Yeah! The easiest thing to do on the social media and even the offline world is to flog the micro-blogger. It is so easy to say, ‘These 140 character creators are good for nothing dolts.’ People who tweet know that there is more truth carried in their precision than even a 1000 word edit in a prestigious daily bothers to add. The world of twitter with its handles and hashtags included is the one where the first trends get confirmed. Entire stories are or can be shaped out of a tweet that is laden with significance.
What I write here are independently standing defences for micro-blogging… proving that sense and 140 characters go together. If you cannot express clearly in 140 characters, can you survive a comprehension test extending to a thousand sentences? I’ve read blogs with a thousand sentences and yet struggled to get even 140 characters of meaning out of them. A complete story can be encapsulated in 140 characters garnished with every emotion you can possibly imagine. In brevity is the soul of wit.
Twitterature is as real as you are, dear friend
Tweets are micro-blogs and a contemporary trend!
Let me give you a few examples of what you can do with a tweet… and thus, micro-blogging. I can write even a political microblog post: ‘An anarchist has the right to rule in Delhi, a concrete jungle.’
Or even a limerick:
Renie, come out of convention
Understand twitter’s intention
To say more
Without being a bore
And increasing a reader’s retention!
I can even tweet in rhymes and help create a world that runs fast, acts faster, and thinks like a poet:
I’ve tweeted hundreds of couplets that make sense
Microblogging is twitter and is quite intense!
A blog is an expression, a thought, an idea, a story, a poem, an explanation, an excuse, a submission, a statement, and a retort. This is exactly what even a tweet is… or as some say, a microblog.
You agree that anything sensibly expressed can be in lesser words or more. You simply use more words and verbosity in a conventional blog post. The truth is that the less you know, the more you add… and it is almost like Peter’s Principle that talks about your collecting junk being proportional to the number of shelves or storage space you have. More space mean more junk. So isn’t it a great idea to start thinking with less space in mind? Tweet and you’ll know what precision of an expression means.
By the way, do you think a midget is a lesser human? Or do you think a cursory touch is less evocative? Well, let me say that a tweet or a microblog is like a glance that says everything… and a blog post is more like staring away shamelessly. But then we are Indians who go on staring, don’t we? It is time now to realise that twitter is a great teacher of precision and is your own coveted micro-blog.
Wake up.
Less is more.
And if you say more
You can be a bore!
So be sweet
Just tweet!
Stop flogging and start logging on to twitter. Don’t flog, just follow micro-blogging! Better, start micro-blogging because we are living in times where littering is anyway a crime. Micro-blogging helps spread cleanliness… because words flung around indiscriminately are the worse form of littering. Right?
But then we live in times where most of us like to just speak or write in a tortuously long-winded verbose style. We love to buy a larger car, flaunt a larger belly, and generally want more than whatever it is that we get. We like to have a bigger list of online friends. Look at our blogs… isn’t there a race to display a larger number of winner’s badges there? See, we want more and more. We just don’t think small… a pint of beer is never enough. A mini-skirt deserves a massive protest. A focus on details is for the paranoid. This subliminal truth is what we adopt in our written expression too. This penchant for more makes us think that expression means more words. So because expression means more words, we think it is fine to love blogs and despise the 140 character microblogging platform. We, therefore, end up flogging the microblogger. In fact, we have gone one step ahead and decided to say that tweets are not allowed to call themselves micro-blogs. Isn’t this outright silly?
Listen, if I know the right spots on the body I can kill with a jab of my little finger… which means even my little finger is as powerful as an LMG with its burst. Isn’t a 20-20 match as much real cricket as a five-day one is? Believe me even as little as 140 characters can help us create the India that we want. Let’s continue blogging… but let us also be great micro-bloggers.
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On justifying the name ‘microblogging’ for tweets
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Article published in ‘The Huffington Post‘ dated 02 March 2015:
2015_03_02_HuffPost_Flog the microblogger
2015_03_02_HuffPost_Flog the microblogger_post
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Post also published in MarketingBuzzar dot com:
Marketingbuzzar_flog the microblogger
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Arvind Passey
24 February 2015
