Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone invented Twitter in 2006, when the first tweet was sent from their phone (Picard 1). Today Twitter is worth more than 5 billion dollars (Carlson 1). As of March 2011, Twitter has almost 200 million users worldwide and more than 140 million tweets sent daily (Picard 2). According to Andre Picard, “the dictionary definition of Twitter is ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’” (1).
Hash tags, the “@” symbol and the ability to “follow” people, celebrities, and pets on Twitter create an online community. People are reading the same tweets, and can re-tweet or also favourite what they read to share it with the people they follow, so that they can also read it. Twitter is all about reading a lot of information in small fragments. Hash tagging, according to Kupetz, “makes it easer to find all the Tweets that posted on that topic” (61). The reader is able to find all the information on a topic under a specific hash tag. The “@” symbol allows tweeters to connect with other tweeters and to incorporate them in their reading community. Following people also allows for a greater community. By following people, you are able to read their tweets and retweets, so that the users of Twitter can feel like they are all apart of something together.
Twitter created the 140-character limit because “160 characters was the SMS carrier limit and the founders want to leave room for a username” (Picard 2). The limit allows people to have up to date and instant information on what is happening, in the world, right now (Clarke 273). Users of Twitter tend to scroll through updates and tweets, getting just a quick look at each tweet. There is no intensive reading, but more skimming. According to Thomas, “status updates help to keep the network churning the lines of communication between users open. The current, constant and often instant nature of posts and replies stimulate conversation”(60). These small bursts of information allow the users to find any type of news instantly, where all the information is online and not in their memory. The character limit forces the user to create precise tweets where the information must make sense, and must get the main message across.
Over the years there have been many types of reading societies that have changed drastically from one century to the next. Twitter can be classified as a reading society of the twenty-first century. Reading in previous centuries was often done aloud and in groups or in secret (Darnton 44). Twitter is done by one person to a group of people, for example, a user can log on to their phone and check their Twitter feed of the people they follow (the group). It is not necessarily done publically, but more privately. Reading groups of the past had to read through a small number of texts over and over again until the breakthrough of cheap texts (Darnton 45). Twitter is the complete opposite, in that there is always something new going on, always something new trending, and always someone new to follow. There is never the need to re-read the same thing.
The Internet and especially Twitter are affecting the way people read. Reading used to be characterized as a “scuba diver in a sea of word” while now reading on the Internet, and on Twitter is related as “zip[ing] along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr 2). Twitter, with its 140-word character limit contributes to the skimming across pages, and the lack of attention span/memory that was created by reading long novels or articles before. There is a sense of “wearabilty” that is created by the quick access to information, which affects the way people read and ultimately store memory online (Garde-Hansen 82). Carr continues to describe how reading online has affected the way he experiences his thought processes, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (2).

Works Cited

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