Twitter just fuels my short attention (insert shiny object reference) span
This is a Twitter "hashtag". Heh heh, I said "hash".
Not so long ago, I would sit down at my computer at burn precious thought fuel writing and rewriting (quality) humour content. I would take the time to consider a small concept nugget of of humour or satire, and nurture that lump of unrefined funniness into a well-constructed (I thought so) article.
While not every piece hit the tickle ribs in the same manner it would for me (translation: I think I’m funnier than everyone else), at least I put enough care and attention into the jokes to make the writing job worthwhile. There was (is) a satisfaction in creating something tangible that the World Wide Web or print media sources could redistribute. There was something tangible made from that initial intangible thought, that elusive spark of creativity, that is fleeting, but can sometimes be caught and held, put in a mason jar like some kid’s lightning bug.
But now while those sparks still fly, there are alternative avenues that a blog or a website to communicate those creative chunks of hilarity, social media sites like Twitter, where you need not expend your energy reading entire articles, stories, or well-constructed pieces of humour. One can get instant gratification from a sentence tossed into the Twitterverse by anyone–a kid in New Jersey or an old man in Croatia can pop off a witty remark with a sweep of the keyboard (that reminds me–I really need to sweep my keyboard).
And I get caught up in this Twitter shit as much as the next user (unless the next user is my mom, in which case replace “Twitter” with “bingo dabber”). I think that I burn humour ideas faster than a ten-year-old with his first pack of matchsticks (and kid, don’t tell your mom I gave you those matchsticks or you’ll really get burned!).
You see, with Twitter, once you grasp that lightning-bug idea, you can instantly form it into context of 140 characters or less, because that’s more or less the structure of your creative idea. Tweeting that idea sends it off into the Twitterworld (I know that I said Twitterverse before) before it’s had the chance to mature into a fully-formed piece of content. What a waste that was…but oh wait, I still got some gratification, because hitting “post” is almost the same process as hitting “publish” in WordPress. In fact, it was the same single click of the mouse that fired that off to Twitterdom (I’m running out of Twitter descriptives to describe its magnitude).
I have a fair disdain for comedians, because I believe that they are mostly short on comedy ideas and big on their comedy act. They grasp onto unique comedy material like a gollum on some sort of all-powerful ring, clutching to their breast, and defend it to the end. They have all the spit and polish they need to turn that comedy ember into a comedic fire (how many metaphors will I use in this article anyhow?). Imagine a comedian tossing out ideas onto Twitter like they were McDonald’s coupons. They’d be without material and doing improv theatre before they could say “freeze”.
I’m going to make a pledge (after I Pledge my keyboard) to Twitter less and nurture those kernels of humour a little longer, hopefully growing them into something funnier than the two-line snippet they would otherwise result in. While I love Twitter for all it’s connecty people stuff (heh, I should tweet that), I think that…aw crap, I forgot what I was talking about.
This brief article about Twitter, brought to you by the guys who think they’re the world leader in Twitter humor, would have taken more than 50 posts on Twitter.
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