280 Characters
Sometimes I like to ponder how I'd open an article if only 280 characters were available. Of course, we already live in this world. It doesn't have to be imagined. Every idea—as Stewart Lee says—must be condensed into bite-sized chunks of 280 characters to encourage sharing.
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How I'd write my 280 character article: I need a beginning, a middle and an end. I have one sentence to make my point, one sentence to introduce my point, and one sentence to reinforce it at the end. Each sentence has to reference the other sentence.
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A 280 character article would be primed for maximum engagement. It would be sharable across any platform. It could easily be made into a TikTok or a Story or an Instagram post. It wouldn't require any prior knowledge of the topic. It would be perfect.
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But each time the 280 character article began, I'd have to reintroduce the concept. I'd have to cut out many of the words I've already used here. No time for dilly-dally. No time for artful prose. No time to provide nuance or context.
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You see, I failed in that last 280 character explanation of the 280 character article idea. I didn't reintroduce the concept or the idea, leading to an uncertainty in the piece. Whilst it's maximally optimised for multi-platform engagement, there's nothing worth sharing.
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And here my friend is where I begin to shuffle towards my point. Unfortunately, you wouldn't understand my point because you wouldn't have read my first 5 attempts at writing the perfect 280 characters. But let's pretend you did read them. Let's pretend I'd written LONG-FORM.
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A fierce focus on the numbers—in this case the word count—has caused me to edit out important points. It hasn't allowed me to tell you what's actually good about such a medium. The mass transfer of knowledge. The idea that I can read any expert's thoughts globally. I can't say that.
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That previous 280 character article wouldn't have existed in a world of 280 character articles, it would have been cut. Maybe it could have become a Twitter thread, but you wouldn't have read this far down because your attention span has been killed by 280 characters.
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The 280 character performance I'm now writing even kills MY attention span. It kills my ability to write long sentences or use nuance in them. I have to be direct, authoritative and pretend I know what I'm talking about otherwise you'll be even more lost than I am.
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And that's it isn't it? 280 character articles don't INCREASE understanding of a topic or idea, they REMOVE it. They remove it because the very thing to be understood has been removed along with the adverbs, the adjectives and the complicated words and concepts.
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There isn't room to explain something, only to denounce something. There isn't room to provide both sides, only to come down hard on one side. There isn't room to hold somebody's attention, there's only room to use tricks and hacks to steal somebody's attention.
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280 characters is both not enough and too much. It's not enough room to get somebody to understand your point and too much room to get somebody to think they understood the full story. It provides too much of an opportunity to reinforce our bias and divide us further.
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This isn't an artful article. The 280 character cadence might make it appear so, but it isn't. This isn't a haiku or a poem, nor a soliloquy, or a sonnet. 280 characters doesn't allow for it. And now I ran out of words I have to fill in the rest to get to 280 characters.
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No, the perfect 280 character article wouldn't be 280 characters at all. It would be lots of 280 characters, all strung together in whatever order I chose. It might not end up being perfectly 280 characters either, and that would be just fine. It would mean it would make sense.
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Some would call it some kind of article. Some might call it an "essay". Some even a "story". But it would be mine, and I wouldn't have been restrained by the 280 character context that has restrained me throughout this article. I would use run-on sentences with reckless abandon.
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Sometimes I like to consider how I'd open an article if only 280 characters were available. Of course, we already live in this world. It isn't a world we have to live in though. Ideas are spread through the medium that is appropriate, and that shouldn't always be 280 characters.
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There's no big grand ending to this article. No call to subscribe to me, like me, or retweet me. No ask. No social proof. No engagement tactics. No stoic phrases. No self-improvement nonsense. No context. No meaning. No purpose. Just me trying to fill up my last 280 characters.
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