Twitter After Eight Years

Twitter is now more than eight years old. I'm not excited, given I don't use cell phones and never have nor will I ever "tweet". I think language is best used when used with precision, and twitter is , if anything, not precise. I read every day about miscommunications, often by celebrities, who claim their tweets were taken "out of context". Ha! How can that be when twitter, by its very nature is so brief  and lax that no context is possible? If those celebrities want to be taken in context they might lean how to use the language well enough to speak and write it more precisely than tweets allow.

I am certainly no expert on tweeting..is that what they call it? But it does seem to me that Tweeter is better suited for children than adults. It's just not a serious forum.  Yet, in our age of electronic media fascination and addiction it is used as a formal language communication. How odd.  I think if I ever used Twitter I would do so with a statement before hand, something like this. "Anything written here is to be taken non literally. Serious communication will be found elsewhere. I am not responsible for anything tweeted here, as tweeting  is but a mindless diversion and time killer."

It's interesting what people think they can discuss or reveal in 140 characters, often spelled as if by outer spaces aliens and grammatically a mystery. Linguist Noam Chomsky finds the whole thing appalling, calling it "very shallow communication". Further, he believes what I do, saying that "It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication … It is not a medium of a serious interchange."

There is a place for not serious communication, and that is a healthy enterprise. The problem is that Twitter, Face book and the endless other trivial communication platforms are being used as if serious ones. Hmmmm I suppose more than a few Twitter addicts have posted things like, "My husband died 10 minutes ago" or some such news that clearly is better announced elsewhere and with more sensitivity.  But then, so many people today are engaged in the triviality communications that they might find that kind of tweet to be "normal". After all, we live in the time in which humans have a difficult time distinguishing the real world from the pretend one.

I am not sure if the silly slang and abbreviations are eroding the English language, or just making it less attractive to communicate in a more precise way. It might not matter much because it's an accepted language tool today that we language purists can not stop. I wonder and ask you.....is Twitter a reflection of evolving language or one that language is deteriorating?