Twitter has always been brevity. “That is something we will never change,” they promise.

And how could they? That would require them changing us.

Twitter has irreversibly altered our sense of public discourse by convincing us that any argument worth having – religion/politics/racism – can be successfully advanced or bested in a 140-character feat of witty genius. Twitter can change its platform all it wants, but our minds have already evolved to accommodate its original brevity.

Part of our accommodation consisted in us confusing ideas with information. Theodore Roszak explains the difference in his classic The Cult of Information: While ideas are “integrating patterns meant to discover the meaning of things by way of … the slow growth of wisdom over a lifetime,” information is “any transmitted signal that could be metaphorically construed as a message.” That includes facts, judgments, polls, cliches, images, puns, GIFs, quotes, retweets (RTs), etc. Whereas ideas used to be valued only after careful adjudication, all information is immediately and equally valuable in an economy that profits on clicks and social media “engagement.”

This shift from ideas to information has rewired our brains, almost helping us along our evolutionary way to a new kind of human.

Years ago, Jon Ronson, the incredibly sharp author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, once contrasted our behaviour in public with our behaviour online. He argues that even though we’re all quite lovely to each other face to face, when we get behind our smartphones we act like drone strike operators. This wasn’t incorrect at the time (2015), but I wonder if Mr. Ronson thinks that line has since blurred.

Here’s a recent and terrifying example: Ri Yong-ho, North Korean foreign minister, shocked the world earlier this week when he said his country was choosing to interpret Donald Trump’s tweet as a real life “declaration of war.” While I think Mr. Ri is aware that his interpretation is twisting Mr. Trump’s intentions – which were probably just, you know, to score a bunch of RTs from his base – there are two important points we should consider.