Some Joey Bada$$ for ya.
Most of us are familiar with Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media studies. We’re also familiar with his quote:
“The medium is the message.”
So why am I an idiot on Twitter? Well, it boils down to this quote.
The strength of Twitter is in its brevity. You have 140 characters to say something. This isn’t really the best length for ruminations on life and sadness, or on anything serious for that matter. While some people can do short-form punch really well, it’s a skill, and one that most people don’t have. One hundred and forty characters also isn’t enough to give any meaningful advice, unless the person you’re advising is blissfully ignorant. You can’t provide any academic value, and contrary to BJ Fucko’s Marketing Tips, Twitter will not make you a better businessman.
One hundred and forty characters, however, is the perfect maximum length for jokes. And not stand-up jokes, either – a lot of stand-up comedians who are funny in real life are downright awful on Twitter. Twitter is a writer’s medium. A smart writer’s medium. As a matter of fact, like many of their stand-up brethren, a lot of comedy writers are awful on Twitter, too.
You need to know the limits of your medium and you need to know how to deliver a punch in your medium with the tools available to you. Don’t tell me how much you love your friend on their birthday. It doesn’t mean anything more because everyone can see it — It’s actually just annoying. Don’t tweet a picture of your gym workout with a comment about how sweet it is that there’s only one other tank-top wearing neanderthal sharing the squat rack with you. Nobody gives a shit. Don’t try to promote your awful band. I can see your ratio. You follow 100,000 people and 10,000 people follow you. You’re fishing.
Tell me a joke.
The strength of Twitter for me is in its situational humour. Affectionately known as “weird Twitter”, there’s a circle of hilarious guys and gals that have slowly become some of the only people I don’t know in real life who I follow on Twitter out of actual interest and not out of politeness and propriety. Some of these people have more than 100,000 followers – all from tweeting things as stupid as
As dumb as their humour is, as improper their grammar and sentence construction, these guys get Twitter. They use typos and arbitrary capitalization to create inflection and humour where classic writing rules fall flat (I’m sure you’ve been in a text conversation with someone who types like they “should”. It’s excruciating. They’re always mad at you.) They carefully craft their idiocy and irony like so-called comedy writers never could.
It’s more than that, too. They’re often on to news stories before they become news stories. They know trends, and they know how to lampoon those trends in the most insightful ways. We recently talked about coolhunters in class, and these folk are the ones to be hunted. I’d go further into this, but I’m really only blogging to keep up with a class assignment. If you’re interested in seeing what I mean, follow me on Twitter and then follow everyone I follow.
I’ll never keep up with the best, but I try.
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