Damn you Twitter.

Twitter Has Completely Ruined My Ability To Read

Damn you Twitter.

Many years ago you came in to my life and I thought, “140 characters, that’s not nearly enough!” Of course, I also thought “Who’s going to spend hours reading Twitters*?” *Give me a break, it was 2006.

If you made it this far, you’ve read more than 140 characters. Congratulations, you’re a great human being,with a much longer attention span than me.

I don’t consider myself a rocket scientist, but I think any intelligent person can understand when their mind is being trained, and my mind has been trained by Twitter. By sending out nearly 60,000 tweets and reading probably hundreds of thousands of tweets,my mind has slowly been conditioned to think and consume in 140-character fragments. My brain has been shown so much short-form content that now short-form is what it expects.

Now, Twitter isn’t the only culprit. Text messaging emerged years prior to Twitter, and in the early stages it too had a character limit. (Come on, we all remember pre-iPhone when a long text had to be sent in three or four separate messages, usually out of order.) However, in the early 2000s, hardly anyone was sending hundreds of text messages a day because it cost too damn much. Yeah, remember that, we used to have to pay for each message or buy a bulk amount of messages. There was no “unlimited plan.” Damn I feel old writing that.

And while I’m at it, let’s add Facebook to the list as well. The status syntax when Facebook started was “Jason is…” So, naturally you finished that sentence and knew it was a quick update about yourself, not a place to write a Michael Creighton novel about your dog’s ability to roll over. Yes, Facebook has changed and content is a bit longer, but it typically limits you to 160 characters before the “See More…” link. Think about it though, those few posts that do show up in my Feed longer than 160 characters, I know I glaze right over them (especially if it’s one epically long paragraph — ugh).

I find myself clicking links with interesting titles, only to close the tab or click the back button within seconds. I’ll open an email and if the first paragraph doesn’t get me all amped up, I’ll flag it for later and move on the next one. I know for a fact the “Editor’s Pick” here on Medium has to be a good read, but I often don’t make it anywhere near the end of the article. Sometimes I can actually feel myself reading the words on a page and slowly having my attention pulled to something else. This is usually how my brain operates:

Oh wow this is interesting! Yeah I’ll totally keep reading this... Okay, boring, let’s move on to something else now.

The irony here is I’ve written way more than 140 characters in this post. Like, 5x that amount. But I can tell you, even when I scroll back up to proofread my own writing, I only get so far without losing focus. IT’S MY OWN WRITING, BRAIN! YOU DID THIS! READ IT!

Here’s hoping that with the access to so much great content on the web, I can keep pushing my mental boundaries and get back to having an attention span that’s longer than a toddler’s. Wait, toddlers probably don’t tweet, so they probably can read things longer than me. Crap.

If you made it all the way through this post without diverting your attention to anything else, feel free to tweet at me and rub it in my face that you have better reading attention span than I do.