Why Twitter doesn't matter

I'm a Twitterer. I'm also a Facebooker, a LinkedInite, a FriendsReunitedee and now apparently a blogger.

I have the opportunity never granted to my parents' generation to disseminate my wisdom around the world.

Then comes the question which all writers dread: "What, exactly, should I write about?"

And here's my problem - with social networking, with blogging, with twitter updates.

What if few of us have anything of substance to discuss?

Being a published author has been the ambition of millions of people for a couple of hundred years. The chance to have your words savoured, relished, repeated. The opportunity for your thoughts to live on in time. You used to have to handwrite a lengthy document and submit it to an editor, who would emasculate your precious thoughts, shredding them to the bone, leaving only a lean beast for the typesetter to print up. There were, in effect, barriers to entry.

You needed: an education, the ability to (hand)write, contacts with publishers, and often, another source of income in order to become a writer. That's a vicious, soul-sapping process, but in the end, it resulted in many, many respected works of thought and art which have indeed lived on.

Now look at today. In order to be a published author with a far greater audience than Dickens ever had, you need a £100 laptop, two fingers, and the internet. No barriers to entry at all, really.

You don't have to be bright, or even educated. You don't have to spell. There's no editor, so you don't have to be truthful. You're not even obliged to be interesting. All you need is the desire to be published.

Which is why the majority of self-published contributions out there on the web are either parasitic, or ill-informed, or both.

There are not enough generators of original and interesting content. Those people that do generate content are linked to or commented on in a desperate attempt to replicate the aura of the original. Writers and bloggers of repute spend their time providing little more than links to other people's work. The pool of creation is small; the ocean of tittle-tattle overwhelming.

What's the root cause? We're spending our time writing, not learning. We're broadcasting before we're inputting. We write half-formed opinions on things that someone, somewhere, once researched. Those that do create go unpaid, and then watch their valid words and opinions get tossed around and mutilated by the uninformed.

We need to research. We need to learn. We don't republish, we don't claim others' work for our own unless we can add something to the discussion. We need to think, and reflect, and come up with articulate, well-argued points of view.

Why doesn't Twitter matter? Because you can't say it in 140 characters. You can say nothing of consequence in a tiny space. All you can do is express an opinion, without the wherewithal to explain why. (and yes, E=MC squared, you say, or any of the Ten Commandments. And I say, now explain any of those concepts in a Twitter.)

We've spend centuries creating vast structures of artistic and scientific achievement, and, as a culture, we're obscuring these crystalline structures with post it notes. "Read This. Thought you might like it. LOL."

So go and read something. And here's a suggestion - read something that's not on an LCD screen. Pick up a book and spend a few hours. Luxuriate in edited thought, constructed argument, meditative consideration. Then see what you honestly, genuinely think as a result. Does this work deserve your recommendation? How can you add to the argument? What can you contribute? Then blog if you feel you genuinely should.