Twitter democratized the sharing of stories for whoever was interested in reading them.
The quality of information didn’t matter. Once it could fit within 120 characters and had the ability to go viral, you had a banger tweet on your hands! We live in an age where the expedience of information is valued over the quality of information.
Once we began reading in 120 character long increments, our attention spans began to become limited to that. The value for longform reading seemingly disappeared. Who has time to read long ass articles when we basically know what they mean from the headline anyway (right?).
Cal Newport gave me this idea through his book “Digital Minimalism”! Let’s bring reading back. Let’s bring sharing our ideas with others back. Texts can’t replace actual conversations with people and tweets surely can’t be the medium to convey nuanced ideas.
In a world where information is haphazardly thrown at you 24 hours a day, we need some peace and quiet. With clickbaity titles and thumbnails designed to capture your eyeballs, our brains are operating on information overload. When was the last time we sat down and read a piece of longform writing (and I’m not just talking about skimming)?