Every few years, it seems to be an unwritten rule that the newspapers have to have a scare about dumbing down, e.g. GCSE results now don’t mean as much as they used to back in the good old days. Now, whether they have a point or not I can’t say, but it does seem to me that a lot of it is alarmism: things aren’t really as bad as all that, the “good old days” were never that good, etc.
That said, I have been thinking a bit about Twitter recently, and how it affects communication. Twitter, if you’ve never got into the craze (and have had your head buried under a rock for the past few years – in which case, how are you even reading this?!) is a social media service where you can send messages to your ‘followers’, people who subscribe to your updates, as long as the messages are 140 characters or less.
In many respects this has been an absolute revolution – but, frankly, lots of people have written about it far more eloquently and intelligently than I ever could. What I’d like to look at is one aspect of Twitter usage which I’ve become more and more disturbed by over the past few months (and years – it’s been building for a long time).