The popularity of Twitter continues to astound me. How can truncated sound bites ever add up to anything? In an overworked language meaning drains away and the ability to say anything worthwhile in a few words becomes virtually impossible.
I was hit by the same thought this week when drawing up a direct marketing script. The USPs I had listed for FedEE extended to more than twenty – but then I was told that in a telephone marketing campaign the marketeer has just 45 seconds in which to get their message across. Try that out for most USPs and you are left with just two mini-messages at best to convey.
In this speed dating world we are trapped in a wasteland on non-communication. Appearances are everything, truth becomes a social construct and both subtlety and detail go to the wall. I guess that is why selfies are so popular. If we spend long enough finding the perfect pose then perhaps we will success in impressing others (and ourselves) that we are the perfect image we can find amongst all the faces that we make. We are not just the two dimensional people of the 1960s, but now just a single dimension heading for a kind of egotistical oblivion.
Maybe we are therefore out of trend by still constructing classical job ads and even communicating in complete sentences. Let’s therefore Twitter job ads – calling for “Sales Director, good at schmoozing clients, great salary “. We could even conduct salary negotiations in the language of the stock market or simply hand employees a badge during performance reviews indicating their star rating. The human social vacuum we are all so proudly building may even remove the need for words at all. Instead of a blog I can then just post a gesture.