Writing Versus Blogging Versus Tweeting

The medium does strongly influence the message. There has been recent chatter about the superiority of blogging to tweeting - mostly from bloggers, of course - and a push to revive this already-outmoded form.  There is a discipline to limiting the number of characters that can be used, yet I find this does not affect people on twitter as much as it might.  They simply reduce to repetition of a bumper-sticker points until they reach the maximum.

I will say it does seem to work for humor.  It is also good for a one-sentence summary while linking to a longer piece, which some researchers are making use of. Yet it is not long enough for developing an idea.  There is a tweet form of putting out ten related ones in a row to make a point in staccato style.  I usually dislike these, but i have seen it done well.

Blogging is an imitation of the formal essay, op-ed piece, or news story. The earlier forms often had strict constraints, stretching to fill a page or condensing to prevent spilling over.  I remember the highschool newspaper and needing someone to produce 50 words or 500 on command as the pages were being assembled.  It's a good exercise.  I had forgotten it in all my discussions of education these last fifty years, but it was one of the more valuable experiences of 9th-10th grade for me.  I was rewarded with a monthly humor column in 11th-12th, with a fairly narrow range of words each time.

The formal essays of Twain, Mencken, and E.B.White do not appear to have set lengths.  However, all of them wrote for fitting to the page for years, and they likely developed an intuition for what the market would bear. Now that I think of it, collections of essays by any of them often contain notes in the early pages crediting the publication where they originally appeared.  They may or may not have been given an estimated length to write toward, but they likely hewed to what was usual for the periodical in question. They were also under constraints.

But blogging, now, that's a form where one can go on at any length, and many do.  Increased freedom often means decreased discipline. I have no idea how many words are in each post. Many short posts grow'd like Topsy, under little control. Some, perhaps most, are too long.  It is usually more important to get them out promptly rather than polish them by cutting them 50 or 70%.  I fancied at first I was writing for posterity.  That was the original draw of being online, remember.  "The internet is forever," we used to say.  We now know that's not true, and the maligned dead-tree publishing remains more permanent. (But no search engine.) Yet even when I pull back my own older posts and bring them forward there is a forced nature to it. Like newspapers that quickly become fishwrap, blog posts do work mostly in the atmosphere of immediacy.  Hmm.  "immediacy" is too strong.  That would be more like Twitter.  But the shelf life is not long.  It may not be as short as the coffee and donuts, but it ain't canned goods in the blogosphere either.

Yet there does remain an advantage of being able to develop an idea somewhat and push it out into the marketplace to interact with the other citizens for a bit.  It may be that it is favored by older writers because we were raised on essays in school, both the reading and the writing, and blogging is a derivative of that form. Newspapers, magazines, and television did not have a tweet equivalent, except perhaps the headlines themselves, or the late-night comics.  Radio is a better candidate as the precursor to tweeting.