A Twit Tweets

Maybe I shouldn’t say “twit,” but unlike “bimbo” the word is not gender-specific in its connotations, which do not include any sexual ones. The woman Mark Belling referred to was acting like a twit, at least in the moment she spoke about right to work legislation without knowing what it is but thinking she did. Yet she would have been a twit even if she were a man.

Anyway….

Another woman felt compelled to quit her employment with Governor Walker’s campaign – I guess that’s what it is by now – because her tweets proved offensive to Iowans of influence in the Governor’s party. Maybe she deserved a setback. She should rethink the uses of social media before seeking employment as an expert in that field again.

I’ve never tweeted anything, but I do know that tweets lack context. An isolated string of 140 characters, even if they form words and constitute a sentence, has little but itself to give it meaning. Moreover, one who tweets cannot legitimately expect anyone who happens to read a given tweet to be a follower. The same is true of hashtags.

Thus readers are free to give a tweet any context they desire, even compelled to do so. This is what happened to the quitter. She tried to make up for it by issuing a whole paragraph of early morning tweets, but the fact she had to issue them in six or eight installments only tends to prove my point.

In general, only a very profound, or a very trivial, sentence carries its own context with it – that is, sufficient context to make its meaning unmistakable. Users of Twitter should probably confine themselves to the trivial. Unfortunately, most political discourse, on the other hand, is neither profound nor trivial. This is what our Twitter quitter should reflect on.

Tweets are like sound bites that way. Only with sound bites the context, sometimes maliciously, gets edited out. Tweeters have only themselves to blame.