Today I read this advice someone had tweeted from a blogging conference: "Keep your writing concise & tweetable. It makes you shareable." It didn't rest well with me. I'm sure it's true that creating concise, tweetable content makes you shareable, but what didn't rest well was the idea that everything we do and write on a blog should aim to be shareable. That the highest goal was shareability and we should sacrifice eloquence or longwindedness on the altar of shareability. Humans aren't designed to communicate in 140 characters. Hell, they're not even designed to communicate in characters alone. They're designed to communicate with their entire beings. Their tone of voice, their body language, and their words. They're suppose to communicate in context, and the internet is often a huge contextless void, endlessly filling with words unattached to their appropriate contexts.
I guess what I'm saying is that, no, I won't be neatly packaging myself into twitter friendly soundbytes. I can't do the endless rat race for viral shares. I've spent my fair share of time at blogging conferences learning from "the best" about how to make my blog into an empire, and while there was tons of useful information learned at those conferences, I just can't get on board with the plea to encourage our slow devolvement into newspeak. Words are powerful. Sometimes a few words are powerful, but often it's far more than 140 characters which touch our hearts and souls, tantalize our minds, and change the world.
If you're looking for shareability, then I suppose creating concise and tweetable content is good advice. At the end of the day, though, I'd rather write from my heart, as long or short as necessary to share what is trying to leap from inside me onto that blank screen.
