Does use of Twitter discourage exploring ideas in greater depth?

Twitter makes it incredibly easy to share random thoughts and links to topics of interest. For me personally, this is the main attraction of using Twitter, but the drawback of the brevity is that it discourages exploring and expanding a thought beyond 280 characters (how did we ever survive with only 140 characters?!)

After posting a short sentence about something I’m thinking about or have recently read elsewhere, I usually think “I could write a whole article on this single topic”. For example:

I could have easily taken this idea of open office spaces having the opposite intended effect on worker productivity and explored this in more depth in a longer article, but instead captured this thought as a single paragraph and left it at that.

In this sense I think Twitter makes us lazy. It makes it easy to quickly share a quick thought, but in doing so we throw out these nuggets of info and then leave them there, unexplored.

I don’t make New Years Resolutions, but if there’s one thing I plan to do more of this year, it’s to spend more time writing more articles, and less time sharing quick, throwaway thoughts.

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